Banking Circle

Banking Circle is a bank whose customers are payment businesses. It started in 2013 as Saxo Payments, a Danish payment institution incubated by Saxo Group, adopted its current name in 2017 and became independent in 2018, when funds managed by EQT bought it together with the founders. Its parent, Banking Circle S.A., has held a Luxembourg banking licence since 2019 and is supervised by the CSSF.

Clients are regulated firms rather than shops: card acquirers and issuers, cross-border payment providers, account providers, alternative payment method providers, banks and digital asset businesses. Stripe, Checkout.com, Nuvei, Paysafe, PPRO and Paymentsense are among the more than 950 institutions it names. They use it for accounts, virtual IBANs, foreign exchange, deposits, liquidity and correspondent banking. Banking Circle says it handles over €1.7 trillion of payments a year and processed 314 million B2B transactions in 2024.

It offers payments in 24 currencies and connects directly to local clearing for 14 of them. Those rails include SEPA, SEPA Instant and T2 for euros, Faster Payments and CHAPS for sterling, NPP and BECS in Australia, and the domestic systems of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Poland, Czechia, Hungary, Romania, Hong Kong and Singapore. Other currencies travel over SWIFT. The bank has branches in the UK, Denmark, Germany, Sweden and Norway, a Liechtenstein subsidiary licensed in 2024, and in Australia it bought Australian Settlements Limited, a deposit-taking institution, in 2025.

The bank suits licensed payment companies that need multi-currency accounts and settlement at volume. It is not a merchant acquirer, and no price list appears on its website.