Crypto, Neobanks, AI Agents Among the Top Fintech Trends of 2026

2026-03-18 - 06:10

In 2026, neobanks and buy now, pay later (BNPL) leaders will continue expanding into full-spectrum consumer banking firms, gaining significant ground over incumbent banks. Simultaneously, cryptocurrency giants are broadening their institutional offerings to capitalize on banks’ growing appetite for digital assets and tokenization, according to CB Insights. These predictions stem from research across more than 23,000 fintech startups. The study examined hiring momentum, commercial maturity, business relationships, and Mosaic scores, a metric which measures the health and growth potential of private tech companies, to identify which companies and sectors are making headway. The findings highlight a profound reshaping of financial services in 2026. In addition to the maturation of the neobanking, BNPL, and crypto sectors, the report notes that the landscape will witness the rise of the agentic economy, and Robinhood’s evolution into a financial superapp. It also expects a shift in the prediction market from betting platforms to data providers as industry leaders like Polymarket and Kalshi convert collective market signals into institutional-grade data products. Competition from neobanks intensifies Neobanks are no longer startups nipping at the heels of incumbent banks. A new class of players is now scaling globally, going public, and filing for full banking licenses. These digital-first institutions are competing directly for the primary consumer banking relationship and are moving into new markets with increasingly full-service offerings. In the business-to-consumer category, Revolut is demonstrating strong hiring momentum, reflecting robust growth relative to company size and job openings. In particular, the company is hiring senior regulatory and compliance leaders across more than countries, underlying a systematic market entry strategy. Other neobanks expanding aggressively include YouTrip from Singapore, which is currently pushing across Asia-Pacific, starting with Australia; Kuda from Nigeria, which secured a license in January 2026 to operate as a national microfinance bank; and Toss Bank from South Korea, which aims to to launch in Australia, marking its first overseas expansion. The maturing of the neobanking industry also reflects in the initial public offering (IPO) pipeline. In June 2025, Chime completed the largest-ever US neobank IPO with its US$864 million public offering. This was followed in January 2026 by PicPay, which debuted on the Nasdaq after raising US$434 million. Neobanks expanding into new markets, Source: CB Insights, Mar 2026 Battle of the BNPL banks Buy now, pay later (BNPL) platforms are evolving beyond their initial purpose as a simple checkout feature. Market leaders like Klarna from Sweden and Affirm from the US are transforming into comprehensive consumer banking firms, expanding their services and increasingly overlapping with other verticals. These two companies now rank among the most active payment companies based on partnership volume, and share 27 partners including Apple, Adyen, Google, and JP Morgan, according to CB Insights. These companies are integrating BNPL into various processes and functions, like device-based checkout flows, digital commerce, merchant banking, and payment processing. Affirm, for example, is partnered with Fiserv to bring pay-over-time capabilities to debit card programs for financial institutions. Klarna, meanwhile, is teaming up with Marqeta to embed BNPL into a debit card offering. Klarna holds both a EU banking license, and a UK electronic money institution license, while Affirm applied to the Nevada Financial Institutions Division and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in January 2026 to establish Affirm Bank. The proposed Nevada-chartered industrial loan company aims to complement Affirm’s current business and bank partnership models, and spur opportunities to introduce new products and services. An analysis by CB Insights reveals that Affirm is currently hiring in analytics leadership roles to develop its Partner Bank Debit Program. Meanwhile, Klarna is strengthening its fraud detection and risk management capabilities through specialized roles, with a particularly strong focus on regulatory compliance in the UK market. Klarna and Affirm’s battle for core financial infrastructure, Source: CB Insights, Mar 2026 Crypto comes for big banks Crypto firms are shifting their focus from offering alternatives to traditional banking to building the next phase of financial evolution. In 2025, Ripple, Coinbase, and Circle emerged as the most aggressively partnered crypto-native companies, forging over 50 relationships each to target the traditional banking system and expand their offerings of institutional services, as reported by CB Insights. Ripple is currently building institutional-grade custody infrastructure for digital assets and digital treasury management through partnerships with the likes of Securosys, Figment, and Chainalysis, and acquisitions, such as its US$1 billion purchase of GTreasury. The company already serves incumbent banks and financial institutions including BBVA Switzerland, DZ Bank, and Siam Commercial Bank. Similarly, Coinbase is expanding from retail brokerage into institutional prime brokerage, custody and payments infrastructure for financial institutions like BlackRock, JP Morgan Chase and Standard Chartered. Its Coinbase Prime offering is an integrated platform that allows firms to trade, finance, custody, and manage digital assets within a single system built for institutional scale. Finally, Circle is embedded its regulated USDC infrastructure directly into core banking systems and payment processors such as FIS, Fiserv, and Finastra. This aims to make stablecoin adoption seamless for traditional financial institutions. Circle went public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in June 2025, making history as the first major stablecoin issuer to achieve this milestone. This momentum carried into 2026, with several notable companies, including the crypto custody firm BitGo, going public in the first months of the year. More are expected in 2026, including crypto exchange Kraken, which confidentially filed to go public in the US in November 2025. With players including Circle, Ripple, Fidelity Digital Assets, BitGo, and Paxos all receiving conditional approval for US national trust bank charters over the past year, CB Insights expects the next stage of the sector will see crypto-native leaders move beyond partnerships and compete for the full-stack banking relationship. Blockchain, stablecoins and the agentic economy In 2026, AI agents will continue to be a key theme in the global fintech landscape, with cryptocurrency rails and blockchain technology creating a new layer for machine-to-machine commerce. This trend will build on the momentum of 2025, where financial services led all sectors in AI agent partnerships, and during which payment processors continued to build agentic commerce rails, accelerating crypto integrations. Notably, Mastercard expanded from six crypto partnerships in 2024 to more than 25 in 2025, according to CB Insights. At the same time, the AI agent payments infrastructure market is growing steadily, with startups like Circuit Chisel, Catena Labs, and Skyfire running on stablecoin rails. Moving further, CB Insights expects stablecoins to transition from crypto-native tools to the settlement layer for agent-driven commerce. These digital currencies will power instant, programmable payments across online marketplaces, cross-border retail, and embedded checkout experiences in 2026 and beyond. Parallel to this payment evolution, a new infrastructure layer is emerging where AI agents operate fully on-chain. Blockchain-based AI agent platforms are now providing the tools for creating, deploying, and managing autonomous agents that operate natively on-chain. These agents can execute decentralized finance (DeFi) trades, participate in governance, interact with decentralized applications, and coordinate with other agents without human intervention. While still an early market, CB Insights notes that this space is rapidly moving from experiment to infrastructure, and poised for explosive growth. On-chain AI agents funding skyrockets, Source: CB Insights, Mar 2026 Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Switzerland, based on image by freepik via Freepik