There aren’t any.

No Fintech or finance company has broken that barrier; JP Morgan is $924bn, Visa $657bn, and Mastercard is $465bn. And we live in an age where SpaceX debuted in public markets at $1.75 trillion, with a T, and it's still hovering close to $1.6 trillion; that’s nearly two whole JP Morgans.

And while it’s entirely possible the hyperscale fintechs (Revolut, Nubank, Stripe, Ramp) could one day get there, they’re a long way away yet.

In the age of AI, everything looks smaller. So can fintech have its trillion-dollar company? Or is it destined to be a more workmanlike, sanitized industry, held down by the gravity of numbers, regulation, and balance sheets?

In physics, a phase transition is the change from one state of matter to another. Water becomes vapor. Gas becomes plasma. The rules of the medium change. I believe the last decade was the warm-up act, and we’re about to enter a phase transition. The two things that kept finance small, the cost of going global and the cost of shipping, are the exact two that AI and tokenization knock down.

You’ll be in great company: speakers from Chime, Mercury, Figure, Valon and Forward have already joined the guild, and tickets are on track to sell out again. Grab yours here.

Fintech revenue passed half a trillion dollars, up 22% across 2025, after clawing out of the Fintech Winter of 2022 to 2025.

The fintech industry is growing four times faster than the incumbents, across every category. Today, the incumbents in finance sit on $13 trillion of annual revenue, growing around 5% YoY. Last year, fintech grew 22%. And that growth rate compounds, so if fintech holds that pace, it reaches half the market cap of incumbents in 21.5 years (based on my own back-of-the-envelope).

Today fintech is a worthy competitor for incumbents, and financial services is still a massive prize as the second largest profit pool on earth (after tech). The fight so far has been for the underserved. Nubank, GCash, and M-Pesa barely register in the richest markets. Lending, insurance, and deposits sit largely untouched.

That is changing. Fintechs are now applying for, and winning, full banking licenses in Europe, the UK, and above all the United States.

Nubank and Revolut are a different proposition from the neobanks that tried the US before. With over 130m and 70m customers, they sell deposits, lending, and crypto, and in Revolut’s case, wealth, B2B, card processing for merchants, and a great deal more. They have the firepower for a multi-year push in America. Nubank is worth around $58bn today. Revolut is reportedly raising at $115bn.

Enormous numbers, built on the expectation of growth, from investors who could have put every dollar into the next AI stock and chose not to.

Now, valuation is vanity, revenue is reality, and (net) profit is sanity. Private valuations get bid well ahead of the revenue and earnings underneath them, and a real reset may be coming once the big AI IPOs clear. It’s now a market view, that we’re in an AI bubble, and a correction may be coming in private market valuations.

Use that to wave these companies away, though, and I think you have made a mistake, precisely because of the revenue growth. Look at Nubank. The stock is off about a third from its highs while revenue grew north of 40% YoY.

BCG puts fintech at 4% of global financial services revenue. So fintech is 4% done. This is the second-largest market in the world by revenue, and the entire sector raised $58bn last year, less than the $65bn that Anthropic raised in its recent Series H.

Fintech and finance is big.

But there is something bigger. Big tech.

Big tech is, to state the bleeding obvious, really rather big.

Meta barely scrapes the global top ten at $1.48 trillion market cap. That is nearly two Visas and half a Mastercard. Alphabet at $4.4 trillion is 5.3 JP Morgans. Every company at this altitude has cracked global distribution, high growth, and runs on a revenue model that owes nothing to legacy infrastructure or regulation.

To count as big tech, a company has to dominate three things.

(1) Unbounded top-line. Every new user adds almost no cost, because the infrastructure and software are already built. That throws off enormous margins. The rough bar is $10bn or more of net revenue at gross margins above 70%, without heavy physical investment to get there.

(2) Platform lock-in. Leaving has to hurt. Quit Apple and you lose your photos, your apps, your family’s shared world. Pull a business off AWS and the lights go out. The bar is a multi-product monopoly, an App Store, an Apple Pay, a chokepoint the user touches many times a day across unrelated tasks.

