The Swedish accounting platform Fortnox is one of Europe's more complete examples of embedded finance: an accounting company that offers both cards and financing to its customers. Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Växjö, Fortnox provides bookkeeping, invoicing, and payroll software to Swedish SMEs and the accounting firms that serve them, and has grown into the leading platform in its home market. On top of that core offering sit two financial products. A company card built with the Swedish fintech Mynt, live since October 2023. And a financing arm that lets customers borrow against their own accounts in three different ways.
How the card actually works
So how is the card actually built? Fortnox's card is free for Fortnox customers and available as both physical and virtual Visa cards, each with an individual spending limit. Every purchase is recorded directly in the bookkeeping, with the receipt attached. Underneath sits Mynt, an electronic money institution supervised by the Swedish FSA, acting as the card issuer. Fortnox owns the brand, the interface, and the customer relationship, while the licence, the issuing infrastructure, and the expense management engine sit with Mynt. Since Fortnox customers do not pay any card fees, we can assume Fortnox earns part of the interchange as revenue.
Three ways to borrow against your own books
The financing side runs three products, all built on the accounting data Fortnox already holds. The first lets a company pay supplier invoices, and even tax, up to 180 days after the due date, with Fortnox fronting the money on the due date and charging a fee. The second is factoring: sell a customer invoice with one click and receive up to 99% of the value the next banking day, with Fortnox buying the invoice and collecting from the customer. The third is a straight business loan, up to 5m SEK over five years, priced on the company's live bookkeeping rather than the historical accounts a bank would ask for. The through-line is the data. Fortnox already sees the invoices and the ledger, so it can assess credit risk on current numbers, which is the part a traditional lender cannot do as quickly.
Build on one side, buy on the other
Here, the two sides of Fortnox split. The financing products run through Fortnox Finans, a payment institution licensed by Finansinspektionen, so the credit side is, at least in part, built and owned in-house. The card is bought from Mynt. The way I read it, the line follows the margin. Invoice purchase and lending carry credit risk and credit margin, which can justify running your own licensed entity. A card programme earns thin interchange per transaction and requires scheme membership and issuing infrastructure that a partner can provide just as well.
And Fortnox is far from Mynt's only accounting client. Regular readers have seen the name twice on EFR, in the e-conomic deal in Denmark (EFR) and the Nordea partnership (EFR). Add Visma and Accountor, and one Swedish EMI has signed most of the Nordic accounting software market, plus the region's largest bank. Every platform in the vertical seems to want a card, and none of them wants to become a regulated issuer. Whether Fortnox stays on that side of the line is the open question. With a payment institution licence already in the house, it has more of the regulatory groundwork for card issuing than most embedders in Europe, and three years in, it has not made that move.
