FinTech proving its resilience despite the volatility this year after clawing back to a $1 trillion market cap in 2025, a sharp correction this year wiped out recent gains.
But beyond the swings, the underlying fundamentals do tell a story of maturity.
We now have a new generation of heavyweights.
Companies like Revolut, Soi, and New Bank boast nearly multi-billion dollars each in deposits, numbers that rival top traditional banks.
And last year's staple coins crossed. $1 trillion in monthly volume and Wall Street titans like BlackRock and Fidelity helped launch more than 75 new crypto ETFs.
So while Fintech has lagged in AI adoption, and I may be poised to forge the next gen of financial giants.
Well joining me to weigh in is Lamont, senior associate at F.
So great to have you here.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's great to be here.
Well, 2026 has started with a lot of volatility across all asset classes, but when it comes to fintech.
Give us an idea of what's happening and tell us about what you're seeing in your index.
Yeah, for sure.
So I would say we could talk about 2025, which was a year of optimism, and then we can talk about the first two months of 2026, which kind of tell the other side of that optimism.
So 2025 saw a big market cap gain for our F FinTech index, so a basket of 54 publicly traded fintech companies gained over $200 billion in market cap, which was really exciting for.
The sector that included no IPOs, it's been a very quiet IPO market, but 2026, just in the first two months, over 90% of that market cap gain was essentially decimated.
So a lot of that market cap gain wiped away, and a lot of that is due to this broader Sass sell-off.
So in the broader Sass market, you know, $1 trillion wiped off in market cap, but Fintech, about $200 billion due to this broader Sass selloff.
Advances in AI foundation models, the risk it proposes to traditional Sas seed-based models.
The propensity now to build versus buy is kind of threatening a lot of these Sas giants, and FinTech has kind of been susceptible to that sell-off too.
And you're talking about Sass, and there's even a term for what we've seen, and that is Sas apocalypse.
So that gives you an indication of what's happening.
But what is the data actually telling you?
It's a great question.
So in fintech, the market cap gain of $200 billion tells a pretty pessimistic story, but if you do look at the underlying fundamentals of those fintech companies, it's actually a more positive story.
So if you look at just the fundamentals of revenue growth, this basket of 54 companies has grown their revenue over 29% over the last few years.
So really strong revenue growth and then investors are turning their attention more and more towards profitability, which is something we're also seeing improving in fintech that's across every sector payments, banking, wealth, insurance, real estate, even crypto.
All these companies over the last five years we all kind of remember the 2021 era of growth.
Costs.
All of these companies are now kind of inching towards profitability, which investors really care about, you know.
Investors are now kind of prioritizing these Goldilocks companies that are both growing at a strong but sustainable rate, but also inching towards profitability, growing profitably, not growing at all costs like they were about 5 years ago.
And we're here at the New York Stock Exchange and at the beginning of the year there was a lot of anticipation about IPOs.
So first and foremost, tell us what we saw in 2025 and where you stand in terms of expectations for this year.
Yes, 2025 was a big year for IPOs, the biggest since 2021, so the IPO window was essentially shut for that amount of time.
We didn't see any fintech IPOs until 2025, where we saw 11 VC-backed IPOs, which is great.
Those were added to our index, um, and then even in the first, you know, two months of 2026 we've already seen three FinTech IPOs that was Bitco in the crypto space, PickPay out of Brazil, Ethos in the insurance space.
So the sentiment there is looking strong, you know, there's, there's a really healthy pipeline of IPO candidates now in FinTech, um, you know, they might try and wait out the storm to go public, but there's a really strong IPO pipeline right now in Fintech.
We see those signals.
We see people publicly disclosing gap financials.
That's usually a pretty good indicator that they're gearing up to go public.
They are hiring a CFO, another pretty good indicator.
They might be hiring investment banks, lawyers.
They might be doing a cap table cleanup.
These are all pretty good signals that a lot of companies are gearing up, and we see a lot of those.
We see a few $100 billion in the IPO pipeline for this year.
Time will tell if it ends up being on the back half of this.
Early next, but there are a lot of really late stage valuable private companies in fintech that are kind of gearing up for it.
And Sarah, finally, before I let you go, I do want to ask you about what we're seeing in crypto.
So in digital assets there are several trends that we are watching here at FinTech TV, including institutionalization as well as regulation.
But when it comes to what you're seeing, given the recent price action and the crypto majors, what is your outlook?
I would say the convergence of fintech and crypto has sort of finally happened in the last year.
It's hard to be a fintech investor now without also focusing on crypto.
So I think this past year we saw a few big trends happening.
You mentioned regulation, which I won't touch on as much, but stablecoins have kind of risen as the primary sort of killer use case.
Last summer is when they kind of crossed that $1 trillion monthly transaction volume threshold and I think in February they're now approaching almost $2 trillion in transaction volume.
So stablecoins have risen as kind of the killer use case of crypto.
I'm really excited about that trend.
And then ETFs we saw over 75 crypto ETFs launched last year, which is More than all previous years combined, so ETFs on the rise, introducing new long-term pools of capital for the space, and then tokenization a little bit more nascent, but following the rise of tokenized treasuries, we think we'll see it in a few other private fund areas like private credit.
It's a great place for tokenization to play, and we think we'll see it across other private asset classes too.
Well, Sarah, it was great having you here.
Thank you so much for joining us and thank you so much for sharing all of your insights.
Thank you so much for having me.
