Fintech providers are under mounting pressure to deliver AI-driven experiences that move the needle on customer outcomes. Yet many are leaving value on the table due to misaligned business and pricing models. As M&A and IPO activity pick up, the central question for leaders is no longer whether to invest in generative AI, but how to harness this generational shift in technology to position their organizations for meaningful growth. In the following sections we reflect on the lessons from an eventful 2025 and distill the key themes shaping how fintechs will compete, and win, in 2026.
Reflections on an eventful 2025
The race to integrate AI into offerings was well under way in 2025, as companies grappled with what products to make, how to price them, and what it would mean for their existing business models. Mounting investor scrutiny on profitability pushed firms to assess AI-enabled propositions with clearer unit economics, scalable pricing, and a credible path to margin improvement.
The deals are back in town
While deal volumes have yet to return to 2021 levels1, the rate of decline in financing has stabilized. Recent high profile-IPOs, including Klarna and Chime, signal renewed investor confidence in fintech firms with promising business models.
As investor appetite returns, dealmakers are focused on enhancing network effects to increase customer stickiness and deploying sophisticated monetization strategies to secure better unit economics. Investors have largely lost patience with growth-at-any-cost business models that build large customer bases before figuring out how to monetize them. The strategic imperative is clear: pricing models must align with customer value and lay the groundwork for sustainable, profitable growth.
Customers expect AI to deliver measurable value
The fintech landscape underwent a paradigm shift in 2025: AI in fintech shifted from an ‘innovation story’ to a baseline customer expectation. End-users increasingly judged AI by its ability to drive measurable outcomes like faster loan approvals, reduced fraud losses, and smoother onboarding. Over the course of the year, the market reached a tipping point: AI-powered hyper-personalization became table stakes. For example, one global survey found 84% of customers will switch banks in order to access timely personalized services that take into account their personal financial situations2.
Unlike earlier waves of AI investment that concentrated on back-office efficiency, leading fintechs are now pushing AI into front-office workflows that directly impact growth and customer outcomes such as servicing, underwriting, and risk operations, while also treating trust as part of the value proposition through clearer controls, stronger security, and more transparent decisioning. Looking ahead, differentiation will increasingly come from AI-native experiences that not only advise but help complete tasks end-to-end, making measurable customer impact the central test of ‘AI value’. Growth-focused organizations have already started aligning their AI investments to these key drivers of customer value.
Seat-based pricing models limit value delivered
In 2025, many fintech companies experienced the limitations of seat-based pricing. Seat-based pricing often encourages customers to restrict user access as a way to control costs, sometimes via credential sharing, which simultaneously depresses revenue growth and value delivery. With only a small user base, fewer workflow improvements, and fewer stakeholders experiencing benefits, the product became easier to cut when budgets tightened. By contrast, enterprise-wide access would have created more value moments across teams to broaden adoption and increase stickiness as more stakeholders see measurable benefits.
In addition to depressing adoption, seat-based pricing also has a monetization issue. The model fails to account for the fact that two customers paying roughly the same amount based on seats can derive vastly different levels of value from a product or service. Any growth logic supporting seat-based pricing also started to fall apart in slow hiring environment.
AI only amplified the shortcomings of seat-based pricing models. As automation concentrated output into fewer employees and workflows got more efficient, user count became an even weaker proxy for value. That pushed some providers to experiment with value-based and outcome-linked metrics such as revenue uplift, losses prevented, time saved, assets covered, or risk mitigated. These model changes were often introduced alongside a step-change in value delivery, like enterprise AI, so customers would experience the change as new value creation rather than new pricing.
Heading into 2026, we expect broader experimentation with value-based models that unlock adoption and align monetization to measurable impact.
Outlook for 2026
Building on the strategic lessons of 2025, our outlook focuses on where the market’s next competitive edge will come from. Across key subsectors, we expect performance to be shaped less by standalone product features and more by the ability to fully operationalize technology investments including embedding AI into core decision-making, scaling profitable economics, aligning pricing to measurable value, and winning distribution through ecosystem and embedded partnerships.
