Fintech is no longer a category of its own. It’s the efficiency layer that that sits beneath how every industry moves money.
We’re well into a new year, and industry truths we learned in 2025 are continuing to prove themselves. Increasingly, we think fintech success will be defined by the kind of “unsexy” technology that supports the operating systems and revenue of companies.
AI has dominated tech discourse over the past few years, including massive funding rounds, high-profile launches and sweeping claims about how it will transform work. That framing isn’t wrong, but it misses where AI and other tools are creating enduring value in fintech. Their impact is defined less by how they’re marketed and more by where they function. These technologies work behind the scenes, as part of systems that move money, manage risk and run daily financial operations.
That perspective is informed by our experience. Great North’s partners built and scaled NativeX, an advertising technology platform, through the dot-com crash by prioritizing execution, profitability and durable systems while many companies pursued scale without fundamentals. That same discipline underpins how we think about fintech today. The most durable fintech companies won’t be standalone apps, but the plumbing that makes businesses run more profitably. We think of this layer as the Revenue Operating System.
Signal 1: Integration Determines Scale
Earlier in the fintech lifecycle, product differentiation was often the primary driver of success. A strong product still matters, but today, growth depends just as much on how easily that product fits into the systems and workflows businesses already use. Distribution and deployment, not novelty, now determine which fintech companies scale.
Reach and adoption no longer only come from launches or brand awareness; they come from being integrated into the systems customers already use. Recent technological advances make this easier. APIs have long been the connective tissue of fintech, allowing product offerings to integrate into banks, platforms and enterprise systems. AI is lowering the cost of integrations by automating setup, reducing ongoing maintenance, and making fintech products easier to customize across platforms.
A few years ago, every new partner meant a new integration and a fresh round of custom work. Today, well-designed APIs let fintechs roll out the same capability across dozens of platforms with minimal incremental effort. Embedded finance, or delivering financial products inside existing software workflows rather than as standalone tools, represents one of the biggest opportunities in fintech because it concentrates distribution, data, and revenue inside systems that businesses already rely on every day.
Our portfolio companies show how these dynamics are playing out. In many cases, growth follows when financial tools are built into the places where customers are already doing their work:
- Rather than a building a standalone lending product, LendAPI lets fintechs and vertical software platforms embed lending, underwriting and compliance directly into workflows they already control. Founders can launch credit products without assembling a full backend stack or inventing a new go-to-market motion.
- Enterprise workforce platform Field Nation followed a similar path, with financial capabilities emerging over time rather than by design. Payments, tax handling and compliance capabilities emerged because enterprise customers needed them inside existing workforce management workflows.
- OneCarNow reflects the same logic in mobility, with financial tools operating within day-to-day fleet and ride-hailing operations.
Signal #2: Capital Efficiency Separates the Winners
Capital efficiency lets winners stand out from the rest of the field. How capital is used now matters more than how much is raised.
What does this mean in practice? As capital gets more selective, outcomes depend on how well teams convert dollars into deployments, customer usage and durable revenue. In our portfolio and pipeline, that shows up as smaller raises, longer runways and less emphasis on announcement-driven momentum. For example, Micruity connects recordkeepers, insurers and asset managers to enable retirement income inside 401(k) plans, and its growth comes from integrations and live usage rather than rapid expansion.
Having built companies through tighter cycles ourselves, we tend to be cautious with fintech models that require constant capital to maintain velocity. What separates durable companies now isn’t how much they raise, but whether capital turns into repeatable growth.
One pattern we see consistently is that companies are scaling faster with smaller teams. Part of that reflects where much of our deal flow originates. While we invest nationally, we overindex in the Midwest, with a long-standing presence in Minnesota. In those markets, lower cost structures mean capital goes further and early hires tend to stay focused on execution rather than expansion. That dynamic often shows up in stronger unit economics as companies scale. We’re open to backing larger rounds and coastal companies when market size and execution support it. But across our portfolio and pipeline, the clearest signal of durability remains how efficiently capital converts into revenue. We look closely at fundamentals like LTV to CAC, burn multiple, and whether growth repeats as companies scale. Over time, teams that prove they can execute early and compound that discipline tend to become the strongest players in their category, regardless of where they’re headquartered.
