Brite Payments quietly secures a UK EMI licence from the FCA
Brite Payments — the Stockholm-based instant bank payments fintech — is now an authorised electronic money institution in the United Kingdom. The authorisation appeared on the FCA's Financial Services Register with an effective date of 21 April 2026. As of publication, the company hasn't announced it, and we couldn't find it reported anywhere else.
We didn't get a press release either. The entry surfaced in License Watch, our monitoring feed built directly on regulators' registers.
What the register shows
| Entity | BRITE PAYMENTS LIMITED |
| Register | FCA Financial Services Register (UK) |
| Reference (FRN) | 1033237 |
| Status | "Authorised Electronic Money Institution" |
| Effective | 2026-04-21 |
You don't have to take our word for it — verify it on the FCA register. The status wording above is the regulator's own.
Who is Brite Payments?
Brite Payments is one of Europe's fastest-growing account-to-account (A2A) payment providers. Founded in Stockholm in 2019 by Lena Hackelöer — an early Klarna employee — Brite processes instant Pay by Bank payments and payouts on top of open banking rails, and raised a $60M growth round led by Dawn Capital in late 2023.
Until now, Brite's licensing footprint ran through Sweden: it operates across European markets under its authorisation from Finansinspektionen, the Swedish financial supervisory authority. That works for the EEA — but since Brexit, it doesn't reach the UK.
Why a UK EMI licence matters
Post-Brexit, EEA passporting rights don't extend to the United Kingdom. A European fintech that wants to operate there on its own paper needs its own FCA authorisation.
And Brite didn't take the lightweight path. An electronic money institution authorisation under the UK's Electronic Money Regulations 2011 goes further than a payment institution licence: it permits issuing e-money and safeguarding customer funds, on top of the full range of payment services. For an A2A provider, that's the difference between facilitating payments and holding real balances — settlement accounts, stored value, faster payouts.
It also reads like a deliberate UK build-out rather than a box-ticking exercise. The UK is Europe's largest and most mature open banking market — arguably the market for a Pay by Bank specialist — and Brite has been hiring UK compliance leadership, with a London-based Head of Compliance & MLRO role publicly referencing the firm's status as an authorised EMI.
What Brite launches on top of the licence — and when — is the part the register can't tell you. We'll be watching.
Why you're reading it here first
License changes land in the register weeks or months before the press release — if a press release ever comes. This grant has been in effect since April and, as far as we can tell, hasn't been covered anywhere.
That's exactly the gap License Watch exists to close: we monitor regulators' registers — 19 of them — and publish every grant, cancellation, and revocation in a weekly digest, with a citation link to the regulator's own record on every line. No claim without a citation. If we can't cite it, we don't publish it.
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PaymentProviders.io is an informational service. Registry data belongs to the issuing regulators; status labels reflect the regulator's own wording. This article is not financial or legal advice, and PaymentProviders.io is not affiliated with Brite Payments.