Swedish open banking company Trustly is reducing its workforce by about a quarter, eliminating roughly 200 positions worldwide as it tries to simplify its structure and put more money behind a smaller set of priorities. The company, based in Stockholm, employs more than 800 people and has international offices in London, Helsinki, Ottawa and San Carlos.
Trustly’s business is built on account-to-account payments. Instead of routing a purchase through Visa or Mastercard, a shopper can authorize a transfer straight from a bank account.
Merchants including Alibaba, PayPal, Wise and BNY Mellon use the service as a cheaper or faster alternative to cards.
Investors have put more than $400 million into the firm over the years, with BlackRock, Nordic Capital, Aberdeen Standard Investments and the Investment Corporation of Dubai among the backers.
In 2023 Trustly also bought UK open banking specialist Ecospend.
The latest cuts were first reported by Swedish news site Breakit and later confirmed by the company.
Leadership presented the plan as a way to concentrate spending on markets and products it believes will matter most in a fast-growing open banking sector.
Most of the roles affected are understood to be in Brazil.
Reports also said Trustly last year lost a large share of revenue when two unnamed major clients departed, though both later came back, and that the company may have been exploring a sale during that period.
Chief executive Johan Tjärnberg informed employees by email.
A company spokesperson said Trustly had “shared proposed organisational changes with our employees that impact around 200 roles globally,” adding that the aim was “sharpening our focus and concentrating investment behind the priorities that will help us lead the rapidly growing open banking market.”
The company said it understood the personal impact and would support staff through the process.
The move fits a broader pattern in payments and fintech, where firms that hired quickly during earlier growth phases are now trimming costs and narrowing their geographic bets.
Trustly has been through this before.
In 2022 it cut about 120 jobs after a stalled IPO plan and regulatory pressure in Sweden, arguing then that the organization had become too layered and had lost some of its original agility.
The current round is larger as a share of the workforce and is framed less as a retreat than as a reallocation toward markets the company considers more profitable.
Open banking remains a crowded field.
Banks, card networks and specialist payment firms are all competing to own the connection between a customer’s deposit account and a merchant’s checkout.
Trustly’s bet is that a leaner company, with fewer overlapping teams and clearer ownership of products, can move faster in that contest.
Whether cutting a quarter of the staff delivers that speed will depend on how cleanly the remaining organization can serve its largest merchants and on whether Brazil and other secondary markets can be wound down without disrupting core operations.
For employees, the announcement is a reminder that even well-funded European fintechs are not insulated from restructuring. For the industry, it is another sign that open banking is shifting from a land-grab phase to a period of tighter execution and more selective investment.
