Marqeta went public in 2021 at a $15 billion valuation. The company does not issue credit cards to consumers, does not hold deposits, and does not make loans. What it does is provide the card-issuing infrastructure that DoorDash, Square, Klarna, and dozens of other companies use to create their own payment cards. Marqeta processes over 320 million cards on its platform. It is, in the most literal sense, banking infrastructure built by a fintech company and used by other fintech companies and banks. That model, fintech companies building the infrastructure that the financial system runs on, is now a $18.6 billion market globally, according to Global Market Insights, growing at 15.1% annually toward $73.7 billion by 2034.
The Infrastructure Stack
Banking infrastructure is not a single system. It is a stack of interconnected layers, each performing a distinct function. Fintech companies have built specialised businesses at every layer.
At the foundation is core banking: the system of record that tracks every account balance, transaction, and customer relationship. Thought Machine, Mambu, 10x Banking, and Temenos SaaS have built cloud-native core banking platforms that banks purchase as a service. These platforms replace the COBOL mainframes that have run banking since the 1970s. Platform-based models account for 69% of the global BaaS market, per Global Market Insights.
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.
Above core banking sits the payments layer. Stripe, Adyen, and Checkout.com built payment processing infrastructure that connects merchants to card networks and bank accounts. Their APIs handle authorisation, settlement, fraud screening, and dispute management in a single integration. The global cross-border payments market reached $371.59 billion in 2025, per Fortune Business Insights, and fintech-built payment infrastructure handles a growing share by connecting directly to local payment networks rather than routing through correspondent banking chains.
The identity layer sits alongside payments. Onfido, Sumsub, and Jumio built API-based identity verification services that confirm who a customer is in under 60 seconds using document scanning, biometric matching, and database cross-referencing. Banks and fintech companies integrate these services through APIs, replacing manual processes that took days.
The compliance layer monitors transactions for fraud, money laundering, and sanctions violations. ComplyAdvantage, Chainalysis, and Featurespace built automated screening systems that analyse transactions in real time. Banks globally process over 2 billion API calls daily, handling $676 billion in transaction value, per Coinlaw. A significant portion of those calls are compliance checks running automatically on every transaction.
Why Fintech Companies Build Infrastructure Better Than Banks
The specialisation advantage is the core explanation. A fintech company building payment infrastructure does nothing else. Every engineer, every product decision, and every dollar of R&D spending goes toward making the payment system faster, cheaper, and more reliable. A bank, by contrast, spreads its technology resources across dozens of functions: payments, lending, compliance, customer service, branch operations, treasury, and regulatory reporting.
The talent advantage reinforces this. Fintech infrastructure companies recruit from the same engineering talent pool as Google, Amazon, and Meta. They offer equity compensation, modern development environments, and focused technical problems. Banks compete for the same talent but typically offer lower total compensation, older technology stacks, and slower organisational processes. The engineers who build Stripe’s payment infrastructure or Thought Machine’s core banking platform are, on average, working with more modern tools and shipping faster than their counterparts at traditional banks.
The commercial model also helps. When a fintech company builds infrastructure, it sells that infrastructure to multiple customers. The development cost is spread across dozens or hundreds of banks and fintech companies, each paying a fraction of what it would cost to build the same capability internally. This produces better software at lower per-customer cost than any single bank could achieve alone.
The Banking-as-a-Service Model
Banking-as-a-service (BaaS) is the commercial model through which fintech-built infrastructure reaches the market. A BaaS provider bundles core banking, payments, compliance, and card issuing into a platform that any company can use to offer financial products.
The model requires a licenced bank at the foundation. In the US, companies like Column, Lead Bank, and Blue Ridge Bank provide banking charters that fintech companies operate under. In Europe, the single banking passport allows a licence in one EU member state to serve all 27 markets. The US BaaS market reached $5.9 billion in 2024, per Global Market Insights, and cloud deployment accounts for 67% of the global BaaS market.
The BaaS model has enabled hundreds of non-bank companies to offer financial products. Shopify offers merchant cash advances. Uber provides instant driver payouts. Apple launched a savings account with Goldman Sachs. In each case, the customer-facing company handles the product experience while fintech-built infrastructure handles the banking mechanics.
The Neobank as Infrastructure Customer
Neobanks are among the largest customers of fintech-built infrastructure. Rather than building every component from scratch, most neobanks assemble their operations from specialist providers: core banking from Thought Machine or Mambu, card issuing from Marqeta, identity verification from Onfido, payment processing from Stripe or Adyen.
The global neobanking market reached $210.16 billion in 2025, per Fortune Business Insights, growing at 49.30% annually. That growth rate reflects, in part, the speed at which fintech infrastructure allows new banks to launch. A neobank that would have taken three to five years to build a decade ago can now assemble its technology stack from existing components and reach customers within 12 to 18 months.
Europe accounts for 37.20% of the global neobanking market. The concentration reflects both regulatory support (open banking mandates, single banking passport) and the depth of the European fintech infrastructure ecosystem, which includes core banking providers, payment processors, and identity verification companies headquartered in London, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Stockholm.
Risks in the Infrastructure Layer
Fintech-built banking infrastructure concentrates operational risk. When Synapse, a US-based BaaS middleware provider, collapsed in 2024, customers at multiple partner banks temporarily lost access to their funds. The failure revealed that the chain of dependencies between customer, fintech app, infrastructure provider, and bank charter holder was long enough that a single point of failure could cascade across the system.
Regulators have responded with increased scrutiny. The FDIC requires sponsor banks to maintain direct oversight of all fintech partners. The EU’s DORA regulation, effective January 2025, requires all financial institutions to demonstrate resilience across their technology supply chains. These regulations add compliance costs to the infrastructure model but also improve its stability.
Concentration risk is a related concern. If a significant share of the banking system runs on a small number of fintech infrastructure providers, a failure at any one of them could have systemic consequences. Cloud provider outages at AWS have already caused temporary disruptions at multiple fintech companies simultaneously.
Fintech companies are building the infrastructure that modern banking runs on because they can build it faster, cheaper, and more focused than banks can build it themselves. The trade-off is a new form of systemic dependency that the financial system is still learning to manage, and that regulators are still learning to supervise.
