The money came back in 2025, but it did not come back evenly. European fintech raised more capital than in 2024, but deal volume kept falling. Fewer companies raised, and the ones that did raised significantly more. The era of broad-based early-stage funding is still frozen. What recovered was the very top of the market — Revolut at $75 billion, Wise adding over a thousand people, Ebury raising £550 million rather than risk a difficult IPO. The rest of the market is still finding its footing.
The talent data tells the same story. Across the 39 companies we tracked, the total net headcount added in twelve months was just over 6,300. That sounds healthy until you realise that Revolut and Monzo alone account for more than half of it. Strip those two out and the remaining 37 companies are, collectively, more or less flat. European fintech is not rebuilding broadly. It is concentrating — around the platforms that proved they could scale, the companies that reached profitability before the correction, and the cities where engineering talent already exists in depth.
The segment picture is where the real texture lives. Neobanks are the only category adding headcount with conviction. A2A and open banking is the troubled story — the highest attrition in the dataset, negative net headcount, and a workforce quietly walking out of acquired companies that lost their independence. BaaS is holding on with the most senior workforce in the market, but barely growing. Cross-border is essentially a Wise story with four other companies attached. BNPL looks stable until you look underneath — legacy tenure, AI-driven cuts at Klarna, and a post-IPO reality that leaves considerably less room for error than before.
Engineering leads every single segment without exception. But what comes second is where each segment's identity lives — Finance in BaaS and cross-border, Sales closing in on engineering in payments and neobanks, Operations appearing in BNPL and nowhere else. The compliance skills — anti-money laundering in BaaS, KYC verification in cross-border — signal where regulation has become a genuine talent requirement, not just a cost.
London remains the undisputed centre, leading in four of six segments. But Barcelona, Berlin, and Paris are real hubs now. European fintech talent is more geographically distributed than it has ever been, and that distribution is becoming more deliberate.
The companies in the best shape right now share one thing in common: they made hard decisions before they had to, hired with discipline rather than ambition, and built something people actually want to stay part of.
