We spoke with wamo Founder & Co-CEO Yankı Önen and Group CEO Deniz Güven about the financial infrastructure of small businesses in Europe, the EMI licence, artificial intelligence and the idea of a “super company.”
Small businesses form the backbone of the European economy, but in financial services they’re still stuck with fragmented infrastructure, high costs, limited access to financing and the daily grind of admin. wamo is now scaling the business model it built around exactly that problem. Its footprint across European markets, the licence it obtained in Finland, its payments and financing products, its investment in artificial intelligence and, most recently, a €10 million Series A round have taken the company well beyond its founding story, into an ambitious, European-scale fintech player.
This month we put wamo Group CEO Deniz Güven and wamo Founder & Co-CEO Yankı Önen on our cover. We talked to these two experienced founders about wamo’s journey from day one to today: the calls made during hard times, the numbers behind the new investment, the country-by-country playbook being built across Europe, and the goal of turning small businesses into “super companies” with AI-powered financial tools.
Take me back to the beginning of wamo’s story. What did you see in how small businesses were dealing with financial services in Europe that told you there was a real problem to solve? And how has today’s structure grown out of that original idea?
YANKI ÖNEN
The problem we saw on day one was actually quite simple. A large part of the European economy is made up of small businesses, but the financial infrastructure they use is rarely designed with them in mind.
A large company has a CFO, a treasury team and an accounting team. The founder of a five-person business has to be all three at once: opening accounts, tracking payments, managing cards, collecting payments, monitoring cash flow, and trying to grow the business at the same time.
The original wamo idea was to make these operations easier. Today we see it much more broadly. We no longer want to offer just a business account. We’re building a financial operating system where accounts, cards, payments, acquiring, expense management, financing and, increasingly, AI all work together.
For us, banking isn’t the product itself. It’s the infrastructure that lets the customer run their business more easily.
We know wamo went through a serious crisis caused by a banking partner along the way. Looking back, which period challenged you most? How did that change wamo’s product, its licensing strategy and the way you make decisions as a founder?
YANKI ÖNEN
For a fintech, having a big part of your infrastructure depend on other institutions can create serious vulnerability. We learned that the hard way.
The most important lesson from that period was this: if the responsibility to the customer sits with you, you also need as much control as possible over the critical infrastructure underneath it.
That’s why getting our own licence wasn’t just a regulatory decision. It was about having real control over the future of our product and our company.
On 26 June 2024, we received our EMI licence from the Finnish Financial Supervisory Authority. Looking back, I think it’s one of the most critical milestones in wamo’s history.
As a founder, it also taught me that speed matters in a crisis, but resilience matters more. The fastest solution isn’t always the right one in the long run.
Europe gets talked about as if it were a single market, but on the ground it’s a very fragmented one. What signals does wamo look at when entering a new country, and how far does it localise the product?
YANKI ÖNEN
Europe is definitely not a single market.
POS and collections might be the priority for a small business in Italy, while access to financing matters far more in Finland. In Sweden, a local IBAN, BankID, or a strong FX experience in SEK can be the deciding factor.
So, our approach isn’t to take the same product to every country.
We start by looking at the friction in the customer’s daily life. How do they get paid? Which currencies do they use? Is the card the priority, or POS, or financing? Which local integrations does the product need before it feels genuinely local?
Then we layer market-specific features on top of wamo’s global platform.
I think the European fintechs of the future won’t be the ones that build a single global product. They’ll be the ones that can build local experiences on top of global infrastructure.
You’ve recently leaned hard into the idea of “from small companies to super companies.” What is wamo’s promise to small businesses in that shift?
YANKI ÖNEN
I think AI’s biggest impact will land on small companies.
That’s because, for the first time, a five-person company will be able to access some of the capabilities of a fifty- or hundred-person company.
Imagine an AI that tracks cash flow, understands invoices and expenses, spots payment delays, anticipates financing needs, and works out when money is coming in and from which customer.
Every one of those takes up a small business owner’s time today.
Our vision is for wamo to become a platform that doesn’t just carry out the customer’s financial transactions, but helps them understand their business and make decisions.
We’re not talking about turning small companies into large ones. We’re talking about them having some of the capabilities of large companies while staying small.
For us, that’s exactly what “super company” means.
From where you sit today, what excites you most about wamo? Which indicators tell you this model will work at European scale?
DENIZ GÜVEN
What excites me most is that the growth isn’t coming from just one metric.
The customer base is growing, revenue is growing, acquiring is growing, product usage is deepening, and at the same time the company is getting far more disciplined operationally.
We’ve recently seen monthly growth of around 12 percent on both revenue and customers. We’ve reached roughly 25,000 companies, our annualised revenue has passed €20 million, and we’ve hit break-even.
I’ve built or scaled digital banks my whole career. You can’t tell whether a model works just by looking at customer numbers.
Are customers using you more? Is revenue climbing? Is product penetration rising? Are your acquisition economics improving? Is operational leverage kicking in?
So, what excites me about wamo today is that every one of these is moving in the right direction at once.
After the €10 million Series A, what changes in wamo’s growth mathematics? How will you split the capital across product, AI, credit, team and new markets?
DENIZ GÜVEN
I never see capital as a marker of success. Capital is an accelerator.
We raised this round for a business model that already works. So this money isn’t for “finding the model,” it’s for scaling the model we already have, faster.
But our biggest investment isn’t capital. It’s our small, 95-person Wamigos team with very big hearts. Today wamo has a strong team with backgrounds from 16 different countries, working around the clock to solve problems for our customers and small businesses. I think that’s where our real, scalable advantage begins.
