About PayLens
PayLens is a market and competitive intelligence service for European payment acceptance, run by SmallBiz Guide GmbH in Kelkheim, Germany. This page is the whole story: what we publish, how we work, and who does the work.
Robert Hoffmann
Co-Founder & CEO
Ran the companies this dataset tracks: former CEO of Concardis, Nets and 1&1.
LinkedIn
Antoni Schilling
Co-Founder & Strategy
Transformation and sales roles at Nets, Nexi and Ingenico; McKinsey consultant before that.
LinkedIn
Simon Feldhusen
CTO & Tech Lead
Builds the platform and the data pipeline; Deutsche Bank before that.
LinkedIn
What PayLens is
One connected dataset of European payment acceptance: the acquirers and PSPs, the terminals and the companies that actually build them, the payment methods and rules per market, the deals and the people. The public pages carry the facts any primary source already publishes; the dashboard carries the relations between them: who deploys whose hardware, at what share, and what changed this week.
How we work
Every figure links to a public primary source: the ECB Data Portal, a central bank's own survey, a national statute, a manufacturer's datasheet, a company filing. Where a figure comes from an industry report instead, it is cited as a single data point with a link, never republished as a table.
Its definition
Provided by resident PSPs (ECB)
Its source
Its as-of date
12 Aug 2026
A real number from the dataset, with everything it has to carry before we publish it.
The dataset carries one as-of date, shown on every page; figures change only with a data release.
The analysis is descriptive and market-neutral: every player is a tracked entity, no company is the implied reader, and nothing on PayLens is advice or a recommendation.
The free pages answer what something is. The product answers who, where, at what share, and what changed. Those relations are the work, and they stay behind the login.
Citing PayLens
Figures on the public pages may be cited with attribution: "PayLens, …, data as of 12 Aug 2026" and a link. If you find an error, tell us; corrections ship with the next data release.
PayLens Radar
The newsletter on European payments: the week in five minutes. The developments that matter, curated and sourced, every Tuesday in your inbox. Free, no account needed.
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