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Hey, fintech fam 💜

One (of the many) things I’ve learned building Fintech Is Femme: you cannot do it alone.

The rooms, the partnerships, the sponsors, the speakers — none of it happens in isolation. It takes community. It takes trust. It takes people who believe in the mission enough to build alongside you.

It’s been a grind over here at Fintech Is Femme HQ as I build out the agenda for the largest event yet, FTW: NYC during New York Fintech Week.

And while I’m deeply grateful that I’ve been content directing financial services conferences since my first editor job at a finance magazine in New York (yes — including a massive Las Vegas conference with thousands of attendees), every year feels like starting from zero again. Bigger vision. Higher stakes. More moving pieces.

Still, there’s something I love about it.

Designing rooms with intention. Bringing together leaders who don’t just want to be seen, but want to partner, build, and actually move capital and innovation forward together.

And then, in the middle of it all, a little reminder of why we do this: Fintech Is Femme was named one of FinTech Magazine’s Top 10 Fintech Influencers alongside some truly global leaders in our space.

That recognition belongs to this community as much as it does to me. We’ve built this together. Want to hang out with us? The FEMMY Awards are just around the corner on March 2.

Let’s get into the news. ✨

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What’s Up In Fintech

Every Thursday, I break down the fintech stories that matter most—grounded in my reporting, interviews with industry leaders, and what I’m seeing unfold across the industry.

F-Prime Index Shows Fintech’s “Quiet Year” Wasn’t Quiet at All

It’s looking increasingly clear that 2025 may go down as the year fintech grew up — when high-growth companies that cemented their place in the digital economy stopped being labeled “startups” and started entering incumbent territory.

The F-Prime Fintech Index — which tracks 54 public fintech companies, including Adyen, Coinbase, SoFi, Shopify, and Nubank — rebounded to $947 billion in market cap by the end of 2025, still below the $1.3 trillion peak of 2021 but well above the sub-$400 billion trough of 2022–2023, according to F-Prime’s 2026 State of Fintech Report.

In other words, the mania is gone. The sector is maturing.

The average company in the index grew revenue 29% year-over-year, with multiples settling around 5.6x revenue. Not bubble territory. Not distress. Something more telling: normalization.

While the Fintech Index added more than $200 billion in market cap last year, the recovery hasn’t been evenly distributed. F-Prime reports that a handful of companies — including Robinhood, Shopify, and Nubank — accounted for nearly 80% of the index’s market cap gains in 2025.

That concentration signals a market that’s still selective.

The end of “growth at all costs”

You’ve probably heard this phrase thrown around a lot lately — and for good reason. What investors reward now, especially after the valuation reset a few years ago, are the “goldilocks” companies, as F-Prime calls them.

Not quite hypergrowth, not quite stagnation.

But steady 20–40% growth, improving margins, and a clear, credible path to profitability.

That shift changes how fintech gets built.

The 2026 playbook is about durability. Improve net income margins. Lower customer acquisition costs. Make cross-sell real. Earn trust instead of renting it.

In the 2021 hype cycle, teams optimized for speed: ship features, buy growth, figure out unit economics later, raise another round, repeat.

In the new era, the winners are optimizing for durability: better margins, cleaner underwriting, disciplined CAC, real distribution, real risk controls.

F-Prime notes that net income margins improved across every sector versus the 2021 era. Translation: the “boring” work is back in fashion—and it’s what creates category leaders.

A decade of winners is now visible

The fintech wave of the 2010s has officially produced its first generation of giants. The new incumbents are already here.

Companies like Nubank, Stripe, Affirm, Toast, and Robinhood aren’t scrappy insurgents anymore. They are institutions — with scale, brand, and regulatory gravity.

If measured against U.S. standards, Revolut, SoFi, and Nubank would now rank in the top 1.5% of American banks by deposits if they were chartered in the U.S. Each holds nearly $30 billion in deposits.

History offers a useful analogy. Fidelity and Charles Schwab began as discounted alternatives to legacy brokers. They were once dismissed. They now define wealth management infrastructure.

Fintech’s version of that transition didn’t happen overnight — it happened right in front of us, headline by headline, quarter by quarter.

The question isn’t whether fintech will produce giants. It already has.

The more relevant question is who owns the next layer.

Over the past decade, roughly $1.8 trillion in venture capital has flowed into fintech, generating an estimated $2.4 trillion in returns. But an additional $4.2 trillion in liquidity remains locked in private companies, with fintech representing about $600 billion of that — including private leaders like Stripe ($107B), Revolut ($75B), and Ramp ($32B).

In other words: we’ve minted giants. But the exit cycle isn’t finished.

Crypto moved inside the system

One of the clearest shifts in our industry is crypto’s repositioning.

