Around one in four Trustly employees is losing their job. The Swedish payments company is cutting roughly 200 roles worldwide as it narrows where it spends.
The Stockholm company lets customers pay directly from a bank account without a card or app, positioning itself as an alternative to Visa and Mastercard. It is backed by BlackRock and has raised more than $400M, and its rails are used by thousands of merchants including Alibaba, PayPal and Wise.
Breakit, the Swedish outlet that reported the cuts first, said Trustly shed a significant slice of revenue last year when two unnamed major clients walked, and reported that the company may have been for sale. Both clients came back.
Trustly said the changes mostly hit teams in Brazil. A spokesperson described them as sharpening focus and concentrating investment behind priorities that will help the company lead a rapidly growing open banking market, adding that affected employees are being supported through the process.
Open banking has been a promising category for a decade and a genuinely awkward business to run. Payments margins compress quickly, winning enterprise merchants means long integrations, and account-to-account providers compete against card networks that spend heavily to defend their rails.
Trustly’s decision to shrink by a quarter suggests the company believes scale alone will not settle that contest. It is headquartered in Stockholm with offices in London, Helsinki and beyond, and the reduction concentrates what remains on fewer markets.
