As Ukraine endures the fifth year of the full-scale invasion, its financial sector has proven one of the most resilient pillars of the economy, with technology as the main driver of that resilience. Few European financial systems have been tested as deeply or innovated as rapidly.
Ukraine has emerged as a fintech leader, with its ecosystem now numbering over 300 companies valued at ca. USD 2 billion, introducing new products each year across payments, lending, digital wallets, and a broad range of financial services.
Open Banking: Regulation is now catching up with and enabling further market opportunities. Since August 2025, Ukraine has required banks to open their systems so that licensed third parties can access customer financial data (securely and with consent) through standardised interfaces, bringing the country in line with the EU’s framework and allowing fintechs to build services directly on top of banking infrastructure. Early refinements have already eased obligations for providers that initiate payments on customers’ behalf, and the regulator is now signalling a further shift from open banking toward open finance, extending the same data-sharing logic across the wider financial sector.
Single Euro Payments Area Accession: Cross-border integration is advancing through Ukraine’s planned accession to the SEPA. Once adopted by the Parliament, the enabling legislation will let Ukrainians and Ukrainian businesses send and receive euro payments across Europe on the same terms as domestic transfers: cheaper, faster, and without the correspondent-banking friction of today. Savings are reported to reach EUR 70–100 million annually, with full accession expected by 2027–2028.
Financial Inclusion Banks: A new institutional form is also emerging. Recent legislation, effective June 2026, creates a lighter category of banking licence for retailers and postal operators that maintain extensive branch networks in underserved and frontline regions, extending basic banking and payment services to places where a full-scale bank branch would be commercially unviable. Ukraine’s largest postal-logistics operator has moved first, acquiring a small bank to convert into the country’s inaugural inclusion bank.
Embedded Finance: Looking further ahead, embedded finance represents the sector’s next frontier. Ukraine has no dedicated regime yet; the model operates atop open banking, payment-services rules, and digital identity infrastructure such as Diia and BankID. The IFC views embedded delivery as central to channelling reconstruction capital to households and SMEs, with B2B use cases, EU-aligned regulation, and AI-driven credit scoring shaping its evolution.
Factoring Reform Enacted: Among these developments, one long-standing service has just gained a clearer legal footing. Factoring, in which a business sells its unpaid invoices to a factor for immediate cash and typically receives up to 90–100% of their value upfront rather than waiting for customer payment, has long been a practical working-capital tool. Yet in Ukraine, its legal meaning was blurred: the same Civil Code provisions covered both genuine trade factoring and the purchase of financial debt, including discounted non-performing loans. That has now changed. Although the dedicated Law “On Factoring” was adopted back in June 2025, the recently adopted changes remove factoring from the Civil Code and consolidate its regulation in that special law, further developing the instrument while leaving the rest of the Code intact. The reform introduces state registration of assigned claims to curb fraud and expressly separates trade factoring from financial-debt operations. For businesses, particularly SMEs, the result is a clearer, EU-aligned route to converting receivables into immediate liquidity.
Taken together, these reforms trace a sector moving from survival to leadership, building a financial system that delivers wartime resilience and post-war recovery in equal measure.
Material prepared by Olexiy Soshenko, Managing Partner, and Artem Mykhailyk, Associate, for the 11th edition of LIR Ukraine (page 42).