Who’s buying fintech startups?
In our updated market reports, you will find everything you need
SUMMARY
Scaled fintech companies are now the most likely buyers of fintech startups, with crypto platforms, payment networks, exchanges, banks and private equity forming the rest of the active buyer pool.
Fintech M&A is active again, but 2026 is not repeating the oversized 2025 rebound. Most of the cooling comes from fewer mega-deals, not from buyers leaving the market.
The buyer hierarchy has genuinely changed. Scaled fintechs completed 659 acquisitions in 2025, ahead of the 589 deals made by incumbent strategic buyers, reversing the ranking from one year earlier.
Buyers are concentrating on infrastructure rather than broad consumer reach alone. Payments, trading, stablecoins, fraud, identity and B2B finance software attract the strongest interest because they sit close to transaction volume and recurring financial workflows.
The real acquisition premium is replacement difficulty. Licenses, liquidity, proprietary data, active networks, regulated access and embedded customer relationships are worth far more than another interface or easily copied feature.
Crypto companies are unusually aggressive because they are trying to become complete financial platforms. Their acquisitions now span derivatives, payments, wallets, tokenized assets, custody and prime brokerage rather than just spot trading.
Visa and Mastercard are buying selectively, but they can pay heavily when a target becomes more valuable after being connected to a global network. Stablecoin rails and fraud intelligence fit that logic much better than standalone consumer apps.
Banks are still serious buyers, just more surgical than before. Capital One’s Brex deal shows they can still make a multibillion-dollar move, while Citi’s Kard acquisition shows the more common pattern: buying a focused capability that can immediately improve a huge existing franchise.
The valuation reset remains uneven. Brex and Melio sold below their 2021–2022 peaks, while scarce infrastructure assets such as Bridge and BioCatch moved well above earlier private-market marks.
Young fintech startups can still sell quickly when they own something urgent and hard to rebuild. AI helps when it improves fraud, underwriting, treasury, accounting or compliance inside a valuable workflow; a generic AI wrapper is not enough.
Is fintech M&A actually back right now?
Fintech M&A is active again today, although 2026 is running at a cooler pace than the huge rebound we saw in 2025.
FT Partners and BCG counted 1,737 fintech acquisitions in 2025, the highest annual total in their dataset, with $251 billion of transaction value. The recovery was large enough to look structural rather than like a handful of opportunistic deals. In 2024, the same dataset had recorded $184 billion.
Activity has cooled since that peak. FT Partners recorded $24.3 billion of fintech M&A in Q2 2026, while total fintech deal activity across M&A, financings and IPOs fell for a third consecutive quarter. The main difference was the disappearance of the $15 billion-plus transactions that inflated 2025 totals. Buyers are still doing deals; the checks have become more selective.
Recent deals back that up. ICE recently agreed to acquire MarketAxess at an enterprise value of about $5.7 billion, Visa agreed to pay $2.4 billion for BioCatch, and Nuvei agreed to acquire Payoneer for $2.75 billion. Windsor Drake’s narrower fintech M&A tracker counted 162 announced acquisitions and $18.4 billion of disclosed value through the first part of the current quarter.
So, yes: the fintech exit market is open today, with buyers concentrating money around companies that already own something difficult to recreate.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest FinTech market report.
Who’s actually buying fintech startups now?
Scaled fintech companies currently sit at the center of the fintech acquisition market, surrounded by payment networks, crypto platforms, market-infrastructure companies, banks and private equity.
That is a major change from the earlier fintech cycle, when founders often assumed that a bank would eventually become the natural buyer. Stripe, Nuvei, Robinhood, Coinbase, Ripple, Kraken’s parent Payward, Adyen and other technology-led financial platforms now have enough capital, distribution and regulatory infrastructure to become consolidators themselves.
Traditional financial infrastructure companies are active too. ICE’s planned $5.7 billion MarketAxess acquisition brings electronic bond trading into a much larger data, exchange and fixed-income network. Visa is moving further into fraud intelligence through BioCatch. Mastercard has completed its acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure company BVNK. Banks still appear when the target fits a specific product gap, as Capital One and Citi have shown recently.
