TechRound is excited to announce the winners of our FinTech50 2026!
TechRound is proud to announce the winners of our FinTech50 campaign 2026, celebrating the entrepreneurs and companies changing the global financial landscape. From payments and personal finance to blockchain and beyond – our list has it all!
Founded in 2016, TechRound is the UK’s best-known and fastest-growing startup and tech news site. This is where decision makers, investors and startups of all sizes and nature come to find out the latest developments and trends within the industry.
See The List
Top 50 – See Here >>
Top 40 – See Here >>
Top 30 – See Here >>
Top 20 – See Here >>
Top 10 – See Here >>
Who Ranked Number 1? – See Here >>
Feedback From The Judges
The 2026 entries demonstrated that fintech’s most exciting chapter is about infrastructure, not just interfaces. Standouts like bunq, Datarails and Silverflow are rebuilding the rails others run on quietly but profoundly. What impressed me most was the depth of genuine AI integration: not marketing language, but AI that makes underwriting decisions, predicts distress 60 days out, and detects fraud before transactions clear.
The inclusion stories – Platcorp serving a million Africans, Creditspring expanding credit to those the system ignores, reminded me why this industry matters. The next FinTech50 will look very different. The foundations are being laid right now.
Chris Ball, CEO at Hoxton Wealth
Several entries stood out for their clarity and depth of thinking. The strongest teams demonstrated a firm grasp of the operational realities behind their markets, particularly in areas such as payments, compliance, and financial infrastructure. Their submissions were specific and grounded, with a clear sense of how their products are implemented and adopted in practice. There was also a noticeable difference in how AI was presented, with the more compelling companies using it to support defined outcomes rather than as a general positioning tool. Overall, the most impressive entries combined practical execution with a mature understanding of risk, control, and trust within financial services.
Madhu Nadig, Co-Founder and CTO at Flagright
This year’s FinTech50 entries reflect a market at a genuine inflection point. The dominant theme is clear: agentic AI is moving from pilot to production across fraud, compliance, treasury, and payments. What excites me is the shift from AI as a co-pilot to AI as an autonomous operator, orchestrating decisions, connecting ecosystems, and acting across agents. Alongside this, real-time payment infrastructure is finally maturing, making the promise of always-on, borderless treasury a reality. The strongest entries combine deep workflow embeddedness with genuine scalability. The weakest lack differentiation from commodity infrastructure. Overall, this list reflects where financial services is actually heading.
Jean-Baptiste Gaudemet, SVP Strategic Innovation Lab at Kyriba
Judging this pool reminded me how varied the fintech category has become, and how the focus has shifted from consumer apps to picks-and-shovels. The strongest entrants were almost uniformly infrastructure plays: Prometeo and Juspay as cross-border banking middleware, Ctrl Alt and Tokenovate operating inside regulatory sandboxes, and REGnosys owning the regulatory standard for ISDA trade reporting.
The most defensible positions belong to the companies that banks, regulators, and other fintechs genuinely depend on. Coming from the Nigeria and Kenya markets, two things stood out to me. First, FALKIN moves scam prevention upstream of the transaction itself. It’s the right shape of solution for a problem we see daily. Second, Bir ecosystem and Platcorp Group show what fintech consolidation actually looks like in under-penetrated emerging markets.
The pool’s main weakness was a long tail of payment-orchestration entries that struggled to articulate genuine differentiation against incumbents.
Tony Odiba, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Risevest
I know it may feel like I say this every year, but the entries really do get better and better each time! I genuinely enjoyed learning about all these companies and what they do.
But for me, Mia Wealth stood out the most because it feels like a different and useful fintech idea. Many finance and fintech companies are trying to get adults to save or invest better, but Mia Wealth starts much earlier.
I think turning birthday and Christmas gifting into investments for children is genius because it builds on existing family habits and behaviours instead of requiring people to learn completely new ones.
Also, the timing is just right – the cost of living is high and things like property feel harder to access. This is when parents must consider long-term financial security for their children. A business that helps families build wealth from childhood feels far more relevant today than it might have a few years ago.
Another thing I liked is that it has a female founder, Sophia Jarvis, building around a real consumer insight relating to motherhood and gifting, as well as money habits. I feel like it gives the business a more thoughtful angle.
Sometimes, it’s the simplest, most viable and most intentional ideas that win!
