NEW YORK—Fewer than 100 of the roughly 37,000 fintech companies worldwide generate about 60% of the industry's total revenue—and payments firms are the clear frontrunners, responsible for more than half of that share, Banking Dive reported.
Of the $378 billion in global fintech revenues in 2024, $126 billion came from payments fintechs, some of which have seen growth from digital wallets (like PayPal and ApplePay) or vertical software-as-a-service (like Stripe, Toast and Square), Banking Dive said, citing a report released by QED Investors and Boston Consulting Group.
“Companies like Stripe and Adyen and Square really filled the gap when there was a shift to [e-commerce] and mobile commerce. They were able to just win that race and grab market share,” explained Laura Bock, QED partner and one of the authors of the report, “Fintech’s Next Chapter: Scaled Winners and Emerging Disruptors.”
“What we talk a lot about, and think a lot about, is how financial services lives downstream of the real economy,” she said. “When there are shifts in how the real economy works, that’s a huge opening for fintech to make waves.”
While fintech accounted for just 3% of overall banking and insurance revenues in 2024 ($12.7 trillion, according to the report), fintech revenues surged 21%, compared to the 6% growth rate of incumbent banks, Banking Dive noted.
“In recent years, embedded payments has revolutionized how consumers and merchants transact for certain things, Bock explained – for their fitness classes, as with MindBody, or their dinner, as with Toast,” Banking Dive said.
Artificial intelligence presents the possibility of another major shift, she noted, this time due to agentic payments, the Banking Dive report noted.
“For example, I use ChatGPT for way too much,” Bock said. “Yesterday, I was trying to figure out where to go on my honeymoon … so I was asking it ‘what’s the weather in Italy in September? Which part should I go to? What should I book?’ You can have it generate an entire itinerary. Imagine that I could then just say, ‘Hey, I like this plan, book it.’”