(3) Global reach. Big tech sits outside any single country’s rulebook for its core product. A Google search box works the same in New York and Tokyo, so it can take billions of users at once. The bar is a billion monthly actives, or 30% share for the infrastructure players like AWS. A footprint so large the company stops being a product and becomes part of the furniture of daily life.

Meta laps all three.

Fintech has the first pillar (revenue growth) in sight. The revenue is real and closing on hyperscaler, err, scale. Fintech revenue does not earn like software. Stripe’s margins are based on a payment processor’s take rate; Nubank earns like the bank it is (an exceptionally profitable one), balance sheet and all. Neither keeps anything close to Meta’s 82 cents on the dollar, and thin margins cap the multiple.

So fintech has the scale but not the margin, the lock-in, or the reach. That is exactly where the two new forces come in. AI builds the lock-in fintech could never ship its way to, and drags the margin toward software economics along the way. Tokenization opens the global reach that regulation always walled off.

It feels cliché to say AI and tokenization will converge, but it is actually, slowly, finally happening. And Fintech will be the biggest beneficiary.

In 2015, the pitch from a young UK bank called Monzo was “the first bank for a billion people.” Back in those heady pre-Brexit days, Facebook had just crossed a billion daily users.

The logic was as follows: The same forces that turned Facebook global, cloud and mobile, could do it for banking. A bank would have no branches, no mainframes, just an app and a license, and the UK was the obvious launchpad. It had built a regime to hand licenses to newcomers, and a single UK license let you passport across all of Europe.

Ten years on, Monzo does not have a billion customers. It does not have a hundred million. It has a genuinely impressive 16 million, almost all of them in the UK, a country of 55 million adults. The reasons are partly bad luck. Brexit landed in 2016, and the European expansion path blurred. When Monzo finally won its full license, the regulator was busy course-correcting, having watched a young industry learn risk the hard way. Then COVID arrived in 2020, just as Monzo looked outward again, and gutted the card revenue it ran on.

Monzo’s troubles are its own, and I would not over-generalize from them. But look wider. Nubank, 130m customers, dominates Brazil, is large in Mexico, and is a startup everywhere else. Revolut, 70m and counting, is strong across Europe, and sits fourth to seventh in most of those larger European markets.

(Side note: I am rooting hard for Monzo as it finally goes pan-European. It is still my number one current account and daily driver.)

Add it all up, and this is not the global consumer story of the mobile era. The enterprise value is not there either. At least not yet.

Two pillars were out of reach, and each had a wall in front of it.

The wall in front of global reach is regulation. Every market has its own laws, its own licenses, its own lawyers, and above all its own local knowledge. Mexico alone wants around $100m of regulatory capital, a $250k license fee, a business plan, and round after round of meetings. Multiply that by every country on earth, and it dwarfs the work of shipping an app in a new language. Money is stickier than photos, too. Willingness to switch banks has doubled, from 7% in 2019 to 15% in 2025, helped along by switching services and open finance firms like Plaid. Doubling sounds dramatic until you remember it is still a fraction of the market, and it took six years to get there.

(Although Revolut is on a licensing blitz lately, having just secured Australia and the UAE, and applied to the US, so again, never bet against them).

The wall in front of lock-in: the pace of shipping. Building the next product, the next license, the next integration was slow and expensive, so fintechs stayed narrow. A card. An account. One good feature. They stayed tools when the prize was an ecosystem, because they could never ship fast enough to build one.

It turns out it is much easier to make a photo-sharing app than a bank.

A lot has changed since the mid-2010s. A lot has not.

Apple still owns the smartphone. We have gone from the iPhone 6 to the iPhone 17. Meta still owns social, Google still owns search. But Nvidia is now the most valuable company on earth, and we are about to watch not one, not two, but three trillion-dollar IPOs.

What about finance?

Three things have not moved.

Two things have.

