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Commentary American Banks Left the Door Open. European Fintechs Are Walking In.
The new battleground for U.S. banking will be about who owns relationships, not who has the biggest balance sheet.
Netflix Inc. co-founder and former CEO Reed Hastings said a few things in 2014 that American banks and fintechs should consider pinning on the breakroom wall or at the top of their main Slack channel.
“We were so obsessed with not being the next Kodak, the next AOL, about not being the company that clung to its roots and missed the big thing.” Hastings recalled: “We said if there’s a bias, we should be more aggressive; we have to be so aggressive it makes our skin crawl.”
Hastings was reflecting on Netflix’s failed 2011 decision to split its DVD and streaming businesses. The move turned him into a temporary laughingstock—one who, as history has made clear, had the last laugh.
It’s hard to imagine the CEO of a major American bank or fintech saying anything like this.
And that’s precisely the problem: While many U.S. banks and fintechs still think like financial institutions, Europe’s most ambitious challengers think like global technology companies.
Global technology companies don’t wait for perfect conditions; they navigate imperfect ones.
That’s the playbook businesses such as Netflix, Uber Technologies Inc., and Amazon.com Inc. followed because international expansion was always part of the plan. These companies didn’t use legal complexity as an excuse for standing still, nor did they stop after achieving success.
Of course, tech isn’t banking. One could argue that the stakes are higher and the consequences of being too aggressive are greater.
But Revolut Group Holdings Ltd. co-founder and CEO Nik Storonsky might politely disagree, because that’s exactly what London-based Revolut is doing as it blazes its global trail—politely disagreeing.
Amid exponential growth in Europe, the company has had to deal with different regulations, entrenched incumbents, and cultural barriers across nations—and, in some cases, even regions. For goodness’ sake, Revolut had to make Catalan, not Castilian (Spanish), the default language on its ATMs throughout Spain’s Catalonia region, which includes Barcelona.
The point is clear: The U.S. is hardly the only market where regulation and culture can feel like roadblocks. Fintechs such as Revolut have amassed considerable experience dealing with these obstacles.
As Yorick Naeff, head of innovation at ABN AMRO Bank NV, told me, Europe may talk about a single market, but companies still have “to conquer every market separately again and again.” Tax systems, know-your-customer rules, reporting requirements, consumer behavior, and language all change from country to country—as do the challenges along the way.
In other words, Europe is already a regulatory maze. Fundamentally, the U.S. isn’t a different challenge; it’s just a new one.
Recently, the Financial Times reported that the European Central Bank placed restrictions on Revolut in 2025 to slow down the company’s rapid approval of new products. In April, news broke that Italian authorities fined Revolut €11.5 million ($13.3 million) for “unfair commercial practices.”
Revolut’s response has been a mix of pushback, lip service, and concrete action, such as hiring experienced banking executives who can help the company scale globally while managing complex regulatory environments. None of this has stopped what Storonsky called the company’s “self-guided missiles”—small groups of employees who have the latitude to deploy new products rapidly with minimal corporate oversight.
Revolut has more than 70 million customers worldwide, up from 50 million in November 2024. Across France, Poland, Germany, the U.K., Ireland, Italy, and Spain, nearly one in three new financial accounts is with Revolut. Despite the regulatory friction, Revolut adds about four new Italian customers per minute. In Spain, where traditional banks are thought to have a stronghold, Revolut has more than 6 million accounts for a 13% penetration rate, making it the country’s fourth-largest bank by number of customers.
Revolut enters the U.S. battle-tested, armed with the necessary experience to navigate another complicated regulatory landscape, ready to seize the opportunity American banks and fintechs have left wide open.
To an observer in Europe, one thing is obvious: The U.S. still lacks a company trying to own the entire financial relationship.
Americans still piece together banking, payments, investing, foreign exchange, travel, insurance, and mobile connectivity across multiple platforms. That’s far less the case in Europe and elsewhere around the world.
