Pencils Down: 2025 Fintech Predictions Reviewed

Some years go by, and when you’re done, you look back and think, “Did anything really happen??” Would anyone have noticed if a time cutter just threw that chunk of time away? A movie analogy would be like Godfather 3, Teen Wolf Too, Police Academy 3 through 8 (who asked for those??). In those cases, time goes by, and things occurred - or did it? Take 2014. The news? Skinny jeans gain popularity. Um, that’s it. Let’s call those teflon years - we did a lap around the sun, now let’s move on.

Then there are years like 2025. It’s no Empire Strikes Back. Or Godfather 2. But a solid Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade type of year. Bordering on Toy Story 3. Solid - lots of action, lots of quotable lines, lots of memories. Politically, it was a global sharknado. And in Fintech, the landscape shifted from not one, but TWO major trends. Crypto and stablecoins zoom back into our lives - this time for real. We think. And there’s the mega-hit: AI. Even after you trim back the hype engine, there’s still so much that's different now than a year ago, it’s hard to believe that was only 12 months of action.

It’s time now to look back at our bold predictions on the quiet day back in January 2025 and see how well we did at predicting how the wave of 2025 hit us:

2025 Bold Prediction #1: Crypto is Back.

Isn’t this cute? It was a bold prediction back in January. The regulation-misers of the previous administration had just cleaned out their desks, thinking they had clearly killed an entire fintech sector. But the bullish remarks by the Trump administration and the quickly-passed GENIUS Act brought crypto back to the grown-up table. With the government making stablecoins legit, huge announcements came from major banks and fintechs. Stripe’s completion of its $1B acquisition for little ol’ Bridge brought salivating VCs from around the world looking for the next hot thing. At this point, any fintech dealing with global money flows has an active stablecoin strategy. Less heralded but just as active is the defi space where innovators are really pushing hard for new models in insurance, loans and exchanges. Yet, I missed on thinking that the use of cryptocurrencies in American commerce would be more mainstream by the end of the year. It just wasn’t meant for that, it seems.

Prediction Score: A-

2025 Bold Prediction #2: Social Commerce Boom

To be clear, social commerce had huge trend shifts in 2025. With TikTok’s success in social commerce, other major platforms like Instagram and Facebook in the US tried to revamp the creator-led commerce channel, creating cleaner on-platform optimization of this lucrative $2T global market. Video and livestreaming took an even higher share of commerce than in previous years as these creators made shopping exciting and engaging. And naturally, our friend AI has found all these great items and is creating new paths to new places, with Gen Z’ers leading the way with their wallets. But in the end, social commerce’s growth rate is only a bit over 10%. That’s pretty good for a $T dollar industry but only a couple clicks faster than Grandpa E-Commerce, which is predicted to grow at 7-8%. This is more a rapid market adoption to preferences than it is a new, explosive market overall.

Prediction Score: B

2025 Bold Prediction #3: Open Banking Steps Into the Light

Oof. Well, take everything I said about how a change of administration unlocked the power of Crypto and play it backwards for Open Banking. The Dodd-Frank Rule 1033 clarification, which was going to be one of the big legacy actions of outgoing CFPB Chairman Gensler, got dumped with most of the CFPB within weeks of the Trump administration taking over. Years of trying to balance consumer, merchant, fintech, and bank needs went “poof” overnight. And perhaps Open Banking for payments was never going to work, given how much JPMC and PNC hated it. But with this chaos, merchants hoping to find a cheaper rail via Open Banking Payments for their loyal users largely threw up their hands and said, “Hey Stablecoin Guy - what are you selling over there? How do I use that stuff?” I actually think Open Banking and Stablecoins have a lot to talk about, as together they can make non-card commerce interesting - but that’s a prediction for another year.

Prediction Score: D

2025 Bold Prediction #4: AI - Somewhere, Somehow

Right up there with “And the sun will rise tomorrow.” Even at the start of 2025, there was a lot of momentum with AI touching more of our lives. Yet as late as May, during Stripe’s Sessions trade show, the words “Agentic Commerce” were still being defined. Yes, an “agent” could one day buy you a perfect trip to Miami with zero input from you, and you’ll be guaranteed to love it. But that’s a very limited, often-mocked use case. What is changing is our discovery, permissions, and how we buy things, with Visa/Mastercard, Google, OpenAI, and Stripe building out new protocols, directories, paths to merchants, and purchasing support tools. Similar to Social Commerce above, this may be more about improving how we do something we already do today, rather than a new economy. But like stablecoins, everyone in payments and commerce is trying to figure out how they play with the new toys. Meanwhile, every financial service out there is implementing AI to improve their customer experience with better search, better customer support, and new product discovery paths. In short, this story has just begun and will play out for years.

Prediction Score: A- (the prediction title captures the spirit of the year)

Dang. That’s a B- average. I should have studied harder for that Open Banking final or I could have made the Dean’s List. I missed some of the bigger resulting trends around the new rise of Neobanks, the growth of Prediction Markets, and traditional banks being front and center in the news again. But in the end, 2025 was a momentous year of industry-wide change where huge swaths of the industry tried to think through how AI and stablecoins/crypto would impact their top or bottom line and rush toward solutions or be left behind. And with VC investments, major hiring waves, and regular quarterly announcements on these subjects, we’ll feel the impact of these trends for quite a few years more. That was one great movie.