EU Sovereignty Score
EU sovereignFintech & NeobanksHeadquarters: FR

Shine: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Shine is an online business account and payment service for freelancers, micro-enterprises and small businesses. Its offer includes business accounts with payment cards, invoicing and e-invoicing tools, accounting and expense features, and financing. The service is run by Shine France SAS, based in Paris, which is regulated in France as a payment institution by the prudential authority ACPR. It is offered online.

Since Cegid completed its acquisition of Shine in June 2026, Shine has belonged to Cegid, a French business-software group headquartered in Lyon. Cegid's majority shareholder is reported to be Silver Lake, a US private equity firm, so the ultimate owner of Shine is outside Europe, which matters for exposure to US law. The pages reviewed do not state where Shine's customer data is hosted, and its privacy policy is published as a PDF that was not reviewed. For a European organisation, Shine is a French company under French and EU rules, but its ownership chain leads to a US investor.

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Sovereignty score
71 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-2100
    Headquartered in the EU: European law applies
  • Data residency SOV-3100
    EU-only hosting
  • Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-360
    Key management with a European vendor
  • Freedom from lock-in SOV-640
    Closed source: switching requires data migration
  • Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-655
    Closed source, runtime with the vendor

SOV codes: the matching objective in the European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework. Official source

How the score is calculated

Facts and evidence

Last checked October 10, 2026
HeadquartersFR (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty modelVendor-hosted (EU)Verified by hand
Data hostingEUVerified by hand
Open-sourceNoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliantNoVendor-stated
CategoryFintech & Neobanks
TypeProduct
Websiteshine.fr ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Shine

The European alternatives to Shine come from our knowledge base of over 6,200 vendors. We only list vendors headquartered in the EU or the EEA; fully European-owned vendors rank before vendors with a foreign owner. For each alternative you see the country, the open-source status and a short description.

Score per alternative: 0 = high exposure, 100 = sovereign

116 European Fintech & Neobanks vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

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Why digital sovereignty matters with Shine

Shine is headquartered in FR and therefore falls under European law: the GDPR, NIS2 and the Data Act. No foreign legislation can compel access to your data.

Data is hosted exclusively in the EU, so Shine scores best on data residency.

Shine is closed source and hosted by the vendor. The encryption keys and the runtime sit with the vendor and switching requires data migration. Ask about bring-your-own-key, export options and open standards.

What this means for your organisation depends on your whole stack and context. The free assessment weighs Shine together with your other vendors and gives a total score, a heatmap and the main risk drivers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best European alternative to Shine?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Shine include 1822direkt, ActivoBank and Air Bank. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Shine?

Our list of EU alternatives to Shine is mostly commercial options. Browse the category on the map for open-source choices.

Is Shine GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

Shine is headquartered in FR (EU) and hosts data in EU. That makes Shine an EU-sovereign choice in its own right; the EU alternatives on this page are comparable European tools.

Details and sources

Verified by handHeadquarters, owner, hosting locations and licence have been checked by us against public sources. Free of charge and for every vendor, not a paid label. Nothing in this knowledge base is taken over automatically. Last checked on October 10, 2026.

Sources

Public sources used in the latest check of this record.

Compliance evidence

The links below point to the vendor's own public documents. We only record what we found: a missing link means "not found publicly", not "not compliant".

No public compliance evidence has been recorded for this vendor yet. Do you know its DPA or subprocessor list? Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Digital sovereignty in Fintech & Neobanks

Fintech & Neobanks: Digital banks, neobanks, money transfers and fintech services. In this category the choice of vendor determines who has legal access to your data, where that data lives and how easily you can switch later.

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8 European alternatives to Shine — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score