Guardrails, Gamechangers and Growth: European Fintech’s 2026 Playbook

By Koen Vanderhoydonk, CEO The Connector. European fintech is heading into a more grown‑up, rules‑heavy era, and the winners of 2026 will be the ones that treat regulation, AI safety and ecosystem presence as superpowers rather than chores. Think less “move fast and break things” and more “ship fast, pass audits, and stay invited to all the right rooms”.

The new rulebook era

By 2026, the combined impact of MiCA, DORA, PSD3/PSR, the AI Act and the emerging FIDA open‑finance framework will be reshaping product roadmaps across European payments, lending, wealth and digital assets. These rules are either already in force (DORA from early 2025, AI Act from August 2024) or moving through the legislative process with implementation work planned into 2027, which means teams are designing products now with that future in mind.

From a front‑row seat at Europe’s fintech events, conversations have visibly shifted from “what if” to “how exactly do we make this compliant and live?”. Ecosystem platforms and community players that show up at dozens of conferences a year are increasingly comparing notes on concrete use cases, not just visions, which makes 2026 look more execution‑heavy than hype‑driven.

1. Compliance becomes part of the product

“Compliance by design” is on track to move from a slide at the end of the deck to a core part of the value proposition. With PSD3/PSR tightening fraud rules, access to data and consumer protection, and DORA making operational resilience and third‑party risk a supervisory priority from 2025, large buyers will expect vendors to show exactly how their products behave under stress, not just what features they offer.

MiCA is pushing serious crypto‑asset players to operate as regulated, supervised institutions, which will further normalise detailed regulatory narratives in sales and partnership conversations. RFP processes from banks and insurers are therefore likely to feel increasingly like compact regulatory reviews, favouring fintechs and regtechs that arrive with mapped controls, evidence trails and tooling that makes continuous compliance almost plug‑and‑play.

2. AI‑native fintech, but with guardrails

AI is no longer the wild west topic it felt like at 2023 panels; as the AI Act phases in, the conversation is shifting to model governance, explainability and documentation. The Act, fully applicable from August 2026 with staged obligations beforehand, requires risk‑based classification of AI systems, quality standards for data, and mechanisms for human oversight, all of which fit naturally with the already regulated environment of financial services.

This is likely to favour AI products that are audit‑friendly: think decisioning models that surface reason codes, co‑pilots for relationship managers and underwriters with visible confidence levels, and vendors who can show testing, monitoring and retraining processes on demand. Around them, expect a growing “AI assurance” niche focused on bias testing, robustness checks and regulatory alignment, especially as supervisors and the EBA step up AI‑related work in banking and payments from 2026 onward.

3. Open finance starts to earn its keep

Open banking was the rehearsal; open finance is where multiple sectors start seeing new revenue lines. The EU’s FIDA initiative is designed to extend secure data access beyond payment accounts into areas like investments, pensions and insurance, with mandates expected to fall on supervisors between 2025 and 2027.

Even if all FIDA obligations are not fully live by 2026, the direction of travel is clear enough that forward‑leaning banks, wealth managers and fintechs are building to an open‑finance architecture now. That paves the way for consumer apps offering unified views of everyday banking and long‑term savings, B2B “financial data middleware” that cleans up messy datasets, and a sharper contest over who owns the primary customer interface as big tech, incumbents and specialists all lean in.

4. Programmable money leaves the lab

Instant euro payments are moving from nice‑to‑have to mandatory plumbing, with new EU rules requiring euro‑area payment service providers to support instant transfers by October 2025. Combined with the growing use of request‑to‑pay, this makes “real‑time” not a premium feature but the baseline on which more sophisticated programmable flows can be orchestrated.

The digital euro will still be in the design and pilot phase in 2026 rather than fully rolled out, yet political and technical choices will be clearer, and experiments involving central bank money, commercial bank money and tokenised assets are likely to continue across Europe and key cross‑border corridors. For SMEs, corporates and platforms, that translates into increasingly automated treasury, smarter payout and escrow workflows, and more seamless settlement options, particularly along routes connecting Europe and Asia where payment innovation tends to show up early.

5. Events turn into always‑on growth engines

The events calendar keeps getting fuller, but travel budgets are not, which is forcing fintechs to rethink how they show up at conferences and community gatherings. Instead of sending large teams to a handful of flagships, many growth‑stage companies are experimenting with smaller, targeted delegations for high‑value meetings, while using partners and community platforms to stay visible at a much larger number of local and specialist events.

The most effective players are also blurring the line between events and content: turning panels into podcasts, roundtables into whitepapers, and side meetings into ongoing communities that live on newsletters, Slack groups or webinars. As a result, brand presence is shifting from logos on sponsor walls to sustained, human visibility in the ecosystems that matter most, whether that is payments, wealthtech, crypto‑assets or AI‑led financial services.

What it takes to win 2026

All of this points to a 2026 in which “loud” matters less than “trusted and present”. The most successful European fintechs are likely to be those that build like regulated institutions, innovate with startup speed, and stay plugged into the communities and events where new collaborations, standards and partnerships are hammered out in real time.

"These predictions are based on the nearly one hundred fintech events we’ve attended this year, and we’re excited to do even more next year. The market is shifting fast, and we’ve got our finger firmly on the pulse"