Qonto turns its SME transaction data into a free monthly barometer

Qonto has started publishing a free, monthly set of statistics on the health of European small businesses, built from anonymised transaction data collected across its own customer base. The Paris-based business banking group calls the project Qonto Insights, and it went live on 7 October with figures covering France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

The move matters because reliable, current data on how small businesses are actually faring is hard to come by in Europe. National statistics offices and the European Commission track SMEs mainly through surveys and annual filings, which arrive with a long lag. The company is instead using the transaction flows that already pass through its own accounts, turning its position as a payments provider into a data product.

What the indexes measure

The platform is organised around four indexes, each refreshed on the 7th of every month using the prior month's data. A Cash Buffer Index tracks how many days of reserves a typical small business holds, what share keep at least a month of cash on hand, and what share dip into a negative balance at some point. An AI Adoption Index follows the proportion of businesses paying for AI subscriptions through their Qonto account, their average monthly spend and how many tools they use.

A Late Payments Index measures what share of invoices are settled late, how long the delays run, and the average value of a late invoice. An International Transactions Index covers how many businesses trade across borders, where that money goes, and typical transaction sizes. Qonto says the figures are aggregated and anonymised before publication, using only percentages, averages and medians, so no individual customer's activity can be identified. The company has also said it plans to publish occasional "Qonto Insights: Explained" features that dig into country-level patterns, alongside the raw monthly releases.

What the first numbers show

The inaugural release, covering September, offers a mixed snapshot of SME conditions. Typical reserves stood at 18.5 days' worth of spending, a slight improvement on August, with French firms sitting highest at 19.4 days and Italian firms lowest at 9.5 days. Across the four markets, 7.4% of businesses slipped into a negative balance at least once during the month, a small improvement on the prior month.

AI spending kept climbing: 16.7% of SMEs paid for at least one AI subscription in September, against 10% at the start of the year, with average monthly spend reaching €34.46, up more than €8 in a single month. Late payments moved the other way. Nearly a third of invoices settled in September, 31.6%, were paid late, rising to 38.9% in Spain, with average delays stretching to 58.6 days, almost 11 days longer than in August. Cross-border activity stayed significant, with 20.6% of SMEs transacting internationally and Germany leading at 23.5%, spread across 154 countries; companies with ten or more staff were the most active traders abroad.

Co-founder and chief executive Alexandre Prot framed the launch as a use of the company's reach into its customer base, pointing to its direct link to hundreds of thousands of small businesses across eight markets as the reason to publish the figures. He said the goal is to put "real-time, real-world data behind hunches and hypotheticals, with trends that are updated every month."

The stated aim is to replace guesswork with evidence for the people who track the SME economy day to day, from reporters to civil servants, rather than to offer Qonto's own reading of the trends.

Why a bank is publishing an index

The company serves more than 750,000 customers across eight European countries and has raised over €622m since it was founded by Prot and Steve Anavi, including a €486m round in 2022 led by Tiger Global and TCV. Its core product bundles a business account with invoicing, bookkeeping and spend management, and the company has expanded through acquisitions of Penta and Regate.

The data platform follows a run of moves this year aimed at positioning Qonto as more than a banking app: an AI-native push through tools like Qonto MCP, a new 11,000 square metre Paris headquarters, and earlier research on how small business owners cope with cash pressure. Publishing its own transaction-based index gives Qonto a recurring reason to be cited by journalists and policymakers, independent of whether they ever become customers.

The scope is still limited to four of Qonto's eight markets, and the figures reflect only businesses that already bank with Qonto rather than the broader SME population. Whether the monthly releases hold up as a genuine economic indicator, or simply as a marketing exercise dressed in index form, will depend on whether the trends track what shows up later in official statistics.