The Private Market Is Now The Real Fintech Index

Photo by Bradley Andrews on Unsplash

This post was originally published on my Forbes column here.

For the first time in fintech’s twenty-year history, the top 100 private companies in the sector now generate more revenue than the top 100 public ones founded since 2006. Roughly $174 billion versus $158 billion. The private cohort is valued at 2.9x the public cohort, according to a new report from FT Partners and Blue Dot Investors.

That headline number is striking, but it is not the most interesting thing in the report. To understand the future of financial services, you need to look at the private companies as well. The public 100 is increasingly a survivorship-biased subset of companies that happened to clear an American IPO window, particularly during a narrow stretch of 2020 and 2021. But the private 100 is the bigger, broader, and importantly for me, offers a more global picture. In many ways, it is a leading indicator of the future. As Sahej Suri, Managing Partner of Blue Dot Investors, told me it: “Nearly half of revenue among leading private companies is now generated outside North America… The future of FinTech won’t be defined by a single geography.”

A few reflections:

1. The IPO bar has increased particularly for global fintechs.

Median revenue at IPO for the 2024 to 2026 cohort is $673 million. For the 2011 to 2019 cohort it was $199 million. That is a 3.4x jump in less than a decade. Sixty-nine percent of recent fintech IPOs were profitable at listing, up from 52 percent in the earlier cohort. Median IPO gross proceeds rose 3.2 times.

The standard read on this is that quality is finally being rewarded. That is partly true. As the analyst CJ Gustafson recently put it, the new rule is roughly half a billion in revenue or a very good reason. But the corollary is that the public market is now structurally inaccessible to most globally significant fintechs, and emerging market companies in particular face an even higher bar.

A few key drivers are causing this shift. Addressable revenue pools tend to be smaller in many emerging markets, even in the largest ones like Indonesia, Brazil, or Nigeria. Currency volatility compresses dollar-denominated revenue figures regardless of operating performance. The Atlantico team makes this point well in their 2025 Latin America Digital Transformation Report: even in markets where local interest rates look attractive, fifteen years of FX depreciation eats into foreign return profiles in ways that are not always intuitive. Lastly, public market investors apply emerging market discounts even after a company has cleared every operational bar, forcing even more growth.

Kaspi is the textbook example of all three pressures stacked on top of one another. It is a super app combining payments, e-commerce, and consumer finance for Kazakhstan, with >60% gross margins and >70% growth. It is profitable. And it currently trades at around 7 times earnings. A US-headquartered comparable would trade at a meaningful premium.

That’s why most emerging market fintechs grow as camels: they are profitable, capital-efficient, and built to outlast macro cycles. They can wait to the right IPO window.

2. A new pathway for exit is fintech-to-fintech M&A.

The most under-discussed chart in the FT report is the one that shows fintech-to-fintech M&A activity has grown 4x over the past decade.

Strategic acquisition by other fintechs is now a larger source of exits than acquisition by traditional financial institutions or by legacy technology strategics. The same chart shows secondary market volume up 3.7 times in 2025 alone.

One example, which I covered previously, was Stripe’s acquisition of Bridge: $1.1 billion for a stablecoin company.

I expect we will see an increase of this as an exit route for emerging market fintechs.

3. The US remains the core venue for now, even for global IPOs.

Look at the geographic distribution of the private top 100. North America accounts for 55 percent of revenue only.

The rest of the world is the other half. Europe is 16 percent. Asia is 11 percent. Latin America and the Middle East are 7 percent each. Africa is 3 percent. As Steve McLaughlin, Managing Partner of FT Partners, told me: “While these businesses are often global in nature, the U.S. remains the most consistent destination for listing, because it still offers the deepest pools of liquidity.”

And yet the US still dominates as the listing venue. Of the 26 fintechs that have listed in the US since 2024, many more were international than their listing venue would suggest. The Tokyo-based payments giant PayPay listed in New York. Kazakhstan’s Kaspi.kz moved its primary listing from London to Nasdaq in 2024 specifically because, in the words of its CEO, the US was the natural home for ambitious technology companies.

Where we are headed: More Global

The first wave of global fintechs were often replications of US models into other markets. Many were built by US educated founders, or funded by US venture capital.

That is changing.

The most interesting fintechs being built today are originating in markets that have nothing to do with the US, are funded increasingly by local and regional capital. Brazil’s PIX has spawned a generation of payment fintechs applications that have no US analog. India’s UPI has done the same, and is now being exported as cross-border infrastructure to half a dozen countries. Kenya’s M-Pesa was a generation ahead of Apple Pay and remains the dominant rail in East Africa.

And in some cases, global companies may have advantages for IPO. India has built the most credible domestic listing path. PB Fintech, Paytm, MobiKwik, and most recently Groww have all listed on the NSE. Saudi Arabia’s Tadawul saw Rasan oversubscribed 129 times with $29 billion in orders for a $224 million raise, popping the maximum 30 percent on its first trading day. Local exchanges are not always at a discount to Nasdaq anymore for category-leading regional champions. Sometimes they offer better prices, deeper local demand, and an investor base that actually understands the model.

--

The fintech story is still in flight. One thing is certain, the future won’t be read by looking at the current public financial services companies alone. Onwards.