Author: Gayathri

2025 was the year fintech stopped talking about future rails and actually started building on them. AI moved into regulated production, CBDCs and stablecoins gained real legal frameworks, instant payments became a default expectation in many markets, and tokenization shifted from slideware to early stage financial plumbing. 2025: The Year Fintech Got Serious About Infrastructure If the last decade of fintech was about pretty interfaces and rapid onboarding, 2025 was about rewiring the back end. AI shifted from demos to regulated workflows. Central banks doubled down on CBDC pilots. Stablecoins gained regulatory guardrails in major markets. Instant payments went from…

By 2026, many compliance teams won’t just use AI models they’ll supervise digital colleagues that monitor transactions, triage alerts, draft case notes, and explain every decision in regulator-ready language. The shift to explainable, agentic AI is turning FCC and risk functions from slow control centers into proactive, real-time defense systems. Trend: Explainable & Agentic AI Becomes the FCC “Nerve Center” Financial crime has gone fully real-time. Instant payments, always-on digital channels, and crypto rails mean suspicious activity can start, move, and disappear in seconds. Traditional controls, overnight batches, manual triage, and siloed monitoring simply can’t keep up. At the same…

Banking is shifting from “Where do you bank?” to “How does your money work for you, wherever you are?” The next phase of banking services is being shaped by three forces working in concert: deep personalization, AI threaded through every interaction, and open APIs that stitch together seamless financial journeys across an ecosystem of providers. The new CX battleground in banking For most of the last century, banks competed on physical reach, balance sheet strength, and product range. If you had branches on every corner, a competitive rate table, and a recognizable brand, you were in good shape. Those rules…

Digital banking is no longer an experiment operating alongside traditional finance. For millions of customers, a mobile-first bank is now the primary financial relationship, not a secondary convenience. Regulators have adjusted their posture accordingly. Neobanks are no longer viewed as temporary challengers learning in public, but as systemically relevant financial infrastructure. In this environment, regulatory risk is not a compliance function issue or a legal footnote. It is a core business risk that directly affects growth velocity, capital efficiency, valuation, and customer trust. BaFin’s long and evolving intervention into N26 shows how quickly supervisory engagement can escalate into binding constraints,…

Fintechs have outgrown the patchwork era of separate tools for KYC, AML, fraud, and onboarding. A new generation of all-in-one RegTech platforms is emerging, promising a single compliance stack where financial crime controls, onboarding, and enterprise risk run as one continuous workflow instead of disconnected silos. The Compliance Silo Problem in Modern Fintechs Most fintechs did not design their compliance stacks; they accumulated them under pressure. A KYC provider to get live quickly, an AML system added after the first regulatory review, a fraud tool bolted on once chargebacks spike, and a spreadsheet-driven process for periodic reviews and enhanced due…

By the time India enters 2026, the investing world will feel very different from what most retail savers grew up with. The RBI is easing rates into a low-inflation environment, the rupee has tested record lows, and domestic investors, through mutual funds and direct equity, are increasingly driving the market narrative. In this landscape, “just start a SIP in a couple of equity funds” is no longer a complete plan. The real question is how to blend mutual funds, FDs, gold, REITs, ETFs, and even a tiny sliver of crypto into a portfolio that can live with volatility and currency…

Over the past five years, India’s consumer credit story has quietly changed its entry point. For a 24-year-old gig worker in Bengaluru or a first-job engineer in Jaipur, the first brush with formal credit is less likely to be a bank branch or a plastic card, and more likely a notification: “You’ve been approved for ₹15,000. Tap to activate.” The macro context explains why: Once payments live on the phone, credit naturally follows. BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later) and micro-credit apps have embedded credit into everyday digital behaviour, food delivery, quick-commerce, utilities, and education, rather than asking users to separately…

Real-time payments have moved from novelty to necessity. But behind the clean “instant payment successful” screen is a messy infrastructure challenge that banks, fintechs, and regulators are all scrambling to solve at once. The real-time moment: why infrastructure suddenly matters For decades, payments moved at the speed of the banking day: batch files, end-of-day settlements, cut-off times, and “T+1” that nobody seriously questioned. That world is disappearing fast. Real-time payment schemes such as India’s UPI, Brazil’s Pix, the U.S. FedNow and RTP networks, and the U.K.’s Faster Payments have pushed expectations toward “instant by default” across P2P, bill pay, merchant…

The Digital Risk Protection (DRP) landscape has matured sharply between 2024 and 2025, driven by buyers demanding unified external-risk visibility, faster takedowns, and deeper automation. The 2025 SPARK Matrix shows a market shifting decisively toward purpose-built DRP platforms rather than repackaged modules. The report also calls out a major structural shift: the vendors capable of continuously mapping external assets, correlating multi-surface signals, and executing rapid, in-house takedowns are the ones pulling ahead. At the same time, several long-standing players remain static, and a handful disappear altogether, illustrating how competitive and unforgiving this market has become. According to Sahil Dhamgaye, Analyst…

The Financial Close Management (FCM) market entered 2025 with a decisive shift: enterprises are moving away from periodic, calendar-bound close cycles toward continuous, AI-driven, and controls-embedded accounting. Automation is now foundational rather than aspirational, and the newest SPARK Matrix™: Financial Close Management, Q4 2025, reflects this transformation clearly. Vendors differentiated themselves not by who could automate a checklist, but by who could deliver real-time anomaly detection, predictive intelligence, enterprise-grade reconciliation engines, and workflow orchestration deep enough to support autonomous accounting models. Amid this evolution, the year-on-year comparison between 2024 and 2025 reveals meaningful shifts in leadership positions, capability maturity, and…