For years, fintech sold the story of rebels versus incumbents. Speed versus bureaucracy. Apps versus banks.
That era is over.
In 2026, fintech isn’t the disruptor on the edge of financial services, it is the infrastructure moving it forward. And that shift is reshaping everything: regulation, investment, delivery models, and what “innovation” actually looks like.
And we can see that the market is rewarding those shifts too. Valuations have migrated from “growth-at-any-cost” fintechs toward those proving profitability, resilience, compliance and infrastructure-grade reliability.
Fintech has grown up and become system-critical – but are they resilient enough?
The big narrative shift is simple: fintech moved from experiment to essential.
- The payments market infrastructure built by fintechs is becoming the rails on which many financial services are depending on
- Compliance and regulatory services built by innovators have turned into essential dependencies for many firms
- All customers from retail clients to larger organisations now expect fintech-grade user experiences regardless of whether they’re dealing with an incumbent bank or a tech provider
Fintech is no longer a “nice-to-have innovation partner”; for many European institutions it’s now woven into core processes. When major processors like Stripe experience outages, something EU merchants have dealt with several times over the past few years, card payments fail at scale and downstream merchant operations halt almost instantly.
Recent disruptions across European open-banking providers, such as TrueLayer’s well-publicised payment initiation outages, have shown how even non-bank infrastructure can freeze account-to-account payments, stall onboarding flows, and delay settlement cycles across multiple banks and fintechs at once. These are clear examples of how disruptions, even from mid-tier service providers can create systemic ripples. All a clear sign of how deeply fintech is embedded in everyday economic activity.
Regulators have noticed this too. In 2023, the UK’s FCA formally warned several open-banking and payments providers about repeated outages and operational-resilience gaps that were directly impacting consumers and merchants – reinforcing just how critical these fintech intermediaries have become to the wider financial system.
Regulation finally caught up — and that’s a good thing
For more than a decade, fintech moved faster than regulators could respond. That lag is narrowing fast, particularly in Europe where frameworks like MiCA and the EU Payments Regulation have moved from high-level proposals to enforced implementation timelines.
With MiCA live in the EU, the GENIUS Act reshaping US stablecoin oversight, and global regulators tightening AI governance, the industry now faces a level of scrutiny once reserved for banks. This is
already visible in how major processors such as Nexi and Worldline have been required to strengthen operational resilience and supervision frameworks due to the systemic reliance banks and merchants now place on their infrastructure.
This is not the end of innovation. It’s the start of responsible, scalable innovation.
The smartest players are already treating regulation as:
- a design constraint, not a blocker
- a market advantage, not a chore
- a trust differentiator, not paperwork
The new competitive edge is clarity: companies that can operate predictably in supervised environments are increasingly the ones securing licences and expansion opportunities. In Europe, this is already visible in payments, where firms that align cleanly with PSD2/PSD3 and instant-payment rules gain faster regulatory approval and stronger bank partnerships.
Payments are undergoing their fastest shift in decades
Everyone is distracted by crypto headlines, but the real revolution is happening in payments:
- Instant-payments regulation is forcing banks to modernise core capabilities
- Account-to-account (A2A) and wallet-based payments are taking share from cards
- Cross-border settlement is fragmenting, opening significant terrain for orchestration players
- Africa and Asia are setting the pace for mobile-first innovation
We’re already seeing the scale of this shift in the EU, where the Instant Payments Regulation is making SCT INST (SEPA Instant Credit Transfer) compliance mandatory. Banks that traditionally process payments in batch windows must now offer 24/7 real-time settlement at the same cost as standard transfers. It’s a profound operational shift – one that forces institutions to modernise legacy cores, rethink fraud controls and upgrade their entire payments architecture.
The next winners won’t be those who pick a scheme and defend it. They’ll be the ones who treat every payment method as modular, and build seamless, scheme-agnostic experiences for merchants, banks and platforms.
From a tech perspective, that modularity isn’t aesthetic or the latest in best practice. It determines margin, cost-to-serve, and the ability to expand internationally without rebuilding your entire payments stack.
AI is reshaping fintech from the inside out
And as this infrastructure matures, a new layer of transformation is accelerating underneath it: AI. The same pressures shaping payments, regulation and resilience are now reshaping how financial platforms are built, governed and scaled.
Everyone has access to the same foundational AI models. What matters now is how responsibly you use them, how you fine-tune them, how deeply they integrate and orchestrate with risk, fraud, operations and compliance, and how effectively you can communicate their use to your customers, investors, partners and regulators.
Europe’s AI Act has solidified this expectation. Many financial-services models, from credit scoring and fraud detection to biometric identification and customer profiling, are now formally classified as high-risk systems. Providers must demonstrate explainability, monitoring, bias controls and documented human oversight before deployment. In practice, governance has become as important as performance.
Fintechs that master AI governance (explainability, model management, bias controls, lineage, human-in-the-loop) will be far more investable and customer-ready than those focused only on superficial implementations.
Increasingly we’ll see the barrier to adoption not as the chosen AI model, but rather the organisation’s ability to demonstrate control, auditability and responsible guardrails that regulators can trust within their AI solutions.
The return of resilience: Teams, delivery models and operational excellence
As financial organisations scale digital fintech capabilities, they’re discovering an uncomfortable truth: running reliable, regulated, always-on financial platforms is significantly harder than launching them. UK and EU real-time rails, including recurring disruption and Faster Payments, have repeatedly shown how operational fragility anywhere in the chain can impact millions of users.
The same has played out at the consumer layer. Outages at digital banks such as Revolut and Monzo have left consumers temporarily unable to transfer or pay – a sharp reminder that resilience isn’t a back-end concern; it’s a customer-impacting reputation-defining event.
That’s where teams with the experience to build resilient systems come in. For our clients, we’ve seen that the below combination offers the highest ROI:
- Deep engineering strength anchored by strong domain knowledge
- Delivery models that assume constant disruption and design for it
- Ability to understand the full technology stack from core underlying infrastructure to the application services and APIs to third-party systems
In a world where everyone relies on third-party solutions and SaaS providers, the true differentiator is whether your teams can architect a solution that expects chaos, scale securely, problem-solve under pressure, and keep services running in an increasingly unreliable ecosystem.
In this environment, resilience is no longer a back-office concern —but a board-level KPI tied directly to revenue protection and customer churn.
What this means for the next five years
If fintech 1.0 was about disruption, and fintech 2.0 was about rapid scaling, fintech 3.0 is about resilient, compliant, interoperable financial infrastructure.
The winners will be those who:
- Build for interoperability
Not card or A2A or stablecoins, but all of the above — cleanly abstracted, with strong identity and data layers. - Treat regulation as a product feature
Make compliance visible, automated and intuitive. Help your customers stay on the right side of the rules by design, not documentation. - Invest in resilient, AI-literate teams
The future belongs to companies that blend engineering excellence with regulatory fluency.
The bottom line
Fintech isn’t a disruptor anymore, it’s increasingly part of the operating fabric of modern commerce, from payments and identity (where services like Onfido and Auth0 enable onboarding at scale) to open-banking rails used by banks, retailers and fintech apps alike.
The companies that will dominate the next decade aren’t the loudest. They’re the ones building solid foundations: resilient engineering, thoughtful regulation, strong teams, and infrastructure that can scale and survive whatever comes next.
