SumUp is partnering with Berlin-based Upvest to bring in-app investing to its merchant platform. Starting this month in Germany, merchants can allocate their SumUp balance into euro-denominated money market funds, with as little as €1. A broader rollout across Europe and the UK is planned for the coming months. Upvest handles everything underneath: order execution, settlement, custody, regulatory reporting, and tax processing, through a single API integration.
From Card Reader to Full Financial Stack
SumUp started as a payments company, so it does not fit the classic definition of a non-financial brand entering financial services. But the direction of travel is the same: a platform built around merchant workflows is now offering the full range of financial products that its customers would otherwise get from a traditional bank.
I have a small personal connection to this story. In 2012, I interned at a VC firm that invested in SumUp's Series A, and spent a month at SumUp itself shortly after. Back then, the company was essentially a dongle that let small merchants accept card payments. That felt significant enough at the time.
What SumUp has become since is a different thing entirely, where payment acceptance was just the start. The company now offers business accounts, a merchant cash advance product, invoicing tools, a point-of-sale hardware suite, and an online store. More than 4 million merchants across 37 markets use the platform, which hit $1 billion in deposits from 1.5 million active business account users by the end of 2025. The investing feature is the latest addition to what has become a full financial stack for SMEs.
The Infrastructure Behind It
SumUp built much of its banking and lending infrastructure in-house, but chooses a different strategy for investing. Assumingly, the regulatory and operational complexity of handling securities, custody, and tax processing sits far enough outside the core merchant proposition that partnering makes more sense than building. Upvest, which already powers investing for Revolut, N26, bunq, and Raisin, processes more than 100 million trades a year. It is reasonable to expect that investing will remain a peripheral feature for most SumUp merchants, useful for those sitting on larger balances, but unlikely to become as central to the platform as banking or lending.
The Question Worth Asking
Put the full product list together: payment acceptance, business banking, lending, invoicing, POS, and now investing. At what point does a SumUp merchant actually need a traditional bank?
That is not a rhetorical question designed to declare the death of banking. Most of SumUp's four million merchants are small: cafés, market stalls, sole traders. Their financial needs are not complex. For that segment, a single platform that handles everything from taking card payments to earning a return on idle cash is genuinely compelling. No need to onboard separately with a lender, open a separate savings account, or navigate a different app for investments.
The European SME banking market has been waiting for something like this for a long time. SumUp is not the only platform building in this direction. Wolt, Shopify, and others are following the same logic. But SumUp is one of the furthest along in Europe.
