Turkish FinTech Midas Targets Consumer Payments Business

Midas has reportedly applied to Turkey’s central bank for an electronic money institution license.

The Istanbul-based FinTech hopes to begin offering digital consumer payment products, Bloomberg News reported Friday (June 19), citing an interview with founder Egem Ersalan.

He said the company is building a digital wallet and prepaid-card business that will let customers spend the money held in their accounts.

Bloomberg noted that this strategy resembles that of American brokers like Robinhood, which launched its credit card business in 2024.

Ersalan added that Midas is also considering introducing local and international money transfers as it tries to expand beyond its brokering operations.

The Bloomberg report, citing Turkey’s central bank, said there are 57 electronic money institutions operating in the country.

The report added that Midas, established in 2020, gained popularity when Turkey’s retail equity investor population boomed during the COVID lockdown. However, rampant inflation has in recent years driven Turks to equities to protect their savings. The number of investors in that space has increased five-fold in the last six years.

Midas serves around 4 million investors, offering access to local, U.S. and some European markets, along with mutual funds and cryptocurrencies, Bloomberg said.

The company’s push into the payments space comes at a time when many FinTech companies in America are moving into the banking sector.

“Traditionally, FinTech companies have built around banks, not as banks,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this year. “The strategy was simple: partner for access to payments rails, deposit insurance and compliance infrastructure; don’t build it from the ground up yourself.”

That model, the report added, provided speed, but also fragility, as sponsor banks could alter terms and regulators could reinterpret guidance. In addition, public scrutiny picked up after high-profile failures exposed the limitations of banking-as-a-service.

However, “getting a charter” is not a monolith, PYMNTS wrote. In the U.S., de novo banking charters cover a range of “banking” business models, each answering to different regulators, operate under different statutes and bring with them different privileges. While the headlines can blur these boundaries, the operational consequences are far from vague.

A bank charter “is not a trophy, and it certainly isn’t a product label, but it’s a public trust,” Rodney E. Hood, former acting comptroller of the currency, said in a January interview with Competition Policy International, a PYMNTS company.