I asked Edy Bruinooge the direct question first: why should anyone give up a payment method they already trust? His answer was about who owns the rail underneath the payment. Bruinooge is co-founder and CCO of ibanXS, a Dutch platform that reaches more than 2,500 banks in 31 European countries over the PSD2 rails, and he was one of the product people on the iDEAL programme. Seven years ago he and his business partner started again, this time for the whole of Europe.
| What you need to know |
|---|
| 1ibanXS is a payment institution supervised by De Nederlandsche Bank, registration R163657, KvK 74638858, with offices in Voorschoten and Barcelona. It sells access to the PSD2 payment-initiation and account-information APIs rather than a consumer brand. |
| 2Bruinooge puts the reach at 31 European countries and more than 2,500 banks, heading for 3,000. The company was built seven years ago, at the point where PSD2 forced every bank in Europe to publish those APIs. |
| 3He and his business partner Hans were on the iDEAL programme, Hans on the technical side, Bruinooge on the product side. iDEAL is owned by Currence, part of the European Payments Initiative since 2023, and is now migrating into Wero. |
| 4My read: the pitch here is sovereignty rather than a cheaper checkout, and that argument stopped being theoretical in a year when the card schemes turned into a strategic-autonomy file in Brussels. |
The full conversation runs just over thirteen minutes.
The sovereignty argument, not the price argument
I put it to him that he is not the only option, and that in the Netherlands we grew up with iDEAL while Germany grew up with PayPal. He did not reach for a feature list.
So why is pay by bank better than the rest? It’s European payment methods, completely European.
Edy Bruinooge, co-founder and CCO, ibanXS
Then the line he told me he always uses.
big card schemes are not European, we always say. So it’s European sovereignty and you can reach every IBAN in Europe
Edy Bruinooge
That is a bigger claim than it sounds in a booth at the WTC. Every other method he is competing with is local by birth: iDEAL is Dutch, Bancontact is Belgian, Blik is Polish. An IBAN is not local, which is why he keeps coming back to it as the unit of reach rather than to a market share figure. ibanXS does not sell the checkout button. It sells the connection underneath it, and then lets the payment service providers fight over the button.
if we provide the rails the other parties like the payment service providers are on top of that rails and they are doing the competition as they are doing now competition with iDEAL or PayPal or whatsoever
Edy Bruinooge
It is a deliberately unglamorous position. It also means his growth does not depend on persuading a single consumer of anything, which for a seven-year-old company competing with card networks is the only version of this that works.
Read the thread on X
What seventeen years of iDEAL taught them
The reason to take the claim seriously sits in his CV, and he brought it up himself, with the qualification attached.
my business partner myself were among the founding fathers of iDEAL 17 18 years ago
Edy Bruinooge
Hans was one of the technical architects on that programme. Bruinooge was on the product side. Then, unprompted, he gave the credit a wider frame.
in interviews like this I always say that we invented iDEAL. Not entirely true, there were a lot of people present, but we learned so much from 17 years of iDEAL and we brought that all together in our new platform seven years ago
Edy Bruinooge
That was the moment he stopped selling, and it is the most useful thirty seconds in the interview. A founder who shares the credit for iDEAL with the room is also a founder who talks about bank coverage in exact numbers. iDEAL is now being folded into Wero, the European Payments Initiative wallet, which is the single biggest reason the Dutch checkout is in motion at all this year.
Crypto money in, money out
I did not have to steer him to the part our readers care about. He went there himself, and named the channel while doing it.
they are now doing money in money out for crypto companies via iDEAL credit cards I don’t know or just bank transfers
Edy Bruinooge
those need to know that pay by bank it’s cheaper it’s faster it’s there money in money out
Edy Bruinooge
Anyone who has funded an exchange account in Europe knows the shape of the problem. Cards get declined or surcharged on crypto merchant codes, SEPA transfers clear when the bank feels like it, and iDEAL stops at the Dutch border. A PSD2 payment initiation is a push from the customer’s own bank account, authorised in the customer’s own banking app, which is why it survives the risk policies that kill the card route. The interesting part is that it is the same rail in 31 countries, so an exchange or a broker does not have to re-plumb its deposits market by market.
