Ten years ago, getting a small business loan in Indonesia meant visiting a bank branch, submitting paper documents, waiting two to six weeks for approval, and accepting an interest rate that reflected the bank’s inability to assess risk on a business with no credit history. Today, a street vendor in Jakarta can receive a working capital loan through the GoPay app in under 24 hours, underwritten by transaction data from the rides and deliveries processed through the Gojek platform. That loan product did not exist in 2015. The banking infrastructure that makes it possible, built on cloud platforms and distributed through APIs, reached $18.6 billion globally in 2024, according to Global Market Insights, with a projected trajectory to $73.7 billion by 2034.
Embedded Finance: Banking Inside Non-Bank Products
The largest category of new financial opportunity is embedded finance: banking services delivered through platforms that are not banks. When Shopify offers a merchant cash advance based on a seller’s transaction history, or when Uber provides instant earnings access to drivers, the banking function is invisible to the user. The customer interacts with the platform they already use. The bank or BaaS provider behind it earns fees without acquiring or servicing the customer directly.
This model works because the non-bank platform has something traditional banks lack: a direct, data-rich relationship with the customer at the moment a financial need arises. A ride-hailing platform knows a driver’s daily earnings, trip completion rate, and customer ratings. That data produces better credit decisions than a traditional bank could make using only income statements and credit scores.
The Boston Consulting Group projects fintech revenues will reach $1.5 trillion by 2030, with embedded finance and digital lending accounting for the largest share of projected growth.
According to CB Insights’ 2024 fintech report, global fintech funding declined 40 percent between 2022 and 2024, pushing the sector toward consolidation and a sharper focus on profitability over growth at all costs.
Platform-based banking-as-a-service models account for 69% of the BaaS market, per Global Market Insights. That share reflects how much of the new opportunity in banking is being distributed through non-bank channels. The bank provides the licence, the balance sheet, and the regulatory infrastructure. The platform provides the customer and the distribution.
Open Banking: Turning Data Into Products
Open banking regulations in the European Union, United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia require banks to share customer data (with consent) through standardised APIs. The policy intent was to increase competition. The practical effect has been a wave of new financial products built on bank data by third-party companies.
Account aggregation apps like Plaid (in the US) and TrueLayer (in Europe) use open banking APIs to pull transaction data from multiple banks into a single view. From that foundation, fintech companies build budgeting tools, automated savings products, credit scoring models, and financial health dashboards that no single bank could offer.
The most commercially significant open banking products are in lending. By analysing a borrower’s real transaction data across all their accounts, fintech lenders can make more accurate credit decisions than traditional models based solely on credit bureau scores. This has opened lending to self-employed workers, gig economy participants, and small businesses that were previously excluded from bank credit.
Banks globally process over 2 billion API calls daily, handling $676 billion in transaction value, according to Coinlaw. A significant and growing share of those calls are open banking requests from third-party fintech companies accessing customer data to power new products.
Real-Time Payments: New Revenue From Speed
Instant payment networks have created financial opportunities that batch-processing systems could not support. When money moves in seconds rather than days, entirely new business models become viable.
Request-to-pay services let businesses send payment requests directly to a customer’s bank app, replacing invoices and manual bank transfers. Pay-by-bank options at online checkout bypass card networks entirely, reducing merchant fees from 2% to 3% (for card payments) to 0.1% to 0.5% (for direct bank payments). Variable recurring payments allow subscription businesses to adjust payment amounts each cycle without requiring new authorisation.
Brazil’s Pix system demonstrates how quickly these opportunities can scale. Launched in November 2020, Pix processed 42 billion transactions in 2024. It has become the default payment method in Brazil, used by over 150 million people, and has generated new revenue streams for banks and fintechs that build services on top of the instant payment rails.
The global cross-border payments market, another area where real-time infrastructure is creating new opportunities, reached $371.59 billion in 2025, according to Fortune Business Insights, growing toward $727.74 billion by 2034. Fintech companies that connect local real-time payment networks across borders are capturing revenue that traditional correspondent banking chains are losing.
Financial Inclusion: The Largest Untapped Market
The World Bank estimates that 1.4 billion adults globally remain unbanked, with the highest concentrations in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Banking innovation is reaching these populations through mobile-first products that require no branch infrastructure and minimal documentation.
M-Pesa in Kenya was the prototype. By 2024, mobile money services across Africa processed over $1 trillion in annual transaction value. The next generation of financial inclusion products goes beyond payments to include micro-savings (deposit as little as $0.10), micro-insurance (coverage for a single crop cycle or a single trip), and micro-lending (loans of $5 to $50 repaid from mobile money balances).
These products are only viable at scale when the cost of serving each customer approaches zero. Traditional branch-based banking cannot achieve that cost structure. Cloud-native banking platforms and mobile-first delivery can. The neobanking market, which includes many financial inclusion-focused institutions, reached $210.16 billion in 2025, per Fortune Business Insights, with a 49.30% CAGR reflecting the scale of the remaining opportunity.
Where the Opportunities Face Constraints
Regulation is the primary constraint on new banking opportunities. Embedded finance products are coming under increasing regulatory scrutiny, particularly after the Synapse collapse in 2024 exposed risks in bank-fintech partnerships. Regulators want clarity on who is responsible for customer funds, compliance, and dispute resolution when financial services are distributed through non-bank platforms.
Data privacy rules also shape what is possible. Open banking gives fintech companies access to sensitive financial data, and regulators in every market are tightening the rules around how that data can be used, stored, and shared. The EU’s GDPR, combined with PSD2, creates a framework where customers can share data freely but companies face significant penalties for misusing it.
The financial opportunities created by banking innovation are real and growing. But they are growing within a regulatory environment that is also becoming more complex, and the institutions that capture the most value will be those that can innovate within those constraints rather than around them.
