Lithuania-based kevin., which offers card-less account-to-account payments, raises a $65M Series A led by Accel and says 6K merchants in Europe already use it
Payments remains a very fragmented business around the world: depending on where you're buying or selling something …
Context & Ripple Effects
kevin.'s $65M Series A lands two months after London rival Banked raised a $20M Series A for nearly the same pitch — letting merchants accept payments without accounts or shared data — confirming that account-to-account checkout has moved from open-banking experiment to a funded category with multiple backed contenders.
The round also extends Accel's payments streak: the firm previously led UK-based Primer's £14M round to consolidate merchant payment stacks, so it is now backing both the orchestration layer and a rail that bypasses cards entirely. Across the Atlantic, Link's seed and Series A for US direct bank payments show the same thesis being tested in a different regulatory environment.
First-order effects
- kevin. gets capital to scale beyond its 6,000 European merchants, while those merchants gain a checkout option priced off bank transfers rather than card interchange.
- Card issuers and acquirers serving kevin.'s merchant base now face direct competition at the checkout from a rail they don't control.
Second-order effects
- Banked and other A2A rivals must accelerate merchant acquisition and differentiation before kevin.'s war chest locks up European checkout volume, echoing how Lithic's $60M round intensified competition among card-issuing API providers.
- Payment orchestration platforms of the Primer type face pressure to add A2A rails alongside cards, since merchants consolidating their stacks will expect both.
Third-order effects
- If A2A adoption keeps compounding across Europe and the US, payment economics shift from interchange-based card fees toward per-transaction bank-rail pricing, weakening the card networks' hold on online checkout.
- Fragmentation itself becomes the structural story: rather than one winner, merchants route across cards, wallets, and direct bank payments, making orchestration and routing intelligence the durable layer — a pattern Flatpay's SMB-focused card business will eventually have to answer.
The trend: Online payments are splintering from card-network dominance toward directly funded account-to-account rails, with venture capital racing to back regional champions before open-banking regulation makes bank-direct checkout table stakes.