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- 🤑 2025 Recap for 2026
🤑 2025 Recap for 2026
Looking Back to Move Forward – A 2025 Review and a Look Ahead to 2026.
Nicole Casperson
December 30, 2025
Hey fintech fam đź’ś
I can’t believe I’m writing the last newsletter of 2025. Not because the year flew by, but because… whew. It asked a lot from all of us.
This was a full “founder mode” year at Fintech Is Femme. Lots of big swings, a lot of leaping before the net showed up. What I learned is that the net really does appear only after you jump.
And honestly? We did so much together.
Here’s a little look at what we built:
We grew our audience to 100,000+ across platforms, with 6 million impressions
The Academy of Fintech grew to 155+ paid members and became a real partnership room, not a performative one
Humans of Fintech crossed 100,000 podcast downloads, plus two seasons of Fintech Mavericks
We sold 1,000+ tickets across our Leadership Summits in NYC and SF, grew event revenue by 200%, and partnered with Stripe, Brex, and Middesk
We created custom editorial and content campaigns with companies like FIS, Salesforce, Rho, Unit21, and Fintech Penthouse
I spoke on 15+ stages, from Harvard Business School to Istanbul with Akbank
And somehow, I was named Top 100 Women in Fintech by FinTech Magazine
Behind the scenes, though, this was the most challenging work I’ve ever done. Hosting 500-person summits is not for the faint of heart. But doing it together is what makes it worth it. Seeing you go from this newsletter to in-person at our events is the absolute joy of this work.
Before we close out the year, two quick things:
đź’« Today is the final 24 hours to secure a founding membership to The Academy of Fintech, our private community for building, scaling, and partnering with intention.
đź’« You can apply directly, or lock in founding status by grabbing a ticket to our second annual FEMMY Awards Gala, happening February 16 in NYC.
Happy New Year. I’m so grateful for you, and I can’t wait to grow even more together in 2026.
For now, let’s rest, reflect, and get ready to do it all again — even bigger.
INNOVATION
Looking Back to Move Forward – A 2025 Review and a Look Ahead to 2026
2026, we’re coming for you.
At the start of this year, I asked a deceptively simple question:
Would 2025 be the year fintech finally entered the cultural zeitgeist — not as an industry headline, but as infrastructure people actually feel in their daily lives?
Looking back now, the answer isn’t a clean yes or no.
Fintech doesn’t arrive all at once.
It inches closer to the center — quietly, persistently — until one day you realize you’re standing inside it.
Fintech didn’t suddenly become universal. Today, it’s unavoidable.
Money moves through fintech rails even when people don’t call it fintech. Payments clear faster. Credit decisions happen silently, somewhere behind a screen.
Identity, fraud, and data access stopped being abstract concepts and became determinants of whether people trusted the system at all.
You could feel the shift before you could name it.
And that distinction matters.
Despite the scale, fintech still represents only about 3% of global banking and insurance revenue pools, according to Boston Consulting Group and QED. Roughly 60% of all fintech revenue is generated by fewer than 100 scaled players — companies large enough to feel less like startups and more like infrastructure providers.
So no — fintech hasn’t “won” the economy.
But in 2025, it crossed a more meaningful threshold: it became mandatory.
People no longer ask whether payments should be instant. They assume they will be.
Small businesses don’t marvel at digital onboarding — they get irritated when it’s slow.
Consumers don’t think about fraud systems until trust breaks — and then they expect answers. Quickly. Clearly. From someone accountable.
That’s how infrastructure enters culture.
Not through hype — through habit.
Fintech in 2025: Stable, Selective, and Settling In
On paper, 2025 was a strong year for fintech.
According to the F-Prime Fintech Index, which tracks 47 publicly listed fintech companies, the sector closed the year with:
$997 billion in total market capitalization
5.21x average revenue multiples
23% average last-twelve-months revenue growth
These numbers matter not because they’re flashy, but because they’re grounding.
A near-trillion-dollar market cap paired with steady double-digit growth tells us fintech isn’t bouncing back anymore. It’s settling in.
