Mews has been granted an Electronic Money Institution licence by De Nederlandsche Bank, held through a newly established entity called Mews Financial Services B.V.
Mews is the Amsterdam-headquartered vertical software provider for hotels, covering everything from booking and guest check-in through upgrades, point of sale and check-out, with 15,000 customers across 85 countries, $19.7bn in hotel transaction value in 2025, and a $2.5bn valuation following its Series D round in January 2026.
The licence gives Mews regulated standing across the European Economic Area. Regulated capabilities will roll out from late 2026, beginning with a pilot group of properties in the Netherlands before expanding across the EEA.
What Mews already offers in financial services
As many other vertical SaaS providers, Mews built payments first. They started with Stripe Connect and later extended to Adyen as a second payment provider. Hotels moving to Mews cannot keep the PSP they were already using; they need to convert to Mews payments (online and offline payments).
Matt Welle put it plainly on our podcast in July 2024, saying he would rather not have a hotel on the platform at all than have one running a bad experience without Mews payments. Lending followed in 2025 through a partnership with YouLend, offering UK hotels £3,000 to £1,000,000 over three to twelve months, with repayments collected out of the revenue already flowing through the platform.
By the time of that podcast, Mews had said its fintech revenue was already larger than its SaaS revenue.
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Why a licence is bigger news than a product launch
We usually treat the launch of a new financial product by a non-financial brand as the big news, and often it is. A launch, however, can be a test run on someone else's licence, quietly wound down if the numbers disappoint. Applying for and receiving an EMI is a multi-year commitment with capital requirements, safeguarding obligations, governance and a regulator to answer to afterwards.
Plenty of European platforms and marketplaces already hold e-money licences. A vertical SaaS provider doing it is something I have not seen before in Europe, and Mews is likely the first to do so.
Matt Welle on Mews, payments and the e-money licence
On the podcast, Matt admitted payments made him nervous at first, and that Richard Valtr was the one who kept pushing. I asked him whether Mews would eventually want its own licence. He talked through the options: a payment licence, an e-money licence, or maybe more. He was also honest that it would be a multi-year bet before it paid off. Nothing was decided at that point.
But he did explain why the idea kept coming up. Investors look at revenue first, then margin, and a platform relying on someone else's infrastructure only has so much room to improve it. Building your own is one of the few real levers left, and it requires being regulated. Additionally, there is another very important factor for the licence: new product development. Building your own regulated entity opens up products a vertical software company cannot otherwise offer, along with protections for hotel customers that only become available once you hold the licence.
What the licence does not yet tell us
An e-money licence does not give Mews a general lending capability. It allows credit only in narrow cases tied to a payment transaction, not lending out the funds Mews holds for its customers, so the existing lending product likely continues to run through a separate partner. Overall, the press release points to unifying payment services, financial workflows and operational data in one system, and to building new financial products on top of the operational data already running through the platform. I will continue to follow Mews' journey and report back on which products come next and whose infrastructure they run on.