I see three main areas.
First, product. We’ll deepen wamo’s core financial operating system layer.
Second, AI. And I don’t just mean using AI internally for productivity. I mean our products are becoming increasingly agentic.
Third, financing. When you can see a customer’s account, payment traffic, acquiring data and cash flow, the way you offer them financing can look very different from a traditional bank.
But alongside growth, we hold ourselves to real financial discipline. We don’t want wamo to grow by burning more capital. We want it to grow while getting more efficient.
You’ve said SMEs in Europe need a “financial operating system” more than they need another digital bank. What layers does that operating system include?
DENIZ GÜVEN
Today, when you sell a customer a “business account,” you’re really only solving a small part of the problem.
An SME needs to receive money, send money, collect payments through POS, give its people cards, control expenses, manage invoices, handle FX, and access financing when it is needed.
From the customer’s point of view, it’s hard to explain why there should be eight different products.
That’s why wamo’s architecture isn’t built around the account. It’s built around the daily financial life of the business.
When account, cards, acquiring, payments, expense management, FX and lending sit on the same data layer, you can start layering intelligence on top.
AI is that final layer.
In an ideal world, the customer shouldn’t have to log into wamo and “do their banking.” wamo should be managing their financial operations in the background.
I think that’s what real digital banking actually is: making banking invisible.
As you move toward your €50 million ARR target, how do you balance growth against financial discipline?
DENIZ GÜVEN
I think the “growth at all costs” mindset from fintech’s early days is behind us now, and that’s a healthy thing.
Revenue growth on its own means nothing.
I look at three things together: growth, unit economics and operational leverage.
wamo needs to get more efficient as it grows. We want revenue to grow faster than headcount, customer acquisition cost to improve, and existing customers to use more of the product and generate more revenue.
Break-even isn’t an outcome for us. It’s an important milestone for our culture as a company.
As we move toward our €50 million ARR target, we want every euro of that to be quality revenue.
For me, a good fintech isn’t one that grows fast by spending a lot of money. It’s one that becomes a better company as it grows.
What shortcomings in traditional credit assessment can real-time data and AI actually fix in SME financing?
YANKI ÖNEN
Traditional credit assessment mostly looks backward: financial statements, credit history, static documents.
But the life of a small business is highly dynamic.
If you can see daily cash flow, payment behaviour and acquiring performance, you understand the state of the business in something much closer to real time.
DENIZ GÜVEN
I think there’s a huge opportunity here.
The interesting point is this: financing doesn’t have to mean “we only lend to someone who’s been a customer for six months.”
We can assess a new customer using different data sources. Maybe their first loan is smaller. Maybe we apply different pricing, or take on different risk.
AI and transactional data let us push underwriting past a binary yes-or-no decision, into something far more dynamic.
I think that’s where the future of SME lending is heading.
Italy and the Nordics are your strong focus areas today. Where’s next on the map? Is there a bigger European financial infrastructure story behind the 100,000-business target?
DENIZ GÜVEN
Absolutely.
100,000 customers is a good milestone, but it isn’t the vision on its own.
We try to read Europe not by number of countries, but by customer problem.
Italy matters a great deal to us. Malta is small but a genuinely valuable test market. Finland is our regulatory home and matters most from a lending perspective. In Sweden, we’re building a much more local experience.
When we enter new markets, we deliberately avoid the “plant a flag” approach.
The product has to be good enough to feel genuinely local in every market.
Long-term, we want wamo to become one of the financial infrastructure layers for SMEs in Europe. In other words, the point isn’t simply for 100,000 companies to hold a wamo account. It’s for those companies to run their business through wamo.
Where do your instincts complement each other, and where do you push back on one another? How do you balance a founder’s gut instinct with the discipline of a scaled financial institution?
YANKI ÖNEN
I’m naturally close to the customer and the product, and I like trying things fast and learning from them.
Because Deniz has built digital banks across so many markets, he can often spot a problem today that we won’t hit for another three steps.
That’s genuinely valuable.
DENIZ GÜVEN
One of the things I like most about Yankı is just how much of a founder he is. He sees the customer’s problem, wants to solve it, and keeps the whole organisation’s energy up.
My instinct runs a little differently.
I ask: will this still work at 100,000 customers, not just 25,000? Is the control structure ready? What do the unit economics look like? Can we do this across four countries at once?
Of course we push back on each other. If we never disagreed, one of us wouldn’t be needed.
But on the fundamentals, we’re very much aligned.
We believe wamo needs to be as reliable and disciplined as a large financial institution, as fast as a technology company, and as customer-obsessed as a startup.
I think the winning combination is all three at once.
Three years from now, what achievement would make you say, “We really did turn small companies into super companies”?
YANKI ÖNEN
I look at the customer.
If a wamo customer tells us, “I used to spend five hours a week on this, now I don’t even think about it,” then we’ve succeeded.
I want a small company to do more business with less operational work, make decisions faster, and spot growth opportunities more easily.
DENIZ GÜVEN
For me, success three years from now won’t just be about how big wamo has become.
It’ll be about how much stronger wamo’s customers have become.
If we see a five-person company able to access the capabilities a 50-person company has today, across financial management, payments, treasury, financing and AI, then we’ll truly have changed something.
I believe AI will change what “company size” even means.
The “super company” of the future won’t necessarily be the one with 1,000 employees. Maybe it’s the company where 15 people, with AI and the right financial infrastructure, do the work that used to take 150.
And that’s exactly what wamo wants to do: not force small companies to grow, but give them far greater capabilities while staying small.