Zee Yende, Reporter at TechRound
The top 50 candidates demonstrate strong alignment with meaningful financial service innovation, particularly across infrastructure, lending, payments, and embedded finance. I have prioritised companies that address genuine industry inefficiencies with a clear understanding of regulatory and operational constraints. The strongest entries show credible integration into existing financial ecosystems and a pathway to scalable, sustainable impact. Businesses with a solid grasp of risk, compliance, and real-world execution stand out clearly. Lower-ranked companies tend to be more consumer-focused or less differentiated.
However, overall, this cohort reflects a healthy balance between innovation and practical applicability within modern fintech.
Dr. Marko Sjoblom, CEO at Fiinu plc
Thank You To Our Judges
Chris Ball, CEO at Hoxton Wealth
Chris started his career in 2004 with KPMG as a Tax Adviser specialising in personal taxation issues relating to investment income and pensions. He trained at the KPMG Tax Business School in Canary Wharf for his Chartered Accounting and Chartered Taxation Adviser exams.
After 7 years with KPMG, Chris moved to the Middle East to join the deVere Group, where he continued his work as an IFA, starting in their Abu Dhabi offices and eventually heading up the Qatar operations for the group dealing with HNW and UHNW individuals.
In 2018 he and founded Hoxton Wealth (then called Hoxton Capital Management) where the sole emphasis of the group is to help HNW and UHNW clients with borderless global financial advice. Chris’ speciality is assisting individuals with their retirement planning needs. The company now employs around 300 people worldwide, has offices in UAE, UK, USA, SE Asia and Australia and has a total AUM of $3.3bn (£2.5bn).
Madhu Nadig, Co-Founder and CTO at Flagright
Madhu spearheads engineering and design, skillfully driving the development of cutting-edge compliance and fraud prevention systems. His achievements in cloud computing, particularly in building high-performance infrastructures and architecting real-time systems, have had a significant impact on the logistics and fintech industries.
In addition, Madhu has showcased considerable expertise in data analytics and integration, especially within the pharmaceutical industry. His wide-ranging skills and innovative approach have firmly established him as a trailblazer in the tech industry, setting the stage for continuous advancements in the field.
Jean-Baptiste Gaudemet, SVP Strategic Innovation Lab at Kyriba
Jean-Baptiste Gaudemet brings twenty years of experience in fintech, combining deep expertise across data, analytics, agenting ai, and digital currencies. Currently serving as SVP of Product Innovation, he leads the prototyping of next-generation, AI-native liquidity performance solution.
Previously, he led Kyriba’s Data and Analytics organisation, where he spearheaded the launch of Trusted AI and Liquidity Analytics, empowering treasurers with reliable, contextualised and actionable insights. Jean-Baptiste is a graduate of École Polytechnique, France’s leading engineering institution and is a regular speaker at industry events. He has appeared on BFM Business to discuss the future of AI in finance.
Tony Odiba, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Risevest
Tony Odiba is Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Risevest, a wealth management platform serving users across Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda and Kenya. He oversees product across the Rise Group: Rise (managed portfolios), Hisa (self-directed trading), and AssetBase (an alternative exchange for tokenised assets). Tony brings a systems-thinking lens to capital markets infrastructure, regulatory complexity, and emerging-market fintech. Having built and scaled fintech products across multiple African markets, he is well-positioned to evaluate what makes early-stage fintech businesses viable and durable.
Zee Yende, Reporter at TechRound
Zee is a TechRound reporter who specialises in tech, startup news, AI developments and digital business. On fintech, she researches and reports the latest fintech trends and developments as well as findings from UK fintech businesses.
The world is moving digital, and so are our currencies. It’s so important for businesses and startups even outside of the fintech industry to stay up to date and understand how the industry works. She brings a strong understanding of how fintech connects with everyday business, from payments and digital banking to emerging tools that impact and influence how companies work with growth in mind.
Dr. Marko Sjoblom, CEO at Fiinu plc
Dr Marko Sjoblom is a successful second-time entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Fiinu plc, the London-listed fintech behind the Plugin Overdraft®. He is also a former elite athlete with a doctorate in artificial intelligence and unbundling banking services.
His fintech experience includes over 20 years on Wall Street and in the City of London, including ten years with leading banking, treasury, risk and payments companies. He has served as a treasury steering committee member at four DAX-30 companies. Prior to Fiinu, Marko founded one of the largest overdraft-style lenders in the UK. This company developed a fully automated software robot that lent and recovered over $1 billion in small increments in the UK without relying on credit bureau data. His previous business was independently valued at $171 million after five years.
