About the Author
Josh Linkner is a five-time tech entrepreneur, innovation keynote speaker, New York Times bestselling author, and globally recognized innovation expert. He has founded or co-founded five tech companies that sold for a combined value of over $200 million, and is co-founder and Managing Partner of Muditā Venture Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm. As Chairman of Platypus Labs, Josh helps organizations across industries build cultures of innovation and creative problem-solving.
In This Article
- Why embedded finance is quietly remaking the customer relationship in nearly every sector
- How real-time payments are ending decades of float and pulling business models forward with them
- The shift of stablecoins from crypto curiosity to mainstream settlement infrastructure
- A short note on AI’s role in the industry, plus a deeper read for those who want it
- The CFPB 1033 rule and what open banking means for switching costs and competition
- What separates the firms that will lead this decade from the ones defending the last one
The financial services industry has rebuilt itself many times over the course of my career, most notably after the 2008 crisis and after the rise of digital banking and fintech. These shifts might have looked existential at the time, but they turned out to be a chapter rather than a conclusion. 2026 feels like the start of another chapter, but with more arrows pointing in the same direction at the same time than I can remember.
Finance and fintech leaders need to think about whether their organization is positioned to ride these waves or get rolled by them. Here are five trends I would put at the top of the watch list for 2026, and a perspective on what they ask of the people leading through them.
Five Trends Reshaping Finance and Fintech in 2026
1. Embedded Finance Quietly Becomes the Default
The most consequential financial trend of the next few years will happen inside the apps and platforms you already use for something else. Embedded finance, the practice of integrating banking, payments, lending, and insurance directly into non-financial software, has crossed from novelty into core infrastructure.
Bain & Company has projected the embedded finance market will reach multiple trillions in transaction volume by 2030, with revenue from embedded financial services growing at double-digit rates annually. Shopify Capital has originated billions in merchant cash advances without a single bank branch. Toast, the restaurant software platform, now offers payroll, working capital, and integrated payments as a unified product. Apple Pay has become a meaningful share of U.S. mobile contactless payments. Uber, GrubHub, DoorDash, and Airbnb each move significant volumes through embedded financial flows that were once owned by banks.
What this means for incumbents is a quiet redefinition of distribution. The customer relationship that used to belong to the bank now belongs to the platform the customer is already on, and the bank becomes the rails. Some financial institutions are leaning into this with banking-as-a-service offerings. Others are watching their highest-margin products get absorbed into someone else’s experience.
For fintechs, the strategic question is whether you are building the infrastructure layer (Stripe, Plaid, Marqeta), the experience layer (Toast, Shopify, Block), or both. The middle is where margins compress fastest.
2. Real-Time Payments Become Table Stakes
The U.S. has spent decades behind the rest of the world on payment speed. That gap is closing fast. The Federal Reserve’s FedNow service launched in 2023 and has expanded steadily, joining The Clearing House’s RTP Network to give the U.S. two real-time, 24/7 payment rails. Adoption has been notable but uneven, and 2026 looks like the year real-time payments become assumed rather than novel.
When settlement collapses from days to seconds, an entire stack of business assumptions collapses with it. The float that has historically funded parts of bank balance sheets shrinks. Cash management software gets rebuilt around continuous reconciliation rather than end-of-day batches. Gig workers expect instant pay, and platforms that cannot offer it lose talent. Cross-border payments, long the most painful corner of finance, are beginning to follow as Mastercard Move, Visa Direct, and Wise push toward near-real-time international settlement.
The leaders pulling ahead here are the ones treating real-time payments as a strategic capability rather than a technical project. They are redesigning treasury, fraud detection, and customer experience around the new rhythm of money. The institutions that simply check the compliance box and keep operating like settlement still takes two business days will find themselves explaining why their experience feels slower than the consumer apps their customers use every day.
3. Stablecoins Move from Crypto Curiosity to Settlement Rail
For most of the last decade, stablecoins lived in the crypto-native corner of finance, but that has changed quickly. In late 2024, Stripe announced its acquisition of Bridge, a stablecoin payments infrastructure company, in a deal valued near $1.1 billion. PayPal launched its own stablecoin, PYUSD, and integrated it across its consumer and merchant networks. Visa expanded its stablecoin settlement pilots with major issuers, allowing card programs to settle in USDC alongside fiat.
The shift on the institutional side is even more telling. BlackRock’s BUIDL tokenized treasury fund, launched in 2024, has grown into the hundreds of millions in assets and become a reference point for tokenized real-world assets. JPMorgan’s Kinexys platform (formerly Onyx) processes meaningful daily volume in tokenized deposits. Franklin Templeton’s tokenized money market fund operates on public blockchains. The 2025 GENIUS Act and parallel global regulatory efforts have given U.S. issuers a clearer path forward, removing one of the largest barriers to broader adoption.
