Why the Next Decade of FinTech Belongs to Infrastructure Builders

For the better part of a decade, venture capital chased the consumer FinTech layer. Neobanks. Buy-now-pay-later. Digital wallets. The promise was compelling: millions of underbanked consumers, low switching costs, and a generation that had grown up expecting financial services to feel like Spotify. The problem is that the promise was largely delivered, and the market is now saturated. Margins are thin, customer acquisition costs are climbing, and differentiation has become nearly impossible at the product level. The opportunity now sits one layer down. Infrastructure is where the durable businesses are being built. The payment rails that process trillions annually. The compliance engines that every regulated entity must license. The API layers that every neobank, every embedded finance product, and every crypto application runs on top of. These are not glamorous businesses. They are essential ones, and essential businesses, in our experience, become category-defining ones. We've made three infrastructure bets in the last 18 months. Each targets a different segment of the stack: settlement, compliance automation, and banking-as-a-service middleware. The thesis across all three is the same: build the rails, and everyone else pays the toll. The next decade of FinTech will be won by the companies that most investors are currently ignoring. That's precisely why we find it interesting.