Kevin.

Founded in 2017 by CEO Tadas Tamošiūnas and COO Pavel Sokolovas, Kevin was a Vilnius-based financial technology company positioned to alter the payments landscape. The founders leveraged their respective backgrounds in banking and business development to create a payment infrastructure designed to challenge the dominance of traditional card networks.

The company’s core business was a sophisticated account-to-account (A2A) payment infrastructure, accessible to merchants via an API. This technology enabled businesses to accept payments directly from a customer's bank account, bypassing the conventional card networks. The business model was predicated on charging significantly lower transaction fees than the interchange and other fees associated with card payments, which could be up to 10 times cheaper for merchants in certain sectors like parking or deliveries. Kevin served a diverse client base across industries such as retail, mobility services, and insurance, supporting both online and mobile transactions.

Kevin's product was a white-label, PSD2-compliant payment solution designed for the European Economic Area (EEA) and supervised by the Bank of Lithuania. A key feature was its ability to facilitate seamless payments from pre-linked bank accounts for recurring or low-value services without requiring authentication for every single transaction. The company expanded its product suite to include an innovative point-of-sale (POS) solution. This allowed customers to make A2A payments in physical stores using existing NFC card terminals, a development aimed at capturing a significant share of the in-store payments market. The company was also a notable first in executing an A2A NFC transaction on an iPhone, demonstrating its technical capabilities after Apple opened up its NFC technology.

The company showed early signs of rapid growth, securing a $10 million seed round in late 2021 and a substantial $65 million Series A round in May 2022, led by Accel. At its peak, the team grew to over 170 employees across 30 countries. However, the firm encountered significant operational and regulatory headwinds. In July 2024, the Bank of Lithuania blocked Kevin from acquiring new clients, citing delayed financial reports and failure to meet capital adequacy requirements. Following these challenges and struggles to establish a sustainable, profitable business model, Kevin declared bankruptcy in September 2024. Keywords: account-to-account payments, A2A payments, open banking, fintech, payment infrastructure, PSD2, POS payments, NFC payments, Tadas Tamošiūnas, Pavel Sokolovas, direct bank payments, payment gateway, e-commerce payments, mobile payments, cardless payments, financial technology, Lithuanian fintech, payment processing, acquiring services, interchange fees, Accel, Bank of Lithuania, payment solutions, digital payments, online transactions