Why Two Netflix Engineers Left Streaming to Fix European Open Banking Payments
European open banking payments have long suffered a reliability problem that most merchants and developers quietly tolerate: bank-initiated transactions fail at rates that would be catastrophic in any other part of the technology stack. Nopan, a fintech startup founded by two former Netflix engineers, has raised €7.2 million in seed funding to change that — bringing a streaming-industry obsession with uptime and resilience to the fragmented world of European bank and digital wallet payments.
Konstantin Surkov and Nick Ryabov, who previously worked on Netflix's Amsterdam-based payments team, identified the problem firsthand. While ensuring that millions of subscribers across Europe could pay their monthly bills seamlessly, the duo discovered that account-to-account (A2A) payments and wallet transactions were riddled with inconsistencies — dropped connections, unexpected API responses, and silent failures that degraded conversion rates without ever triggering an obvious alert. The insight that shaped Nopan was straightforward but powerful: payment infrastructure in Europe needed the same engineering rigour applied to consumer-facing technology at scale.
The funding round was led by investors backing the founders' thesis that reliability — not just connectivity — is the missing layer in Europe's open banking ecosystem. For developers, IT decision-makers, and fintech operators who have spent years working around inconsistent bank APIs, the pitch is refreshingly technical rather than purely commercial.
Europe's Payment Reliability Gap: What the Data Actually Shows
Europe's open banking ecosystem was built on the foundations of PSD2, the EU's revised Payment Services Directive, which mandated that banks open their infrastructure to third-party payment service providers. The regulation was designed to foster competition and innovation, and by many measures it has succeeded: the number of open banking users across Europe has grown significantly, with industry data from the Open Banking Excellence network suggesting tens of millions of active users across major markets.
But connectivity is not the same as reliability. According to analysis published by open banking infrastructure providers, A2A payment success rates across European markets vary dramatically — from as high as 97% in well-integrated markets like the UK and the Netherlands, to as low as 60–70% in markets where bank API implementation is inconsistent or underdocumented. For an e-commerce merchant processing thousands of transactions per day, a 30% failure rate on a payment method is commercially untenable. For a developer integrating payments into a B2B SaaS product, it means building elaborate retry logic, fallback flows, and customer-facing error handling that should not be necessary in a mature infrastructure environment.
The digital wallet landscape compounds the problem. Services like PayPal, Klarna, Revolut, and a patchwork of local wallet providers each implement payment flows differently, creating integration headaches for developers who need consistent, predictable behaviour across markets. As the European Payments Council has noted in its analysis of instant payment adoption, harmonisation remains a work in progress — particularly as the EU's new Instant Payments Regulation pushes banks to support euro-denominated instant transfers by mandated deadlines.
Nopan's founders argue that the solution is not simply connecting to more APIs, but engineering a reliability layer that normalises behaviour, handles edge cases gracefully, and provides the kind of observability that modern engineering teams expect. "The payment infrastructure in Europe has more moving parts than most people realise," Surkov has noted in discussions about the company's founding thesis. "When you've watched what happens when a streaming platform takes reliability engineering seriously, you start to see exactly how much headroom exists to improve payments."
What Nopan Actually Builds — and Why Developers Should Pay Attention
Nopan positions itself as a reliability layer for account-to-account and wallet payments across Europe, sitting between merchants or platforms and the underlying bank or wallet infrastructure. Rather than simply routing transactions, the company focuses on increasing payment success rates through intelligent retry logic, real-time monitoring of bank API health, and adaptive routing that steers transactions away from degraded endpoints.
For developers and engineering teams, this kind of abstraction layer is immediately recognisable from other parts of the infrastructure stack. It is conceptually similar to what tools like AWS Route 53 health checks or Cloudflare's reliability layer do for web traffic — ensuring that failures at one node do not cascade into customer-facing errors. Applied to payment infrastructure, the same logic reduces silent failures, accelerates debugging, and makes it significantly easier to build reliable payment flows without deep expertise in the quirks of individual bank APIs across 27 EU member states.
| Payment Method | Typical Reliability Challenge | Nopan's Approach |
|---|---|---|
| Bank A2A (Open Banking) | Variable API quality across EU banks, silent failures | Real-time API health monitoring, adaptive routing |
| Digital Wallets | Inconsistent flow implementations, timeout variance | Normalised integration layer, intelligent retry logic |
| Instant Payments (SEPA) | Bank readiness gaps, reachability inconsistencies | Routing fallbacks, real-time reachability checks |
| Cross-border EU Payments | Regulatory fragmentation, latency spikes | Market-specific optimisation, latency-aware routing |
The approach also has implications for data sovereignty and GDPR compliance — topics that matter deeply to European enterprises. Because Nopan operates within European infrastructure and focuses exclusively on European payment rails, customers avoid the data-residency complications that arise when routing sensitive payment data through US-headquartered infrastructure providers. For privacy professionals and compliance officers, this is a meaningful architectural distinction, particularly as regulators increasingly scrutinise cross-border data flows in financial services under both GDPR and the EU's financial data access framework (FIDA) currently moving through the legislative process.
How Nopan Fits Into Europe's Crowded Open Banking Infrastructure Market
Nopan enters a market that already includes well-funded players. Companies like TrueLayer, Yapily, Token, and Tink (acquired by Visa) have spent years building open banking connectivity infrastructure across Europe. More recently, Volt and Nuapay have focused specifically on A2A payment flows. The market, according to research from Juniper Research, is projected to generate significant transaction volumes as A2A payments gain traction relative to card-based alternatives — driven partly by regulation, partly by merchant demand for lower interchange fees.
What differentiates Nopan's positioning is the explicit focus on reliability rather than connectivity breadth. Most established open banking providers compete primarily on the number of banks they connect to and the geographic coverage they offer. Nopan's founders argue that raw connectivity is increasingly commoditised — the harder and more valuable problem is ensuring that those connections actually work consistently under real-world conditions. It is a distinction that resonates with engineering teams who have already integrated an open banking provider and are now wrestling with the long tail of failures that standard connectivity promises do not address.
The company's Netflix pedigree is also a credibility signal in a market where enterprise buyers are increasingly sophisticated. Netflix's engineering culture — characterised by chaos engineering, rigorous incident post-mortems, and a near-religious commitment to uptime — is well understood by the developer and IT audience Nopan is targeting. The implication is that the founders are not approaching payment infrastructure as a compliance problem to be managed, but as a systems engineering challenge to be solved.
According to reporting by Tech Funding News, the €7.2 million seed round positions Nopan to expand its engineering team and deepen its bank integrations across core European markets. The company is operating at a moment of significant regulatory tailwind: the EU's Instant Payments Regulation, which came into force and is rolling out phased compliance deadlines, is forcing banks to improve their real-time payment infrastructure — creating both opportunity and complexity for providers like Nopan.
Originally reported by Tech Funding News. Summarised and curated by European Purpose.