Private equity occupies a different part of the market. Sponsors remain major fintech buyers, but their control acquisitions tend to cluster around companies with established revenue, cash flow or a credible consolidation strategy.
| Buyer group | Examples currently active | What they tend to want |
|---|---|---|
| Scaled fintechs | Nuvei, Adyen, Robinhood, Stripe | Adjacent products, new workflows and geographic expansion |
| Crypto and digital-asset platforms | Payward/Kraken, Coinbase, Ripple, MoonPay | Trading, payments, wallets and regulated infrastructure |
| Financial networks and exchanges | Visa, Mastercard, ICE | Fraud data, payment rails, trading networks and infrastructure |
| Banks | Capital One, Citi | Specific technology that can improve a large existing franchise |
| Private equity | TPG, Advent, Hg and other sponsors | Mature fintech software and consolidation platforms |
Are fintech companies really buying more fintech startups than banks?
Yes. Scaled fintech companies have now overtaken incumbent financial institutions as fintech acquirers in FT Partners’ global data.
The reversal happened quickly. BCG and FT Partners counted 659 fintech acquisitions by scaled fintech companies in 2025, compared with 589 acquisitions by incumbent strategic buyers. One year earlier, incumbents were still ahead, with 517 deals versus 491 for scaled fintechs.
That gives us something much stronger than a collection of anecdotes about Stripe or Coinbase. The balance of acquisition activity actually moved.
The underlying economics have changed too. BCG estimates that global fintech revenue has passed $500 billion, with 74% of the largest listed fintech companies now profitable. A mature fintech can therefore fund acquisitions from a combination of cash flow, equity and debt while offering a target immediate access to millions of customers or enormous transaction volume.
This has quietly changed the fintech exit market. Founders can increasingly sell to companies that were themselves venture-backed startups one or two funding cycles ago.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest FinTech market report.
Are banks still serious buyers of fintech startups?
Banks are still serious fintech buyers, but they are choosing targets much more surgically than the fintech platforms actively assembling broader product stacks.
Capital One provides the clearest large-scale example. It agreed to acquire Brex in a cash-and-stock transaction initially valued at $5.15 billion and completed the deal shortly afterward. Capital One’s subsequent SEC filing recorded approximately $4.5 billion of purchase consideration at closing, reflecting the value of the stock and cash actually transferred.
The accounting tells us more than the headline price. Capital One booked about $510 million of developed technology and $432 million of customer relationships and other identifiable intangibles, alongside more than $3 billion of goodwill. Brex gave the bank corporate cards, expense-management software, payments technology and a position with startups and larger technology companies in one transaction.
Citi offers a fresher, smaller example by agreeing to acquire Kard Financial. Kard runs a rewards and commerce-media platform built around transaction data and already serves banks and fintech companies. Citi can plug that technology into a card franchise with roughly 70 million customers. The purchase price was undisclosed, which illustrates the broader bank pattern: large acquisitions remain possible, while many deals involve focused technology additions that barely move a global bank’s financial statements.
Banks remain credible buyers, especially when a startup can immediately improve cards, payments, lending, fraud, treasury or customer engagement. They just no longer dominate the buyer pool.
Why are crypto companies buying so many fintech businesses?
Crypto platforms are currently among the fastest-moving fintech acquirers because they are building broader financial platforms ahead of the next stage of competition.
Payward, the parent company behind Kraken, shows how far this has gone. Architect Partners counts eight acquisitions announced or completed by Payward since early 2025. The group has expanded into futures through NinjaTrader, regulated derivatives through Bitnomial, card issuance and payments through Reap, tokenized assets through Backed Finance and embedded wallets through Magic Labs.
Magic Labs is a useful example. Payward already had trading, custody, settlement and payment infrastructure; Magic adds the account layer that businesses need to create embedded wallets for their own users. Architect Partners says Magic had provisioned more than 60 million wallets for over 200,000 developers across more than 18,000 applications.
Coinbase followed the same broadening strategy when it acquired Deribit. Coinbase’s SEC filings put the total consideration for the crypto derivatives exchange at roughly $4.3 billion. Deribit brought a large established options market and institutional liquidity that would have taken years to build organically.
Ripple has been moving in a similar direction through acquisitions spanning prime brokerage, stablecoin payments and corporate treasury. Crypto businesses are moving beyond spot trading revenue and buying the pieces needed to handle more of a customer’s financial life.
Crypto buyers deserve their own category now. Many have both the balance sheets and the urgency to acquire.
Are Visa and Mastercard becoming major fintech acquirers?
Visa and Mastercard are becoming more aggressive fintech buyers where ownership can strengthen the networks they already operate.
Mastercard’s completed acquisition of BVNK is the clearest example in digital money. The deal was agreed at up to $1.8 billion, including contingent payments, and gives Mastercard infrastructure for moving value between fiat currencies and stablecoins. BVNK had already built a large business around cross-border payments, settlement and treasury flows.