Four themes stand out:
Theme 1: AI becomes a decision engine
In 2026, AI in fintech will move from an “assistant layer” into the system of record that underpins high-stakes decision making. Instead of sitting at the edge as a customer-facing chat feature, AI will be embedded directly into underwriting, fraud detection, servicing, and risk management workflows. This evolution from reactive chatbots to proactive AI agents that can make decisions and perform tasks with limited supervision in pursuit of complex goals will require a high level of data infrastructure maturity within the organization. Organizations will need to provide AI Agents with a unified data layer of high-quality views of customer accounts, transactions, and products. AI Agents depend on real-time inputs for context and guardrails to execute securely and safely.
The organizations that can modernize their data architecture for AI Agents will have an advantage. As customers and regulators scrutinize outcomes, these leaders will be able to position trust as a core feature and seek differentiation through robust guardrails, explainability, and controls that make AI-driven decisions feel reliable in moments that matter.
Some subsector implications include:
- Insurance: alternative data sources will enable smarter, more sophisticated pricing.
- Neobanking: AI-native servicing and hyper-personalization at scale will unlock operational efficiencies and new pathways for monetization.
Theme 2: Monetization and profitability become operating disciplines
The focus will shift further from growth narratives towards rigorous unit economics including profitability by segment, visibility into cost-to-serve, and monetization strategies. Successful fintechs will treat monetization and profitability as core operational disciplines, moving to prioritize operationalize margin management, tighten pricing discipline, reduce leakage, and evolve business models towards delivering operating income growth.
- Neobanking: there will be a strategic pivot from a heavy reliance on fees and commissions for income toward more sustainable, stable sources. This will bring digital-only banking business models closer to those of traditional banks.
- Payments / fintech broadly: pricing discipline and cost-to-serve will become a top priority.
Theme 3: Pricing models shift toward value and outcome-based structures
More fintechs will break away from legacy pricing approaches that have limited adoption and under-monetized value.
We expect an acceleration in experimentation with value-based and outcome-linked pricing as AI makes usage patterns and customer ROI easier to track and measure. Pricing anchors will shift from static indicators like seats, accounts, and transaction volumes to business outcomes like revenue uplift, loss reduction, and time saved.
- Fintech SaaS: instead of charging per user or per seat, market leaders will adopt tiers and pricing metrics tied to business impact. This decoupling will support more robust renewal and expansion discussions.
- Insurance: alternative data and more granular pricing turns “pricing sophistication” into a competitive lever.
- Neobanking: pricing/packaging of ecosystems (bundles) becomes a monetization mechanism.
Theme 4: Distribution shifts to ecosystems and embedded partnerships
In 2026, we believe fintech firms will move away from differentiation along standalone products towards “problem-space ownership” ecosystems that bundle partners, workflows, and adjacent services into a single value proposition. This will be especially pronounced in B2B and in embedded contexts, where distribution moves closer to the customer’s point of need and becomes an integrated feature rather than a separate purchase journey.
- Neobanking: B2B customers will gravitate toward “beyond banking” ecosystems partnerships. In B2C, bundling offerings that combine banking and Fintech product offerings will become the standard go-to-market.
- Insurance: As discussed in 5 new rules of growth for PE-based insurance, we expect leading industry players to move away from brute-force, short-term, transactional approaches, preferring instead long-game distribution strategies built on embedded offerings, smarter partnerships, and scalable platforms.
- Payments: open finance lowers switching costs and accelerates ecosystem competition; distribution becomes about partner positioning and embedded access.
Future-ready your organization
Growth will tilt toward organizations that can modernize their data infrastructure to support the full transformative potential of AI agents to automate and optimize decision-making and customer experiences. As the industry has matured, profitability and discipline will take centre stage and investors will explicitly favor fintechs with a path to sustainable unit economic. AI and the shift away from single-product offerings to multifaceted ecosystem will require a reconsideration of current pricing, packaging, and monetization strategies.
To understand what these trends mean for your business, and how to turn them into a competitive advantage, reach out to our fintech team.
1 Interim Results, Augentum, 2025
2 What Drives Customers to Switch Banks Today?, Personetics, 2025