State of Fintech 2025: The Age of the Fintech Hyperscaler

Hey Fintech Nerds 👋

What a year 2024 has been.

To cap off a year of Fintech Brainfood, I’ve collaborated with the incredible Jevgenijs Kazanins of Popular Fintech for a little holiday gift 🎁. The nerdiest of Fintech nerd gifts.

📣 Annual Rant: The State of Fintech 2025

Or view it online for an easy scroll

👀 Highlights

We’re at the dawn of the Fintech hyperscaler, with Nubank having over 100 million customers, Klarna at 85 million, and Revolut snapping at their heels at 50 million.

There’s an AI Agents Fintech for everything:

But your AI Agent results may vary.

BaaS is coming through its difficult teenage phase (as Max Levchin described well here).

Big banks had a banner year.

Digital banks and Neobanks are now some of the largest consumer finance businesses on the planet based on customer numbers (and soon, earnings in Nubank’s case).

Will Revolut, Nubank or someone else get a charter and come after the big banks in 2025?

Payments are an all-out fistfight for market share.

The wallet wars have started, with the battle to “own” the customer wide open since Apple was forced by the EU to open NFC.

Pay by bank keeps appearing in the wild. Is it the new consumer payments authentication rail over real-time payments with FedNow and others?

The Stripe acquisition of Bridge has got everyone talking about Stablecoins. The vibe has monumentally shifted.

Sadly its not all good news. We’re in a more uncertain world, where AML alerts and scams have never been a bigger issue.

In the age of the Fintech hyperscaler, wallets and Neobanks are re-bundling consumer finance to hit profitability. AI is also helping those companies become more profitable and accelerate their growth. If they keep growing at this pace, they’ll over take incumbents in the next 5 years.

AI is now also enabling a true disruption to capital markets workflows for the first time.

You’ll also find our 2025 predictions and some bonus thoughts on the market towards the end of the report.

Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing over the winter break, I hope it treats you well, and we get to meet soon. If I can ever help a fellow Fintech nerd, then just reply to this email and I’ll see what I can do.

I have to say a huge thank you to

• Jev, for being my partner in crime in this report. Your work is astonishing, sir.

• Aperture for tidying the report (you’ve seen my diagrams, they worked miracles!)

• And, of course, Sardine* for being the best employer a guy could have. I genuinely adore my job and the people I work with (including you Alex).

That's all for 2024, folks. 👋

Remember, if you're enjoying this content, please do tell all your fintech friends to check it out and hit the subscribe button :)

(1) All content and views expressed here are the authors' personal opinions and do not reflect the views of any of their employers or employees.

(2) All companies or assets mentioned by the author in which the author has a personal and/or financial interest are denoted with a *. None of the above constitutes investment advice, and you should seek independent advice before making any investment decisions.

(3) Any companies mentioned are top of mind and used for illustrative purposes only.

(4) A team of researchers has not rigorously fact-checked this. Please don't take it as gospel—strong opinions weakly held

(5) Citations may be missing, and I've done my best to cite, but I will always aim to update and correct the live version where possible. If I cited you and got the referencing wrong, please reach out