Visa has taken a different route with its $2.4 billion agreement to acquire BioCatch. BioCatch analyzes behavioral, device and network data to detect scams, account takeovers and other financial crime before money leaves an account. Visa says the company serves more than 350 financial institutions, analyzes about 19 billion digital banking sessions each month and protects roughly 760 million users.
Those acquisitions sit unusually close to the networks’ core economics. Mastercard can route more forms of money through its infrastructure, while Visa can help stop fraud earlier in the payment journey. Both capabilities can be distributed across huge existing customer bases.
The pattern is pretty clear: Visa and Mastercard have little reason to buy every successful fintech application. Infrastructure becomes much more interesting when it gets stronger after being connected to the network itself.
Is private equity buying fintech startups too?
Private equity remains a major fintech buyer today, although its sweet spot sits further along the maturity curve than the typical venture-backed startup.
FT Partners counted 50 sponsor-led fintech transactions in Q2 2026 worth $10.1 billion. The composition is revealing: 29 of those 50 were financings rather than full acquisitions. Minority investment volume rose, while large control deals became less common.
The pullback has been particularly visible in software-heavy fintech. FT Partners points to concern around AI disruption and lower public software valuations as reasons sponsors have become more cautious about paying large multiples. Earlier in 2026, the sell-off in listed software companies wiped roughly $1 trillion from aggregate market capitalization and compressed valuation multiples sharply.
PE still has plenty of reasons to buy financial technology. Recurring revenue, low churn, regulatory barriers and fragmented markets can create excellent roll-up economics. Sponsors can also fund acquisitions through existing portfolio companies, which makes the actual buyer look like a fintech even when private equity provides the capital behind it.
For an early fintech startup, a strategic buyer usually remains the more plausible acquirer. Once revenue becomes predictable and the business can support leverage or consolidation, private equity becomes much more relevant.
Which fintech startups are getting bought the most?
Financial infrastructure is where buyers are spending most aggressively right now, especially around trading, payments, stablecoins, fraud and software tied directly to money movement.
The freshest aggregate comes from Windsor Drake’s 2026 fintech exit tracker. More than 90% of disclosed M&A value in its dataset sits in exchanges and market data, payment rails, stablecoin infrastructure and fraud prevention. That concentration lines up closely with the largest recent transactions.
ICE is paying an enterprise value of about $5.7 billion for MarketAxess, which connects roughly 2,100 institutional investors and dealers in more than 90 countries. Nuvei’s $2.75 billion Payoneer agreement combines merchant acquiring with cross-border payouts, multicurrency accounts and banking infrastructure. The companies expect the combined platform to process more than $500 billion of payments annually for over 2.4 million customers.
Lower down the stack, buyers keep acquiring technology that touches the transaction directly: wallets, card issuance, billing, account-to-account payments, fraud detection, rewards and treasury software. Each product gives a larger platform another place to capture revenue or control the customer workflow.
Consumer fintech can still produce large exits, but the current M&A market places a very high premium on infrastructure that other financial companies need in order to operate.
| Fintech category | Buyer interest today | Why buyers care |
|---|---|---|
| Payments and money movement | Very high | Revenue follows transaction volume |
| Exchanges and market infrastructure | Very high | Liquidity, data and network effects are difficult to recreate |
| Stablecoin infrastructure | Very high | Buyers want direct control of emerging payment rails |
| Fraud and identity | High | Fraud prevention protects existing revenue at enormous scale |
| B2B finance software | High | Payments and financial services can be embedded into the workflow |
| Consumer fintech | Selective | Scale, strong economics or regulatory assets usually need to be present |
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest FinTech market report.
Why are payments and stablecoin startups getting bought so aggressively?
Payments and stablecoin infrastructure have become one of fintech’s hottest acquisition areas because buyers can attach these companies directly to existing money flows.
Architect Partners’ crypto M&A data shows the acceleration clearly. Payments infrastructure produced 13 acquisitions in Q1 2026, up from seven in Q2 2025. Disclosed transaction value across the same quarterly sequence climbed from $77 million to $636 million, then $1.2 billion and finally about $2.05 billion.
The composition has changed at the same time. Traditional payment companies such as Mastercard and Checkout.com now appear beside crypto-native buyers such as Ripple and Polygon. Architect Partners describes most of the acquired companies as infrastructure providers involved in processing, e-money issuance, orchestration, settlement and regulated access.
