I left the bank in mid-2025 after 14 years in fintech coverage. The 2022-2025 fintech reset has been the most distorting episode I've seen in my career — and how it resolves through 2026 will shape the category for years.
The pre-2022 fintech market was characterised by extreme valuation expansion. Companies with $50M of ARR were getting $5B private valuations. The capital coming in — venture, growth, crossover, public-market PIPE — was effectively free, and it rewarded growth at almost any cost. The category leaders all played to this: aggressive customer acquisition, thin gross margins, narrative emphasis on TAM rather than unit economics.
The 2022-2023 reset cut these valuations by 60-80%. By mid-2023, the consensus was that fintech was 'dead.' That framing was always wrong; what was actually dead was a specific era of capital pricing. The underlying businesses still existed; they just couldn't be valued the way they used to be.
The M&A response through 2024 and 2025 was a wave of strategic acquisitions at sober prices. Established financial institutions and bigger fintechs picked up category leaders at 30-40% of the prior peak valuation. Some of these deals will look brilliant in retrospect. Others reflected acquirer optimism about turning around businesses that had fundamental unit-economic flaws.
The IPO market through 2024-2025 was effectively closed for fintech. A handful of profitable B2B fintechs went public to mixed reception. Consumer fintechs that should have IPO'd at the peak missed the window entirely; some of them sold for less than the last private round.
Looking ahead to 2026 and beyond, I see three patterns. First, the M&A wave has another 18-24 months to play out. There are still 30-50 priced-down fintechs that will get strategic-acquirer interest at prices their boards can finally accept. Second, the IPO market reopens slowly for genuinely profitable B2B fintechs, but consumer fintech IPOs remain difficult. Third, a wave of category re-bundling — the platform vendors absorbing point-solution fintechs — restructures the competitive landscape in ways the analyst coverage hasn't caught up to yet.