Revolut, the U.K.’s Monzo Bank Ltd., Germany’s N26 AG, and the Netherlands’ bunq BV all extend well beyond traditional banking. Spain’s Banco Santander SA recently launched an eSIM directly in its app. Swedish buy-now-pay-later pioneer Klarna Bank AB is a fully licensed bank in the E.U. and has applied for its U.S. banking license.
None of these companies see banking as a collection of products. They want to be the primary financial relationship—the place where customers start, not occasionally visit.
Ironically, the closest the U.S. has to this model isn’t a traditional bank at all; it’s Cash App. Block Inc., the parent company of Cash App, deserves enormous credit for recognizing that consumer finance is about more than checking, high APYs, and commission-free stock trades. But as big as it has become, Cash App remains more narrowly focused than the expansive ecosystems emerging across Europe, many with their sights set on the U.S.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon also deserves credit for recognizing that something has changed. When he admitted he was jealous of Revolut’s speed, it didn’t take a linguist to read between the lines.
Sure, Dimon was complimenting a rival—as JPMorgan continues to compete more aggressively on Revolut’s European turf—but it appears he was sending a message to the U.S. banking establishment. By and large, the companies operating like tomorrow’s global consumer platforms aren’t American, and their speed and ambition are something to aspire to.
So why take on America now? As Naeff pointed out, part of the reason “is the size of the market; with even a small percentage market share, you can create an attractive business case.” Just as importantly, these companies believe they can compete not simply on rates or fees, but on experience.
Unless more American banks and fintechs start thinking like global tech companies—such as Netflix, Uber, and Amazon or, in their same sector, like Santander—Europe’s challengers won’t just enter the U.S. market; they’ll redefine what consumers come to expect from the companies they trust with their money.
Rocco Pendola is a U.S.-born journalist based in Spain covering finance, fintech, and investing.
Can fintech bridge Colombia’s financial gap? Recent policy shifts and new leadership suggest it can.
This article appears in the July/August issue of Global Finance Magazine.
After several years of subdued growth, weighed down by weak fixed investment, high borrowing costs, persistent productivity constraints, and a complex political environment, Colombia’s next growth story is taking shape, centered on technology, particularly fintech and payments.
But first, the country must reckon with a paradox it has so far failed to resolve.
Over the past decade, Colombia has built one of Latin America’s largest fintech ecosystems, incubating more than 400 active companies. Their combined revenues have tripled over the past four years and are projected to double again by 2027, according to Finnovista’s Fintech Radar Colombia 2025.
Yet the country’s underlying financial system remains shallow. Fewer than one in six microenterprises have access to formal credit. Insurance penetration is just 3.3% of GDP and the financing gap for small and medium-sized enterprises is estimated at 13% of GDP, according to the World Bank.
“For years, we celebrated open accounts while ignoring that millions of people cannot use them to save, pay, or finance their projects without falling into informality,” notes Gabriel Santos, president of Colombia Fintech.
But with the narrow victory in June of right-wing, Trump-backed outsider Abelardo de la Espriella, whose presidential campaign promised deregulation and a more business-friendly stance, Colombia’s industry — and the opportunity for foreign investors — appears to be entering a new era.
“Colombia is selling at a discount to its fundamentals,” says Juan Manuel Quintero, CEO of Precia, a leading provider of valuation services and financial information in Latin America. “For investors willing to look past the headline political noise, the risk-adjusted opportunity is more attractive than the country’s reputation currently suggests.”
At first glance, Colombia appears well-banked. In 2024, 95.8% of Colombian adults held a deposit product, according to Banca de las Oportunidades, and bank-led digital wallets such as Nequi and DaviPlata have driven much of that expansion.
But deposit access and financial depth are not the same thing. Only 35.5% of adults had access to any credit product in 2024, according to the Superintendencia Financiera de Colombia. The gap is even wider among businesses; just 15.3% of microenterprises had access to credit, compared with 74.8% of medium-sized enterprises, according to a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Domestic credit to the private sector stands at about 50% of GDP, below the Latin American average of 54% and a fraction of Chile’s 116%, according to the World Bank.