CoinGecko’s separate H1 2026 dataset points in the same direction. Capital going into payments and stablecoin companies reached roughly $2.85 billion, around twenty times the comparable earlier level in its analysis. Mastercard’s BVNK deal and Payward’s $600 million Reap acquisition alone represented about 84% of the total, so the amount is concentrated, but the buyer interest is very real.
Bridge provides another useful example from the previous wave. Stripe reportedly paid around $1.1 billion for a stablecoin infrastructure company that had been valued near $200 million in its preceding round. Buyers were already willing to pay far ahead of the latest venture mark when the infrastructure filled an urgent strategic gap.
| Period | Payments M&A deals tracked by Architect Partners | Disclosed consideration |
|---|---|---|
| Q2 2025 | 7 | $77M |
| Q3 2025 | 12 | $636M |
| Q4 2025 | 12 | $1.22B |
| Q1 2026 | 13 | $2.05B |
What do fintech buyers actually pay up for?
Fintech buyers pay the most for assets that would take years to rebuild: licenses, transaction networks, proprietary data, liquidity, customer relationships and technology already proven at scale.
Market access can be extremely valuable on its own. Robinhood’s acquisition of Bitstamp gave it more than 50 licenses and registrations across multiple jurisdictions, together with an established institutional crypto operation. Nubank made a similar move from the banking side and agreed to acquire Banco Porto Real as part of strengthening its Brazilian banking structure. In regulated finance, buying the legal operating infrastructure can save as much time as buying the software.
Liquidity and network density command another type of premium. Coinbase acquired an established derivatives venue through Deribit. ICE’s MarketAxess deal gives it a network of around 2,100 institutional firms along with trading data and electronic execution capabilities. Those networks become harder to copy as more market participants depend on them.
Existing commercial relationships can also reduce acquisition risk. Ripple had already invested in and used Hidden Road before acquiring the prime broker. Xero already knew Melio through its ecosystem before agreeing to buy the company. A partnership gives the future acquirer real data on customer behavior, product reliability and integration quality before billions of dollars are committed.
For founders, the implication is fairly straightforward. A feature can be copied. A regulated position, active transaction network or deeply embedded customer workflow is much harder to replace.
Are fintech startups still selling below their 2021 valuations?
Many fintech companies are still exiting below their boom-era valuations, although the strongest infrastructure assets can now sell well above their previous private-market marks.
Brex remains the clearest reset. Investors valued the company at $12.3 billion in 2022. Capital One later announced its acquisition at $5.15 billion, roughly 58% below that peak headline valuation. As mentioned earlier, the final accounting value at closing came in lower still because part of the consideration was Capital One stock.
Melio followed a milder version of the same path. The B2B payments company reached a $4 billion valuation during the 2021 boom. Xero later agreed to pay $2.5 billion upfront, with additional contingent consideration that could take the total to $3 billion. Even the maximum price sits about 25% below the old valuation.
Some infrastructure companies moved sharply in the opposite direction. Bridge had reportedly been valued around $200 million before Stripe agreed to buy it for roughly $1.1 billion. BioCatch was valued at about $1.3 billion when Permira acquired control in 2024; Visa’s current agreement values the company at $2.4 billion.
The reset is uneven. Old valuations carry little protection today. Buyers will still exceed them when a company has become strategically scarce, while businesses valued mainly on growth expectations can exit at large discounts.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest FinTech market report.
Can young fintech startups still get bought, or do buyers only want scale?
Young fintech startups can still get acquired quickly today, but they usually need a capability that has become strategically urgent before they have had time to build huge revenue.
Wallet infrastructure is a good example. Stripe acquired Privy only a few years after the company was founded, by which point its technology was already powering tens of millions of accounts across more than 1,000 teams. Payward’s recent purchase of Magic Labs’ wallet business followed the same logic at a larger installed base.
The threshold changes for less differentiated products. Buyers can build another dashboard, card interface or generic workflow internally. A startup becomes much harder to ignore when it already owns regulatory approvals, highly specialized engineering, transaction volume or distribution that would take years to reproduce.
This explains why many of the biggest deals involve mature companies while a smaller set of young infrastructure startups can still produce surprisingly fast exits. Age itself is not the deciding variable. Replacement difficulty is.
Is AI changing what fintech acquirers want?
AI is already influencing fintech M&A, especially in fraud, rewards and finance automation, but buyers currently pay for AI that sits inside a valuable financial workflow.
Citi’s recent Kard acquisition is a good example. Kard uses machine learning and first-party transaction data to match consumers with merchant-funded offers. The attraction for Citi comes from combining that technology with billions of card transactions, merchant relationships and tens of millions of card customers.
