Onchain finance is moving into the core of the financial system.
Across 2025 and Q1 2026, Visa and Mastercard moved further into this space by becoming the integration layer. Visa extended its model across public blockchains, enabling stablecoin settlement, card issuance, wallet integrations, and cross-border flows through partners and APIs. Mastercard built its MTN network, where institutions join a permissioned environment to issue, transfer, and settle tokenized assets.
The scale reflects this shift. Visa’s stablecoin settlement platform reached $3.5B in annualized volume across four blockchains and four stablecoins, and supports 130+ stablecoin card programs across 40+ countries. Mastercard acquired BVNK for $1.8B to bring stablecoin infrastructure into its network, while MTN expanded into EEMEA with participants including JPMorgan, Standard Chartered, and SoFi.
Australia is one of those markets that looks attractive from the outside and unforgiving in practice. Xinja folded. Volt shut down. 86 400 was absorbed. Yet Revolut, a UK challenger with no banking licence, crossed 1 million customers and turned profitable.
Most foreign digital banks that entered the US burned cash, hit the regulatory wall, and retreated. Nubank entered with a conditional OCC charter, $2.9B in net profit, and 4–5 million customers already active in the US. With 131 million customers across Latin America, the question is whether it has found the model that finally makes a foreign digital bank work at scale in America.
Most SME neobanks can win attention. Far fewer can attract deposits, build a meaningful loan book, and reach profitability. Allica has done all three. Now, with a fresh $155 million Series D and ambitions beyond the UK, the bigger question is whether it has found one of the few scalable models in SME banking.
Adyen was built to replace fragmented payment stacks with a single platform that handles payments end to end. That foundation has scaled to €1.4T in processed volume in 2025, with net revenue nearing €2.4B. By bringing online, in-store, and in-app payments into one platform, Adyen turns transactions into shared data that strengthens reporting and optimization across channels.
At WhiteSight, we’ve unpacked Adyen’s growth strategy, highlighting the product and market moves driving this expansion.
Monzo went from challenger bank to a £1.2B-revenue machine, without losing its inimitable Hot Coral halo. What actually powered the step-up: Flex’s shift from BNPL to full-stack credit, paid plans with real stickiness, and SME monetisation at scale. Grab the deep dive for hard numbers, product moves, and the playbook behind 12.2M customers and counting.
From disrupting cross-border money movement to building a 60M+ customer base across 48 countries, Revolut has consistently stretched the boundaries of what a digital bank can be. Now, CEO Nik Storonsky has set a new ambition: to make Revolut the first truly global bank – serving 100M customers, in 100 countries, and generating $100B in revenues. With investors projecting a $242B valuation by 2030, Revolut’s journey is now about becoming An Everything Bank for Everyone.
At WhiteSight, we’ve unpacked the strategy behind this vision, uncovering how Revolut is shaping its model, products, and market moves to turn ambitious goals into a global reality.
At WhiteSight, we’ve unpacked the strategy behind this vision, uncovering how Revolut is shaping its model, products, and market moves to turn ambitious goals into a global reality.
BNPL shifted deeper into retail and banking infrastructure, while tokenisation gained serious ground in real estate and assets. Licensing activity heated up across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, reshaping virtual assets, digital wallets, and e-KYC. Meanwhile, fintechs are scaling across borders, tapping into high-demand markets and underserved segments with sharper models. WhiteSight’s latest report unpacks the moves, the capital, and the momentum that are setting the course for MENA’s fintech future.
CBDC pilots ramped up in India, Korea, and Thailand. Regulators rolled out clearer digital asset rules. And across Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and China, tokenised ESG bonds, money market funds, and digital bonds started hitting production. Meanwhile, SME banking kept pace with mobile-first credit tools, invoice-backed lending, and even Shariah-compliant BaaS making waves. WhiteSight’s latest report breaks it all down – how fintechs, regulators, and financial institutions across APAC are syncing up to rebuild finance from the ground up, one use case at a time.
Latin America’s fintech pulse beat louder in Q1 2025. From cross-border scale-ups to QR-powered payments and licensing-led land grabs, LATAM’s fintechs are maturing and branching out. Real-time payments hit new heights – Brazil’s PIX reached record adoption, and Colombia rolled out Bre-B as its own real-time payment rail. Meanwhile, fintechs embedded themselves deeper into people’s daily lives — powering payments at fast-food chains, streamlining checkout in ecommerce, and becoming the go-to wallet for gig workers. And regulators? They remained proactive as ever, greenlighting licences that gave crypto players and payment startups a serious leg up. WhiteSight’s latest report explores the most telling patterns shaping LATAM’s fintech future — one expansion, partnership, and product launch at a time.
Nubank’s building a case as the most dominant fintech on the planet. With 114M+ users, $2B+ in net income, and metrics that legacy and challenger banks would kill for, Nu is proof that fintechs can scale and stay profitable.
In a region where high cost-to-serve and low credit access are the norm, Nubank built a lean, digital-first platform that’s low-cost, hyper-scalable, and sticky. Whether it’s cracking payroll loans, embedding telecom into its superapp, or using Open Finance to find low-risk borrowers at scale—Nu’s model is what sustainable fintech looks like in emerging markets. WhiteSight’s latest deep dive distills the plays, pivots, and product bets that fuel Nubank’s rise across LATAM.
From BNPL baked into payment rails to co-branded cards reshaping loyalty—Q1 2025 was a turning point for embedded finance going deeper and broader across industries. Payments are becoming optimised at checkout, layered with loyalty, and embedded across physical and digital channels. BNPL is being natively built into payment rails, marketplaces, and even operating systems. Meanwhile, modular infrastructure models like BaaS, CaaS, and IaaS are letting platforms embed cards, savings, insurance, and wealth tools with minimal overhead. WhiteSight’s latest report dissects the quarter’s most defining developments—across embedded payments, lending, insurance, and infrastructure—exploring how businesses across sectors are building financial products into the fabric of user experiences.
In April 2026, Mastercard completed its first live authenticated agentic transaction in Hong Kong. Coinbase launched a marketplace…
For years, foreign neobanks tried to crack the US market by borrowing someone else’s banking rails. Then the…
BNPL began with a simple proposition: make credit frictionless at checkout. While both Klarna and Affirm emerged from…
Colombia’s banking sector is controlled by four incumbents holding three-quarters of all personal deposits. Savings accounts carry sub-1%…
From its origins as a niche student loan refinancer to its valuation as a $33B diversified financial powerhouse,…
Adyen has become the powerful financial infrastructure beneath some of the world’s largest platforms such as Uber, Etsy,…
