Author: Charitarth Sindhu

We asked industry leaders what separates the fintechs that sell for premium multiples from the ones that end up in fire sales. Here is what they told us. The fintech M&A market is back. Global investment hit $116 billion across 4,719 deals in 2025, bouncing back hard from a seven-year low the year before. But this is not a rising tide lifting all boats. The gap between premium acquisitions and distressed fire sales has never been wider. On one end, you have companies selling for 8 to 15 times revenue. On the other, formerly billion-dollar startups offloading assets for pennies…

Author: Hasan Can Soygök, Founder, Remotify.co If you earn money through platforms like Upwork, Fiverr, Airbnb, or even selling stuff on Vinted, there’s an EU tax rule you need to know about. It’s called DAC7, and it went live on 1 January 2023. Here’s what it does and why it matters, even if you don’t live in Europe. What is DAC7? DAC7 is an EU directive that forces digital platforms to report how much their users earn. Every year by 31 January, platforms must hand over detailed income data to tax authorities in the EU member state where they’re registered. That data…

Stablecoins are no longer a crypto experiment. They are becoming the plumbing behind how businesses pay each other across borders. B2B stablecoin payment volumes grew 733% year-over-year in 2025, reaching $226 billion. That is still a fraction of global B2B payment flows, but the trajectory is hard to ignore. Visa launched stablecoin settlement in the US. Stripe spent $1.1 billion acquiring stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge. Mastercard enabled stablecoin spending at over 150 million merchant locations. JPMorgan’s blockchain payments platform now processes over $5 billion in daily volume. The message from major financial institutions is clear: this is not a side…

Author: Charitarth Sindhu, Fractional Business & AI Workflow Consultant Agentic AI is no longer a pitch deck buzzword in financial services. It is in production. Banks, fintechs, and lending platforms are deploying AI systems that do not just flag problems or spit out predictions. They investigate, decide, and act. We asked five industry leaders a simple question: what is one practical use case where agentic AI will deliver real value in financial services this year? Their answers covered everything from treasury cash management to cross-border freelancer payments. But a clear thread ran through every response. The biggest gains are not coming…

Author: Hasan Can Soygök, Founder, Remotify.co Most founders think growth means adding. More features. More services. More markets. But a growing pile of evidence says the opposite is true, especially for bootstrapped companies. The ones that win tend to be the ones that cut. The pattern keeps showing up ConvertKit launched in 2013 as a general email marketing tool. It stalled at $1,300 a month. Founder Nathan Barry shut down his profitable course business, narrowed ConvertKit to serve professional bloggers only, and went all in on that single audience. Today it does $45 million a year. Gumroad tried to be…

AI-powered fraud is moving faster than the companies trying to stop it. Deepfake videos that fool live identity checks. Fake people with perfect credit histories. Bots that learn how fraud detection works and then dodge it. These are not future problems. They are happening right now. We asked five industry leaders one simple question: what is the biggest AI-powered fraud threat fintech companies are not prepared for in 2026? Their answers point to a common theme. The tools fintechs built to catch fraud were designed for a different era. And the attackers have already moved on. Deepfake injection is breaking…

The finance world is going through a quiet revolution. Not the flashy, crypto-bro kind. The kind where the boring stuff, how loans get approved, how data moves between systems, how decisions get made, is being rebuilt from the ground up. We asked founders and executives across fintech and tech what trends in finance they’re most excited about. Their answers pointed to a clear theme: the old way of doing things, static credit scores, siloed data, backward-looking reports, is being replaced by something faster, smarter and more connected. Here’s what they told us. Lending is finally catching up with reality For…

The grind is dead. Or at least, it should be. In 2022, the fintech world got a wake-up call nobody could ignore. The Federal Reserve hiked rates, cheap capital dried up overnight, and some of the biggest names in the game watched their valuations crumble. Klarna went from $45.6 billion to $6.7 billion. Stripe took a 50% haircut. Sequoia Capital sent founders a blunt message: “Money is no longer free.” What came out the other side was a completely different playbook. Growth at all costs was replaced by something far less exciting on paper but far more effective in practice:…

Author: Charitarth Sindhu, Fractional Business & AI Workflow Consultant For years, ETFs mostly meant passive investing. You bought an ETF, you got “the market,” and you got it cheaply. That story is still true, but it is no longer the full story. The more newsworthy shift is this: active ETFs are growing fast, and the growth is now big enough that major firms are reshaping their product strategy around it. The ETF wrapper is becoming the default container for investing, and active managers want their strategies inside that container. What “active ETF” means in plain English An ETF is a type…

Author: Charitarth Sindhu, Fractional Business & AI Workflow Consultant Open banking is a simple idea. You should be able to share your own financial data with whoever you choose. Want a budgeting app to see your transactions? A lender to check your real income instead of just your credit score? That should be your call, not your bank’s. More than 470 million people worldwide now use services built on this idea. The global market sits around $30 billion. But here’s the thing: depending on where you live, open banking is either transforming your financial life or it barely exists. The countries…