As fintech matures, we’re seeing the emergence of scaled winners and a shift in what success looks like. A new BCG & QED Investors report, “Fintech’s Next Chapter: Scaled Winners and Emerging Disruptors,” finds that the industry’s fundamentals are stronger than ever. Despite the funding pullback in 2022–2023, fintechs overall have come out leaner and more disciplined, and now many are hitting profitability. In fact, 69% of public fintech companies are profitable today, with average EBITDA margins up to 16% (from 12% a year prior). Much of the revenue growth is being driven by a new cohort of large fintechs—those pulling in over $500 million annually now account for about 60% of total fintech revenue. In other words, some fintechs have “grown up” to the point of rivalling mid-size traditional financial institutions, and they’re turning their focus to sustainable growth and even preparing for IPOs.

Crucially, fintech’s growth hasn’t stalled—it’s accelerating relative to incumbents. In 2024, global fintech revenues grew 21%, significantly outpacing the ~6% growth of traditional financial services that year. After a slight dip in 2023 (~13% growth), fintech is back to a high growth rate, showing the sector’s resilience through the pandemic and funding crunch. There remains huge headroom: fintechs collectively still only represent ~3% of the global banking and insurance revenue pool. That means there’s 97% of the market left to penetrate—a massive opportunity in the coming years, especially in segments or regions incumbents underserve.

The next chapter of fintech will likely be defined by a few key themes: AI at scale, deeper regional expansion, and collaboration. On the technology front, many fintechs are early adopters of AI—not just using ChatGPT-like tools, but applying “agentic AI” (a term for autonomous AI agents) to reinvent processes in commerce, lending, personal finance, and more. This could be a game-changer, especially for fintech SaaS and financial management apps that use AI to provide smarter services. Geographically, we’ll see fintechs pushing into markets with unmet needs—the report calls out the Middle East, Africa, LatAm, and parts of Asia as ripe for fintech growth, as these regions still have large unbanked populations and high fintech adoption potential.

Interestingly, fintechs and incumbents are increasingly finding common ground. The narrative of “fintechs vs banks” is evolving into “fintechs + banks” in many cases. We already noted that 84% of fintechs partner with incumbents in some fashion. Going forward, regulators and investors are expecting fintechs to operate with more accountability and closer adherence to financial standards. This means more mergers and acquisitions could be on the horizon (both fintechs buying peers and banks buying fintech capabilities) and more convergence in business models. For example, some big fintechs are getting banking licenses, while big banks are launching digital offshoots—essentially meeting in the middle.

Summing up this chapter: Fintech isn’t a scrappy upstart story anymore; it’s entering an era of scaled, sustainable growth. The leaders are profitable, the up-and-comers are hungry, and the whole sector is woven more deeply into the fabric of global finance. The excitement now is about the quality of growth—using technologies like AI to amplify advantage, expanding into new markets, and serving customers better than ever, all while proving that fintech can be profitable at scale. This sets the stage for fintech to not only continue outperforming traditional players but also to collaborate and reshape the broader financial industry in the process.