The opportunity for finance and fintech leaders is to think of stablecoins less as a crypto product and more as programmable money: a settlement instrument that can be moved, split, reconciled, and combined with software in ways traditional bank rails cannot match. The risks are real and include regulatory, custodial, and operational complexity. But pretending this category is going away is the riskiest position of all.
4. AI Becomes the New Operating Layer
I have written a longer piece about AI specifically in finance and fintech, so I will be brief here. The headline is that AI has moved from experimental tools into the core operations of nearly every major financial institution. Fraud detection, credit decisioning, wealth advisory, compliance, and customer service have all been rebuilt or are being rebuilt around AI systems. The conversation has shifted from “should we use AI?” to “are we governing it well, and are we deploying it fast enough to keep up with the firms that already are?”
The next phase, what the industry is calling agentic AI, moves beyond AI as an assistant to AI as an operator. Systems that don’t just analyze a loan file but execute the workflow. Systems that don’t just summarize a market report but trade against it. The firms that figure out how to combine that kind of capability with strong governance, explainability, and human judgment will be in a different competitive position from the ones that don’t.
For a deeper exploration of where AI is changing finance and fintech, real-world examples in production today, and a 90-day action plan for finance leaders, read more about AI’s impact on finance and fintech here.
5. Open Banking Hands Customer Data Back to Customers
In October 2024, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized its rule implementing Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act, formally establishing consumer rights to access and share their financial data. The implementation is rolling in stages, but the strategic implications are already reshaping product roadmaps across the industry.
The mechanics are straightforward; the consequences are not. When a consumer can move their transaction history, account information, and financial relationships from one institution to another with a few taps, the switching costs that have protected incumbent banks for generations begin to evaporate. Plaid, Akoya, MX, and a growing field of data connectivity providers are rapidly building the rails. Personal finance apps, neobanks, and aggregators are designing experiences for a world where the customer’s data is the customer’s asset, not the bank’s.
In Europe, PSD3 and the related Financial Data Access regulation are pushing in the same direction with a longer regulatory runway. In aggregate, the global trend points toward a financial system where customer data flows freely, products compete more directly on quality of experience, and the moats that came from owning the data start to erode.
Leaders should be honest with themselves about which side of this trend they are on. If your strategy depends on customers staying because leaving is annoying, the next few years are going to be uncomfortable. If your strategy depends on being chosen because the experience is genuinely better, this is the trend that rewards you.
The Bottom Line
Finance and fintech in 2026 are being reshaped by the collision of several trends at once: how money moves, where it lives, who owns the customer relationship, what intelligence sits behind every decision, and which data the customer can carry with them. None of this requires you to pick a winner. It requires you to be honest about how each shift touches your business and to start small, deliberate experiments while the cost of being wrong is still low.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is embedded finance, and why does it matter for traditional banks?
Embedded finance refers to financial services (payments, lending, deposits, insurance) that are delivered inside non-financial software, such as Shopify Capital for merchants or Apple Pay inside iOS. It matters for traditional banks because it shifts the customer relationship away from the bank’s app and toward whichever platform the customer already uses, often turning the bank into commoditized infrastructure unless it deliberately builds for this distribution model.
How are real-time payments changing fintech business models?
Real-time payments compress settlement from days to seconds, which removes the float many financial business models implicitly relied on and forces operations like fraud detection, treasury management, and reconciliation to operate continuously. Fintechs that build natively for instant settlement gain a structural advantage in customer experience, particularly in payouts, payroll, and cross-border use cases.
Are stablecoins a niche crypto product or a mainstream financial instrument?
Both, and the boundary is moving. Stablecoins still play a significant role in crypto-native trading, but Stripe, Visa, PayPal, BlackRock, and JPMorgan have all built or acquired serious infrastructure that treats them as mainstream payment, settlement, and asset-tokenization rails. With the GENIUS Act and parallel regulatory frameworks providing clearer rules, the institutional view is increasingly that stablecoins are an additional class of programmable money, not a fringe asset.
What does the CFPB 1033 rule mean for everyday consumers?
The CFPB 1033 rule implements consumer financial data rights under Dodd-Frank, giving consumers the legal right to access and share their financial data with third parties of their choosing. In practice, it will become substantially easier to move accounts, link financial apps, and benefit from products that aggregate or analyze your financial data, while also raising privacy and consent considerations consumers should pay attention to.
Learn more about Josh Linkner’s keynote speaking in Finance and Fintech.
Josh Linkner speaks to financial institutions, fintechs, and leadership teams around the world about innovation, navigating disruption, and building cultures that thrive in periods of rapid change. To explore how Josh can energize your next event, schedule a call today.