Signal #3: AI Is Proving Its Value Inside Financial Workflows
AI is finally breaking through in fintech where it matters most: as decision infrastructure embedded inside financial systems. After years of chatbot launches and surface-level automation, companies moving into production are using AI to reduce uncertainty, improve planning accuracy and support high-stakes financial decisions. That means AI operating inside advisor tools, underwriting engines and planning systems where outcomes matter more than interfaces. We’re moving away from AI that just explains or summarizes, and toward AI that calculates, models and pressure-tests financial outcomes in real time. This change is also showing up in payments, where agentic AI can move beyond fraud alerts or routing recommendations and optimize authorization, settlement and risk decisions directly inside the payment flow.
Our portfolio company Waterlily shows this dynamic at work. It provides long-term care planning software for financial advisors, using AI to analyze hundreds of millions of data points to calculate care needs, costs, and timelines across decades. The focus is on removing the friction of uncertainty from one of the most complex planning decisions advisors face. Waterlily’s AI functions as a back-office actuary, calculating outcomes and scenarios in seconds rather than weeks and giving advisors the confidence to make high-stakes recommendations backed by data. Built for advisors, carriers and enterprise partners rather than consumer-facing apps, the platform embeds AI as an infrastructural tool, with intelligence built directly into existing financial planning systems.
Signal #4: Embedded Infrastructure Beats Novelty — Invisible but Indispensable
The companies that endure operate as essential, behind-the-scenes infrastructure. They solve specific problems inside workflows, layering in payments, automation, or financial controls. That’s where Great North Ventures continues to focus: embedded finance and vertical AI, foundational infrastructure and finance operations systems once deployed.
Micruity is an example of operational defensibility. By being embedded into 401(k) plans, Micruity sits inside one of the most structurally complex systems in financial services. Once a fintech solution is operationally embedded at that level, the switching cost becomes nearly insurmountable. This is the moat. It stands in direct contrast to interface novelty, which can be easily disrupted by the next shiny UI.
Field Nation reflects the same dynamic in an enterprise setting. Payments, tax, and compliance capabilities didn’t emerge from a push for differentiation or UX experimentation; they became necessary because the platform was already operationally embedded into enterprise workflows.
What This Means in 2026
Across our portfolio and beyond, a few patterns keep reappearing among fintech companies that are gaining momentum:
1. Fintech earns relevance by showing up in daily work. Fintech companies that matter most are embedded in everyday decision-making. The firms with the greatest potential think early about how their infrastructure fits into existing business workflows, rather than positioning themselves as standalone destinations. Value compounds when financial systems live inside the tools businesses already use as part of normal operations.
2. Capability beats novelty. Capital is being used more carefully, with more time spent building practical capability than shipping features designed to impress. Users are not asking for new apps or destinations. They want better functionality and easier integrations within the systems they already use every day. Fintech wins when it reduces friction inside existing environments, not when it asks customers to adopt new ones.
3. Deployment matters more than polish. The 2026 founder values deployment over polish. They focus on getting into real production environments quickly and choose proven paths to customers over speculative awareness-building. Progress is measured by usage and reliability, not by launch moments.
4. Capital efficiency signals execution discipline. Capital efficiency is treated as evidence that a team is ready to execute. Founders who convert dollars into working systems, repeat usage, and durable revenue demonstrate operational maturity that compounds over time.
5. Fintech is becoming infrastructure, not a category. Founders positioned to win understand that fintech is no longer a standalone category. It’s the efficiency layer for every industry that needs to move money, manage risk and enable decisions. That is why Great North Ventures invests in invisible infrastructure that moves money.