Visa’s BioCatch agreement goes deeper into risk. Its models analyze thousands of behavioral and device characteristics to detect account takeovers, scams and manipulation. The product becomes especially valuable when Visa can distribute it across financial institutions already connected to its network.
Brex is the clearest large acquisition where AI is part of the product story. Capital One specifically highlighted Brex’s AI agents for automating expense and finance workflows. Yet the acquisition also included cards, payments, software, customers and financial infrastructure. The AI sits inside an already valuable business.
So far, there is little evidence of buyers paying huge fintech prices for a generic AI wrapper. AI becomes much more valuable when it improves underwriting, fraud, accounting, compliance, treasury or another workflow where the buyer already controls customers and money.
Who is most likely to buy a fintech startup today?
Today, the most likely buyer of a strong fintech startup is another financial technology platform that can plug the target into an existing distribution, licensing or transaction network.
The numbers make that conclusion unusually clear. Scaled fintech companies completed 659 fintech acquisitions in 2025, according to BCG and FT Partners, versus 589 by incumbent strategic buyers. The previous year’s ranking was reversed. Meanwhile, the largest recent transactions keep clustering around financial infrastructure: market trading, payments, stablecoins, fraud and B2B financial workflows.
Banks still matter, particularly when a startup fills a precise hole in cards, payments, lending or customer engagement. Visa, Mastercard and exchanges can pay heavily when a technology improves infrastructure they already distribute globally. Crypto companies are unusually aggressive because many are trying to become much broader financial platforms. Private equity becomes a stronger candidate as the target matures.
The practical answer has changed. Founders today should look first at companies already sitting one layer above, below or beside them in the financial stack. The buyer with the strongest reason to pay is usually the one that can take the startup’s technology, licenses, data or transaction flow and make it much larger almost immediately.
| Fintech startup | Most plausible buyers today |
|---|---|
| Stablecoin or crypto payments infrastructure | Payment networks, processors, crypto platforms |
| Trading, brokerage or market infrastructure | Exchanges, brokers, crypto platforms, market-data companies |
| Fraud, identity or compliance technology | Networks, banks, processors |
| B2B payments and finance software | Accounting platforms, payment companies, banks, spend-management fintechs |
| Regional regulated fintech | International fintechs, banks, payment companies seeking licenses |
| Consumer fintech with meaningful scale | Banks, larger consumer fintech platforms |
| Mature recurring-revenue fintech software | Private equity, PE-backed consolidators, strategic software buyers |
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest FinTech market report.
OUR METHODOLOGY
This analysis asks who is actually buying fintech startups now, rather than relying on the old assumption that banks are always the natural acquirers. We broke the question into a few practical dimensions: who is buying, whether activity is rising or cooling, which fintech categories attract the most money, what buyers are trying to obtain, and how target maturity changes the likely buyer pool.
We prioritized recent 2025 and 2026 evidence. Aggregate M&A data was used to establish whether a pattern was broad enough to matter, while individual transactions were used to understand the strategy underneath the numbers. One large deal can distort a quarterly total, so deal count, disclosed value and buyer mix were considered separately.
Different market trackers cover different slices of fintech. We therefore treated BCG and FT Partners, Windsor Drake, Architect Partners and CoinGecko as complementary datasets rather than forcing their totals into one artificial series. Where their scopes differed, we used the direction of travel and the category mix, not a false one-to-one comparison.
For individual acquisitions, we favored announced or completed transaction documents, SEC filings, investor-relations releases and direct company disclosures. These sources were used for purchase price, closing consideration, licenses, customer counts, payment volume, wallet scale and the buyer’s stated rationale. When an announced headline value differed from the accounting value recorded at closing, we kept the distinction.
We did not treat every fintech acquisition as equally revealing. The strongest conclusions were reserved for patterns that appeared repeatedly across buyer groups and deal types, especially around payments, market infrastructure, stablecoins, fraud, regulatory access, liquidity and embedded financial workflows.
Key sources include BCG’s Global Fintech Report 2026, FT Partners’ report and underlying market work, FT Partners’ recent-transactions database, ICE on MarketAxess, Visa on BioCatch, Mastercard on BVNK, Payoneer on the Nuvei transaction, Capital One’s Brex filing, Citi on Kard, Coinbase on Deribit, Ripple on Hidden Road, Robinhood on Bitstamp, Stripe’s 2025 company update, and Xero on Melio.
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