“This is a powerful story of growth,” argues José Ignacio López, president of the National Association of Financial Institutions of Colombia (ANIF). “Colombia is lagging in many regards in terms of financial inclusion compared to peers in the region,” not just in credit but also in insurance and investment products. “The whole agenda of financial inclusion as an engine of growth is there.”
Start-ups are not the only leaders in Colombia’s fintech development; established banks have been among the most aggressive builders. Nequi, created by Bancolombia, and DaviPlata, from Banco Davivienda, highlight how the country’s largest financial institutions were willing to bet early on digital. DaviPlata alone reached 18.5 million customers by the end of 2024.
“The talent, the regulatory openness, the incumbent institutions willing to innovate, and a large, underserved population that represents both a social imperative and a commercial opportunity” are all there, says Quintero. What Colombia lacks is “the institutional architecture to convert those ingredients into compounding, systemic change. That gap is not a market failure; it is a policy choice. And it remains reversible.”
Colombia is building the plumbing to make that possible, and some of it is already functioning.
Bre-B, the country’s interoperable instant-payment system modeled on Brazil’s Pix, went fully live last October. Within months, it had registered 99 million aliases for more than 33 million customers and 2.8 million merchants.
Cash still accounts for 77.8% of transactions in Colombia, but Bre-B aims to change that by allowing anyone to send and receive money instantly across any bank, wallet, or fintech, using nothing more than a phone number or national ID.
Decree 368 of 2026, handed down in April by the outgoing administration of President Gustavo Petro, added a second layer, making open finance mandatory for supervised institutions and replacing an earlier voluntary framework that had seen limited adoption. Its significance goes beyond convenience. Most of Colombia’s small businesses have no credit history, operate on cash, and lack collateral or audited accounts. The formal credit system was not built to serve them.
But a business that processes payments through Bre-B immediately starts producing something it never did before: a timestamped, verifiable record of money moving in and out. Quintero calls it simply the “credit file” for businesses that have never had one. If open-finance rules allow lenders to access that data, the underwriting equation shifts from asking whether a borrower has the right documents to asking whether it generates enough cash to repay a loan.
The deeper opportunity, López argues, lies in open data: extending the logic to commercial records, utility payments, and supply-chain relationships that fall entirely outside formal finance. “The ultimate goal is to roll out open finance and then move on to open data. That combination of payments and open data could be a powerful tool,” he says.
When he takes office in August, De la Espriella’s government will inherit a fintech sector with solid private-sector momentum, but one that is still short on tax clarity, regulatory continuity, capital formation, data governance, and trust.
His win prompted an immediate rally in Colombian bonds and equities as investors priced in a more business-friendly policy environment. But the harder question remains: whether that agenda can reduce the structural frictions that keep isolated success stories from evolving into deeper financial infrastructure.
The fiscal framework is central to the problem. Early-stage companies face tax obligations disproportionate to their cash generation, while the treatment of reinvested capital, equity incentives, and technology investment does not reflect how digital businesses actually scale.
“A fiscal architecture not designed for innovation-stage businesses creates disproportionate burdens at exactly the moment when companies need to reinvest capital to scale,” Quintero notes.
López anticipates continuity despite political polarization. Financial inclusion and fintech are “not really controversial” areas, he says, even in a politically divided country. But investors still need “clear signals, especially long-term ones, so fintech firms and the broader financial sector can put their bets on the country.”
Financial inclusion alone will not solve Colombia’s growth problem. But if the country can turn payment data into access to credit and fintech momentum into deeper financial markets, it could show that parts of the informal economy can become more visible, financeable, and productive.
Thomas Monteiro is a contributing writer based in Spain.
With $1.7 trillion tied up in inefficient supply chains, CFOs are making liquidity a core strategy.
There’s $1.7 trillion of working capital sitting on the balance sheets of the largest U.S. companies: not locked in failed investments or delayed acquisitions, but trapped in slow receivables, excess inventory, and payment structures designed for a different economic environment.
That money hasn’t disappeared. It remains tied up in processes that no longer reflect how companies manage risk, liquidity, or supply chains.
