Qonto and Upvest bring investment function for company cash to the banking app

The European business finance platform Qonto is expanding its offering with a new investment function for business customers. In cooperation with Upvest's investment infrastructure, companies will be able to invest surplus liquidity directly in money market funds.

The rollout will initially start in Germany, Qonto's largest market outside France, before the solution is gradually rolled out across Europe.

Investment function directly in Business Banking

With the new function, small and medium-sized companies can invest in selected euro-denominated money market funds from as little as EUR 1. The returns are based on short-term interest rates and are intended to offer companies a simple way to earn interest on unused liquidity.

Integration takes place entirely in the Qonto app, including transparent presentation of the net return in the dashboard and without additional verification processes beyond the existing business account identification.

Infrastructure instead of in-house development

Technically, the solution is implemented via Upvest's API-based investment infrastructure. This handles order execution, custody, regulatory processes and tax processing in the background.

This allows Qonto to offer the new function without having to set up the complex capital market infrastructure itself - a typical approach of modern embedded finance models.

Access to capital market tools for SMEs

Until now, treasury and cash management functions with investment access have been reserved primarily for large companies. With the new solution, small and medium-sized companies in Europe will now also have access to comparable tools.

In Germany alone, there are over 3.4 million SMEs - a market segment with considerable unused liquidity reserves, most of which have so far been sitting in business accounts without earning interest.

Expansion into an all-in-one financial platform

Qonto's strategy is to become the central financial platform for European companies. In addition to banking, accounting and expense management, an additional level is now being added: the active management of company liquidity. Many companies have capital in their accounts that has not yet been put to productive use. The new function is intended to close precisely this gap.

Upvest sees the cooperation as an example of how modern infrastructure makes capital market products scalable and accessible - without operational complexity on the customer side.

Exciting for founders and start-ups

Short-term investments of liquid funds are always a question, especially at the beginning of one's own entrepreneurial journey. However, this requires an LEI-REG. The current requirements for parking liquidity on the capital markets are anything but easy to understand and are subject to high bureaucratic hurdles. If Qonto and Upvest have a simple answer to the problem, this could certainly be a benefit for founders and start-ups. Irrespective of this, the relevant liability issues, etc. still need to be clarified.