ipagoo

ipagoo

ipagoo launched as a UK-based fintech aiming to deliver a fully passportable mobile banking experience across the European Economic Area. Carlos Sanchez, the founder and CEO, positioned the firm around an open-banking architecture that would let individuals and businesses hold accounts denominated in multiple currencies simultaneously, with local IBANs in multiple countries. The company secured an e-money licence from the UK's Financial Conduct Authority and acquired Orwell, a French payments institution, to anchor its regulatory passporting strategy. The firm's core product combined a mobile current account with integrated foreign-exchange at interbank rates, bill-splitting tools, and real-time transaction notifications. Customers could open accounts in the UK, France, Italy, and Spain from a single app — a compliance-heavy build that few challenger banks attempted at the time. The Orwell subsidiary brought a full credit-institution licence in France, which ipagoo intended to use for expanding into lending and deposit-taking across the EU. A team of roughly 40 professionals operated from offices in London, Paris, and Milan. The board included veteran bankers from Lloyds and Barclays. The model attracted scrutiny for how customer funds were safeguarded under its e-money permissions. In 2017, the UK's Prudential Regulation Authority began reviewing foreign bank branching rules — a shift that directly threatened ipagoo's reliance on its French licence for pan-EU operations. ipagoo's structural differentiator was its genuine multicurrency banking with local account numbers, not just a travel card or multi-currency wallet. That required holding regulatory permissions in each country where it issued IBANs — a hard problem the firm was solving through acquired licences rather than third-party middleware. The administration in 2019, triggered by PRA restrictions on branch passports, marks one of the sharper regulatory reversals in European fintech history.