For years, fintech sold the story of rebels versus incumbents, speed versus bureaucracy and apps versus banks. That era is over.

In 2026, fintech isn’t the disruptor on the edge of financial services, it is the infrastructure moving it forward. And that shift is reshaping everything: regulation, investment, delivery models and what “innovation” actually looks like.

Enterprise software development company BBD has seen that the market is rewarding those shifts, too. Valuations have migrated from “growth at any cost” fintechs towards those proving profitability, resilience, compliance and infrastructure-grade reliability.

Fintechs have grown up – but are they resilient enough?

The big narrative shift is simple: fintech moved from experiment to essential.

The payments market infrastructure built by fintechs is becoming the rails on which many financial services are dependent.
Compliance and regulatory services built by innovators have turned into essential dependencies for many firms.
All customers from retail clients to larger organisations now expect fintech-grade user experiences regardless of whether they’re dealing with an incumbent bank or a tech provider.

Fintech is no longer a “nice-to-have innovation partner”; for many institutions, it’s now woven into core processes. And when infrastructure fails, it fails loudly.

When major processors like Stripe experience outages, something EU merchants have dealt with several times over the past few years, card payments fail at scale and downstream merchant operations halt almost instantly. The same pattern plays out closer to home: in South Africa, payment and platform outages (whether bank-side or third party) quickly become commerce outages, with immediate knock-on effects for merchants, consumers and service teams.

Recent disruptions across European open-banking providers, such as TrueLayer’s well-publicised payment initiation outages, have shown how even non-bank infrastructure can freeze account-to-account payments, stall onboarding flows and delay settlement cycles across multiple banks and fintechs at once.

In South Africa, the stakes are similar, especially as the ecosystem leans more heavily on:

Real-time rails like PayShap;
Third-party onboarding, identity and fraud services; and
Platform-integrated payments across retail, telco and digital marketplaces.

These are clear examples of how disruptions, even from mid-tier service providers, can create systemic ripples. All a clear sign of how deeply fintech is embedded in everyday economic activity.

Regulators have noticed this, too. In 2023, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority formally warned several open-banking and payments providers about repeated outages and operational-resilience gaps that were directly impacting consumers and merchants – reinforcing just how critical these fintech intermediaries have become to the wider financial system.

South African regulators have been moving in the same direction: resilience expectations are increasingly part of the conversation as the financial ecosystem becomes more interconnected, and as digital payments become more central to economic participation.

Regulation finally caught up – and that’s a good thing

For more than a decade, fintech moved faster than regulators could respond. That lag is narrowing fast.

In Europe, frameworks like MiCA and the EU Payments Regulation have moved from high-level proposals to enforced implementation timelines. South Africa is following its own path, but the direction is clear: stronger governance, clearer accountability and more scrutiny on any technology that becomes system-critical. The Protection of Personal Information Act (Popia), in particular, has increased expectations around data protection, consent and operational discipline for firms handling sensitive personal information.

With MiCA live in the EU, the Genius Act reshaping US stablecoin oversight and global regulators tightening AI governance, the industry now faces a level of scrutiny once reserved for banks.

This is already visible in how major processors such as Nexi and Worldline have been required to strengthen operational resilience and supervision frameworks due to the systemic reliance banks and merchants now place on their infrastructure.

This is not the end of innovation. It’s the start of responsible, scalable innovation.

The smartest players are already treating regulation as:

A design constraint, not a blocker;
A market advantage, not a chore; and
A trust differentiator, not paperwork.

The new competitive edge is clarity: companies that can operate predictably in supervised environments are increasingly the ones securing licences and expansion opportunities.

Payments undergoing fastest shift in decades

Everyone is distracted by crypto headlines, but the real revolution is happening in payments:

Instant-payments regulation is forcing banks to modernise core capabilities.
Account-to-account (A2A) and wallet-based payments are taking share from cards.
Cross-border settlement is fragmenting, opening significant terrain for orchestration players.
Africa and Asia are setting the pace for mobile-first innovation.

