The Next Fintech Unicorns Will Be Built On Invisible Infrastructure

Forbes

a day ago

Serge Beck, the founder and CEO of Omniwire, is driven by his belief that people deserve robust and secure financial services.
For the past decade, most fintech success stories have appeared similar from the outside: intuitive mobile apps, sleek interfaces and rapidly growing user bases.
However, something has changed.
Today's important innovations in fintech are no longer visible to the end user. They are happening in the infrastructure layer that makes modern financial services possible. Quietly, these systems are becoming the foundation for the next generation of fintech unicorns.
Founders are no longer trying to compete solely on the interface. Investors are no longer rewarding shallow growth. Users are no longer impressed by a clean dashboard if the service behind it is slow, limited or unreliable. According to CB Insights, the Fintech 100 cohort has raised nearly $22 billion in equity funding across 381 deals since 2019. Among the winners in 2023 were core banking and infrastructure platforms.
Invisible infrastructure refers to the core technologies that support financial products behind the scenes without being seen by the end user. From payments and identity verification to compliance and core banking, this infrastructure forms the backbone of every fintech offering.
Key infrastructure categories include:
Banking-As-A-Service (BaaS): Enables nonbanks to offer regulated financial services such as accounts, payments and lending under their brand.
Payment Processing Systems: Facilitate fast, secure payment initiation, routing and settlement. The global digital payments market is projected to reach $19.89 trillion by 2026.​
Card Issuing Technology: Powers creating and managing physical and virtual payment cards at scale.
Compliance And Risk Engines: Automate critical functions like anti-money laundering checks, transaction monitoring and identity verification.
In practice, here's how it looks: When a fintech app lets a user open an account, send a payment or issue a debit card, that front-end interaction is powered by an invisible stack of infrastructure services.
Several companies have emerged to lead this shift:
• Unit offers embedded banking platforms that allow startups to offer accounts, cards and payments by integrating directly with banking rails.
• Alloy helps fintech automate identity verification and risk decisions, enabling faster onboarding while staying compliant with global regulations.
These infrastructure players do not market to consumers or need brand recognition among end users. Instead, they focus on delivering reliability, scalability and compliance to the companies building consumer-facing products.
According to Boston Consulting Group, the global fintech market is expected to reach $1.5 trillion annually by 2030. Much of that growth will be driven not by flashy apps but by the infrastructure quietly powering them. Here are the key reasons driving this trend:
Launching a financial product used to take months of engineering work. Infrastructure providers now allow companies to go live in weeks. APIs replace the need to build core systems from scratch, which means startups can focus on customer experience rather than back-end development.
Infrastructure platforms handle payments, KYC, fraud detection and ledger management so companies do not have to. That means fewer internal resources are needed to build and maintain core functions.
Regulations in fintech change often and vary by region. Infrastructure providers are designed to keep up with these shifts. They build compliance into their systems, reducing the chance of mistakes and delays.
While invisible infrastructure has become a foundational part of how fintech is built today, it is not without its challenges. One of the first challenges is platform dependency. When a company integrates deeply with an infrastructure provider, switching costs rise quickly and migrating away is rarely simple.
Regulatory responsibility is another key consideration. While many infrastructure providers offer built-in compliance features, the ultimate responsibility for compliance often still rests with the company offering the financial product.
Security and data handling can also become more complex. Even when providers are compliant, any breach or downtime from the third-party infrastructure affects not just one company, but potentially dozens of customers relying on the same infrastructure.
Lastly, the long-term economics of building on infrastructure should be carefully evaluated. While upfront costs are lower, and speed to market is faster, the cumulative fees from usage-based pricing can grow significantly at scale. What looks like operational efficiency in the early stages can turn into a margin challenge as the business matures. This doesn't mean the model is flawed. However, it does require careful forecasting to keep unit economics healthy over time.
As this infrastructure becomes the default way to build in fintech, what success looks like for operators and those backing them is changing.
Startups succeed by moving fast and focusing on their edge. For fintech founders, that edge is rarely in building internal compliance systems, managing bank integrations or handling payments infrastructure from the ground up. Instead, founders should direct their energy toward what sets their product apart. Everything else, like payments, identity verification, card issuance and account creation, can and should be handed off to trusted infrastructure providers.
For investors, this shift changes how they should evaluate early-stage fintech opportunities. Consumer-facing products will always have appeal, but the more durable value often sits in the companies that enable those products.
Infrastructure companies benefit from:
High retention, because once integrated, they are hard to replace.
Recurring revenue is important since they typically charge per user, per transaction or via platform fees.
Scale without exposure because they support many customers without taking on direct regulatory or reputational risk from end users.
These traits make infrastructure businesses highly attractive, especially in uncertain or highly competitive markets. They also grow and benefit from the ecosystem's success rather than just their own. For investors, the takeaway is clear: Backing the right infrastructure company means betting not just on one business model but an entire generation of fintech builders who depend on it.
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