The first is AI. You could call today’s AI valuations a mirage, an exuberant market telling itself a dotcom-grade story. To a point, I would agree. But the technology and value won’t vanish even if it reprices. Even as the cost per token slides from the big labs to open weights to something running on your laptop. The speed at which you can ship has changed for good.* The newer finance companies are the ones who gain. Ramp, Nubank, Revolut, and Robinhood already run AI through most of their workflows. They won the last decade by shipping faster than anyone else, and AI has poured fuel on that.

This does not make lending safe or banks obsolete. You still need a balance sheet to absorb a shock. What it does is drop the cost of the next product through the floor. When launching a new vertical falls from $5m to $500k, you try ten things where you used to try one, and a category already growing four times faster than the incumbents starts compounding toward eight, sixteen, and beyond. Ramp just launched Stack, built for the work accountants do. Accountants used to be a channel that referred Ramp. Now they are customers. Every new product is one more reason to stay. That is the second pillar, platform lock-in, built in quarters instead of decades.

The second is tokenization. You could call stablecoins a regulatory arbitrage; their one-to-one backing is a story that hides the risks of private, dollarized money loose in the world. To a point, again, I would agree. But I have argued before that stablecoins are a platform. They sit as a layer above the old rails, the way the internet sat above the phone networks. They do not make regulation disappear. You still need a license to do regulated things, and the last mile still bites. What they do is let you sell one global product on one global rail, instead of stitching together forty local banks. Kast is a neobank in more than 30 markets already. Its CEO told me, on a recent episode of the Tokenized podcast, that they skipped the core banking plumbing the 2015 cohort had to build, because stablecoins hand you a great deal of it out of the box. Tokenized assets might not be default global, but they are a lot more global than anything before them.

And dollars were only the start. The DTCC, Nasdaq, and Hyperliquid are now putting every other asset on-chain. That is one more axis to expand along, stacked on the one these companies already hold. That is the third pillar, global reach.

The odds are now better than ever.

Coatue’s data suggests the odds of getting from $1bn to $10bn is around 8%, from $10bn to $100bn, between 8 and 13%. But once you break $100bn, the chances of reaching $1 trillion rockets to 31%

Nubank and Revolut have the top line and are using AI to build the lock-in. Both have even built a foundation model for money. Stripe holds strong developer lock-in already, and its new stablecoin-backed accounts reach 120 markets. The AI-natives, Rogo, Hebbia, Dolar, are too small to score, but they are building from zero at a speed the 2015 cohort never had.

No one holds full global reach yet. But for the first time, you can trace the line from here to there.

Coatue has a name for the eight private companies it thinks will define the next decade: “the Magnificent 8.” SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, Anduril, ByteDance, and two fintechs, Stripe and Revolut. Together, around $4 trillion.

Fintech holds two of the eight seats in the next generation of hyperscaler.

A few years ago it held none.

Do not write off the chasing pack either. Ramp just hit $44bn, and who would bet against the next ridiculous number? Checkout, arguably the third real modern processor, touched $40bn once and may again. Even the prediction markets, Kalshi and Polymarket, are edging into the conversation.

This is a phase transition.

Water at 99 degrees still looks like water. The change of state hides in the last degree. Finance has spent a decade heating up: more revenue, more customers, more licenses, and it still looks like finance. The last degree towards the boiling point comes from the level of lock-in and reach these companies can achieve, powered by AI and tokenization as the heat.

The company that finally crosses the line probably will not look like what we have spent a decade calling fintech. It will be AI-native, or tokenized, or both. Which leaves me, a guy whose newsletter is literally called “Fintech Brainfood,” with an uncomfortable question.

If the winner doesn’t look like a fintech, is “fintech” still the word?

ST.

*The AI shipping argument relies on intelligence staying cheap. I think it does. But that is another essay.

Shout out to the annual BCG Global Fintech Report. I talk a lot of crap about strategy shops, but credit where it’s due on this one.

If you enjoy this kind of content, I can guarantee you’ll love being in a room of 1,500 other folks who love to go deeper into where finance meets AI. That’s a huge theme for us at this year’s Nerdcon in San Diego on the 19th and 20th November. I’m bringing my audience, the operators, the people who read this newsletter. And it’s the perfect place to find your next hire, client, or just get inspired. Let’s make events awesome again.

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(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