The fintech narrative has shifted. After years of consumer-facing growth stories, the industry’s centre of gravity is moving toward the infrastructure layer. QED Investors’
2026 outlook captures the mood: “Consumer fintech is oversaturated. Funding flows to whichever startups solve institutional problems, and in 2026, that means B2B infrastructure.”
The pattern is consistent across analyst forecasts, venture capital allocation, and regulatory direction.
Taylor Wessing’s fintech outlook notes that financial infrastructure providers, from API layer operators to payment and clearing infrastructure companies, are expected to be a primary focus for both investors and regulators throughout 2026.
Modern Treasury’s predictions go further, arguing that the neobank boom is slowing as infrastructure-first fintechs capture more value by enabling payments and financial services across existing platforms.
This is not a list of the largest fintechs or the most likely IPO candidates. It is a list of five companies, at different stages and scales, that are each building something structurally important for the next phase of global financial services.
1. Airwallex: the full-stack platform preparing for what comes next
The numbers speak for themselves. Airwallex
crossed $1 billion in annualised revenue in October 2025. Its
Series G, closed in December 2025, raised $330 million at an $8 billion valuation. Annual transaction volume doubled year-on-year to approximately $235 billion. The company now holds more than 80 licences across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and
Asia-Pacific.
What makes Airwallex interesting in 2026 is not just scale, it is geographic rebalancing. While the company built its reputation in Asia-Pacific,
Contrary Research reports that North America and Europe have been scaling at over 200% year-on-year and are expected to represent over 40% of revenue by early 2026. A
$200 million investment in the Netherlands, a new regional general manager in London, and expansion into France, Germany, and the UAE signal a deliberate pivot toward Western institutional clients.
The product suite has grown well beyond cross-border payments. Corporate cards, treasury, embedded finance, spend management, and billing (following its
acquisition of OpenPay) now sit alongside core payments. More than 200,000 business customers use the platform, including Shein, TikTok, Canva, and Rippling. Perhaps most notably, Airwallex is building a team of specialised AI agents to automate complex
financial workflows, from expense approvals and policy checks to end-to-end task orchestration. If that bet pays off, it could meaningfully separate Airwallex from legacy treasury and payments providers.
CEO Jack Zhang clarified on LinkedIn in January 2026 that an IPO is not planned for 2026 or 2027. But with $1.5 billion raised, a growing global workforce, and a $1 billion commitment to U.S. expansion
through 2029, the company is clearly operating on a public-market timeline, whether or not it files this year.
2. Nium: the infrastructure purist betting on programmable money
Where Airwallex is building a platform, Nium is doubling down on infrastructure purity. The Singapore-headquartered company processes over $50 billion in annual transaction volume,
holds more than 40 regulatory licences, and reaches 190 countries. Its clients are not merchants or consumers. They are banks, financial institutions, travel companies, payroll providers, and platforms that need real-time cross-border rails without building
their own.
The recent
C-suite appointments announced in February 2026 reveal the strategic direction. A CTO from Coinbase and Visa. A CMO with deep fintech experience from dLocal, Feedzai, and PayNearMe. A Chief Risk and Compliance Officer to oversee regulatory strategy as digital
assets become part of the payments mix. The mandate, according to CEO Prajit Nanu, is to capture the convergence of AI, stablecoins, and programmable money.
That positioning is deliberate. As stablecoins move from speculation to infrastructure (with dedicated legislation now in place in the U.S. under the
GENIUS Act and MiCA gaining traction in Europe), the question is not whether they will integrate with traditional payment rails. It is who will provide the integration layer. Nium is betting that its existing modular API suite, combined with compliance
infrastructure across 40+ jurisdictions, makes it the natural bridge.
The B2B cross-border payments market is
projected to reach $175 trillion by 2030. Nium raised $50 million in its
Series E at a $1.4 billion valuation in late 2024, with revenue growing over 50% year-on-year. If it can execute on the programmable money thesis while maintaining its infrastructure-only positioning, it occupies a valuable and defensible niche.
3. Lorum: the correspondent bank rebuilt for the platform economy
The least familiar name on this list may be the most structurally interesting.
Lorum, a
DFSA-regulated financial infrastructure company (formerly Fuse), operates as a specialist correspondent institution. It provides global clearing, custody, treasury operations, and multi-currency payment rails via API, serving payroll and EOR platforms,
payment service providers, trading platforms, and marketplaces across more than 30 markets.
As CEO George Davis put it: “Global payments are not broken. Incentives are. The real friction is the chain of custody at the start and end of a payment.” Lorum’s argument is that clearing has been trapped inside institutions whose primary business model
is lending and interest. When clearing is subordinated to balance-sheet priorities, settlement slows and certainty drops.
What makes Lorum worth watching is the breadth of infrastructure it wraps around that clearing thesis. Named custody accounts, including client-segregated, safeguarding, operational, and escrow structures, give platforms the ability to hold and manage client
funds in their own customers’ names across jurisdictions, without applying for their own banking licences. On top of the custody layer sits a treasury and liquidity management stack: wholesale FX at institutional rates, automated liquidity sweeps across currencies,
yield on idle balances, and real-time visibility across multi-currency positions. For platforms managing funds on behalf of clients across 10 or 20 markets, the ability to consolidate clearing, custody, and treasury operations through a single API integration
rather than managing bilateral banking relationships in each jurisdiction represents a significant operational and regulatory advantage.
