Launching a Neobank in 2026: How Long Does It Actually Take?
TL;DR
Building a neobank from scratch isn’t a weekend project — it’s a multi-year journey involving regulatory hurdles, card network partnerships, and serious infrastructure work. A recent Reddit thread on r/fintech sparked exactly this question: how long does it actually take to get a neobank live these days? The fintech community is clearly wrestling with this, and the answer is: it depends heavily on your geography, your licensing strategy, and the partners you choose. Visa and Mastercard remain the backbone of any card-issuing operation, and platforms like GoodFirms can help you research the service providers who do the heavy lifting.
What the Sources Say
A thread in r/fintech recently asked the straightforward but surprisingly complex question: “How long does it take to get a Neobank live these days?” The post generated 19 comments, reflecting genuine community interest in this topic — and genuine confusion about the answer.
The fact that this question is being asked at all tells you something important: the barrier isn’t obviously visible from the outside. Neobanks like Revolut or N26 look like apps, but under the hood they’re financial institutions with all the compliance baggage that entails. The Reddit community, which skews toward developers, founders, and fintech professionals, is clearly grappling with the reality that “build an app” and “launch a bank” are two very different things.
The Three Paths to Launch
Based on the framing of the discussion and the key players referenced in the source package, there are broadly three approaches fintech teams tend to consider:
1. Get your own banking license. This is the long road. Regulatory approval alone can take anywhere from one to several years depending on the jurisdiction. You’re dealing with capital requirements, compliance frameworks, and regulators who don’t move fast.
2. Partner with a sponsor bank (Banking-as-a-Service). This is the faster route most modern neobank startups take. You find a licensed bank willing to sit behind your product, and you focus on the front-end experience. This can compress the timeline significantly, though you’re now dependent on a third party’s risk appetite.
3. Use a white-label or BaaS platform. Platforms that bundle compliance, infrastructure, and even card issuing can theoretically get you to market faster — but they come with their own tradeoffs in terms of customization and margins.
The Role of Visa and Mastercard
Both Visa (visa.com) and Mastercard (mastercard.com) appear as critical infrastructure partners in the neobank ecosystem — and for good reason. Without a relationship with one of these networks, you simply can’t issue cards. These partnerships aren’t a formality: they involve due diligence on your part, underwriting on theirs, and onboarding timelines that aren’t always predictable.
For most startups, access to Visa or Mastercard comes indirectly — through a sponsor bank or a BaaS provider that already has a principal membership. Going direct as a new entrant is rare and requires significantly more capital and credibility.
What GoodFirms Reveals
GoodFirms (goodfirms.co), a B2B software and services review platform, is specifically noted as a resource for neobank launch information — which makes sense, because it aggregates reviews and listings for the exact type of vendors (core banking providers, compliance tools, BaaS platforms) that you’d need to evaluate when starting this journey. If you’re in early research mode, it’s a practical starting point for understanding who the players are.
Pricing & Alternatives
The source package doesn’t include specific pricing for any of the tools or services mentioned — which is itself revealing. Neobank infrastructure pricing is almost universally “contact us,” a sign that costs are highly negotiated based on volume, geography, and risk profile.
Here’s a comparison of the key players referenced:
| Player | Role in Neobank Stack | Pricing | Direct Access for Startups? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visa | Card network / transaction rails | Not disclosed | Rarely direct; usually via BaaS or sponsor bank |
| Mastercard | Card network / transaction rails | Not disclosed | Rarely direct; usually via BaaS or sponsor bank |
| GoodFirms | Research & vendor discovery platform | Free to browse | Yes — useful for evaluating BaaS providers |
The absence of published pricing across all three is a consistent theme: at this level of financial infrastructure, you negotiate, not click “buy now.”
What Nobody Tells You Up Front
The Reddit community asking this question is likely running into a few hard truths that don’t get surfaced in the “fintech startup playbook” content that floods the internet:
Regulatory timelines are unpredictable. You can do everything right and still wait. Regulators are understaffed, cautious post-2023 banking stress events, and increasingly scrutinizing new entrants.
Your jurisdiction matters enormously. Launching in the EU (under PSD2 and EMI licenses) looks completely different from launching in the US (where you’re navigating state-by-state money transmitter licenses and potentially OCC/FDIC involvement). The UK post-Brexit has its own FCA regime. Some founders deliberately choose smaller or more permissive jurisdictions for their first license.
The “live” definition varies. Some teams count a soft launch to 500 beta users as “live.” Others mean fully compliant, publicly available, and processing real transactions at scale. These are very different milestones with very different timelines.
Partnerships take time even when everything else is ready. Sponsor bank relationships, card network agreements, KYC/AML vendor integrations — each of these has a procurement cycle. You can’t parallelize everything.
The Bottom Line: Who Should Care?
Founders in early ideation: If you’re asking “how long does this take?” on Reddit, that’s the right instinct. The answer is: longer than you think, and the variance is huge. Use platforms like GoodFirms to map the vendor landscape before you commit to any path.
Developers building fintech products: Understanding that Visa and Mastercard are gating infrastructure — and that access typically runs through intermediaries — will save you from pitching the wrong architecture to investors.
Investors evaluating neobank startups: Timeline projections from founding teams are almost always optimistic. A team that understands the regulatory and partnership complexity, and has already initiated conversations with sponsor banks or BaaS providers, is meaningfully de-risked compared to one that’s still in the “we’ll figure it out” phase.
Established fintech players considering expansion: If you’re adding a banking vertical to an existing product, the BaaS route is typically faster than building from scratch — but you’re trading speed for control.
The Reddit thread on r/fintech asking this question had only a score of 2 but drew 19 comments — a ratio that suggests engaged discussion rather than passive upvoting. That engagement pattern is typical of questions where the “right answer” is messy and context-dependent, which is exactly the situation here.
There’s no clean universal timeline for launching a neobank. The fintech community clearly knows this, which is why threads like this one keep appearing. The honest answer is: plan for 12–24 months minimum on the fast track (BaaS partnership, permissive jurisdiction), and considerably longer if you’re pursuing your own license or targeting a heavily regulated market.