As 2026 unfolds, a few themes are becoming increasingly clear across global fintech markets. AI is moving from experimentation into production environments. Infrastructure is reshaping how capital reaches historically underserved customers. And in many regions, the next phase of financial innovation will be defined less by new products and more by how intelligently existing systems are connected, governed, and scaled.

In our recent trends to watch piece, we outlined the structural forces shaping global markets. Based on what we are seeing across our portfolio and the broader fintech ecosystem, our team shares our predictions for the year ahead.

Agentic commerce is maturing into a trusted financial workflow engine

Across markets, generative AI is moving beyond assistive tools into agentic workflow ownership. Rather than layering AI onto existing products, platforms are embedding it directly into execution across underwriting, collections, and financial operations.

Sebastian Molina Gasman – Principal, Latin America

Marketplaces will increasingly incorporate AI agents to automate workflows, such as buyer and seller acquisition, matchmaking, request for quotation (RFQ) creation and verification, reducing intermediaries, increasing transparency, and opening access to contracts that were previously limited to closed networks. AI will also materially improve how savings and insurance products are distributed, explained, and adopted through better matching, embedded distribution, and personalized guidance tied to users’ financial realities, allowing brokers and advisors to manage larger portfolios while serving smaller customers more efficiently.

Matt Schaar – Operating Partner

Agentic workflows will begin executing financial transactions directly. Protocols like Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) point toward agents that not only manage underwriting, compliance, and servicing, but also initiate and settle payments across rails. As institutions adopt agent-based orchestration, the defining question will be how agents are authenticated, how transactions are verified, and how money moves across cards, stablecoins, and clearinghouses within clear accountability frameworks. Firms that establish interoperable and auditable standards for agent-driven money movement will not only control transaction flow, but enable more responsible deployment of AI in financial systems.

Akhil Gupta – India Investment Officer

Banks and non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) will shift from API-based systems to agentic workflows, where execution is handled by intelligent agents rather than fixed integrations. Specialized agents will take over tasks such as bank statement analysis, compliance checks, and fraud assessment, while orchestrating agents coordinate end-to-end workflows across lending, servicing, and collections. As this shift takes shape, the go-to-market (GTM) environment for fintech providers will mature, and after a wave of pilots in 2025, institutions are likely to consolidate around top performers, accelerating vendor filtration. Together, these dynamics will enable more personalized financial products and make it economically viable to serve micro-, small, and medium–sized enterprises (MSMEs) and individuals at smaller ticket sizes, advancing financial inclusion.

Infrastructure control will define vertical SaaS in the AI era

This year, control over infrastructure layers within vertical SaaS and fintech ecosystems, alongside disciplined AI production economics, will determine margins, defensibility, and platform power.

Matt Schaar – Operating Partner

Despite advances in generative AI and questions about traditional software moats, vertical SaaS platforms with embedded finance will remain structurally resilient in 2026. AI will not displace these platforms, but deepen them, embedding underwriting, pricing, servicing, and compliance directly into vertical workflows. As AI lowers surface-level software differentiation, defensibility will shift toward infrastructure control, regulatory positioning, and ownership of contextual data – information that can directly drive decisions. Platforms that control these layers will capture durable value.

Devraj Hom Roy – Director of Portfolio Engagement

In 2026, fintech infrastructure growth will concentrate in vertical specialization rather than horizontal expansion, with new issuer and distribution models emerging through industry-specific program management, compliance, and integration layers built for defined sectors rather than broad platforms, while at the AI inference layer, particularly in large emerging markets, Small Language Models fine-tuned to local regulation and financial behavior will outperform generic models in production environments. As these systems operate across full business cycles, teams will gain clearer visibility into inference costs and operational overhead, compressing experimentation and forcing pricing, scope, and GTM discipline, with infrastructure decisions increasingly governed by production economics rather than technical possibility.

Akhil Gupta – India Investment Officer

In 2026, the strongest Indian fintech infrastructure opportunities will sit at the intersection of public digital rails and private control layers. As identity and payments become ubiquitous and low-cost, differentiation will shift from access to orchestration. Firms that help banks, NBFCs, and platforms activate public infrastructure through consented data, risk models, and embedded operational tooling will capture outsized value. As digital public infrastructure (DPI) deepens, private infrastructure providers will increasingly shape how these rails are monetized and governed.

Paolo Limcaoco – Principal, Southeast Asia

Domestic real-time payment systems and QR ecosystems across ASEAN will continue to solidify as foundational digital infrastructure, with regional interoperability initiatives accelerating cross-border commerce and remittances. As central banks and regulators advance standardized QR linkages and faster settlement rails, payment networks will evolve from national systems into integrated regional corridors. This expansion will lower friction and transaction costs for tourism, trade, gig workers, and MSMEs operating across borders. As domestic and regional payment stacks mature, the next wave of fintech innovation will shift toward building and monetizing services on top of these rails rather than competing at the infrastructure layer.

