Qonto

The business account is open to sole proprietors and freelancers as well as limited companies, partnerships and associations. Plans for the self-employed are called Basic, Smart and Premium, and team plans for companies are called Essential, Business and Enterprise. Every plan comes with physical and virtual Mastercard cards, payment links, Tap to Pay on a smartphone and card terminals for sales in a shop.

Customers write quotes and invoices in the app, and an AI function drafts them for review before they go out with a payment link attached. Since 1 January 2025 every company in Germany must be able to receive structured electronic invoices, and the rules are explained under e-invoicing in Germany. Qonto is an official DATEV partner (in German) and connects the account to more than 2,000 accounting and business tools.

Founders of a limited company in Germany pay their share capital online into a capital deposit account at Qonto (in German), with a temporary IBAN for each shareholder. Once the full amount has arrived, Qonto issues the deposit confirmation for the notary within 24 hours. The account becomes a normal business account after the founders upload the notarized application to the commercial register.

Qonto also arranges overdrafts, business loans and a pay-later option for invoices (in German) for its customers in Germany. Customers can also invest idle cash in money market funds inside the app, at a variable return that Qonto does not guarantee. These investments fall outside the safeguarding rules that protect balances on the payment account.

Qonto SA is a payment institution authorized by the ACPR under registration number 16958, granted on 21 June 2018. The ACPR is the prudential supervisor attached to the Banque de France, and the German branch of Qonto in Berlin is supervised jointly by the ACPR and BaFin. A payment institution may run payment accounts and execute transfers under PSD2, but it may not take deposits the way a bank does.

In 2025 Qonto applied for a license as a credit institution, and in September 2026 the company still described the license as subject to regulatory approval. With the license, Qonto could offer financing, savings and payment services directly within its own product. Alexandre Prot, co-founder and CEO, described the goal as becoming the AI-powered European champion of banking and finance management for SMEs.

In July 2022 Qonto agreed to acquire Penta, a business account provider from Berlin. Penta served about 50,000 companies in Germany at the time, and Qonto moved them to its own platform during 2023. Every former Penta customer kept a German IBAN after the move to the Qonto platform.

Qonto gives companies a local IBAN in each of its eight markets (in German), provided the company has its seat or a branch in that country. In Berlin, Qonto was among the first members of the House of Finance and Tech Berlin, which the state of Berlin set up in 2024 with banks and fintechs.

In April 2026 Qonto released two AI agents in its app, called The Operator and The Analyst. The Operator creates cards, prepares up to 50 supplier invoices for payment in one batch and schedules transfers, while The Analyst answers questions about spending. Every critical action still needs the approval of the user with two-factor authentication before Qonto executes it.

Since June 2026 the Qonto MCP server connects the business account to Claude, ChatGPT and other assistants that support the Model Context Protocol. Each user signs in with a personal Qonto login, and the permissions follow the role that user holds in the account.

In October 2026 Qonto launched Qonto Insights, a free monthly data platform built from anonymized transactions of business customers in France, Germany, Italy and Spain. The first edition counted 31.6 percent of invoices paid late in September 2026, and with 23.5 percent Germany had the highest share of SMEs that made or received an international payment.

Qonto runs online business accounts with cards, invoicing, bookkeeping exports and financing for small companies and freelancers in eight European countries. Customers pay a monthly plan fee, and the plan decides how many cards, users and free transfers are included.

Qonto is not a bank yet, because it works as a licensed payment institution while its application for a credit institution license awaits approval. Customers still get a business account with an IBAN, cards and transfers, which a payment institution may provide under PSD2.

A company with its seat or a branch in Germany receives a German IBAN starting with DE for its business account. Founders first get a temporary IBAN for the capital deposit, and the activated account then works like any other German business account.

Team plans include between five and thirty physical One Cards on the Mastercard network, plus virtual cards for online purchases and subscriptions. Account owners can block a card at once and set limits for each card inside the app.

Customer money is safeguarded at French partner banks or invested in qualified money market funds, as the rules for payment institutions require. If a partner bank fails, the French deposit guarantee fund FGDR covers up to €100,000 per institution and per client, and two bank guarantees cover the remaining amount.