If you track European FinTech closely, Miriam Wohlfarth is not a new name. She has spent over two decades working in payments, banking, and ecommerce, and in that time, she has done something most founders only manage once: built a company that actually works, then started over and built another one.
In 2009, she founded Ratepay, a payment service provider where she served as Managing Director until October 2021. That is 12 years running the same company through every stage of growth. Not many founders stay that long.
Starting with Ratepay:
Ratepay achieved unicorn status and has been profitable since 2016. It became one of the leading buy now, pay later providers in the German-speaking market. In 2021, it became part of Nexi S.p.A, and currently employs nearly 300 people.
What made Ratepay worth paying attention to was not just the valuation. It was the consistency. Wohlfarth actively shaped the development of the payments industry in Germany through her work there. She was one of the earliest women to found a FinTech in the country, at a time when both FinTech and female founders were rare in that market.
Moving into Embedded Finance:
In 2020, she co-founded Banxware with Jens Röhrborn. The company operates in embedded finance, which is the practice of letting non-bank platforms offer financial products like loans directly to their merchant customers.
The problem Banxware is solving is real. Small businesses that sell through marketplaces and digital platforms often cannot get fast financing from traditional banks. Banxware reduces that processing time from 3 to 4 weeks down to hours, using automated KYC and AML checks combined with AI-based credit analysis. That translates directly to small businesses getting funded when they actually need it.
Within just one year of founding, Banxware raised over 14 million euros in venture capital and built a team of over 30 employees. Wohlfarth continues to serve as Co-CEO.
In December 2024, Banxware and HypoVereinsbank announced a joint product called HVB FlexFinanzierung. The credit line ranges from 250,000 to 5 million euros, expanding beyond Banxware’s earlier loan cap. That kind of bank partnership is notable because it shows a FinTech working alongside traditional institutions rather than trying to replace them.
Wohlfarth has been direct about where she sees the opportunity. In her own words, B2B payments and FinTech for SMEs remain massively underserved, and as an industry, the work is only at the very beginning in many areas.
Miriam Wohlfarth, Beyond the Founding Role:
Wohlfarth is not just running companies. She sits on the supervisory boards of Mercedes-Benz Mobility AG, Freenet AG, and talentsconnect AG, which puts her inside the boardrooms of large established businesses at the same time she is building a startup. That is an unusual combination and gives her a perspective that most founders do not have.
In 2016, she co-founded the financial news portal paymentandbanking.com, a German industry publication covering FinTech, payments, and banking through articles, podcasts, infographics, and analysis that has become a reference point for practitioners across the DACH region. She has also been a regular voice at FinTech conferences across Europe, speaking on embedded finance and SME credit access.
On the education side, she supports School 42, a programming school in Heilbronn, and has been a shareholder in Startup Teens since 2019, a network focused on young entrepreneurs.
What Her Work Points to:
Wohlfarth has said the ideas behind both Ratepay and Banxware did not come from a big master plan, but from the desire to improve processes and solve problems that slow down businesses every single day. That is a straightforward description of how durable companies tend to get started.
For founders and operators building in FinTech or adjacent spaces, Miriam Wohlfarth’s track record with embedded finance in Germany is worth studying closely. Two companies, two distinct problems, one consistent thread: fixing financial infrastructure that was never built for how businesses actually operate.
That is the kind of work that compounds.
