Embedded Finance Review Podcast, episode 25. Published 27 May 2025. Guest: Tino Keller, co-founder of Accountable. Host: Lars Markull.
Lars Markull: There are not many things that are more intertwined with banking than bookkeeping, accounting and taxes. By now, almost every software provider in the space allows users to integrate their existing bank accounts through an open banking integration. But more and more of these providers are now launching also their own banking products, and one of them is Accountable.
Accountable is a Belgian startup that targets freelancers in Belgium and Germany. Earlier this year Accountable launched an embedded banking offering, consisting of an account and card solution for freelancers in Germany. In this episode I speak with Tino Keller, one of the three co-founders of Accountable.
We take a deep dive into Accountable's product offering. We discuss how banks drove them into launching their own banking product, and Tino shares how much money they're making with their embedded finance offering. My name is Lars Markull and this is the Embedded Finance Review Podcast. Every two weeks I interview the builders and shapers of embedded finance. Let's dive in.
Welcome
Lars Markull: Hi Tino, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today, and in what part of the world are you located right now?
Tino Keller: Thanks, Lars. Thanks for inviting me. And yeah, I'm in Berlin right now and happy to see a bit of the summer coming up slowly.
Lars Markull: I just wanted to say it was pretty dark over here, even in Berlin as well, but now the sun is actually coming out. So maybe that's the right time. Now, we met a few times in the last couple of weeks. Obviously you were also at our very own Embedded Finance Review event in April, where we spoke about Accountable and the banking launch. And we met last night at another event shortly as well.
Actually a lot of stuff has happened on your side in the last months, I would say, and that's basically where we want to dive a little bit deeper. From understanding Accountable a little better, obviously the launch of your very own banking product, then your startup has been acquired as well, that's also not a small news. So trying to put everything together.
But before diving into the different areas, maybe let's start with giving a little bit of an intro pitch to Accountable. And I think the most interesting for the listeners is, why does Accountable exist? When you started Accountable back in the days, what was the big problem that you saw in the market that you wanted to solve?
What Accountable is
Tino Keller: Our objective, our mission, and that's what we started out with, is to solve taxes for the self-employed, so they can get in control of their finances, have clear visibility on what of the money that hits their bank account from their hard work is theirs, and how much they owe to the tax office.
And we do this as simple as humanly possible. They can scan receipts, write invoices, and then automatically the bookkeeping happens under the hood. And out of this they can produce all tax declarations necessary, from their VAT to their personal income tax. And as you said, we've added Accountable banking, as a bank account where you can set aside money for taxes. We launched actually in mid-February, and we feel this is part of our journey to move from our claim, all your taxes done, to all your finances done right.
Lars Markull: And before diving a lot deeper into the banking stack, maybe can you give us a few more numbers or metrics in terms of the size of Accountable? How long have you been around, what markets are you addressing, how many users do you have, if you report any of this?
Tino Keller: We've been around for some time now. I think still a startup technically, but we are active in Belgium and Germany. We've launched our MVP in Germany at the beginning of 2020 and developed from there to now 40,000 users, 26,000 paying customers. So we have a free solution. And the company is now about 70 people. I think end of the year we're probably going to be about a hundred. So a good size, a lot of happy clients, a lot of feedback. We use that to develop the product further.