The Fintech Playbook for 2025: What Did We Learn From Last Year?

AI, instant payments, interoperability…there’s a lot of speculation as to what’ll dominate the fintech scene this year, especially within the payments space. But to understand what the landscape might look like in 2025, we have to start by assessing what 2024 brought us – the good, the bad, and the ugly. And what better way to understand this than by speaking to someone who knows the industry inside out??

That’s why, for our 26th edition of Ctrl + Alt + Comply, we’re interviewing industry expert Jas Shah, fintech product consultant and author of Fintech R&R, a newsletter read by 1000s of industry leaders, containing fintech deep dives, product-centric overviews, and various fintech topics explained.?

Key Lessons from 2024

Q: In your opinion, what were some of the biggest challenges fintechs faced last year?

Probably the most obvious challenge to note is funding. So many mid-sized and lesser known fintechs were struggling to access capital after a long period of ‘wait and see’. This ‘wait and see’ approach from VCs and other fintech funders largely stemmed from a big election year and uncertainty around how the markets would react. I’m not an economist, but this is based on what I saw and felt during the end of 2023 and much of 2024.?

Q: How did fintechs address these challenges? Any particular cases that stood out to you?

A positive outcome from this challenge from my perspective was fintechs looking inwards, focusing on lean operations, cost-cutting, and emphasising profitability over growth. I saw a lot of smaller players pivot to adjacent revenue streams, like partnerships with larger banks or even white-labeling their technology for other players e.g. Starling and Wise growing their ‘as-a-service offerings. Product innovation was also on the agenda to deepen offerings, improve the product for customers, leading to great retention rates to put fintechs in a much stronger position to raise future funding rounds. Monzo is the perfect example of this after a 2023 of, let's say, underwhelming product velocity, 2024 saw huge changes and rapid evolution of the platform which was great to see.?

Emerging Trends Shaping 2025

Q: What trends do you think will dominate the fintech landscape in 2025 – especially when it comes to the payments space?

I have a number of trends that I think will dominate in 2025 but I’ll focus on the payments related ones.

One trend that’s unavoidable is the growth of real-time payment (RTP) adoption. As global economies move toward seamless, always-on financial systems, compliance will play a significant role. Instant Payments Regulation (IPR), for example, is becoming a critical enabler and driver of innovation, especially in regions like Europe and the Middle East. With the US release of FedNow and RTP systems across the globe like India's IMPS and Saudi’s Sarie growing in usage, it’s a clear trend that will soon cover the globe.?

Going hand in hand with RTP growth is AI-driven fraud prevention. With real-time payments, the risk of fraud rises exponentially, so fintechs will need to prioritise proactive measures over reactive ones. I also expect to see deeper exploration of embedded payments—not just as a feature but as a core part of how businesses interact with consumers.

Lastly, I think we’ll see more ‘smarter payments’. What do I mean by that? Payments that are not just secure and fast, but also rules and trigger based. SEPA released Request to Pay on its rails not that long ago but we haven’t seen a lot of innovation or use of that facility by many fintechs.?

The Fintech Playbook for 2025

Q: Is there anything you think that fintech companies should prioritize in 2025 to stay competitive?

Absolutely.?I’ll keep these short and sharp!

The first priority is regulatory readiness. Compliance can no longer be an afterthought—it’s a competitive advantage, especially for fintechs handling payments or lending. The cost of non-compliance in real-time payment systems is far too high. A quick look at the fine Starling took in 2024 is testament to that (yes it was for financial sanctions screening deficiencies but those processes were clearly not robust enough).

Second, fintechs should focus on operational resilience. The macroeconomic climate remains uncertain, so building strong partnerships and ensuring operational efficiency will make the difference between thriving and merely surviving.

Lastly, and from my perspective, most importantly, customer-centric innovation is key. The fintech space is crowded, and to stand out, companies need to build personalised, intuitive, and frictionless experiences. Whether that’s using AI to tailor financial insights or offering seamless payment integrations, the customer experience should be at the core. Probably the most undervalued activity that glean the most insights is analysing and reviewing customer interactions whether that’s through a metrics dashboard, performing customer interviews, reviewing a transcript of a customer support interaction etc. These are areas that can uncover pain points for customers and highlight areas for improvement, innovation and therefore customer benefit and future revenue.

Q: If you could give one piece of advice to businesses within payments based off of everything we’ve discussed, what would that be??

When I think about advice to payments businesses in the context of some of the things I've brought up I’m reminded of this quote:

“Trust takes years to build, seconds to break”

So my advice.?Don’t just focus on building trust with consumers, businesses, merchants and whoever your end customers are. Proactively look at ways to reduce the likelihood of breakage in the payment flow.

That means analysing journeys, constantly reviewing fraud rates, looking at potential points of failure in the payment process and ensuring there are robust mechanisms in place to manage issues as and when they arise.?A final quote to pair with the first.?

“It costs significantly more to acquire a new customer, than to keep an existing one”.

Final Thoughts

We want to extend a big thank you to Jas for all of his unfiltered insights for this special edition of Ctrl + Alt + Comply. At spektr, we work with businesses within the payments industry to tackle some of the exact challenges mentioned by Jas above, helping organizations reduce friction and maintain global compliance, 24/7 – so if you’re looking to stay ahead in 2025, don’t hesitate to shoot us a message.?

And if you’re looking for fintech consulting expertise, drop Jas a LinkedIn message and even if you’re not, connect with him and subscribe to his newsletter for more insights

Compliantly Yours,

spektr