75% of fintech startups fail. Stings, doesn’t it? Before we dive into the explanations, this hard number exists not because the market turned against young businesses, but because of mistakes that were visible long before launch. In his recent column, Artsiom Liashanau, a fintech entrepreneur and payment technology expert specialising in transaction business scaling, argues that 2026 is the year the industry stops tolerating those mistakes.
Excessive focus on product while ignoring operational resilience, underestimating the regulatory environment, the absence of a clear recurring revenue model — these are the factors that destroy companies well before the market ever gets the chance to evaluate them.
The first and most uncomfortable shift Liashanau identifies is offering a digital financial service is no longer a competitive advantage. It’s the minimum requirement for being in the room. The companies winning in 2026 aren’t those with the most polished interface. They are those that have embedded themselves into the operational processes of larger organisations as invisible infrastructure providers. The value of a fintech company, as the expert frames it, is no longer measured by the brightness of its front end, but by how painful it would be to disconnect it.
This logic points directly to the dominance of B2B over B2C. Rather than competing for the end consumer’s wallet — an expensive, unpredictable, and increasingly saturated contest — the more durable play is to secure a position inside corporate supply chains. The mechanics are straightforward:
a fintech provider builds an API;
a retailer or marketplace embeds it into their own service;
the provider earns a stable fee on every transaction that flows through the system. Predictable, scalable, and entirely independent of a marketing budget.
Artsiom Liashanau is precise about what this means for valuation. The metrics that matter are shifting from reach and user growth toward operational dependency: net revenue retention, churn rate among enterprise clients, depth of integration. A company that’s painful to replace is an asset. A company that can be swapped out in a weekend is a liability.
The payments have changed. Again. Account-to-account payments and stablecoins have moved well beyond startup discourse and into the operational reality of corporate finance. Cross-border settlements without correspondent banks — transactions that complete in minutes rather than three to five business days, without percentage losses on conversion — are now standard practice for companies operating in global markets. The traditional correspondent banking model, Artsiom Liashanau notes, simply can’t compete on speed, cost, predictability or any other meaningful parameter.
Companies that recognised this shift early are already building positions as invisible but indispensable providers. Their brand may be unknown to end consumers, but without their infrastructure entire industry verticals would stop functioning.
Regulatory pressure from both the US and EU has permanently raised the entry threshold. Compliance and cybersecurity are no longer competitive advantages that differentiate better-prepared players. They are conditions of existence. Smaller players without serious compliance infrastructure and robust security frameworks have no viable claim to market participation. Natural selection in fintech now operates at the regulatory layer first.
For Artsiom Liashanau, the picture that emerges from 2026 is one of structural clarification rather than disruption. Fintech has stopped being an industry of experimental startups and become a fundamental layer of the global digital economy — as basic and as unglamorous as power grids or logistics chains. The companies that understood that transition early enough to build infrastructure rather than merely products are the ones accumulating durable value. The rest are running out of time.
