Neobanks have proven the fintech thesis with explosive growth and billion-dollar profits, but their once-disruptive UX playbook is now a commodity, leaving them struggling to differentiate beyond branding. Revolut and Nubank are prime examples both combining consistent growth with solid financials. And it’s clear that they have already outgrown their “app” phase and now operate as full-scale financial institutions. The real battleground has shifted to infrastructure — compliance, ledgering, and risk engines — where plug-and-play models are showing cracks and control of the stack is becoming the new definition of strength. Build for vertical SaaS, creator tools and marketplaces — where finance runs in the background, silently. Shopify embeds financial tools directly into the merchant dashboard. Uber built a wallet into the driver experience. Klarna evolved from a standalone BNPL app into an invisible checkout layer. In healthcare, some players are doing something similar — embedding financing, payments and risk management tools directly into provider platforms. It’s fintech without the fintech branding, which makes it all the more scalable. So, infrastructure is turning into a multiplier. Even without consumer-facing brands, the most powerful fintech companies of the next decade will be those quietly owning the rails behind high-volume, cross-vertical financial flows. Major neobanks are already acquiring smaller players to control infrastructure end to end — positioning themselves not just as banks, but as super apps spanning crypto, margin trading, insurance and more. For founders and investors, the message is clear: long-term leverage comes from owning the stack early, even if it means trading off short-term speed. Smart money of the future will be backing the building blocks: unified compliance, simplified payments, modular credit and ledgers that scale. Importantly, this infrastructure is already becoming basic across SaaS, marketplaces and industries well beyond financial services. At this stage, strategic control matters much more than speed. The winners will be the ones who build beyond transactions, as they will power entire ecosystems. Think operating systems for finance, abstracted from banks themselves, embedded wherever economic value moves. That’s the next competitive edge: infrastructure that disappears into everything.