Fintech has been through a lot in the last few years.
There was the growth-at-all-costs era, followed by easy capital, a painful correction, and now a more measured approach to expansion. The industry is still growing, but the expectations around that growth have changed. And there is plenty of room left.
According to McKinsey’s 2026 fintech research, global fintech generated roughly $650 billion in revenue in 2025, up about 21% year over year and well ahead of the broader financial services industry.
Payments alone represent a huge opportunity. BCG estimates that global payments revenue reached $1.9 trillion in 2024 and could reach $2.4 trillion by 2029. Real-time account-to-account payments are also gaining ground in markets such as Brazil and India, according to BCG’s 2025 Global Payments Report.
So there is no shortage of market opportunity. The harder part is turning that opportunity into growth that lasts.
For fintech marketers, that means taking another look at some of the assumptions that have shaped the industry’s playbook — particularly around acquisition, brand, AI, and product marketing.
Here are four shifts worth watching.
1. Performance Marketing Is Getting Closer to the Customer
Fintech and performance marketing have always been a natural match.
Financial products come with plenty of measurable actions: an application, an account opening, a funded account, a transaction, a loan, a card activation. Give marketers enough data and there is usually something to optimize.
But a conversion only tells you what happened at the front door. It doesn’t tell you whether that customer ever became valuable.
Did they fund the account? Use the product regularly? Adopt another service? Stay for the long term? Generate enough revenue to justify what it cost to acquire them?
Those questions become harder to ignore as fintech companies mature. BCG’s Global Fintech Report 2026 found that global fintech revenue grew 22% in 2025, but only 74% of the largest public fintech companies were profitable. That puts more weight on the economics behind customer acquisition.
For marketers, the shift is from optimizing for the first action to understanding what that action is worth over time.
That might mean:
- Building audiences around activation and retention, not acquisition alone.
- Connecting paid media data with CRM and product usage.
- Measuring acquisition against predicted lifetime value.
- Creating campaigns for different stages of the customer relationship.
- Identifying which acquisition sources bring in customers who actually stick around.
It also changes the creative brief.
The campaign that gets someone to sign up may not be the same campaign that gets them to use the product, upgrade, or stay. Marketers need to understand what each audience needs at each point in the relationship.
Performance marketing is still about performance. The definition of “performance” is just getting more nuanced.
2. Your Product Is Easier to Copy. Your Brand Isn’t.
Fintech has a differentiation problem.
A new feature can get attention. A better interface can give you an edge. A clever pricing model can help you stand out.
Then someone else builds something similar.
AI is accelerating that process by making it faster and cheaper to develop, test, and improve digital products. In crowded categories like payments, lending, banking platforms, and financial infrastructure, keeping a product advantage for long can be difficult.
That makes the story around the product increasingly important.
Payments are a good example. Digital wallets, A2A payments, BNPL, and other digital payment methods are now firmly part of the mainstream. Worldpay’s Global Payments Report 2025 found that digital payment methods grew from 34% of global e-commerce transaction value in 2014 to 66% in 2024.
When everyone is promising speed, convenience, and better technology, those promises start to blur together. So what gives a customer a reason to choose one company over another?
Trust is a big part of it. In McKinsey’s research on consumer digital payments, security and trust in the provider ranked as the top selection criterion for digital wallets, cited by 69% of respondents. That makes brand more than a visual identity or a memorable tagline.
A fintech brand needs to make a case for why it deserves a place in someone’s financial life. Maybe it understands a particular audience better than its competitors. Maybe it owns a specific use case. Maybe it has a point of view that people recognize and trust.
Whatever the differentiator is, it needs to show up consistently.
If the product says one thing, the advertising says another, and the customer experience says something else entirely, customers notice.
In a market where features can be replicated quickly, a brand people understand and trust is much harder to replace.
3. AI Is Changing How Marketing Gets Done
AI in fintech usually gets discussed in terms of the customer experience: fraud detection, underwriting, financial advice, customer service, personalization.
But there is another change happening behind the scenes. AI is changing the marketing workflow itself.
