Keel, a Manchester-based Banking-as-a-Service platform, emerged from stealth a few days ago after rebuilding itself out of a failed consumer neobank. The company was originally founded in 2019 as Frost, a digital banking app combined with energy-switching tools, and closed all retail customer accounts in 2024 after the UK energy price cap wiped out its core revenue stream. Over the past two years, the team has rebuilt the underlying infrastructure as a B2B platform, secured regulatory approval for the new model, and started signing fintech clients. Keel is now an FCA-authorised Electronic Money Institution with Visa Principal Membership, claims profitability, and reports quarter-on-quarter revenue growth since its first commercial customer signed in 2024.
From Frost to Keel
Frost attracted more than 18,000 users and processed tens of millions of pounds in transaction volume before market conditions made the consumer model unsustainable. When the energy switching market stalled in 2022, and the price cap removed most of the revenue, the founders had acquisition offers on the table but chose to rebuild instead. CEO Pawel Oltuszyk has said that other businesses were already asking to use the infrastructure behind Frost, which became the origin story for the pivot. The same founding team is still in place: Oltuszyk as CEO, Edyta Sliwinska as co-founder, and earlier Frost investor Andrew Jennings as a director.
A profitable BaaS in a market that has been re-rated
Keel's emergence comes at a moment when UK BaaS has been visibly re-rated. Railsr collapsed and was acquired out of administration, Modulr operated under FCA restrictions on onboarding new agents for an extended period, Weavr has gone quiet on major partnership announcements, NatWest Boxed sits inside a larger institution and is expected to remain focused on enterprise deals, and Griffin took a different route entirely by securing its own UK banking licence in 2023 and positioning itself as a fully regulated bank built for embedded finance. Within that mixed landscape, Keel is stepping into the market claiming bootstrap-style profitability, which is the central marketing argument for the relaunch.
The customer base itself is harder to verify. Keel reports clients in remittance, treasury, property and neobanking, including fintechs backed by Silicon Valley investors and a Southeast Asian platform serving more than 750,000 users, but none of the customers is named publicly. The one concrete signal is Keel's listing in Circle's Alliance Directory, where the product is pitched specifically to stablecoin- and crypto-adjacent fintech companies: Visa cards linked to crypto wallets that settle in digital dollars, USDC and EURC treasury features, and on-chain settlement alongside Faster Payments, SEPA, and SWIFT. That suggests crypto-adjacent fintechs are at least one core segment, even if Keel does not say so directly.
The rest of the product covers multi-currency accounts, virtual accounts, Visa card issuance across debit, prepaid and credit under its own BIN sponsorship, open banking, and the usual UK and international payment rails.
My Take
We haven't seen many profitable BaaS in Europe yet, so that's a success for Keel. Nevertheless, we should also remember that profitability at a small scale is not the same as operational resilience at scale. Additionally, Keel has not disclosed revenue numbers, client counts, or processing volumes, so the profitability claim is real but unverifiable from the outside.
That said, the practitioner background is an important part of the story. The Keel team built and ran a live EMI before becoming an infrastructure provider, which is a credibility argument worth taking seriously in a category where most surviving BaaS providers are now being judged less on growth and more on whether they actually understand the operational reality of running regulated financial products.
