2025 Fintech Investors' Top Predictions

A BlackFin Tech classic, shining the spotlight on some of the fintech trends we expect in the next 12 months

Welcome back and happy new year BlackFin Tech aficionados!

🎶 In the melody of new beginnings, 2025 starts to play, with whispers of hope and dreams on display. Fintech’s journey flows, like a soft winter stream, building on visions, crafted from dreams.

📩 As we wrap up 2024, we’ve already turned our gaze toward 2025, gathering insights from fellow fintech investors. Their predictions are a reflection of lessons learned and opportunities ahead—bold ideas for the coming year.

🌟 Together, we’re shaping what’s next, with a shared vision for an even brighter future. Stay cozy, as the best chapters are still waiting to be written.

🌯📊 Wrapping up 2024

Highs 👠

• Equity raised in 2024 surpassed the previous year, highlighting renewed investor confidence and a shift towards more mature markets.

• Investor sentiment improved as interest rates stabilized and valuations normalized, paving the way for a more balanced market.

• Lined up IPOs took center stage, signaling a resurgence of confidence and market consolidation.

Lows 👟

• Less rounds were raised in 2024 compared to 2023

• Significant layoffs reminded us of the persistent hurdles faced by the sector.

• Geopolitical complexities, from the US to Germany and France, added layers of volatility to an already uncertain landscape.

2024 has set the stage for a year of cautious optimism, lessons learned, and a clearer path forward for 2025 🌟

👽🔮 Our fintech friends’ 2025 predictions

This year, we switched things up! Instead of sharing our own predictions, we invited some of our Fintech investor friends to spotlight their insights and key trends for the year ahead.

1. AI at the core

• Pedro Rychter, Investor at AVP

“In 2025, we anticipate a resurgence in software and fintech IPO activity in the US, with Klarna emerging as the most closely watched IPO by the European fintech ecosystem. Klarna can serve as a case study for leveraging AI to boost efficiency and optimize cost structures, particularly in areas such as CSM, support, and S&M. As a result, we expect tech companies to place greater emphasis on AI strategy – not just for enhancing product features, but also for driving operational efficiency.

Additionally, uncertainties surrounding US tariffs and economic policy can create volatility in sentiment around inflation, interest rates, and economic growth. This will put increased pressure on CFOs and finance teams to manage liquidity with precision. Cash flow management and forecasting tools will play a critical role in helping these teams navigate a range of scenarios and act opportunistically – whether through treasury investments or M&A – despite shifting market conditions.”

• Stan Laurent, Partner at Highland Europe

“Finance and Insurance companies are in the bullseye for agentic AI developments. Whether it’s customer facing, back-office oriented (eg in compliance or claims management) or security-related, it’s the perfect environment (troves of data & complexity) to boost automation and productivity by linking improved LLMs with deeper workflows. The race is on between new “disrupters” and incumbent SaaS providers to bring these innovative, scalable & compliant solutions to their customers…”

• Shiran Shalev, Partner at Battery Ventures

“Traditional financial services rely on a large degree of skilled, manual labor. Similar to its impact in other sectors, I expect to see financial services-focused AI offerings, trained for specific financial services contexts, augment or replace many current business processes”

• Cesar Bteish, Investor at Headline

“The next wave of fintech innovation will transform the back office. AI-driven automation in areas like accounting, reconciliation, and compliance goes beyond efficiency - it’s about fundamentally rethinking financial operations. The shift from periodic reporting to continuous, real-time financial monitoring could enable more dynamic and data-driven decision-making.

Firms that adapt will turn back-office functions into strategic enablers, redefining scalability and resilience in an increasingly complex financial landscape.”

2. Embedded finance and the redefinition of traditional industries

• Judith Vogel, Investor at CommerzVentures

“Everything is Fintech, again - the past decade has seen technology reshape financial systems, but significant opportunities for new fintech solutions still exist.

We are on the brink of vertical fintech innovations that will enhance traditional industries like manufacturing, logistics, and supply chain, which have lagged in technological advancement. As these sectors embrace digitalization, we can expect the rise of task-based pricing and pay-per-use models, shifting them from capital expenditure to more flexible operating expenditure frameworks.

In 2025 we’ll be watching this area closely, as the potential for bold fintech entrepreneurs in these vertical markets is vast and largely untapped.”

3. Wealth management gets smarter and digital-first

• Marine Auge, Investor at Fidelity International Strategic Ventures

“Upgrading the Financial Advisor Tech Stack - Advisors are sitting on disjointed and inefficient tech stacks, often using up to 7 disconnected systems, many built over a decade ago. This slows them down and leaves little room for client-focused work. As a continuation of 2024, we expect companies to address these inefficiencies in 2025. Larger players are likely to lean into adopting best-in-class point solutions, while smaller firms embrace simpler, all-in-one platforms.
With a generational wealth transfer underway, advisors who fail to upgrade risk losing their next generation of clients. It’s time to rethink the tech stack and make it work for today - and tomorrow!”

• Reginald de Wasseige, Principal at Augmentum Financial

“One of the areas we’re really excited about for 2025 is wealth management. There is a compelling “why now” moment here both in terms of changing investment habits from investors (digital-first, willingness to invest in Alts,…) and a strong willingness from intermediaries to adopt technology.”

• Tim Rehder, Partner at Earlybird

“The wealth management market has been showing steep growth, with the greatest wealth transfer in history to be expected: over the next 30 years, >$ 38trn will be transferred from baby boomers to the next generation of investors. However, this market is still vastly dominated by the static personal advisory, with little to no dynamic technical automation and a lot of administrative burdens. We believe the opportunity of Open Wealth will be the next big software wave in Fintech and will lay the necessary foundation for automation and intelligence in the wealth management sector.”

