How Much Capital Is Really Required to Launch a Card Acquirer in Europe (2026 Cost Breakdown)

Interest in becoming a card acquirer has grown as margins tighten for payment service providers and regulators push more responsibility down the value chain. At the same time, European supervisors, card schemes, and merchants expect production-ready systems, mature risk controls, and financial resilience from day one. Against this backdrop, founders often underestimate both the money and time required to reach operational maturity.

This article provides a practical cost framework based on real founder experiences, highlighting where budgets expand, why timelines slip, and how different entry models materially change the capital required.

A card acquirer is a bank or financial institution that enables merchants to accept card payments through a direct relationship with a card scheme like Visa or Mastercard.

Compared to payment service providers, which work on a third-party basis, acquirers hold their own card scheme license and assume first-party responsibility for the complete life cycle of processing transactions, including settlement, fraud, and compliance. Acquirers handle authorisation switching, clearing and settlement, chargebacks, and they operate the technical aspects of the merchants around the clock.

Market discussions suggest figures ranging between €3 million and €15 million. These very different figures reflect uncertainty rather than certainty.

Cost estimates are wide-ranging because launch costs depend on many parameters that vary between card acquirer start-ups. There is no average cost of launching a card acquirer, as each startup makes different choices in terms of business model, market, build vs. buy technology architecture, currencies and methods, and types of merchants.

Regulation varies between EU countries, timelines depend on the quality of preparation, and markets differ in the level of investment required to establish traction.

Regulatory capital

Regulatory capital is the amount that must be kept available to satisfy the requirements of regulatory licensing. This is an amount that has to be reserved and cannot be used for anything other than regulatory compliance.

Amounts vary between €125,000 and several million euros, depending on the country and type of license.

Operational and setup costs

Operational and setup costs are everything else. These costs typically reach multiple millions of euros before the first transaction of any merchant is processed.

They include, but are not limited to:

Together, these expenses represent the largest and most variable portion of the total launch cost.

EU regulatory capital requirements vary by country and license type, starting at €125,000 for payment institutions in relatively friendly jurisdictions and scaling to €1 million+ for electronic money institutions or less friendly jurisdictions. The national regulators determine the amount under local laws implementing EU directives.

The minimum capital requirement is an easy line item for first-time founders to misinterpret. Maintaining regulatory capital is a reserve for consumer protection, so it’s not available for the founder to use to launch the business.

One webinar participant had €3 million total to start with—not the €15 million commonly mentioned for full-feature acquirers—but even that was a lot of money, an order of magnitude greater than any regulatory minimum.

Regulatory capital is an accessible liquidity pool protecting merchant funds and ensuring payment on settled transactions. It sits in segregated accounts or liquid instruments. It is not available to pay salaries, hire staff, or cover the cost of processing infrastructure, brands, marketing, and other operational costs.

Licensing and Legal Setup

License application costs in the EU range from €50,000 to €150,000, depending on the jurisdiction and the degree of preparedness of the applicant. These are direct costs associated with the appraisal of the application, the supervisor, and all direct costs in the granting of the license.

Legal, advisory, and compliance buildout costs often exceed direct costs by 2–5x before the license is granted. Founders typically require:

Together, these add another €100,000 to €500,000 of costs before the license is granted.

Technology and Infrastructure

Technology and infrastructure costs represent a major expense category for acquirers, particularly around processing, fraud prevention, and back-office systems.

Processing and gateway licenses are expensive. One webinar participant was shocked by the total technology costs associated with merchant processing authorisation requests. Building proprietary payment processing infrastructure poses monumental challenges. Efforts to go fully in-house at a reasonable scale take years of engineering effort and untold millions of lines of code. Approaches that rely on certified processors can be completed within months. Both techniques require deep pockets to fund long-term integration and iterative changes.

Fraud prevention costs are non-negotiable. This includes:

Reporting, reconciliation, and settlement back office operations must scale with merchant transaction volumes and produce accurate accounting reports. These costs include:

Webinar sessions focused on “systematic weaknesses.” Participants learned how back-end systems can collapse even in relatively benign environments. Extensive queries must be handled efficiently. Recurring operations must be handled multiple times per second, or at worst, in minutes. The back office keeps everything in check, providing liquidity and protecting against draconian penalties for operational failures.

Team and Operational Costs

Team and operational costs reflect the human and organizational requirements of running an acquirer at scale.

Compliance and risk management staff need to be hired upfront, including a Money Laundering Reporting Officer (MLRO), Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance specialists, transaction monitoring specialists, and reporting specialists. As one webinar participant discovered, companies need around 100 bodies to make an acquirer work at a decent scale—and that’s only once “operational maturity” is reached. Founders should expect to assemble a small team with a reasonable degree of growth as merchants come on board.

Operations staff handle merchants with acquirers, providing 24/7 incident management. Downtime would destroy merchants’ businesses. The cost of support in this regard is notoriously high before any revenue comes in.

The payroll surprises before the business is operational. The webinar speaker was surprised by how long it takes between license approval and revenue. Founders must budget between 18 and 36 months of full salaries for their team while waiting for their operation to reach “operational maturity.” License approvals take time. Merchant integrations are complex—especially if they are non-technical. Onboarding merchants at scale takes months.

Vendor and platform costs for recurring services skyrocket every month. Founders overlook this cost even though they deal with it every day. The list is long:

All charge monthly fees that add up—€10,000 to €100,000+ depending on volumes.

