By Karine Martinez, Head of Strategic Partnerships, Wallester
Every so often a single figure reorganises how you think about your own industry. For me this year, it has been three per cent. That is the share of B2B financial-services revenue that fintech has actually captured, according to the Boston Consulting Group and FT Partners Global Fintech Report 2026. I have not been able to leave that number alone since I read it.
On the surface, fintech is thriving. The same report has the sector generating more than half a trillion dollars in revenue and growing at around 22 per cent, several times the pace of incumbent banks. Then you set that growth rate next to market share, and the picture changes completely. Fintech holds only about 4 per cent of the roughly 13-trillion-dollar global financial-services market. In B2B, the least-penetrated part of it, that figure falls to 3 per cent.
The 3% Problem: B2B Fintech’s Untapped Opportunity
Break the B2B number down and it gets more revealing. Fintechs have taken 11 per cent of payments, 3 per cent of lending, 1 per cent of deposits, and close to nothing in insurance. Whole categories of everyday financial work – expense management, accounts payable, reconciliation – still run on established systems and a surprising amount of manual effort.
I don’t read 3 per cent as a failure. I read it as the honest measure of how much of the B2B market is still there to be won.
Why B2B Fintech Adoption Stalls: Switching Risk, Not Product Gaps
The obvious question is why, if the products are so much better, adoption is still this low. The report is clear that the barrier is not capability. Most fintech platforms today are, technically, very good. The barrier is the risk of replacing infrastructure a business already depends on.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. A young company with simple, recent processes can afford to try something new. A business running on workflows that have quietly held it together for years is making a different calculation entirely. For them, the question is never simply, “Is this better?” It is, “What does this cost us if it fails, and how hard would it be to unwind?” Until a provider can answer that convincingly, the established option wins by default, however imperfect it is.
Execution Has Become the Real Competitive Advantage
This is why I have come to think the real competitive advantage in embedded finance is no longer the feature list. It is execution. By execution I mean the unglamorous things a partner actually experiences: how quickly they get from signed contract to live product, how predictable the implementation is, and whether the infrastructure keeps holding as they scale into new markets without creating fresh operational complexity of its own.
Execution is what speaks directly to the switching risk. A business does not get over its fear of replacing infrastructure by reading a better brochure. It gets over it by watching the new system go live cleanly, on schedule, and then keep working. Every smooth launch gives the partner another reason to believe the change was worth making. Five minutes, five days, five weeks, whatever the benchmark, it is the gap between a customer who has been told about a product and a customer who is already using one, and closing that gap is what turns an infrastructure decision from something that has to be justified in theory into a result a business can see working in practice.
The Next Phase of B2B Fintech Will Reward Operators
I think that is where the next few years of B2B fintech get decided. As embedded finance matures, the advantage is shifting away from who can announce the most features and toward who can take the most friction out of adoption and, critically, who can create the most value through the partnership. The providers that capture more of that remaining market will not necessarily be the ones with the cleverest roadmap. They will be the ones a business trusts to launch on time and stay standing under load.
Because sustainable partnerships rarely come from simply bolting one more product onto an existing offering. They happen when two companies combine complementary capabilities to create one proposition that delivers a better customer outcome and can scale over time.
For a business deciding who to trust with the money that keeps it running, the deciding factor is no longer which provider promises the most. It is which one can prove, day after day, that the switch was worth making. That, far more than any feature, is what will determine who wins the next phase of B2B fintech.
Karine Martinez is Head of Strategic Partnerships at Wallester, a European card-issuing and embedded-finance platform.
