🇷🇺Finom: the European Business Account Built by Ex-Modulbank Founders

This is a provider case study, not a product recommendation. Read it inside the neobank map and the business-account guide. Primary evidence: DNB register entry for FINOM Payments B.V..

Finom is an Amsterdam-based electronic money institution serving small businesses and freelancers across the EEA. It is not a deposit bank: the licence, safeguarding model, fees and onboarding scope below were checked on 14 August 2026 and must be rechecked before opening an account.

Legal and operating perimeter

The DNB register records FINOM Payments B.V. as an electronic money institution from 11 November 2021, with payment and e-money services passported across the EEA. Founder, funding and litigation history from secondary media is omitted because it does not determine the current account contract or safeguarding protection.

Product and pricing

A refreshed plan line-up took effect on 3 September 2025; German prices as of August 2026 (finom.co/pricing, per month, annual billing takes 20% off):

• Solo — €0: one user, a local IBAN, a virtual card and €2,500 of free monthly SEPA volume — a genuinely free tier, rare in this segment;
• Basic — €7–8, Smart — €17–19: physical VISA cards, 1–3% cashback, €25,000–50,000 of free SEPA transfers, two or more users;
• Core — €34–38, Pro — €119–149, Grow — €249–339: up to 10–15 wallets with separate IBANs, unlimited SEPA at the top, a dedicated manager and priority support.

A notable difference from Qonto: free allowances are counted in payment volume, not in the number of transfers. International payments cover 17+ currencies and 150+ countries, with fees from 1% on Solo down to 0% on Grow; a German IBAN is promised within 24 hours; e-invoicing supports XRechnung and ZUGFeRD — now that receiving e-invoices is mandatory in German B2B, that is compliance rather than decoration. The Interest Account pays a 5% promo rate for the first five months, then 0.25–2% per year depending on the plan.

Two newer floors are AI and credit. The assistant is available on all plans; in Germany Finom runs AI accounting — transaction categorisation, tax estimates and filings for freelancers, the very function the company started with in Italy. A credit line of up to €50,000 is live only in the Netherlands so far: a first careful step from a fee-based model onto the balance sheet.

Licence: an EMI, not a bank

The legal core is FINOM Payments B.V., an electronic money institution authorised by De Nederlandsche Bank on 11 November 2021 and passported across the EEA. Client money does not sit "at Finom": it is segregated at BNP Paribas under a dedicated Safeguarding Foundation supervised by DNB. That is standard EMI safeguarding: if the platform fails, funds are separated from its balance sheet, but there is no €100,000 state deposit guarantee as in a bank — an e-money account is formally not a deposit and pays no interest by itself.

Germany was the special case. Historically German accounts ran through Solaris SE, a fully licensed bank with German deposit insurance; from July 2025 Finom moved that base onto its own licence, and by 2026 the migration is complete — all Solaris accounts are closed, and clients received new IBANs and cards on the Finom X infrastructure. The motive is plain: your own licence removes the partner's margin and the dependence on someone else's compliance — Solaris itself was winding down BaaS contracts across Europe at the time, context we cover in BaaS and EMI in Europe. The price is visible too: German clients traded deposit insurance for safeguarding, and re-papering a whole country's account details always costs part of the base. For anyone building a similar service it is a ready-made case study of the "BaaS partner versus own licence" fork — together with the choice of regulator, where the heavyweight DNB competes with the faster and cheaper Lithuanian route.

Competitive context

The nearest benchmark is Qonto: over 600,000 customers, profitable since 2023, and a French banking-licence application filed with the ACPR in July 2025. Finom is several times smaller and runs the opposite way: no public bid for a banking licence, a bet on the light EMI model, free entry (Qonto's cheapest paid plan is €9) and tax-and-accounting depth in each market. From above presses Revolut Business — a group with a Lithuanian banking licence, a record $2.3 billion profit for 2025 and B2B declared a priority: against its scale and multi-currency stack, local players win on service and localisation. The wider segment is mapped in our neobanks overview; the regulatory backdrop for all three is being redrawn by PSD3 and the PSR, which will tighten requirements for payment institutions and EMIs towards 2027–2028.

Finom's weak spots are equally visible from here: one million customers by end-2026 against 200,000 in August reads more like a slogan, lending is confined to the Dutch pilot, and without a banking track deposit protection will not arrive in the medium term either.

Onboarding

Accounts open for businesses from the countries of presence: companies and freelancers in Germany, France, Italy and Spain get local IBANs, while the Netherlands, Belgium and several other EEA countries get a Dutch IBAN. A non-resident holding company without an EU entity has no direct route in: the practical path is an account for the group's operating subsidiary in a country Finom serves.

Verification runs online via Sumsub: passports, ID cards and driving licences are accepted; a residence permit works as an identity document only if issued by one of ten countries — the Netherlands, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Austria, Ireland, Malta, Cyprus and Latvia. For holders of Russian or Belarusian passports with EU residence, the published conditions contain no nationality-based restrictions: formally you need a business in a supported country and standard KYC, after which the decision sits with compliance case by case — sanctions screening applies here as everywhere in Europe. Promising "they will open it, no questions asked" would be wrong; the accurate wording is that the rules do not forbid it and the practice is individual.

The language question is settled unexpectedly for a project with these roots: the interface and support run in seven languages — English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and Polish; Russian is not among them. Finom does not open personal accounts — for private needs see our guide to personal accounts abroad.

In a business owner's structure Finom naturally takes the slot of the operating account for a young company — the free Solo tier covers a GmbH's or SASU's ramp-up period before turnover justifies a subscription — or of a second account alongside a classic bank. Large balances belong where deposit insurance exists, while an EMI should hold working liquidity: not distrust of this particular service, just hygiene for working with any non-bank.