For many CFOs, the largest untapped source of liquidity is the cash already embedded in operations. Yet organizations often struggle to unlock it because treasury, procurement, operations, and suppliers continue to pursue different objectives using disconnected systems and metrics.
J.P. Morgan estimates that hundreds of billions of dollars remain trapped in working capital across large corporations, while consultant The Hackett Group places the opportunity loss at some $1.7 trillion.
The culprits include receivables that take too long to convert to cash, inventory accumulated as protection against uncertainty, supplier payment structures that fail to balance liquidity across the value chain, and cash reserves that remain underutilized because companies lack the visibility to deploy them effectively.
For years, these inefficiencies were manageable. Low interest rates, predictable supply chains, and abundant liquidity reduced the urgency to rethink working capital. Treasury managed liquidity, procurement negotiated payment terms, sales focused on collections, and financial institutions provided financing within established relationships.
Today’s environment demands a different approach.
Higher interest rates, geopolitical uncertainty, higher tariffs, supply chain disruptions, and persistent margin pressure have elevated working capital from a finance function to a strategic business priority. Yet many organizations continue to manage liquidity using operating models designed for a different era.
According to Deloitte’s Q1 2026 CFO Signals survey, siloed organizations and outdated technology remain among the largest internal barriers to cost management. Boston Consulting Group has noted that extending payment terms alone often merely shifts financing costs along the supply chain rather than improving overall efficiency.
The challenge is therefore broader than financing. It is about coordination.
Working capital decisions increasingly require treasury, procurement, operations, finance, and suppliers to operate from the same information and align around shared objectives. Without that alignment, companies often optimize individual functions while reducing efficiency across the broader organization.
Reflecting these realities, investors have changed their expectations. Following several years of tighter capital markets, boards increasingly emphasize cash-flow resilience, capital discipline, and operational efficiency alongside growth. Liquidity has become a competitive advantage rather than simply a financial metric.
Companies are responding in different ways. Many are investing in better forecasting and real-time cash visibility. Others are modernizing treasury infrastructure, digitizing receivables and payables, expanding supply chain finance programs, or adopting data-driven tools that improve coordination across functions. Financial institutions are evolving their offerings through broader funding networks, automation, and digital onboarding capabilities.
No single approach will solve the challenge for every organization. What appears increasingly clear, however, is that fragmented processes and limited transparency are becoming more expensive. As supply chains grow more complex and financing conditions remain uncertain, organizations require greater visibility into where liquidity resides, how quickly it can move, and how financing decisions affect every participant across the value chain.
The International Finance Corporation and the World Bank have consistently highlighted digital infrastructure as a key enabler for expanding access to supply chain finance, particularly among smaller suppliers that have historically remained outside traditional financing programs. The objective is not technology for its own sake, but the creation of more efficient, scalable financial ecosystems.
The U.S. has one of the world’s deepest capital markets. Yet many companies continue to face unnecessary constraints in moving liquidity through their supply chains.
The next phase of working capital management, then, will likely depend less on access to capital — which remains abundant — and more on the ability to connect information, participants, and decision-making across increasingly complex commercial networks.
Organizations that succeed will be those that treat working capital not as a quarterly reporting metric but as an enterprise-wide capability that strengthens resilience, improves capital allocation, and creates flexibility in periods of uncertainty.
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Gustavo Muller is CEO and co-founder of Monkey, a financial solutions marketplace. He has more than two decades of experience in financial markets, having held senior positions at Citibank, XP Investimentos, and as co-founder of Fisher Venture Builder.
Gig platforms offer seamless checkout for buyers, but emerging market payouts remain broken for workers.
In June 2026, member states from more than 180 countries convened for the International Labour Conference to determine international labor standards for digital platform workers. However, even with those standards set, payments remain a big issue.
Imagine a freelance developer in Lagos, who successfully completes a project for a client in London on Upwork. While the client’s payment is secured instantly, the developer faces a mandatory five-day security hold on their funds, followed by conversion to Naira at unfavorable rates, and fees of up to $20 per withdrawal, all eroding a significant portion of their earnings.
