London — May 7, 2026
Gemba Finance, the FCA-authorised banking infrastructure provider often described as the "Shopify for banking", has been named a finalist at the PayTech Awards 2026 in the category of Best Embedded White-Label Payments Solution, in recognition of its turnkey banking platform.
The London-based company will compete alongside Estonia's Wallester and the Italian Lottomatica–Fabrick partnership when winners are announced at the Honourable Artillery Company in the City on 25 June. The shortlist, published this week by FinTech Futures and Informa Connect, distils hundreds of entries down to a handful of platforms judged to be advancing the state of the art in payments technology.
For Gemba, the recognition arrives at a moment of accelerating commercial momentum, as the company continues to expand its base of white-label partners across professional services, vertical SaaS and the consolidator economy. Inclusion on the shortlist places its turnkey proposition alongside a small cohort of platforms judged to be setting the pace in embedded payments.
Rewriting the BaaS playbook
The PayTech Awards nomination underscores Gemba's bet that the second wave of Banking-as-a-Service — what the company calls "BaaS 2.0" — will be defined less by raw API access and more by speed-to-market, regulatory cover, and aligned commercial incentives.
Where incumbent BaaS providers have traditionally charged heavy setup fees and recurring SaaS licences, Gemba has eliminated upfront costs entirely. Partners can launch a fully branded web banking application in minutes via a no-code configurator, with Gemba's FCA Authorised Payment Institution licence (FRN: 804853) absorbing the compliance, KYC, KYB, AML and safeguarding obligations that would otherwise require a partner to build its own regulated entity.
The commercial model is similarly contrarian. Under Gemba's so-called "reverse revenue split", partners share in transaction economics and can layer their own pricing on top — an inversion of the typical BaaS arrangement in which the platform retains the lion's share of revenue from its distribution partners.
A platform built for the aggregation economy
The Gemba Turnkey Banking proposition is engineered for a specific class of customer: the consolidator. Private equity-backed roll-ups in insurance broking, veterinary services, wealth management and care homes are inheriting fragmented branch networks where cash is trapped in local accounts and treasury visibility is opaque. Gemba's stack — dedicated UK account numbers, multi-currency IBANs, unlimited virtual IBANs for automated reconciliation, a high-throughput payroll API and branded Visa issuance — collapses the operational gap between corporate headquarters and the field.
Accounting and law firms, payroll and umbrella companies, vertical SaaS platforms, and a new generation of aggregation economy buyers acquiring legacy service businesses sit alongside the consolidators as natural users of the platform.
Industry validation
The PayTech Awards shortlist follows two earlier markers of external validation: inclusion in the Sifted 100 UK & Ireland Leaderboard, and selection for the JPMorganChase FinTech Forward 2025 Programme. Together they suggest that what began as a contrarian thesis on how non-bank brands should access banking infrastructure is now being read by judges, investors and incumbents as a credible reframing of the category.
The timing is consequential for the wider UK fintech ecosystem. Britain's payments sector has spent much of the past two years navigating tighter regulatory expectations on safeguarding, financial promotions and authorised push-payment fraud reimbursement. Platforms that can demonstrably absorb that compliance burden on behalf of distribution partners — rather than passing it down the stack — are increasingly the ones being rewarded, both commercially and on shortlists such as this one.
What comes next
Gemba's roadmap for the remainder of 2026 points to an expansion of the proposition that earned the nomination. Open-source web and mobile banking front-ends, designed to allow deeper customisation by sophisticated fintech partners, are due in the first half of the year. Additional currency coverage, including HKD and MXN, and stablecoin payouts in USDC and USDT, are planned alongside Open Banking APIs.
The PayTech Awards 2026 winners will be announced at a ceremony on 25 June at the Honourable Artillery Company, London. The full shortlist is available at https://informaconnect.com/paytech-awards.
