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Hey, fintech fam 💜

There’s a real sense of nostalgia in the air — one that’s been building for a while but has come fully alive at the start of 2026.

Scroll through any social feed, and you’ll see it: throwback photos, old playlists, jokes about a simpler internet, simpler jobs, simpler lives. Enough so that I’ve found myself doing the same.

So in honor of the “2026 is the new 2016” moment, I decided to look back — not just culturally, but financially.

What did fintech look like ten years ago? Which companies were just getting started? What was happening in the economy?

And what can we learn from that moment now that fintech is no longer a scrappy outsider but a core part of financial infrastructure?

Let’s get into it. 

_{ON THE LAST DECADE}

2026 Is The New 2016 — But Fintech Is In A Very Different Place

In 2016, fintech still felt early — with big ambitions.

The headlines were confident. Fintech was transforming banking as we knew it. Startups were framed as existential threats to legacy institutions. “Unbundling the bank” was the dominant metaphor, and the assumption baked into most analysis was that technology would replace incumbents rather than reshape them.

What’s striking in hindsight is not how wrong that moment was — but how incomplete.

Ten years ago, many of the companies that now sit at the center of financial infrastructure were just getting their footing. Affirm was still explaining why installment credit could be more transparent than revolving debt (a debate that remains ongoing). 

Coinbase was largely a gateway product for early crypto adopters, not a publicly traded company embedded in global markets. Betterment was a bet that algorithms could manage money as well as — or better than — humans, a radical idea at the time.

Even companies founded earlier but coming into their own around then — Stripe, Square, Plaid — were still understood as challengers. They were products you chose to use, not infrastructure you simply assumed would work.

Consumer fintechs that would later put their names on football stadiums — like SoFi — were still early stories. Founded in 2011, SoFi would go on to become the second-largest online lender within its first five years.

The economy helped. In 2016, the U.S. was coming off one of the longest periods of stable growth in modern history. The recovery from the financial crisis had settled into something resembling normalcy. 

Unemployment was falling. Household debt was declining. Wages were finally ticking up. Capital was cheap, confidence was high, and the sense — fair or not — was that the system could absorb experimentation.

That context mattered. Fintech flourished not just because technology improved, but because the economic ground beneath it was relatively steady.

Venture funding reflected that optimism. In 2016, VC-backed fintech companies raised roughly $12.7 billion across 836 deals. Investors like New Enterprise Associates, General Catalyst, Ribbit Capital, QED Investors, and Nyca Partners were placing early bets on the idea that finance, like media and commerce before it, would be remade by software.

What fintech didn’t have in 2016 — at least not explicitly — was AI as a headline. The technology was there, quietly embedded in fraud models and credit decisions, but no one described it as the future of finance. The question wasn’t how machines would decide for us. It was still how technology could help people make better decisions.

Ten years later, that question remains — but with a subtle and consequential shift. Now, the promise is not just better decisions, but automated ones.

Fintech today is no longer a scrappy outsider. 

It is the financial system’s connective tissue. 

Banks rely on fintech infrastructure. Payments, identity, compliance, lending, and now commerce itself move through fintech rails. When something breaks, it’s no longer a startup problem. It’s a systemic one.

The funding numbers tell that story clearly. In 2025, global VC-backed fintech funding reached $51.8 billion, up 27% from 2024 and, notably, above pre-pandemic levels. But deal volume fell sharply. Fewer bets. Larger checks. Capital concentrating around companies with scale, distribution, and regulatory endurance — names like Binance, Kraken, Polymarket, and Kalshi.

This isn’t 2016 optimism. It’s 2026 selectivity.

What the industry learned in the decade between is that fintech and financial services were never true opposites. They were complements pretending to be rivals.

The work of the last ten years has been integration — fintech becoming infrastructure, banks becoming technology companies, and both discovering that trust, regulation, and scale are not obstacles to innovation but prerequisites for it.

That brings us to the present moment.

Today, the central question isn’t whether fintech can disrupt banking. It’s whether it can support an economy where software increasingly acts on our behalf — deciding when to pay, where to invest, how to manage risk. AI didn’t replace fintech’s original mission. It sharpened it.

We’re still asking the same underlying question we were in 2016: how do we use technology to help people make better financial decisions? But now the stakes are higher, the systems are larger, and the margin for error is smaller.

If 2016 was about possibility, 2026 is about responsibility.

The nostalgia makes sense. That earlier moment felt lighter. But it was also simpler because fintech hadn’t yet proven how central it would become.

That’s no longer the case.

Today, fintech doesn’t just shape user experience. It shapes outcomes. It determines who gets approved, who gets flagged, who gets paid on time, and who doesn’t. Increasingly, it doesn’t just move money — it makes decisions about money, and soon, it will automate them.

That is the real shift of the last decade.

Looking back isn’t about recreating 2016. It’s about remembering what we didn’t yet know: that once infrastructure becomes invisible, accountability must become explicit. That speed without judgment scales harm as efficiently as it scales access. And that replacing human decision-making with software doesn’t remove bias — it relocates it.

Ten years ago, the question was whether fintech could change finance.

Now the question is whether it can be trusted to run it.

And that’s not a problem technology alone can solve.

_{I’D LIKE TO THANK THE ACADEMY}

This year’s FEMMY Awards aren’t just a celebration — they’re an invitation.

We are officially welcoming new members into The Academy of Fintech, and there has never been a more important moment to be in this room.

The Academy is a curated, high-trust community of founders, operators, investors, and executives who understand that growth in fintech doesn’t come from noise — it comes from proximity, shared intelligence, and consistent collaboration. This is where relationships compound. Where insight turns into opportunity. Where leadership sharpens.

Membership isn’t about access to content alone — it’s about access to people.

Through year-round virtual masterclasses led by Academy members, private salons and off-the-record conversations, and intentional in-person gatherings like the FEMMYs, the Academy is designed to support real growth: strategic, professional, and personal.

And the FEMMY Awards are where that community comes to life.

P.S. Even if you can’t attend the FEMMYs in New York, the door is still open. Learn more about joining The Academy of Fintech—our private membership community—and claim your membership directly on the FEMMYs event page.

_#SPONSORED

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_{WTF ELSE?}

• Wealth management fintech Wealthfront reports solid earnings amid post-IPO momentum

• US reinforced its position as the main global FinTech hub with 44% of all deals in 2025

• Credit unions, fintech and the AI inflection of financial services 

• World Economic Forum: Barclays sees strength in AI bubble 

_{I WANT IT, I GOT IT}

• 🍿 Today’s Watch: Cindy Gallop delivered a standout keynote at Blackweek on boys, men, positive masculinity—and why it matters to marketers. My favorite part? She spent the entire talk focused not on what’s broken (we know already), but on real, actionable solutions.

• 📖 Today’s Read: ICYMI, I sat down with FIS President & CEO Stephanie Ferris to unpack the fintech giant’s big bet on agentic commerce for banks. Read about it here.

• 🍜 Today’s Food: Had an incredible Thai dinner last Friday with my head of digital content at Soothr in the East Village. Worth every minute of the cold-weather wait for the Michelin-level chicken khao soi.

_FINTUNES

🎵 Rihanna - Work

My most listened to song of 2016 — no question.

_{LET’S CONNECT}

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That’s all for now! See you on Thursday.

Love,

Nicole 💜