Financial services doesn’t change gradually anymore. It moves in step changes a regulatory framework passes, a payment rail goes live, an AI capability moves from pilot to production, and suddenly the baseline expectation for every bank, fintech, and platform shifts. 2026 has been a year of several of these step changes happening at once.
This post covers the trends actually reshaping how money moves and how financial products get built right now, not a generic list with the data behind each one and what it means if you’re building or scaling a financial product yourself.
Real-Time Payments Are Becoming the Default, Not the Exception
Real-time payment rails have moved from a nice-to-have to genuinely mainstream infrastructure. Transaction volume on the RTP network grew 28% year-over-year between Q4 2024 and Q4 2025, and transaction value grew 405% over the same period, according to data reported by The Clearing House.
That kind of growth means real-time settlement is no longer a differentiator reserved for cutting-edge fintechs it’s becoming table stakes for any platform moving money on behalf of customers. Businesses evaluating domestic wire transfer infrastructure increasingly need to weigh real-time rails like RTP and FedNow against traditional wire and ACH, not treat them as a future consideration.
Embedded Finance and Banking-as-a-Service Keep Expanding
Embedded finance payments, lending, and banking features built directly into non-financial products continues to be one of the fastest-growing forces in the industry. Banks are moving past simply digitizing legacy systems toward API-first architecture and ecosystem partnerships, with embedded finance as a core part of that shift, rather than a side project.
For platforms, this trend shows up as a practical build-or-buy decision: build the banking relationship, licensing, and compliance infrastructure from scratch, or connect to a Banking-as-a-Service platform that already has it. The businesses moving fastest in 2026 are largely choosing the latter.
AI Moves From Pilot to Production Across Banking
AI in financial services stopped being experimental sometime in the last year. Deloitte’s 2026 Banking Outlook points to agentic AI systems that can make decisions and handle complex tasks with less human oversight as the next major shift, following years of pilots and proofs of concept. Separately, Cornerstone Advisors’ 2026 banking industry research found generative AI now deployed by roughly half of banks and nearly 60% of credit unions, with agentic AI increasingly reaching board-level agendas.
The practical impact for compliance and fraud teams specifically: AI is fundamentally reshaping fraud detection and prevention, moving beyond flagging obvious anomalies toward real-time risk scoring across full transaction lifecycles. Platforms building compliance and transaction monitoring workflows into their products are increasingly expected to have this kind of AI-assisted layer built in, not bolted on later.
Stablecoins Enter the Regulated Mainstream
Stablecoins spent years as a crypto-native curiosity. That changed with the GENIUS Act, signed into U.S. federal law in 2025, which gave stablecoin issuers their first formal regulatory framework and the market has responded accordingly. Digital-asset and fintech M&A activity picked up sharply through 2026, including major acquisitions in the stablecoin infrastructure space, and nine digital-asset and fintech companies completed U.S. IPOs in the twelve months ending March 2026, raising more than $5 billion combined, according to PwC’s 2026 financial services M&A outlook.
For platforms, the practical shift is that stablecoins are increasingly treated as one more settlement rail alongside traditional banking infrastructure, not a separate system requiring its own vendor relationship. Our stablecoin payment gateway page covers how that integration works at the infrastructure level.
Open Banking and API Connectivity Are Now Customer Expectations
Customers no longer see connectivity between their bank and their other financial tools as optional. Seventy-seven percent of consumers say their bank must be able to connect to the other apps they use, and 72% say that connectivity is a top priority when choosing a bank, according to Plaid’s 2026 fintech trends research. The cost of falling short is real: 66% of Americans say they’d consider switching their primary bank if it couldn’t connect to their other financial accounts.
Neobanks Mature From Growth to Profitability
Neobanks spent their first several years optimizing for customer acquisition above all else. That phase is ending. Twenty-nine percent of U.S. consumers now use a neobank, and primary banking relationships with neobanks have nearly doubled since 2022 but the bigger story is what neobanks are doing with that base. Leading players have diversified into lending, investing, and insurance, moving from growth-at-all-costs toward genuine profitability and full-service positioning.