Revenue multiples drifting toward ~5x signal something else, too: a market that has stopped paying for promises and started paying for performance. Cash flow, predictability, and governance quietly became cool again.
In other words, fintech didn’t lose momentum in 2025.
It found its footing.
That shift showed up in the public markets. Chime and Navan both went public, reopening an IPO window that had been effectively frozen since 2021. Fintech companies could go public again — but only if the fundamentals held.
At the same time, fintech advertising surged for the third year in a row, up roughly 45% year over year, according to Bloomberg. Subway platforms in New York, London, and San Francisco filled with campaigns from Brex, Mercury, Stripe, and Klarna.
Payments volume across major platforms reached $1.4 trillion in 2024, up 38% year over year — roughly 1.3% of global GDP.
Fintech didn’t just grow in 2025.
It showed up — in the background, in the plumbing, in the expectations people now carry without thinking.
A Year of Scale — and Tension
And yet, this wasn’t a victory-lap year.
The political environment oscillated unpredictably, with tariffs rising and falling depending on the mood inside the White House — rippling through industries from autos and steel to furniture and groceries.
The passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act introduced wide-ranging tax and social consequences that disproportionately impacted lower-income households and quietly reshaped investment strategies across sectors.
Meanwhile, unemployment crept upward. By November 2025, the U.S. unemployment rate hit 4.6%, its highest level in over four years — a statistic that landed very differently depending on whether you read it in a report or felt it in your bank account, arguing with the government’s definition of “affordable.”
Inside fintech, regulatory uncertainty returned to the foreground. The CFPB’s open-banking framework remained in flux, leaving financial institutions and startups unsure whether to build, pause, or hedge.
This was the year the industry learned a difficult truth:
Maturity doesn’t eliminate risk. It redistributes it.
Fraud Became the Tax on the Digital Economy
One force cut across every fintech category in 2025 — and it wasn’t AI.
It was fraud.
Not the headline-grabbing kind, but the systemic kind: identity theft scaled by automation, scams powered by generative AI, payment fraud that moved faster than dispute resolution, and financial crime that increasingly looked indistinguishable from legitimate activity.
In 2025, fraud wasn’t a bug in the system.
It was the system stress-testing itself.
Consumers felt it through account takeovers and exhausting dispute processes. Small businesses felt it through chargebacks and compliance burdens that stole time from growth. Financial institutions felt it through rising losses and regulatory pressure.
Fintech responded the only way it could: by pulling fraud and identity out of the background and putting them at the center of product strategy.
Fraud prevention stopped being a cost center and became a growth engine.
Investments surged in identity, behavioral biometrics, transaction monitoring, and real-time risk scoring — not because they were flashy, but because they were existential.
You can’t scale finance without scaling trust.
And you can’t scale trust without confronting fraud head-on.
Women Didn’t Slow Down. They Scaled.
In 2024, female founders raised $38 billion globally. While fintech remains one of the best-funded sectors for women, the disparity is still stark: women-led fintech companies captured just $3.4 billion of total fintech venture funding, according to Tracxn.
Even as capital tightened, women-led fintech companies continued to build — and raise.
Alinea Invest raised a $10.4 million Series A, scaling to over 1 million users — 92% women, 70% Gen Z — under founders Anam Lakhani and Eve Halimi.
DealMaker, led by Rebecca Kacaba, raised $20 million to expand its retail capital platform, giving founders more control by turning customers into investors.
Upward, founded by (Academy of Fintech member) Danielle Hill, raised $8 million and partnered with Mastercard, proving enterprise trust can be earned early.
Casap, led by CEO Shanthi Shanmugam, raised $25 million in Series A funding, bringing total capital to $33.5 million and valuing the company at $105 million — the largest venture investment to date in the payment disputes category.
Kalyani Ramadurgam, CEO and co-founder of Kobalt Labs, alongside co-founder and CTO Ashi Agrawal, raised an $11 million in Series A funding to build AI agents that automate the deeply manual, deeply painful risk and compliance workflows financial institutions still rely on.
When women lead fintech, we don’t get prettier apps.
