The biggest fintech in 2030 will be an AI tool

The next dominant fintech will manage a customer’s financial life across institutions. Its customers will connect existing accounts and delegate increasingly complex decisions to an AI tool that understands their circumstances. At Finpace, we see a credible path to this becoming the largest consumer fintech business by 2030. The opportunity follows a familiar pattern: a new customer experience changes who controls the financial relationship.

Revolut and Nubank demonstrated how much demand traditional banking had left underserved. Their early appeal centred on making everyday finance easier to access and use. By the end of 2025, Revolut served 68.3 million retail customers, while Nubank reported 131 million customers. These businesses developed substantial financial infrastructure behind their interfaces. Their success nevertheless established that a superior experience could persuade customers to reconsider an existing banking relationship.

The app became the organising principle of that experience. Customers learned where to find their balances and how to move money. As financial products accumulated, the work of coordinating them largely remained with the customer. A well-designed app reduces the effort required to complete a task within one provider. Managing household finances still involves decisions that extend beyond that provider’s accounts. AI creates an opportunity to absorb that coordination work.

Consumer adoption has already given AI providers considerable distribution. The research paper How People Use ChatGPT reported 700 million weekly users by July 2025. More than 70% of usage was unrelated to work. These figures do not establish readiness to delegate financial decisions, but they show that a general-purpose assistant can become an everyday consumer service at extraordinary scale. Adding financial capabilities to an established habit creates a different acquisition opportunity from asking someone to open another account.

The relationship can start moving before autonomous payments become common. The FCA’s 2026 consumer research found that current financial AI use mainly involved explaining information and suggesting actions. A plausible progression follows: customers begin forming decisions with an assistant, then authorise prepared transactions, and eventually delegate repeatable work within agreed limits. During that progression, the banking app increasingly serves as a point of confirmation or review. The institution can lose influence over product selection well before it loses the transaction itself.

Open finance supplies part of the connection between that habit and actual money. A 2026 BIS paper describes how customer-permissioned data sharing extends beyond banking into broader financial products. It also distinguishes reading information from initiating changes. That distinction determines the product’s commercial significance. An assistant that displays balances competes with existing dashboards. Permission to execute transactions allows it to take responsibility for completing financial tasks across connected institutions.

Consider a household preparing for the month ahead. Its AI service would reconcile expected income with upcoming commitments across connected accounts, maintaining an agreed cash reserve before allocating money elsewhere. A delayed salary would trigger a revised plan. Joint expenses would reflect each adult’s permissions, while children’s accounts would retain parental limits. The household would approve meaningful changes and review exceptions. Routine coordination would happen continuously, reducing the need to inspect each account separately.

Shopping and subscriptions belong within the same financial picture. A purchase affects the cash available for an upcoming payment; cancelling an unused subscription changes future commitments. Connecting these decisions would allow the service to assess affordability before spending and adjust its plan afterwards. Investment contributions would follow the household’s liquidity requirements and an agreed investment mandate. The value comes from understanding how decisions affect one another, with authority defined separately for each action.

Research on commerce indicates demand for this reduction in effort. Visa’s 2025 study surveyed 3,700 online shoppers across the United States, Australia and New Zealand. Approximately one-third expected to use AI shopping assistants regularly. The findings measure expectations among selected markets, rather than established global behaviour. They nevertheless suggest that consumers recognise value in delegating parts of a purchase, extending the assistant’s role into decisions that precede a payment.

The competitive consequences reach beyond the interface. An AI service that compares providers and allocates transactions could influence where deposits sit and which financial products customers encounter. The bank would continue to hold the account, while another company increasingly shapes its use. The FCA’s Mills Review identifies AI interfaces as potential competitive gatekeepers. For institutions, this introduces the prospect of retaining regulated responsibilities while sharing the economics of customer access with a new intermediary.

This would also alter the basis of product competition. A service comparing accounts against a customer’s actual needs would evaluate the practical cost of using them, including conditions that headline pricing obscures. Better presentation inside a proprietary app would carry less weight when software performs the comparison and handles execution. Institutions would gain distribution through assistants while facing more frequent scrutiny of their terms. The resulting pressure could reduce the commercial value of customer inertia, particularly where accounts remain open but an assistant redirects new activity to another provider. That pressure depends on broad coverage; limited integrations could preserve expensive defaults instead.

An independent assistant also has a reason to work across competing providers: its usefulness grows with the share of the customer’s financial life it understands. This creates tension with a bank’s interest in retaining balances and distributing its own products. A general-purpose AI platform brings existing daily engagement to that contest. A specialist financial AI provider brings a narrower purpose that may help establish trust. The eventual leader could emerge from either position.

Neobanks already have relevant advantages, including transaction histories and established customer relationships. Nubank’s 2025 results reported that Pix with AI had surpassed 10 million monthly active users. The next leading AI fintech could therefore develop inside an existing digital bank. Its competitive position would increasingly depend on the financial work customers entrust to it. App activity becomes a less useful measure of engagement when the service completes that work without requiring a visit.

Trust remains a substantial constraint. In FCA-commissioned research involving 5,026 UK financial consumers in April 2026, only 13% were willing to grant AI real-time access to banking and financial data. Twenty per cent said they would use a service acting autonomously within preset goals. Interest in AI clearly exceeds willingness to surrender control. Adoption is likely to develop through specific permissions that expand as customers see reliable outcomes and understand how errors will be resolved.

The operating model behind those permissions will determine how far the experience develops. The OECD’s analysis of AI and open finance treats widespread agentic finance as a theoretical scenario and highlights unresolved reliability and accountability issues. Reading an account balance conveys no authority to transfer it. Investment execution carries additional responsibilities. A credible service would translate customer intent into bounded instructions, with financial institutions enforcing permissions before execution and preserving evidence of what happened.

Commercial incentives will matter equally. The OECD’s personal finance research warns that AI recommendations can embed commercial influence consumers fail to recognise. An assistant paid to favour particular products risks compromising the trust on which delegation depends. Subscription revenue may better support a customer mandate, although willingness to pay remains uncertain. Customer retention would become possible across changes of bank or investment provider. The assistant’s accumulated understanding of household decisions would give it continuity that any individual account relationship might struggle to match.

By 2030, the biggest fintech may be the AI service customers trust to coordinate their financial lives across institutions. Its influence will grow with the work customers delegate to it, extending beyond any individual account or product. Finpace helps institutions transition to AI-native products, connecting AI-led customer experiences with the financial systems that turn customer intent into action. For banks and fintechs, this creates an opportunity to develop a relationship that continues across changes in accounts and providers. The service managing those choices will increasingly shape where financial business goes.