The gig economy has taken off like a rocket around the world, making up for 46% of the global workforce in 2025. Global projections state that it is set to increase to $2.52 trillion by 2035 from $674 billion in 2026. And it is expanding aggressively in the Global South. According to recent Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) numbers, emerging markets have growth rates of roughly 21% in India, 17% in Egypt, and 16% in Argentina and Brazil.
Platforms such as Uber Inc. for drivers and Upwork for freelancers offer great opportunities for a second or even a primary income. However, while these companies provide seamless purchasing options for their services, they have largely not adapted their payout structures for workers in emerging markets.
Beyond the lack of stability and control that can come with side hustles, paying workers simply and on time remains a challenge for many gig economy platforms.
Funds get stuck between payer and recipient as they navigate local currencies across fragmented banking and mobile money ecosystems, compliantly and at speed. For all the sophistication of modern payment infrastructure, the last mile of the payout stack remains one of the most technically underserved problems in the industry.
Paying is harder than it looks. There are dozens of local currencies, many with volatile exchange rates and limited convertibility. To pay in a timely, consistent manner, platforms must have local liquidity ready to go, which can be cumbersome when applied globally. Compliance complexities, such as know your consumer (KYC) and AML requirements, vary by region, while worker classification and tax withholding obligations differ.
Additionally, many workers rely on being paid via mobile money such as M-Pesa in Africa, digital wallets, and cash-out networks rather than bank accounts, which have low penetration in some regions.
There are no dominant payout rails, meaning a platform operating in Kenya, Nigeria, Brazil, and Colombia is working with M-Pesa, bank transfers, PIX, and PSE simultaneously. Each comes with unique settlement times, failure rates, and reconciliation requirements. These issues result in delays, unfavorable exchange rates and high cash-out fees that are all absorbed by workers.
Beyond a minor inconvenience, these issues can mean not eating or paying rent for some who live day to day. As a result, workers switch to whichever platform pays fastest, while platforms face churn and risk their local reputations. Marginal inefficiencies, such as failed transaction fees, can add up significantly for platforms such as Rappi and Glovo, which process millions of transactions per week.
Regulatory pressure is also building. The ILC conference this month will determine standards for digital platform workers, including employment classification, pay transparency, and social protection.
Platforms are exploring multiple solutions for workers’ payment issues in emerging markets.
Aggregator models with multiple partners are one model that helps, but simultaneously increases operational overheads, with ongoing liquidity issues. Local wallets that are pre-funded require capital and incur high management costs, making them a barrier of entry for small to medium businesses. Earned wage access ensures workers are paid on time; however, it doesn’t resolve fees. Partnerships with local in-market banks provide faster settlements, with platforms owning compliance and currency conversions.
Single APIs may increase costs for platforms; however, they handle the complexities of local rails, currencies, payment methods, and compliance across multiple markets, making it seamless for platforms to pay workers with minimal overhead.
It can’t be denied that side jobs and flexible working are an attractive opportunity for many, particularly in emerging markets. However, delayed payouts for workers who live paycheck to paycheck is one practical aspect that impedes on a stable standard of living and erodes trust. Those looking to expand their billion-dollar businesses must ensure that the experience is seamless not only for the customer but for all parties involved.
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Carlos Menendez, chief operating officer of dLocal, is a seasoned general manager with extensive global experience in creating and scaling businesses. Prior to dLocal, he spent 14 years at Mastercard, most recently as president of the Global Commercialization Office, and 14 years at Citi, serving senior roles such as COO of Western Europe Retail Banking, EMEA Bankcards regional director, and CFO of Citibank USA. He holds a BA in Economics from Harvard University, an MBA in Finance from The Wharton School, and an MA in International Studies from the Lauder Institute at the University of Pennsylvania.
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FinVolution Group (FINV) has announced a new share repurchase program, effective from May 30, 2026, that allows the company to buy back up to $150 million in shares, including American Depositary Shares (ADSs), from May 30, 2026, to May 29, 2028.
From MNT-Halan to Zeepay, digital pioneers are building a high-value corridor to the Middle East.
