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Smava

“Can Germany's dominant consumer loan comparison portal defend margin as banks push more origination direct-to-consumer and as embedded lenders (auxmoney, BNPLs) reshape distribution?”

Founded2007
HQBerlin, Germany
FoundersAlexander Artopé, Eckart Vierkant
Latest roundPE Growth
IndustryFintech / Lending
The story

Smava started in 2007 as Germany's first peer-to-peer credit marketplace and pivoted over the following years into a broad multi-bank loan comparison portal, adding a scoring engine (2013) and Germany's first fully digital instant loan Kredit2Go (2016). Today it is a broker/aggregator connecting consumers to 20+ partner banks (Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, DKB, ING, Norisbank, Postbank, Santander, Targobank, auxmoney, ABK Bank, Vereinigte Volksbank Raiffeisenbank etc.) plus adjacent verticals — credit cards, current accounts, insurance, and mortgages — all offered as a comparison/brokerage, not as a balance-sheet lender.

Last 12 months
—
Product timeline
2007
Founded as Germany's first credit marketplace by Alexander Artopé and Eckart Vierkant· pivot
2012
Expanded from P2P to comprehensive digital loan comparison across banks· pivot
2013
Combined personalized advisory with scoring engine for offer matching· lending
2016
Launched Kredit2Go, Germany's first fully automated digital loan· lending
Regulated entities
1
regulatory licence held by Smava
Licence types, jurisdictions and registered entities are in the Embedded Finance Index report.
The stack
3 layers disclosed in Smava’s embedded-finance stack
Card issuing
imprint
Card network
in the full report
Lending
in the full report
Accounting gap: none
7 more providers across 2 layers, with confidence-scored evidence and source URLs, are in the Embedded Finance Index report.