We get new systems that hold up under pressure.
It’s pattern recognition.
The Stories You Came Back to in 2025
Before we race into the future, let’s take a moment to revisit some additional highlights from 2025 (these are stories you engaged with most and loved!).
I explored how value is increasingly measured by attention rather than fundamentals — and why that’s dangerous for capital-intensive fintech businesses built on trust, not virality.
Small businesses make up 33.3 million U.S. firms, employ 61.6 million people, and generate 44% of economic activity. A significant share are immigrant-owned — yet immigrants remain politically scapegoated despite the CBO estimating immigration will add $7 trillion to U.S. GDP over the next decade.
Women-led tech companies raised $29.6 billion globally — just 11.7% of total venture funding. In fintech, women secured $3.4 billion. And still, women kept building.
I spoke with CEO Stephanie Ferris after orchestrating one of the year’s largest fintech transactions. She shared her strategy around the deal and leadership mindset.
As fintech matured, I spent time with Akoya’s leadership examining who controls financial data, how it’s shared, and why trust is now the real growth lever.
That’s how much businesses lose each year to fraud, cyber threats, regulatory drag, and outdated financial systems — not theoretical losses, but operational ones.
From Anna Joo Fee’s human-centered approach to wealth, to Nina Mohanty’s belief that community is durable infrastructure, to Stephany Kirkpatrick’s $82M bet on real-time money — women showed what modern fintech leadership actually looks like.
Citi, JPMorgan, and Bank of America stopped “watching” stablecoins and started building around them. The GENIUS Act brought regulatory clarity, shifting the conversation from experimentation to execution.
What 2026 Demands
What 2025 made unmistakably clear is this: fintech is entering a more serious chapter.
One where scale, trust, and accountability matter more than novelty. These are the core storylines Fintech Is Femme will stay focused on next:
Real-economy fintech that improves cash flow for households and small businesses — not just financial access in theory, but liquidity in practice.
Fraud, identity, and trust as economic infrastructure, not edge cases or compliance checkboxes.
AI with accountability, deployed where it reduces risk and cost — not where it creates spectacle.
Embedded finance that disappears into workflows, removing friction instead of adding another app.
Women allocating capital, not just raising it — shaping markets, portfolios, and outcomes.
Profitability with principles, where durable business models and responsible growth are not in conflict.
At its core, fintech exists to answer one enduring question:
Who gets access to money, when, and on what terms?
What follows is where it gets interesting — because that answer doesn’t stop at finance.
It ripples through our economy, our behavior, and our culture.
In 2026, the fintech winners will be those that reduce risk, build trust, and give people their time back.
That’s how economies stabilize.
And that’s the lens Fintech Is Femme will continue to use — not to hype the future, but to document how it’s actually being built, who’s shaping it, and why it matters.
Intentionally.
Unapologetically.
By people who understand exactly what’s at stake.
SEE YOU NEXT YEAR?
🏆 You’re Invited to the FEMMY AWARDS: Presented by The Academy of Fintech
The FEMMY Awards are the official annual awards ceremony of The Academy of Fintech — honoring excellence, leadership, and impact across fintech, finance, and innovation.
​A night where:
​Achievements are recognized on a real stage
​Stories are documented for the industry’s history
​The community gathers dressed to the nines
​And fintech finally looks the way it feels: powerful
Want to learn more about the Academy of Fintech and the FEMMY awards?
I WANT IT, I GOT IT
📰 Today’s Read: See above (plenty of reads to catch up on!)
🍿 Today’s Watch: Is anyone else ringing in the New Year by staying cozy with close friends and eating hotpot? If you are, we're definitely on the same wavelength.
🌍 Today’s Listen: ICYMI — one of our top three most-listened-to Humans of Fintech episodes featuring Frances Zelazny, Founder & CEO of Anonybit, breaking down one of fintech’s most important frontiers: biometrics and identity. Tune in here.
FINTUNES
Song of the year goes to…
LET’S CONNECT
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That’s all for now! See you Thursday!
Love,
Nicole đź’ś