Win tech with fintech

Sanjib Kalita, Chairman of Fintech Meetup, shares insights into the state of the fintech industry, practical measures, and the importance of fintech events.

Working in fintech is like riding a roller coaster. The precise knowledge required for success mandates poring over regulations, technical documents, and history, much like waiting in a long line at an amusement park to sit on the ride. Once on the ride, most roller coasters begin a slow hill climb, with each movement forward clicking and clacking the rail. Both business leaders and technologists can identify with the slow and deliberate efforts to build fintech products and platforms. At the top, there’s the drop into reality where effort shifts into momentum and the real fun begins.

I share this analogy to highlight several truths about our industry gleaned from many years in the industry, whether working at a large multinational bank, a payments fintech, or an events/media business covering the industry. I’ve been in this industry through multiple technology paradigm changes, economic cycles, and massive global changes. While history doesn’t repeat, it does rhyme, and here are 3 oft-repeated stanzas.

1. The future is always murky

Financial services and money movement are at the intersection of global infrastructure and local realities. Whether looking at payments, banking, lending, or investing, macro and micro uncertainties obfuscate the future.

2. The industry always moves slow

The perfect is the enemy of the good – given the choice between a perfect payments system between 2 parties versus a good one between 2 million or 2 billion parties, the latter is usually preferable. Identifying the appropriate tradeoffs is both an art and a science.

3. Threats are always close

Large profit pools and total addressable markets ensure the focus of clever entrepreneurs and brilliant technologists. Whether to improve targeted use cases or scale up mainstream solutions, strong incentives and rewards will be a beacon for newcomers.

The current state

While much remains the same, unique current trends warrant a deeper dive and assessment.

1. Embedded

From entering card numbers on websites to tapping phones at checkout to directing agentic apps, financial services are becoming more embedded. The implications from a data, infrastructure, and security perspective are greater than anything before. This drives the dual requirements of fitting in and standing out.

2. Distributed

Markets are fragmenting across sectors, be it media, where streaming makes everything simultaneously available, or retail, where department stores fight irrelevancy. To keep pace, financial services need to be portable across use cases while preserving the trust of a tightly controlled centralised system.

3. Intelligent

Improved analytics in tandem with greater data availability and user touchpoints enable broad deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) models. This will quicken the pace of decisions and user experiences while potentially reducing traditional business moats such as loyalty or user habits. Businesses not engaging with these technologies are at high risk of being left behind.

Practical measures

Operationally, the challenges are higher than ever, but so are the rewards. While protective barriers have been removed from your business, they’ve also been removed in other target markets as well. While standing still is not an option, neither is burning through resources in scattershot strategies. What have you and your business uniquely done that would take years to replicate? How might you deploy your assets in creative new applications? What are your known unknowns, as well as your unknown unknowns?

1. The right relationships save months of work

While knowledge is power, relationships are the accelerator. A 15-minute conversation with the right person can shortcut months of work and deliver better results.

2. Battles are won on the fringes

The middle of the market is the most aggressively fought and the hardest place to differentiate yourself. The fringes provide an opportunity to create genuinely innovative capabilities that can be deployed elsewhere.

3. You are not alone

Community is critical for sanity and success.

After years of cautious optimism, the energy across financial services has shifted. The ecosystem is no longer just surviving; it’s ready to accelerate. With capital returning, technology maturing, and banks increasingly eager to adopt and experiment, fintech has moved from the periphery to the core of strategic growth conversations.

Fintech Meetup 2026 captures this decisive new chapter. It’s about embracing the moment, not with hype or hesitation, but with confidence, clarity, and collaboration. Whether you’re building AI-native products, exploring stablecoins for faster payments, embedding lending into platforms, or unlocking new business models through Open Finance, this is the year to go bold.

It’s a rallying cry for founders, banks, investors, and platforms to bring their best playbooks, real partnerships, and scalable technologies to the table. The winners will be those who move with speed and purpose across banking, payments, lending, compliance, and beyond.  Fintech Meetup 2026 isn’t about disruption for disruption’s sake. It’s about pragmatic progress, and the partnerships that power it.

It’s time to win tech, with fintech.

About the author

Sanjib is Chairman of Fintech Meetup, and Founder & CEO of Guppy. Sanjib launched over 20 products and businesses, including being a founding engineer on Intel’s graphics chip business, the first Chief Marketing Officer of Money20/20, and a member of/advisor to over 10 startups. A former Googler, working on Google Wallet, and former SVP in Citi’s consumer business, he has been a leader in large companies as well. Sanjib has an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management and BS and M.Eng. from Cornell University, where he built lasers, electric cars, hi-fi audio systems, and biomedical AI systems.

 

 

About the event

Fintech Meetup is the fintech industry’s most productive and anticipated event of the year, where senior leaders from thousands of banks, credit unions, fintechs, and investors come together to connect, collaborate, and drive growth. Powered by breakthrough technology, our Meetings Program delivers 50,000+ double opt-in, one-to-one meetings that spark real partnerships and real ROI. It’s more than an event, it’s a phenomenon. Fintech Meetup is where the entire fintech ecosystem gathers to discover what’s new, what’s next, and how we’ll shape the future of financial services together.