Fintech in 2025: The Year’s Takeaways – and What to Expect in 2026

As another year in the fintech world winds down, it’s always a good time to pause for a moment and look back – and ahead. By any measure, fintechs are still going strong. “The industry exhibits robust fundamentals, including strong revenue growth and improved profitability,” stated BCG’s Global Fintech Report in June, “despite recent volatility and macro uncertainty.”

But after a decade of fast growth and all the talk of disruption, it feels like the sector is settling into its next chapter. Scale has been reached, so resilience is what is being tested at the moment.

Across B2B payments, corporate card issuing, and embedded finance, these trends have become increasingly visible throughout the year. First of all, clients have begun to ask sharper, more informed questions. Efficiency and reliability are becoming more and more important to them, which is to say that innovation alone no longer cuts it. Once challengers, fintechs are now becoming fixtures. In short, growth has matured.

“Embedded finance in the B2B sphere will finally feel mainstream. More non-financial platforms – ERPs, vertical SaaS, B2B marketplaces – will decide that owning the payment experience is strategic”, says Sergei Astafjev, CEO and Co-Founder of fintech Wallester. “Licensed players like us will increasingly sit ‘under the hood’, powering cards, accounts and payouts while the end-customer experiences only the brand they work with every day.”

Here’s a short list of the key developments from 2025 – and the trends shaping 2026.

2025 in Review:

1. Banks are losing ground – but they’re not gone

The majority of businesses still trust banks for financial services – 66% of them, according to the Capgemini World Payments Report 2026 – but customer satisfaction is a different story. In the next 12 months, 40% of small and mid-sized merchants say they plan to switch to fintechs. The reasons are structural: fintechs can onboard a client in less than an hour, while banks can take up to seven days. Add to that downtime, fraud vulnerabilities, and fragmented infrastructure, and the frustration with incumbents becomes clear.

2. Value-added services became a differentiator

Generic, “one-size-fits-all” solutions no longer suffice. According to the same Capgemini report, only 23% of merchants say they receive personalised services from their banks. Meanwhile, fintechs are investing heavily in vertical-specific products and data usage: 45% offer industry-specific services, and 64% use merchant data for personalised engagement. As a result, banks derive just 14% of their merchant revenue from Value-Added Services (VAS), while fintechs earn 19%, reflecting a more effective ecosystem-led model.

3. Cards remain central – especially for B2B

The card model continues to prove exceptionally resilient. Juniper Research projects the modern card issuing market to grow from $1.8 billion in 2025 to $4.2 billion by 2030, driven largely by demand for embedded issuance. Virtual cards are becoming especially dominant in B2B due to their security and control: by 2029, B2B usage will account for 83% of global virtual card volume, up from 76% in 2025.

4. Infrastructure is becoming the real battlefield

While product innovation gets the headlines, back-end infrastructure is where the real competitive edge is being forged. Too many banks still rely on outdated architectures that struggle to scale, reconcile, or respond in real time. The best-performing PayTechs are winning not just on UX, but on modular, reliable core systems built for scale and integration.

What to Expect in 2026:

1. B2B, financial infrastructure, and lending will become dominant growth drivers 

The next big thing in fintech will not be consumer apps. As BCG notes, the primary engines of future growth are poised to be B2B(2X), financial infrastructure, and lending. This makes sense, given that fintechs have captured just ~3% of global banking and insurance revenue to date – leaving massive room to make inroads into that market.

2. AI will stop being a buzzword and move to the front 

GenAI dominated headlines over the last few years, but adoption remained low, and few products achieved scale. This is about to change. The next phase is emerging, and it has everything to do with Agentic AI. These autonomous agents can act and adapt without constant prompting – allowing for new use cases in underwriting, spend management, and user support. In infrastructure-heavy fintechs, these gains will likely be operational before they become consumer-facing.

“We’ll see AI-native financial operations move from presentation slides to reality. Not ‘AI somewhere in the bank’, but actual agents that prepare and reconcile payments, optimise FX, flag anomalies and help CFOs run their spend in real time”, says Astafjev. “The framework for this is already being built, and the next step is to connect it properly to payment infrastructure.”

3. Fintechs and banks will recouple 

After years of competition, 2026 may mark a strategic realignment. Because they are losing ground in certain segments – especially merchant servicing – banks are increasingly open to partnerships, recognising that not every capability must be built in-house. Expect banks to explore acquisitions and joint ventures to modernise faster and access new infrastructure. This trend is already visible in card issuing, payments orchestration, and lending-as-a-service.

4. Merchant expectations will continue reshaping the market 

Merchants are adapting faster than their providers. As the payments landscape grows more complex – spanning wallets, instant A2A (Account-to-Account) payments, and agentic commerce – merchants want fewer providers, faster onboarding, tailored products, and better uptime. Providers that can meet these expectations at scale – especially in the SME segment – will be the ones shaping the next chapter of fintech evolution.

Speed will be the defining factor.

“Real-time payments will become the default expectation, not a premium feature, especially in Europe”, predicts Astafjev. “Between SEPA Instant and similar schemes globally, both consumers and businesses will expect money to move in seconds, and the real innovation will be in risk, compliance and user experience on top of that rail.”

These shifts are already moving beyond projections, shaping real-time discussions across the industry. Customers want speed and scale, but they also demand safety and clarity. In other words, it is expected that in 2026, infrastructure will matter just as much as innovation. And for those who are building for both, there’s a bright future ahead.