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Welcome to the new edition of the Fintech Wrap Up. This week’s themes orbit around infrastructure power shifts in fintech — from who controls payment rails to how capital markets are repricing platforms and digital assets.
What happened? Fintech’s biggest players continue to scale both financially and structurally. Revolut is reportedly targeting a $100B valuation via a secondary share sale, a strategic move designed to create liquidity and reset market expectations ahead of a future IPO. Meanwhile, the long-running comparison between Stripe and Adyen highlights two different playbooks: both process over $1T in annual payments, yet Stripe commands a valuation near $140B versus Adyen’s ~$50B, largely due to its broader platform strategy and developer ecosystem. At the same time, stablecoins are quietly finding product-market fit — with $390B in payment volume in 2025 (more than double 2024) and B2B payments representing about 60% of that total, showing that enterprise use cases are leading adoption.
So what? The infrastructure layer of finance is evolving quickly. Tokenization and stablecoins are not just new payment methods — they’re reshaping settlement architecture and reinforcing dollar dominance by making US assets programmable and globally accessible. Fintechs and crypto companies pursuing US bank charters are essentially trading speed for sovereignty: accepting regulatory weight in exchange for cheaper deposits, direct access to rails, and reduced dependency on sponsor banks. Meanwhile, emerging concepts like agentic payments signal the next platform shift, where AI agents — not humans — initiate transactions, forcing a rethink of identity, authorization, and liability across the payments stack.
Here’s my take. The throughline this week is control. Whether it’s Revolut engineering valuation momentum, Stripe expanding into a financial operating system, or governments and fintechs positioning around tokenization and AI-driven commerce, the battle is increasingly about who owns the infrastructure layer. Payments, custody, settlement, and intent capture are all becoming strategic control points. The companies that win won’t just process transactions — they’ll define the rails the rest of the ecosystem runs on.
#Fintech #payments #crypto