As African fintech matures, companies that once focused on domestic markets are now increasingly seeing Dubai as a strategic base for MENA and international expansion.
Some key players are already on the move. Egypt’s fintech giant MNT-Halan recently launched in Dubai with salary-financing products, while Paymob Technologies has expanded across the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Oman — securing a full UAE Central Bank license last year. Nigeria’s Innovate1Pay runs global operations from Dubai’s Jumeirah since 2019. Lagos-based Flutterwave, one of Africa’s first and fastest-growing fintech unicorns, will soon be the latest to set up shop in the UAE after expanding into Saudi Arabia and Bahrain in 2024.
A key driver of this expansion is the remittance corridor between the Gulf and Africa. Researchers estimate that between 3 million and 5 million African migrants now live and work across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), including large Egyptian, Sudanese, Ethiopian, Kenyan and Ugandan communities. According to the World Bank, global remittances to Africa reached $109 billion in 2024. About a third comes from the GCC, but a lot of transfers remain unrecorded in national data sets.
Currently, a lot of the money still moves around in cash, through operators such as Western Union, MoneyGram or Gulf exchange houses, where the cost for sending funds averages between 8% and 9% — among the highest in the world.
This opens a clear opportunity for lower-cost digital alternatives. A recent Visa study found nearly two-thirds of UAE residents now prefer digital apps over physical locations for sending money abroad. Key drivers include ease of use (50%), followed by safety, privacy and speed (46%). Cashless solutions are heavily encouraged by most GCC governments to increase compliance, traceability and transparency.
Some companies like Zeepay, a Ghana-based payment firm that already operates in 25 countries, are gearing up to tap into that market and the recent war in the Middle East is far from deterring their motivation.
“For us, it’s a new chapter. We are eager to make an impact and become the remittance solution in the Gulf,” said Kojo Amofa, Partnerships Manager at Zeepay. “Many migrant workers want to send money home, and the current volatility creates an even more drastic need that we want to answer.”
For Zeepay, the UAE is the natural entry point. It is the MENA region’s most mature tech hub and the world’s third-largest remittance sender — sometimes described as a financial “switchboard” for Africa-bound flows. To make its first steps, the company is looking for partnerships with digital payment firms already located in Dubai or Abu Dhabi, who would be interested in trying out an African remittance corridor.
“We need to test the appetite. Rather than entering a market we are not native to, we prefer collaboration so that our services can be tried out,” said Amofa. “Once there is a significant level of interest, we can then start to explore creating a physical presence.”
While exploring options in the GCC, the teams at Zeepay, like many African startups, are also keeping an eye open for funding opportunities.
In 2025, African Fintechs raised $1.5 billion across 150 deals, according to data from global investment platform Partech Partners. A growing number of deals involve GCC investors as sovereign wealth funds and family offices from the UAE and Saudi Arabia are increasing their exposure to African assets. In the past decade, GCC countries have invested more than $100 billion in the continent.
In 2022, Nigeria’s Moove.io — a mobility fintech that provides car loans and operates a green ride-hailing platform — raised a $30 million private credit sukuk arranged by Franklin Templeton Investments in Dubai. It later opened an office in the UAE to oversee its MENA expansion.
More recently, Kenya’s iconic fintech M-Pesa has teamed up with the UAE-based ADI Foundation to explore blockchain. The partnership gains significant weight from ADI’s parent company, IHC — a $240 billion giant chaired by the UAE president’s brother.
For Gulf investors, the appeal is straightforward: Africa remains the fastest-growing fintech market globally, with revenues projected to rise thirteenfold to $65 billion by 2030, according to Boston Consulting Group. For now, digital payment tools still dominate, but the next phase is expected to center on small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) finance, credit, and broader digital banking services.
In the medium-long term, a Gulf–Africa fintech corridor is taking shape, with companies scaling up and capital circulating between the two regions. In the short term, there are some regulatory bottlenecks and geopolitical challenges ahead. The war in the Middle East might slow down Gulf investments for a while as governments prioritize spending money at home.