Liberis, the embedded finance company, and Qred, the European digital SMB lender, have now formally merged and formed an international financial platform that caters to the small and medium-sized businesses.
This deal which had been announced back in June 2026 is now completed with regulatory approval by the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority. This merged entity is backed by private equity company Nordic Capital and serves over 60,000 small businesses in 17 countries and has access to about 11.5 million merchants via partnerships.
Through the new corporate structure, Qred Founder & CEO Emil Sunvisson becomes the CEO of the Group, whereas Liberis CEO Rob Fairfield takes up the position of Deputy CEO of the Group. The brands and partnerships of both companies will continue to be intact as long-term strategic plans begin to unfold.
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Uniting Regulated Banking Architecture with Embedded Distribution Rails
Small businesses account for approximately 90% of global enterprises and sustain more than two-thirds of worldwide employment. Despite their economic weight, entrepreneurial ventures routinely face an international financing deficit valued in the trillions of dollars as legacy commercial lenders pull back underwriting exposure from smaller entities.
The structural divide is evident across the market: according to Liberis’s December 2025 Impact Report which evaluated more than 1,700 funded merchants across the United Kingdom and the United States 76% of respondents reported being rejected by conventional banking institutions before securing alternative funding. Furthermore, 42% indicated that external capital directly enabled them to preserve or generate local jobs.
The merger addresses this systemic liquidity gap by combining two complementary operating models:
Digital Banking to Businesses: Qred is a fully licensed bank according to the SFSA licensing framework, offering automated and data-based lending and deposits-backed capital throughout main European markets, which include Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany.
Partner Ecosystem: Liberis offers an embedded finance structure through APIs for embedding financing capabilities within verticals software platforms, marketplaces, and payment providers. The ecosystem consists of more than 30 tier-one distribution partners, such as Deliveroo, Vagaro, and Nexi.
By joining forces, the enterprise provides entrepreneurs with dual financing gateways: via a balance-sheet digital bank and through the daily operating software merchants already run to manage transactions, scheduling, and inventory.
“We’re not challenging banks. We’re challenging the way the system finances small businesses. Too often, lending decisions rely on backwards-looking credit scores and paperwork that takes weeks a business doesn’t have. We use the data a business generates every day to understand its needs. Advances in AI are helping us do this faster and at greater scale, giving more small businesses a fair and timely funding decision. Bringing a regulated bank together with an embedded finance network lets us reach more businesses and go further than lending alone. Our ambition is to become the financial operating system small businesses never have to leave. We power small businesses that power everything else.” Said Emil Sunvisson, Group CEO.