• Morgane Potel & Jordan Platy, co-authors of Mojo

“We have the conviction that neo private banking solutions, and next-gen investment platforms for the mass affluent market will attract more capital inflows in 2025, thanks to a larger panel of investment products. New generations are seeking investment opportunities through various sources, and even though they get more financially educated, the importance of human advisory stay predominent in their path to diversification. Nevertheless, traditional products with low potential return (e.g. Livret A, LDD, Assurance-Vie) might not be attractive to people exposed to exotic investments advised by social media influencers. With a mix of digitalization and human capital dedicated to accompany retail investors, new private banking platforms could have the opportunity to break down barriers from an old school and elite-reserved sector and gain market share.”

4. Insurtech funding rebounds

• Lluís Viñas, Partner at Mundi Ventures

“If there is no major geopolitical adverse event (rather the contrary even some improvements) we foresee a more favorable environment for insurtech funding in 2025, mainly driven by the continuous decrease in the interest rates, and the slight recovery and positive performance of the listed insurtech companies in 2024. Although more favorable, it will still remain challenging, especially for companies with capital intensive models (bearing risk), or D2C models with long paybacks.

We expect to continue seeing a strong early stage investment environment for insurtech companies in Europe and the US, favoring B2B and B2B2C models; whilst we believe late stage deals will show more dynamism and investors open to place bigger bets in the space for companies reaching a relevant size.

Regarding the Gen-AI boom of the last few years, we expect investors to focus on more concrete applications of AI, with measurable use cases and clear value propositions and competitive advantages.

Finally, we believe that the insurtech sector as a whole will continue with its shift towards a strong focus in profitability: protecting margins (loss and combined ratios), and cash (short paybacks and asset light balance sheets)”

5. Regtech continues to rise to combat fraud

• Thibault D’hondt, Partner at 6 Degrees Capital

“Authorized push payment (APP) fraud is expanding globally as fraudsters develop increasingly sophisticated tactics. The financial burden on banks and financial institutions is rising, particularly as regulators implement measures requiring banks to reimburse victims of APP fraud. In response, we can expect ongoing innovation in areas such as consumer awareness and education, payee validation, and cross-sector collaboration among financial institutions, payment service providers, communication networks, and social media platforms.”

• Romain Mombert, Investment Director at Eurazeo Growth

“As fraudsters use AI to exploit vulnerabilities, fintech companies are deploying similar technologies to prevent cybercrime. ML and real-time data analysis will boost fraud detection and protection. Markets will also expect a rise in privacy-preserving models that allow collaboration between institutions to identify fraud without exposing sensitive data.

On the other hand, synthetic identity fraud, where criminals combine stolen and fabricated data to create false identities, will rise. Fintechs will need to enhance their onboarding processes to identify these fraudulent identities early. At the same time, biometric authentication, including fingerprint and facial recognition, will replace traditional passwords, enhancing security and streamlining the user experience in both personal and business payments.”

6. Stablecoins refining global payments

• Romain Dufourcq, VP at Cathay Innovation

“Transforming crossborder payments through stablecoin rails: countries throughout LATAM, Africa, and EAEU are still facing sharp Forex variations, with often low to no solutions to hedge & protect income against volatility. We see a new generation of fintechs, B2C and B2B alike, enhancing their offering (holding a USD account offshore, aggregating payment methods) by leveraging stablecoins to provide low cost and borderless payments. Kredete is a cool example of a financial platform that empowers hundreds of thousands of African immigrants in the US - enabling them to build a credit history but also using USDC for fast blockchain transfers before off-ramping in local currencies.
So what & our prediction: while future regulations remain a question mark in some countries, use cases & scalability are clear, and we expect a dynamic fundraising environment on that category going forward.”

7. The rise of tech-driven private credit

• Victoire de Lavigne, Principal at Portage

“The next era of private credit - The market for private credit has been growing explosively and is projected to reach $3.5Tn by 2028. We expect Technology to enable scale and performance in a market that is ripe for automation. We see potential for Fintech software to solve for financial and operational inefficiencies on the origination side, as well as portfolio risk monitoring, particularly with expected larger pools of assets under management.
In 2025, we'll be deep diving in the Private debt capital market space, looking for founders tackling both the origination side with faster and more efficient access to credit as well as enhanced operations on the private credit investors side.”

8. Growth-stage Fintechs shine in 2024, sparking early-stage optimism

• Philippe Teixeira da Mota, Partner at Shapers

"In 2024 there was a very clear flight to quality in growth stage fintech companies, to companies who were deemed by the general markets to be overvalued after the 2020/21 financing rounds. Those companies, like Revolut, Raisin, Monzo or SumUp just to name a few European ones, raised new rounds at even higher valuations compared to the peak. This is bringing more clarity on how growth stage and cross over investors are valuing fintech companies nowadays, and helps early stage investors get clarity and some comfort on how their early stage fintech companies can raise growth capital to continue accelerating and see a path to exit. This should lead to more capital flowing into early stage fintech again."

9. The road ahead

• Pierre Curis, Investor at Partners Group

“We are focused on the following trends with ever more important for the upcoming year:

• Transforming impact of AI with vertically focused optimization challenges and agentic use cases.

• Expected significant focus on RoI with a natural fit for financial institutions, especially with the ever-growing regulatory compliance push.

• Continued push for platformatisation around buyer persona (office of the CFO, etc.) leveraging successful marketplace models.

• Challenges on most traditional pricing structures with the emergence of more innovative monetization models.

• Effort on risk management in an increasingly more volatile environment”

Thank you to all fellow investors for their contributions ✨

If you are a FOUNDER of a Fintech or Insurtech, we want to hear from you! Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or write us here.