Research, audience analysis, copy development, creative iteration, competitive analysis, segmentation, personalization, reporting, and testing can all happen faster with AI-assisted tools.
AI can help teams move faster, but the bigger advantage is what they can do with that extra time. Marketers can spot a customer behavior, test new messaging, learn from the results, and adjust their approach without stretching the process over weeks.
A team might spot a change in customer behavior, develop a few hypotheses, build different messages around them, test those messages with different audiences, and use the results to inform the next round of work — all in considerably less time.
And marketers aren’t the only ones getting an AI upgrade.
Customers are using these tools to research financial decisions, too. McKinsey’s research on agentic AI and retail banking suggests AI agents could eventually handle parts of discovery, acquisition, cross-selling, and service. The same research found that 23% of surveyed consumers were already using generative AI for financial tasks at least monthly.
That raises an interesting possibility: the system evaluating your product may increasingly be an AI assistant helping someone decide what to buy.
That puts a premium on information that is easy to understand and verify: clear product details, transparent pricing, credible claims, and consistent messaging.
There is also a line fintech marketers can’t afford to cross: Financial claims and product information need to be accurate. Compliance-sensitive communications still require human judgment. Speed is useful, but not when it introduces mistakes that can damage trust.
AI can take a lot of work off a team’s plate, but it shouldn’t take responsibility off it.
4. Product Marketing Needs to Talk About the Part Customers Actually Care About
Feature lists are easy. They are also rarely the reason someone chooses a financial product.
Customers are trying to do something. Move money. Get access to credit. Save more. Reduce fees. Make a purchase they can afford. Run a business with less friction.
The feature matters because it helps them get there.
That sounds obvious, but it becomes increasingly important as customers have more opportunities to compare providers before making a decision.
McKinsey’s Global Banking Annual Review 2025 found that US consumers have become significantly less likely to default to their existing bank. Only 4% of new checking-account openings came from customers choosing their existing bank without exploring alternatives, compared with 25% in 2018. Customers are looking around, and they are doing it in more places.
Someone might discover a financial product through social media, compare options through search, read reviews, ask an AI assistant, visit a website, and eventually convert through an app.
The product story has to hold together across all of those moments. At a minimum, customers should be able to figure out:
- Who is this for?
- What problem does it solve?
- Why should I trust it?
- What makes it different?
- What gets better for me if I choose it?
That last question is particularly important, a product can have ten impressive features and still leave customers wondering what any of them actually mean for their lives. Good product marketing closes that gap.
It gives performance campaigns something more interesting to sell than a feature list. It gives content teams a useful story to explain. It gives sales teams a clearer way to talk about the product.
And it gives customers a reason to remember the company after they leave the page.
Where Fintech Growth Goes From Here
Fintech still has plenty of room to grow. The marketing challenge is making sure growth doesn’t happen in disconnected pieces.
Acquisition, brand, product, and technology all have a role to play. The companies that bring those pieces together will have an easier time building momentum that lasts.
The market itself could become considerably larger. McKinsey’s “The $2 trillion fintech future” analysis estimates that, if current growth continues, fintech could become a $2 trillion industry by 2030 and represent around 9% of the overall financial-services value pool.
That’s a lot of potential — and a lot of companies competing for it. For marketers, four priorities stand out:
- Look beyond the conversion. Understand what happens after someone becomes a customer.
- Give the brand something to own. Features change quickly. A clear position can stick around much longer.
- Use AI to make the team smarter, not just faster. More output is nice. Better decisions are more valuable.
- Talk about the outcome. Customers care about what a product helps them do, not just what is listed on the feature page.
Fintech growth in 2026 won’t come from a single channel or a particularly clever campaign. It will come from making the pieces work together: the product people need, the brand they trust, and the marketing that connects the two.
And if figuring out how all of those pieces should fit together feels like a bigger job than it should be, that’s exactly where a strong marketing partner can help.
At Carney, we help brands bring strategy, creative, technology, and growth together into marketing systems built to actually move the business forward. If your fintech is ready to rethink its brand or growth strategy, let’s talk.