Account information services are the quieter half of the same licence. That is the leg that lets a platform read a verified bank balance or confirm that the IBAN funding an account belongs to the person who opened it, which is exactly the check a MiCA-licensed venue has to run anyway.
A licence, 2,500 banks and a phone number
I asked how a sober Dutch user is supposed to trust a name they have never seen with their bank credentials. The regulatory answer came first: ibanXS is supervised by De Nederlandsche Bank and holds a payment institution licence, registration R163657. Then he moved to the part he actually wanted to talk about.
I always say that we are a small company but we are not a small company as small and tiny, but we are a compressed company
Edy Bruinooge
If you are a partner of ours, you have direct access to me, to my other founder, and to the team.
Edy Bruinooge
He was careful not to name the aggregators he is comparing himself to, and he did not need to. The pitch is that an integration into 2,500 banks eventually breaks somewhere, and that what you are buying is who picks up when it does.
you get a human at the other side of the line from us in our team helping you with your problems
Edy Bruinooge
You’re not a ticket number.
Edy Bruinooge
Bank APIs are not a finished product. Banks change endpoints, consent windows expire, a national implementation drifts. The reason he talks about coverage as a live number, and told me the team was adding more banks while we were sitting there, is that keeping 2,500 connections alive is the actual job. The licence gets you in. The maintenance is what you are paying for.
How long mainstream actually takes
The part I keep coming back to is the timeline, because he measures it against the thing he helped build.
it took iDEAL 10 years to become iDEAL as we know it right now
Edy Bruinooge
We are already seven years in. So the next few years it will become mainstream.
Edy Bruinooge
A few more years is a long runway for a payments startup and a short one for a payment habit. It also lines up with the calendar everyone at this event is already working to: Wero rolling out across the Netherlands, PSD3 and the Payment Services Regulation moving through Brussels, and the card schemes being discussed in the same breath as strategic autonomy. He came to Amsterdam to say so out loud, in a phrase he translated from Dutch on the spot.
pay by bank is here and here to stay
Edy Bruinooge
His own session at the event, “Pay by Bank: Who Will Capture the Value?”, ran in Breakout room 2 on day one, and the title is the right question. The rail being European does not decide who earns on it. That gets decided by the payment service providers and the merchants sitting on top, which is precisely the layer he says will fight it out while ibanXS stays underneath. Ask him for the one takeaway and he puts it in terms every Dutch reader already understands.
pay by bank can be as good as iDEAL
Edy Bruinooge
For a Dutch audience that is not a small thing to say. iDEAL has been the default way the Dutch pay online for years. Saying a European rail can match it, in the country that built it, is his whole argument in one sentence.
Read next
- iDEAL becomes Wero, the migration Bruinooge is building alongside, and the reason the Dutch checkout is open for argument this year.
- Is the euro stablecoin moment here? The other answer to the same sovereignty question, settled on-chain instead of over bank APIs.
- How Cognito builds the Amsterdam Fintech Event, our preview with the people who put this room together.
- Every interview we recorded at the event sits on the Amsterdam Fintech Event hub.
- ibanXS: ibanxs.eu and on LinkedIn. Edy Bruinooge is on X.
- The obligation he built the company on is Article 66 of Directive 2015/2366 (PSD2). The technical standards for those bank interfaces come from the European Banking Authority, and the successor rules are tracked on the European Commission’s payment services page.
I recorded the interview with Edy Bruinooge at the World Trade Center Amsterdam on 7 October 2026. Quotes are verbatim, with filler removed. Cryptofocus is a media partner of Amsterdam Fintech Event 2026. Nothing here is financial advice.