Ongoing Fixed Costs

Ongoing fixed costs are driven primarily by compliance, certification, and supervisory obligations that persist throughout operations.

Ongoing compliance costs mount up in the course of operations. These include:

There’s more to certification than most founders think. Card schemes each have their own codes of conduct. Yearly renewal of operational compliance entails getting permission each year from multiple card schemes to operate. Fraud modelling changes as schemes adjust their patterns. Founders must implement new practices when they emerge—e.g., PSD2, and now PSD3. Each new requirement generates a bill from a consultant for advice, or requires a consultant to be paid to carry out implementation work.

The chosen EU country impacts costs through variations in regulatory capital requirements, supervisor expectations, local fees, and market competition. Lithuania or Latvia offer fintech-friendly licensing with streamlined processes and lower costs, while Germany or France impose stricter requirements, longer timelines, and higher advisory expenses.

Regulator expectations across Europe extend beyond written rules to documentation detail, infrastructure robustness, and management team experience. Some regulators require fully operational systems before licensing, others approve earlier, and certain countries prefer local management presence or specific structures, adding cost and complexity.

The cost impact of different acquirer models varies significantly depending on the level of control, regulatory responsibility, and ownership of technology and merchant relationships. The three most common approaches—full card acquirer, partnered or sponsored acquirer, and step-by-step or phased entry—differ primarily in launch cost, margin potential, and operational complexity.

Full card acquirer

The model with the highest costs but highest control and margin potential is operating as a full card acquirer with its own scheme memberships, processing, and merchant relationship management.

Total launch costs probably exceed €5 million, and can be in the €10–15 million range for well-financed players in competitive markets.

Partnered or sponsored acquirer

Partnered or sponsored models reduce capital requirements by leveraging the existing acquirer's license and processing service.

Launch costs can be cut by 50–70% vs full models, allowing market entry with €2–5 million, but with shared revenues and less control over technology and pricing.

Step-by-step or phased approach

Many successful acquirers start as technical service providers or payment facilitators, building relationships with merchants before approaching regulators to pursue their own license once they have proven the model and raised sufficient capital.

This phased approach reduces costs and allows for revenue generation over a longer period before incurring high costs, but it requires patience.

Card acquirer launch costs are often higher than expected primarily because timelines extend well beyond initial plans, driving additional expenses before revenue begins. Longer-than-anticipated timelines are the biggest source of additional cost overruns. The webinar speaker aimed to build and launch, but it took him three years from license application to going live.

Each additional month adds pressure in terms of:

Tech and compliance delays frequently cause a domino effect on project timelines, as integration dependencies often manifest themselves only during implementation. For example, a three-month delay in processor integration with the gateway and partner can push back:

Having revenue start later than anticipated creates particularly painful dynamics when founders have committed to high fixed costs but find that merchant onboarding and transaction volumes take longer than expected to ramp up after the go-live day. The gap between when the acquirer has meaningful expenses to service (day one) and when he has meaningful revenue (often 12–24 months later) takes deeper pockets than originally planned for.

A realistic working estimate for founders in 2026 requires budgeting with explicit buffers for costs and timelines that go wrong or take longer than expected. Realistic budgeting requires building in buffers for everything going wrong and taking longer than expected, even to the extent of regulatory documentation requests, technology vendor slack, staff turnover, or market condition changes slowing merchant uptake.

The successful founders the speaker spoke to all say to:

Total budgets in 2026 realistically start in the €3–5 million range for skinny partnered models, moving up to €10–15 million for competitive environments for full acquirer launches. The webinar attendee thought some estimates of a minimum of €15 million as a budget may be overly pessimistic, suggesting that it would be possible to launch with about €3 million if vendor partners are used and costs kept under control, but this is a lower bound requiring ideal conditions and execution.

Contingency or buffer capital must be a working assumption for every founder, as dozens of factors are outside of their control when it comes to regulators, card schemes, technology vendors, and banks, with something going wrong or taking longer than planned. Many experienced founders the speaker consulted suggest planning for an additional 6–12 months of runway for buffering breaking even, as market entry rarely goes according to plan, but those who can weather the storm will be the acquirers who ultimately succeed.

There are several alternatives to launching a full card acquirer that allow founders to enter the market with lower regulatory, technical, and capital requirements. These alternatives focus on partnering, sponsorship, or hybrid structures rather than building a fully licensed acquiring stack from day one.

Partnering with existing acquirers

Acting as a payment facilitator or ISO under the license of an existing card acquirer avoids most of the regulatory and technical infrastructure costs, while still allowing for merchant acquisition and servicing.

Sponsor-bank or white-label models

Sponsor-bank or white-label models provide an alternative to launching a full card acquirer by using white-label acquiring platforms from existing processors and banks.

These platforms offer a plug-and-play option with technology, compliance, and scheme relationships provided by the vendor, with only the entrepreneur's input needed for:

These arrangements involve sharing revenues, but market entry is possible with an initial outlay of less than €500,000.

Hybrid approaches are used by many fintechs

Hybrid approaches are used by many fintechs as an alternative to launching a full card acquirer outright. Modern fintech acquirers commonly start as sponsored acquirers to build up a merchant base and trust in the market, then move to apply for a full license when they are big enough to afford the investment.

Many maintain partnerships in some markets while going solo in others.

The webinar highlighted that choosing vendors and building a modular infrastructure carefully allows these acquirers to adapt their business model without needing to overhaul their technical foundation.