The timing is also noteworthy. 2026 is shaping up to be the year tokenized money market funds move from pilot to production, with
AUM growing 110% through 2025 to $8.6 billion and institutions like
J.P. Morgan and
Franklin Templeton launching tokenized treasury products on-chain. Infrastructure providers that combine custody, clearing, and cash management in a single regulated layer are well positioned to become the operational backbone for distributing these instruments.
Lorum’s custody architecture, designed for named client accounts with full fund segregation, maps naturally onto the institutional requirements for tokenized cash products, where compliance, traceability, and regulatory standing are preconditions for participation.
Correspondent banking relationships have declined approximately 30% since 2011 according to BIS data, with some regions losing more than half their
connections. The platforms expanding into multiple markets today do not want to become banks. They want a partner that provides clearing access, holds and segregates client funds, manages multi-currency treasury, and offers institutional FX, all under one
regulatory umbrella. Lorum is purpose-built for that gap, and the structural tailwinds behind it are only strengthening.
4. Stitch: building Africa’s payment backbone, one enterprise at a time
Africa remains one of the most dynamic markets for payments innovation, and
Stitch is emerging as critical infrastructure for the continent’s enterprise economy. The Cape Town-headquartered company
raised $55 million in a Series B in April 2025, led by QED Investors, bringing total funding to $107 million. Its backers include Ribbit Capital, PayPal Ventures, Flourish Ventures, and angel investor Trevor Noah.
What distinguishes Stitch from the many other payment companies targeting Africa is its focus on enterprise infrastructure rather than consumer acquisition. The platform now
processes more than 50 million transactions annually, valued at over $2 billion. Clients include MTN, MultiChoice, The Foschini Group, SnapScan (Standard Bank), and several of South Africa’s largest gaming operators. These are not startups. They are large,
compliance-heavy enterprises that require institutional-grade payment infrastructure.
The strategic moves through 2025 tell a clear story. Stitch
acquired ExiPay to add in-person payment capabilities, creating a unified commerce offering across online and physical channels. It then
acquired Efficacy Payments, a Designated Clearing System Participant recognised by the South African Reserve Bank, enabling it to issue cards and process transactions directly. In 2026, Stitch plans to launch additional acquiring products, expand its e-commerce
tooling, and strengthen in-person payments infrastructure.
The African opportunity is substantial. Fintech
remains the continent’s best-funded sector, and payment fragmentation across markets ensures that the companies providing unified infrastructure will capture outsized value. As global platforms increasingly look to Africa for growth, Stitch is positioning
itself as the default payment layer they build on.
5. Volt: making account-to-account payments work at merchant scale
Open banking has been talked about for years. Volt is building the infrastructure to make it work in practice, at scale, for merchants who actually need an alternative to cards. The UK-headquartered company provides a single
API that connects businesses to open banking payment rails across multiple markets, enabling real-time account-to-account (A2A) payments that bypass traditional card networks entirely.
Volt
raised $60 million in a Series B led by IVP (whose fintech portfolio includes Coinbase, Wise, Klarna, Brex, and Robinhood), with participation from EQT Ventures, Augmentum Fintech, and CommerzVentures. The round valued the company at over $350 million.
The investment thesis is straightforward: with the
value of A2A payments in e-commerce projected to reach $757 billion by 2026 and more than 70 countries transitioning to real-time payment systems, the infrastructure connecting those systems to merchants will be enormously valuable.
What makes Volt worth watching this year specifically is the operational progress. The company recently
partnered with ClearBank to deliver merchant account capabilities, including payouts, refunds, user-level fund attribution, and full lifecycle management, features that bring open banking payments closer to feature parity with cards. It has also expanded
its partnership network to include
Worldpay and
Pay.com, giving its technology distribution through some of the largest acquirers and payment orchestration platforms in the market.
The timing is significant. Regulatory tailwinds in Europe, the UK, and Brazil are pushing open banking adoption past the tipping point. Merchants are actively looking for alternatives to card processing fees, which remain among the highest costs in e-commerce
operations. Volt’s network approach, aggregating open banking connectivity across jurisdictions into one integration, addresses the fragmentation problem that has historically prevented broader A2A adoption. If open banking becomes a mainstream checkout option
in 2026, and the conditions are increasingly there for it to do so, Volt is positioned to be one of the primary beneficiaries.
The common thread
These five companies sit at different stages and scales. One has crossed a billion in revenue. Another just raised its Series B. What connects them is a shared conviction that the future of financial services is not the app on the screen but the infrastructure
behind it. The clearing, the custody, the compliance, the multi-currency plumbing, the direct connections to local payment rails.
The
2026 predictions from Modern Treasury put it plainly: “The neobank era slows as financial infrastructure platforms win.” The market is bifurcating between horizontal platforms that compete through payment expertise and breadth of capabilities, and specialist
infrastructure providers that win through deep regulatory standing and technical precision. The middle is disappearing.
These are the five companies building in that gap. They are worth watching closely.