The days of easy cash for consumer-focused fintechs might be behind us, but investors speaking this week at Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal said they are still on the lookout for future fintech unicorns in the B2B space.
The B2C space is already crowded with established unicorns like Revolut, so the greatest potential now lies with those harder-to-disrupt spaces within financial services, where innovation has been slower to happen, investors like Mike Sigal, Founder of Sigal Ventures, said at the conference that brought together more than 70,000 tech industry insiders and journalists from all over the world.
Kamran Ansari, Venture Partner at Headline, a VC firm that invests between $1M and $50M in companies across stages and geographies, also highlighted the B2B space as the most exciting sector within fintech at the moment, singling out payments in particular. “Payments is the most attractive fintech segment to watch right now,’’ Ansari told a packed auditorium during a panel discussion moderated by Laura Noonan, a senior finance reporter with Bloomberg News.
So what’s hot in payments right now and what can we expect from this fast-changing sector in 2025? Here are some tips from the industry’s movers and shakers, who spoke at Web Summit:
“We are building tech to make sure that payments are so simple you forget they’re there,’’ Juan Pablo Ortega, Co-founder and CEO of Yuno, the world’s leading payments orchestrator, said at Web Summit. Yuno is helping merchants to quickly and easily integrate more than 300 payment methods worldwide to enable them to offer the most locally-relevant payment methods to their customers, be it Pix in Brazil, UPI in India or QR code-enabled payments in China and the Philippines.
Companies like McDonald’s, Carrefour and inDrive are relying on Yuno’s platform to help them navigate the complex and increasingly fragmented payments landscape and to continue scaling across the globe. They also leverage Yuno’s anti-fraud tools, Smart Routing, one-click checkout and various other cutting edge features that make Yuno an end-to-end payment solution for merchants operating internationally.
There are big differences across geographies in which payment methods are preferred by the local populations and how quickly countries are transitioning to becoming cashless societies. In Sweden, cash accounts for less than 7% of transactions, while in Mexico that figure stands at around 80%.
The availability of digital payments and the speed of transactions (i.e. instant payments) often determines where the country falls on this spectrum. For example, Brazil’s hugely popular Pix instant payments system has become the country’s favorite way to pay in just three years, replacing cash and wire transfers, and now threatening the dominance of credit cards in the e-commerce sector, according to Reuters.
Going forward, “the diversity in digital payments will [continue to] increase,’’ predicted Justin Grooms, CEO of Bolt.
As consumers, we are already becoming used to seamless payments in some areas of life like ride-hailing, according to Yuno’s Ortega. Going forward, payments are set to become even simpler across the board, causing some major disruption for merchants, fueling a further expansion of the payment orchestration industry.
“Yuno is here to help merchants navigate this fast-changing landscape,’’ Ortega said.