I spent a morning last week in a converted warehouse off Leith Walk, sitting across from a 28 year old who was explaining how her company processes cross-border payments faster than any high street bank in Scotland. She had twelve employees, a modest office with mismatched furniture, and a client list that included three European retailers. This is Edinburgh’s fintech scene in 2026. It is small, scrappy, and quietly impressive.
Edinburgh has always been a financial city. The Royal Mile sits in the shadow of Standard Life, Baillie Gifford, and Scottish Widows. The big institutions have defined the city’s relationship with money for centuries. But something different has been growing in the gaps between those towering headquarters, and I think it deserves more attention than it gets.
The numbers tell part of the story. FinTech Scotland, the national cluster body based in Edinburgh, now tracks over 200 fintech companies operating across the country. A significant concentration of those are in Edinburgh itself, drawn by the talent pipeline from Heriot-Watt and the University of Edinburgh, and by the proximity to established financial services firms looking to modernise. FreeAgent, the accounting software company acquired by NatWest, started here. Modulr, which handles payments infrastructure for businesses, has a major presence in the city. These are not speculative ventures. They are real companies with real revenue.
What struck me during my visits to several of these startups was how connected they are to the traditional finance sector rather than antagonistic towards it. In London, fintech founders often talk about “disrupting” the banks. In Edinburgh, the language is different. Collaboration comes up constantly. One founder I spoke with, who builds compliance software for wealth managers, told me his biggest clients are the very firms whose offices he can see from his window on George Street. “They need us,” he said. “And we need their distribution. It works.”
This pragmatism may be Edinburgh’s greatest advantage. The city does not have the venture capital ecosystem of London, and it certainly cannot compete with the sheer scale of investment flowing into fintech hubs in Berlin or Singapore. What it has is a concentration of financial expertise that few cities in the world can match, paired with a cost base that makes it viable for early stage companies to survive their first few difficult years without burning through millions.
CodeBase, the technology incubator near the Grassmarket, has been a crucial part of this ecosystem. When I first visited years ago it felt like a novelty, a few dozen tech hopefuls crammed into a repurposed building. Now it houses over 100 companies and has become a genuine hub for the Scottish tech community. The fintech companies there benefit from proximity to each other, swapping notes on regulation, sharing contacts, solving similar problems from different angles.
There are real challenges, of course. Talent retention is one. Edinburgh produces excellent graduates in computer science and finance, but London still exerts a gravitational pull that is hard to resist when starting salaries can be 30 to 40 percent higher. Several founders told me they have lost promising hires to the capital, though they noted that remote working has helped level the playing field somewhat.
Regulation is another hurdle. Fintech companies operating in payments, lending, or investment must navigate the Financial Conduct Authority’s requirements, and the FCA’s processes are not designed with small companies in mind. The sandbox programmes have helped, but founders still describe the regulatory journey as expensive and slow. One told me it took fourteen months to get authorisation, during which time the company was essentially unable to trade.
Then there is the funding question. Scotland has improved dramatically in this regard. Scottish Enterprise, the Scottish National Investment Bank, and a growing network of angel investors have created more options than existed even five years ago. But Series A and Series B rounds still overwhelmingly happen in London. The money is there, and so founders end up spending half their time on trains south, pitching to investors who often know very little about the Scottish market.
Despite all of this, I left those meetings in Leith and George Street and Fountainbridge feeling genuinely optimistic. The fintech companies I visited were not chasing hype. They were solving specific, practical problems for specific, paying customers. That kind of grounded ambition tends to produce companies that last.
Edinburgh will never be London or New York. It does not need to be. What it can be is a city where financial technology companies grow sustainably, drawing on centuries of financial expertise and a quality of life that makes talented people want to stay. The foundations are solid. The scene is small but serious. And I suspect that in five years, we will look back and realise that 2026 was the year it properly took off.