That last point matters. In many ways, Africa isn’t “catching up” in payments, it’s where some of the most practical innovation is happening because adoption is driven by necessity, not novelty. In South Africa, we’re seeing this play out in the steady shift towards faster payments, QR-based commerce and platform-driven payment models.

We’re already seeing the scale of this shift in the EU, where the Instant Payments Regulation is making SCT INST (SEPA Instant Credit Transfer) compliance mandatory. Banks that traditionally process payments in batch windows must now offer 24/7 real-time settlement at the same cost as standard transfers.

It’s a profound operational shift – one that forces institutions to modernise legacy cores, rethink fraud controls and upgrade their entire payments architecture.

A similar transformation is underway locally. As real-time payment rails mature (including PayShap), South African institutions must modernise core capabilities, rethink fraud and risk at speed, and redesign customer journeys for always-on payments.

The next winners won’t be those who pick a scheme and defend it. They’ll be the ones who treat every payment method as modular, and build seamless, scheme-agnostic experiences for merchants, banks and platforms.

From a tech perspective, that modularity isn’t aesthetic or the latest in best practice. It determines margin, cost-to-serve and the ability to expand internationally without rebuilding your entire payments stack.

The return of resilience

As financial organisations scale digital fintech capabilities, they’re discovering an uncomfortable truth: running reliable, regulated, always-on financial platforms is significantly harder than launching them.

UK and EU real-time rails, including recurring disruption and faster payments, have repeatedly shown how operational fragility anywhere in the chain can impact millions of users.

The same has played out at the consumer layer. Outages at digital banks such as Revolut and Monzo have left consumers temporarily unable to transfer or pay – a sharp reminder that resilience isn’t a backend concern; it’s a customer-impacting reputation-defining event.

South African consumers are no less digital and no less impatient. When payments fail, access fails or onboarding breaks, the friction becomes immediate, and trust erodes fast.

That’s where teams with the experience to build resilient systems come in. For our clients, we’ve seen that the below combination offers the highest return on investment:

Deep engineering strength anchored by strong domain knowledge;
Delivery models that assume constant disruption and design for it; and
Ability to understand the full technology stack from core underlying infrastructure to the application services and APIs to third-party systems.

In a world where everyone relies on third-party solutions and software-as-a-service providers, the true differentiator is whether your teams can architect a solution that expects chaos, scale securely, problem-solve under pressure and keep services running in an increasingly unreliable ecosystem.

In this environment, resilience is no longer a back-office concern but a board-level KPI tied directly to revenue protection and customer churn.

What this means for the next five years

If fintech 1.0 was about disruption and fintech 2.0 was about rapid scaling, fintech 3.0 is about resilient, compliant, interoperable financial infrastructure.

The winners will be those who:

Build for interoperability: Not card or A2A or stablecoins, but all of the above – cleanly abstracted with strong identity and data layers.
Treat regulation as a product feature: Make compliance visible, automated and intuitive. Help your customers stay on the right side of the rules by design, not documentation.
Invest in resilient, AI-literate teams: The future belongs to companies that blend engineering excellence with regulatory fluency.

The bottom line

Fintech isn’t a disruptor anymore, it’s increasingly part of the operating fabric of modern commerce, from payments and identity (where services like Onfido and Auth0 enable onboarding at scale) to open-banking rails used by banks, retailers and fintech apps alike.

South Africa is no exception. If anything, the market’s unique mix of advanced banking capability, deep digital adoption and structural inequality makes reliability even more important: the cost of failure lands hardest on customers who have the least tolerance for friction.

The companies that will dominate the next decade aren’t the loudest. They’re the ones building solid foundations: resilient engineering, thoughtful regulation, strong teams and infrastructure that can scale and survive whatever comes next.

About BBD
A leading international provider of bespoke software solutions, BBD’s four decades of technical and domain expertise spans the education, financial services, insurance, gaming, telecommunications and public sectors. BBD employs more than 1 200 highly skilled, motivated and experienced IT professionals, curating flexible teams from our hubs across South Africa, India, the Netherlands, Portugal and the UK. BBD is a 51% black-owned and level-1 B-BBEE partner, with a 135% B-BBEE recognition. For more, visit www.bbdsoftware.com or connect on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok andYouTube.