MSME-led financial inclusion will deepen across regions

Across Latin America and Africa, and increasingly in parts of South and Southeast Asia, MSME financial offerings are evolving from isolated products into embedded systems.

Jasiel Martin Odoom – Africa Investment Officer

Trade finance in Africa is going vertical and global. Emerging platforms are embedding financing directly into sourcing, logistics, and procurement workflows, underwriting cargo and using goods in transit as collateral to close the gap between paying suppliers and selling inventory. This enables MSMEs to buy in bulk and negotiate better pricing, while Treasury-as-a-Service models further differentiate by helping SMEs manage multi-currency liquidity, hedge FX risk, and optimize working capital, abstracting complexity from the user.

Paolo Limcaoco – Principal, Southeast Asia

MSME lending in Southeast Asia will continue shifting from generic digital credit models toward verticalized platforms that integrate payments data, operational software, and embedded financial products. Following the first wave of embedded finance, platforms and lenders now have a clearer understanding of risk dynamics, distribution constraints, and customer behavior, enabling more tailored and sustainable credit models. Agentic AI will accelerate this transition by enabling automated underwriting, dynamic credit limit adjustments, proactive collections, and embedded financial advisory at scale. Rather than replacing credit teams, AI agents will augment them by handling routine decisioning and surfacing real-time risk signals. Vertical integration, combined with intelligent automation, will materially improve unit economics while expanding access to credit for underserved MSMEs.

Akhil Gupta – India Investment Officer

AI and public digital infrastructure will reshape outcomes for MSMEs in India across three dimensions. AI-based tools will strengthen day-to-day financial discipline by simplifying cash flow management, invoicing, and compliance, even for small or informal firms. At the same time, lenders will increasingly underwrite MSMEs using cash flow patterns and consented digital data rather than traditional financial statements, expanding access to formal credit. Finally, shared public rails will reduce reliance on scale and legacy relationships, enabling fintechs and banks to offer more personalized credit limits and repayment structures aligned with real operating needs.

Compliance, fraud, and governance will move toward continuous systems

As financial systems take on greater decision-making responsibility, governance and transparency are becoming central to product design.

Matt Schaar – Operating Partner

Clearer regulatory frameworks in the United States and Europe are beginning to reshape fintech business models, particularly across crypto and stablecoins, influencing compliance design and market entry strategies. At the same time, data monetization and access pricing are reshaping the economics of open banking and embedded finance globally. The intersection of regulation, data pricing, and commercial strategy will materially affect margins and infrastructure design across markets.

Devraj Hom Roy – Director of Portfolio Engagement

As AI systems expand into underwriting and decision making, fraud detection and governance can no longer operate as separate layers, and solutions that combine detection with explainability and monitoring will become increasingly important as regulatory scrutiny intensifies. Rather than stopping at onboarding and identity verification, platforms will move toward continuous oversight, real-time monitoring of transactions, enforcement of internal policies, and real-time regulatory reporting.

Semra Ezedin – Portfolio and Investments Associate, US

Transparency and explainability are moving from compliance requirements to competitive differentiators as financial systems begin acting on behalf of users. Infrastructure providers will increasingly be expected to show how data is used, how decisions are made, and how users remain informed and in control.

Distribution and inclusion will expand through new interfaces

Access and adoption are increasingly being shaped by interface innovation rather than entirely new financial products.

Sebastian Molina Gasman – Principal, Latin America

Voice AI is becoming a core financial interface across Latin America, expanding beyond customer experience pilots into distribution, underwriting, customer service, and collections, particularly for low-ticket, high-volume financial services, while also improving thin support margins by enabling meaningful interaction at scale in markets where voice is the dominant interface and language or literacy barriers limit access.

Jasiel Martin Odoom – Africa Investment Officer

Workforce data will increasingly become a credit layer. In markets with limited credit bureau coverage, payroll platforms sit on a valuable pool of verified income data. Platforms that monetize this employee data layer will enable lenders and insurers to underwrite based on real-time employment status and salary history rather than blunt bank statement proxies.

Katie Hallaran, Head of Impact and Partnerships

Many of the trends reshaping fintech this year are likely to produce measurable gains in women’s financial inclusion, even if not explicitly designed to close the gender gap. AI-enabled formalization, workforce data portability, and voice-based financial interfaces may reduce access and usage constraints at scale — though how carefully these systems are built will determine whether that potential is realized. Bias in models and data privacy gaps remain real risks.

Looking ahead

Across our regions and themes, what stands out most is not any single technology or business model, but how quickly financial services are shifting from tools to systems that make decisions. Over the remainder of 2026, we expect that shift to continue, shaped by local market structure, regulation, and levels of trust, but consistently driven by the same underlying forces: AI moving into production, infrastructure capturing more value, and autonomy becoming more practical in narrowly defined use cases.

The most durable models are likely to be those that combine intelligence with clear governance, embed financial services into existing workflows, and focus on solving real friction points rather than adding surface-level features. As these patterns continue to emerge, they will shape not just how fintech companies grow, but where resilience, access, and efficiency are ultimately created across markets.