When Florian Reike and Luciano Nonnis first met, neither could have predicted that a panel discussion about failure would become the starting point for a fintech venture that is now attracting attention across Europe. Yet it was their shared frustrations that laid the foundations for Peanuds.
“We both gave a panel talk on how to fail when building a crypto startup,” recalls Reike, Director and Co-founder (pictured above). At the time, Nonnis had recently exited a crypto exchange he had founded in Cyprus, while Reike had exited his own crypto-focused venture capital and venture-building business in Germany. They found themselves repeatedly returning to the same challenge: “Banking was a recurring issue for both of us, and we ended up learning a lot about integrating Banking-as-a-Service along the way. After a few months of conversations, we decided to build in this space ourselves.”
Peanuds was initially launched as a business banking solution focused on the Cyprus market. However, the founders quickly encountered the technical and operational limitations that often accompany Banking-as-a-Service providers. Rather than accepting those constraints, they chose to rebuild the company’s infrastructure. Developed alongside a technical partner, the new technology stack proved attractive not only to Peanuds’ own customers but also to other institutions facing similar challenges. What began as an internal solution soon evolved into the company’s core business model, with licensing its banking infrastructure to those institutions becoming a key growth driver.
At the heart of the business are small banking providers without a strong development focus, the kind that struggle to maintain their technical infrastructure, let alone add new functionality to it. Peanuds was built for them as a natively integrated, full-stack banking platform in which optional interfaces, back office, accounts, card issuing, acquiring and external providers all work together, so a provider does not have to assemble or maintain the infrastructure itself. Its modular design lets each client take only what it needs and connect the systems it already runs. “The tools out there are either too light for a real institution or they assume you will build half of it yourself,” Reike says. “That leaves a whole segment of banking providers stuck in the middle.”
One of them, the electronic money institution Bebawa, relaunched its entire platform and infrastructure on Peanuds, moving its accounts, cards, SWIFT and payment connectivity, onboarding, transaction monitoring, multi-currency operations and its web and mobile apps onto a single system. It is one of three financial institutions currently running on Peanuds, with a further three expected to join this year. Asked what sets Peanuds apart, Reike points to the depth of what the platform connects and builds. It goes deep where others stay shallow, in cards, in SWIFT, in the connectors to central-bank payment systems, and it builds the pieces that many providers consider too unscalable to offer, such as risk-assessment tooling and the customer-facing front end. The company has invested heavily in card technology and has worked closely with Visa. That relationship led to Peanuds being selected for the Visa Innovation Programme Europe, which serves Greece, Cyprus and Malta, and, having previously run a Mastercard programme, the company is now relaunching its card programme on Visa, rolling it out to retail and corporate customers across the European Economic Area.
Peanuds has raised €700,000 from angel investors and has generated more than €1 million in revenue, with much of that income reinvested directly into product development. A key priority is securing its own Electronic Money Institution licence in Cyprus, alongside Visa Principal Membership, reducing reliance on external partners for both regulatory and payment scheme services. Peanuds is also investing in its own card-processing infrastructure and expanding the multicurrency capabilities of its card programme. Cyprus remains central to the company’s future – Reike says that Peanuds intends to expand its local team, deepen its investment in the market and attract more Cypriot clients. For a company born out of conversations about startup failures, Peanuds shows that some of the most valuable lessons come not from success but from the challenges that entrepreneurs overcome along the way.
Peanuds
Founders: Luciano Nonnis, Samuel Will and Florian Reike.
Stage: Seed.
What it is: A full-stack banking and card infrastructure platform.
Funds received: €700,000.
Funds needed: €4 million.
Awards: Visa Innovation Program Europe participant.
What it aspires to become: The next-generation independent banking infrastructure platform for Europe.
This interview first appeared in the July edition of GOLD magazine. Click here to view it.