For platforms considering whether to build a neobank-style product themselves, this shift matters: the bar for competing isn’t just acquiring users anymore it’s building a full enough product to retain and monetize them the way established neobanks now do.
Consolidation Picks Up Across Fintech and Payments
After a funding pullback in 2024 global fintech funding dropped 12% that year, and only 33 of the 70 most prominent fintech companies were profitable 2026 has brought a wave of consolidation. Weaker fintech startups are being acquired or merging, while stronger players expand through M&A, particularly firms with differentiated AI capabilities. Payments-sector consolidation is accelerating too, as firms seek the scale needed to compete in an increasingly tech-driven environment.
The practical read for platforms: vendor stability matters more in this environment than it did a few years ago. A payments or banking infrastructure partner’s staying power is now a real evaluation criterion, not an afterthought.
H2: How PRETpayments Reflects These Trends
Several of these shifts aren’t just things we write about they’re built into how PRETpayments operates. On vendor stability, which matters more as fintech consolidation accelerates: PRETpayments maintains access to multiple banking relationships across its network rather than concentrating every program on a single institution, and has had no known material data breach affecting customer data or funds in the past three years. On the resilience and compliance-by-design trend, our compliance program covers KYB/KYC/KYCC, beneficial ownership verification, enhanced due diligence, sanctions and adverse-media screening, transaction monitoring, escalation procedures, staff training, independent testing, and recordkeeping the kind of depth the “compliance built in, not bolted on” trend above is describing industry-wide. And on reliability, the platform is built around a 99.5% uptime commitment.
What These Trends Mean for Platforms Building Financial Products
Taken together, these trends point in one consistent direction: financial products increasingly get built on shared infrastructure real-time rails, embedded banking relationships, AI-assisted compliance, and stablecoin settlement rather than assembled from scratch by every individual platform. The businesses moving fastest aren’t necessarily the ones building the most themselves; they’re the ones choosing the right infrastructure partners and focusing their own build effort on the product experience layered on top.
If you’re evaluating what to build versus what to connect to, our Capabilities page covers the technical and program-level infrastructure PRETpayments provides across accounts, compliance, cross-border payments, and stablecoin settlement.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is the biggest trend in financial services right now?
No single trend dominates, but the combination of real-time payments adoption, AI moving into production use, and embedded finance expansion are collectively reshaping how quickly financial products get built and how customers expect them to work.
2. Is real-time payment adoption actually growing, or is it overstated?
It’s genuinely growing. RTP network transaction volume grew 28% and transaction value grew 405% year-over-year between Q4 2024 and Q4 2025, according to The Clearing House.
3. Are stablecoins actually being regulated now?
Yes, at least in the U.S. The GENIUS Act, signed into federal law in 2025, gave U.S. stablecoin issuers a formal regulatory framework for the first time, and the EU’s MiCA framework serves a similar role in Europe.
4. How is AI actually being used in banking, beyond chatbots?
Primarily in fraud detection, risk scoring, compliance monitoring, and underwriting. Deloitte’s 2026 Banking Outlook specifically points to agentic AI systems that can handle complex decisions with less human oversight as the next phase, moving past years of smaller-scale pilots.
5. What does embedded finance mean for a non-financial company?
It means payment, lending, or banking features can be built directly into a product without that company becoming a licensed bank itself, typically through a Banking-as-a-Service infrastructure provider handling the sponsor-bank relationship and compliance underneath.
6. Should a growing fintech build its own banking infrastructure or use a provider?
Increasingly, platforms are choosing infrastructure providers over building from scratch, given the compliance and licensing complexity involved though the right answer depends on your specific scale, corridors, and how core banking infrastructure is to your product.
Building on Top of These Trends?
If you’re evaluating infrastructure to support real-time payments, embedded banking, or stablecoin settlement for your platform, book an appointment to talk through your use case, or apply now if you’re ready to get started. For general questions, reach out through our Contact page.