Embedded Finance Review Podcast, episode 41. Published 5 February 2026. Guest: Nick Root, co-founder of Intergiro. Host: Lars Markull.
Welcome
Lars Markull: Hi Nick, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today, and in what part of the world are you located right now?
Nick Root: Hey Lars, thanks for having me. I'm pretty good, thanks. I'm in Lisbon, or pretty close to Lisbon in Portugal.
18 June 2025
Lars Markull: Thanks for joining and talking about your story. Obviously we will dive today into the whole development and everything that happened around Intergiro, the Swedish banking as a service provider. Instead of going through it chronologically, I decided let's maybe jump right into a more recent date, June 2025. That's obviously when it was a crucial date for the company. Maybe you can explain to us and to the listener what happened in June 2025.
Nick Root: Yeah, of course. That was a critical moment for lots of us in our lives, I would say. We lost the licence on June 18th, 2025. And it's a pretty complicated story, but at the most high level, the most macro level, we lost our licence for administrative AML failings from a 2021 data set.
Lars Markull: How did you find out about this, about losing the licence?
Nick Root: So we found out when everyone else did. We had an email on the Tuesday that week from the regulator saying, you are on the agenda for the board meeting tomorrow, but we can't say anything else. And the Wednesday was the board meeting, and then we got an email Wednesday afternoon saying that a decision has been reached but we can't mention it, you are going to learn when everyone else learns about this, on our website at 8:00 AM Thursday morning. Well, actually maybe it was Wednesday morning. So all of us were up at kind of 7:59 pressing refresh on the regulator's website.
And we learned it with everybody else, and we were in complete shock. We weren't expecting it at all. We didn't really have any indication that this would be the outcome. And so that threw us then into a wild mess, as you can imagine.