Lunar Way, a Denmark-based challenger bank, has netted €26m in a new funding round and received its European banking licence from the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority.
The investment was led by SEED Capital. With these fresh funds, the company will accelerate the development of its Nordic bank and increase growth in the Danish, Swedish and Norwegian markets.
The challenger bank is available in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, providing a range of banking services including multi-currency cards, insurance, loans, and payments, among others.
Lunar Way founder and CEO Ken Villum Klausen said,”The funding and banking license is the preliminary culmination of years of hard work and dedication from the entire Lunar Way team. We have grown from a small startup to a fintech with close to 100 employees from Denmark, Sweden and Norway with users in all of Scandinavia – a market notoriously hard to penetrate.
“All the while challenging the status quo of banking in the Nordics and meeting the regulatory demands of becoming a bank. We’re the very first of our kind in the Nordics to get a banking license. We’ve done all this in four years. That in itself is an accomplishment. But our journey is only just starting now.”
The bank is set to offer investments with Saxo Bank in the future.
Earlier in the year, Lunar Way selected open banking solution builder Tink to access new payments and personal finance tools for its mobile app. The deal supports Lunar Way’s account aggregation service which enables users to connect any bank account including those for mortgages, investments, loans, and others.
Ken Villum Klausen said, “Unlike other fintechs that have chosen to expand vertically, Lunar Way’s approach is to go deep in the Nordics, building not just a supplement for users to have when travelling or as an add-on to their other banking solutions, but as a 100% digital, innovative and true alternative to traditional banks. We mean it when we say that the goal is to change the status quo of banking and to be the #1 banking app of the Nordics.”
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