Stablecoins surpassed $1 trillion in monthly volume in 2025, according to F-Prime’s report. Regulatory posture shifted meaningfully. Dozens of crypto ETFs have been launched. The asset class stopped behaving like a side experiment and started behaving like infrastructure.

What matters here is not speculation. It’s integration.

Crypto is not overthrowing traditional finance. It’s being absorbed into it. And once absorbed, it changes how money moves — faster settlement, programmable transfers, global liquidity without traditional rails.

When infrastructure changes, power shifts. Stablecoins may be the clearest example of a true “killer use case” in crypto, as F-Prime notes. In a recent Substack, the firm highlighted how stablecoins could reduce the cost of sending $200 internationally from roughly $20–$30 via traditional bank transfer to less than $1.

AI hasn’t transformed fintech — yet

If 2025 belonged to AI headlines, it did not yet belong to AI in financial services.

F-Prime is clear that fintech lags other sectors for understandable reasons: regulation, sensitive data, low tolerance for error. Finance cannot “move fast and break things.” It holds people’s money.

“Financial services are responsible for more than 20% of GDP in the US,” the company noted, “but the industry currently has one of the lowest adoption rates for AI agents.”

But the report points toward 2026–2030 as the period when AI-native systems begin replacing legacy workflows.

And the most disruptive possibility isn’t better chatbots. It’s agentic commerce: autonomous agents that discover, negotiate, and transact on behalf of users, which I’ve written about further in my Forbes fintech column.

If checkout becomes protocol instead of click — if agents decide where your money goes — then payments, distribution, and customer ownership get rewritten.

Why It Matters

Fintech is entering its third act, as I wrote about in my Tuesday column.

The first era was access: unbundle the bank, digitize everything.

The second era was scale: land grab, platforms, growth curves.

The third era — the one we’re entering now — is durability.

Durable margins. Durable infrastructure. Durable trust.

The giants have emerged. Now we find out who builds systems strong enough to last.

And it looks like the companies that will lead in the third era are building the boring, hard things—risk controls, underwriting discipline, compliance, unit economics, and real customer trust—while quietly positioning for agentic workflows and programmable money.

Humans of Fintech: SoFi’s Kelli Keough on building a consumer brand people trust

If you’ve ever wondered what it actually takes to build an iconic consumer fintech brand—one that scales, stays profitable, and earns real trust—this episode is your playbook.

I sat down with Kelli Keough, EVP and Group Business Unit Leader at SoFi, where she oversees the products millions of members use to spend, save, invest, and protect.

And her edge is refreshingly human: Kelli started in psychology, which means she doesn’t just build financial products—she builds for behavior.

In our conversation, Kelli breaks down why most financial institutions still misunderstand customers (hint: people don’t think in “checking vs. savings vs. investing”—they think in goals), how SoFi approaches unit economics without sacrificing the member experience, and what it means to build trust when you’re handling what she calls “the most sacred thing”: people’s money.

We also get into:

• Why the future belongs to fintechs that design around verbs, not product silos

• How SoFi’s flywheel lowers acquisition costs by getting members to adopt multiple products

• What actually changes consumer behavior in uncertain markets (and why “fatigue” isn’t the story)

• The coming shift as people start asking money questions in LLMs—and what fintechs must do to stay relevant

• The leadership principle she’s carried from Schwab to SoFi: build through the client’s eyes

Watch it if you’re building consumer fintech, marketing one, or trying to understand what “trust + scale” really looks like in 2026.

P.S. There’s still time to apply for a chance to win complimentary VIP tickets to Fintech Meetup in Las Vegas — and record a live episode of Humans of Fintech with me. Apply here.

_{MARK YOUR CALENDARS}

Let’s keep you booked and busy. Every Thursday, I share fintech events worth adding to your calendar— both IRL and online.

_{TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 24}

[VIRTUAL] ​

Excited to be in conversation with GTM expert and friend Christine Farrier Rosemin, Principal at Sursum Advisory. We’ll dive into media strategy, partnerships, and how to build relationships that drive real results — and long-term impact. Join us!

_{MONDAY, MARCH 2}

[NEW YORK] ​Celebrate Women’s History Month at the FEMMYs

The room is filling up, and we do have a limited capacity! So proud to co-host this evening with our incredible supporters Candidly, Stripe, Springboard Enterprises, Aprio, and Spave.

_{APRIL 28-30}

[NEW YORK] Fintech Is Femme produces the Official New York Fintech Week Conference 2026

See you in New York! More updates, including our agenda, speakers, and partners, are coming soon.

_FINTUNES

🎵 Ruby Ibarra - Bakunawa ft. Ouida, Han Han & June Millington

_{LET’S CONNECT}

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That wraps up today’s edition—thanks for reading! Until next week, keep innovating and challenging the status quo. See you Tuesday!

Love,

Nicole 💜