Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) are often seen as the ultimate milestone for fintechs – the moment they achieve optimal maturity and scale.
During the booming market of 2021, over 62 fintechs went public (including the likes of Robinhood, Affirm, and Marqeta), doubling the previous year’s tally. However, a post-Covid market correction effectively slammed the public listing window shut.
Now, the public market tide is turning again. Recent listings from major fintechs like Klarna, BitGo, and Chime, coupled with the historic IPO of Elon Musk’s SpaceX in June, suggest momentum is building. This resurgence raises an important question: what is the current sentiment around fintech IPOs?
To gauge the market’s mood and uncover what the future holds for the sector, FinTech Futures sat down with industry experts to find out.
The current fintech IPO landscape
Yusuf Ozdalga, partner and head of UK and Europe at QED Investors, explains: “2025 represented a lot of pent-up fintech demand being released, and then in 2026 SpaceX, energy, and AI grabbed the headlines. From a European perspective, it is worth noting that there is huge pent-up fintech demand there, with lots of successful and exciting fintech companies considering IPOs, e.g. Monzo and Revolut.”
Meanwhile, Jonathan Crystal, managing partner at Crystal Venture Partners, finds that the IPO market is “clearly healthier than it was two years ago”, highlighting that “the US remains the most natural market for companies of scale”, while “Europe has been more difficult”.
Crystal notes that in Asia, India stands out as a “fintech pipeline”, while in China and Hong Kong, “much of the current IPO activity is concentrated in other parts of technology”. He also adds that investors today are “distinguishing between companies rather than buying a category”.
James St. Clair, president at brokerage fintech ViewTrade Security Inc., says that demand for IPOs is “becoming very apparent”. While IPO activity was “almost non-existent over the past few years”, St. Clair states “many fintech companies are now teed up, and the market is picking up steam”.
“It is important to note that while the flow of private funds into fintech companies has increased dramatically over the past year, in anticipation of subsequent IPOs, the number of companies that are the recipient of these funds has decreased,” continues St. Clair.
“The theme appears consistent with the pattern that quality is winning over quantity. We’ve seen a few fintech firms pull their IPOs perhaps due to market conditions, but also perhaps realising that they have not focused on the metrics investors are looking for today.”
Metrics to value late-stage private fintech
So, what metrics are institutional and retail investors looking for to back fintechs in 2026?
While acknowledging that profitability is of course a key driver, St. Clair notes that investors are also “now looking at EBITDA, free cash flow, sustainable recurring technology or platform fees versus transactional revenues, and then the quality of the customers the fintech engages with”.
Meanwhile, Crystal explains that capital providers want to know “why the growth is repeatable, what it costs to produce, how much revenue recurs, how long customers stay, what margins look like at scale and how much capital the company needs to keep growing”.
Comparing today’s landscape to the 2020-21 boom, Ozdalga states that “today, the focus is also on profitability and return on capital”, in contrast to the previous emphasis on revenue and growth.
“For fintech specifically, investors today also focus on how durable the business model is with regard to rate changes as well as regulatory changes, and also what kinds of moats the business has in the age of AI,” adds Ozdalga.
Valuation gaps
According to St. Clair, another sentiment driver is the valuation of late-stage private companies that are coming to market. He explains: “As companies stay private longer, the meat left on the bone is rather thin, which is why a few recent IPOs have not performed well in the short term.” But why has this shifted so dramatically over the past few years?
Addressing the current valuation gaps, Ozdalga says this divide exists because “private markets tend to be less volatile and founders have the opportunity to partner with funds that are more aligned with them on valuation, whereas public markets tend to be more volatile and open to all sorts of actors founders cannot influence, such as short sellers”.
On the differences in valuations today compared to the 2021 boom, Crystal highlights: “A lot of companies were simply priced too aggressively in 2021. Some have reset. Some stayed private and grew into their valuations. And some of the best companies have enough access to private capital and secondary liquidity that they have been able to wait.”
“Stripe and Revolut are good examples of the last category,” adds Crystal. “Both have continued to grow at enormous scale without needing the public markets to provide liquidity or validate the valuation.”
For St. Clair, he finds that around 2021, “many late-stage private companies boasted valuations during the boom era that far exceed their down-to-earth valuations of today”. He notes: “There are many examples of companies that were prepared to enter the SPAC market at unicorn valuations, only to face reality and abandon these high expectations.”
“Many of these companies retrenched and spent time building their businesses, strengthening their customer base, stabilising their revenue streams, including recurring technology fees, and ultimately reflecting positive income statements,” continues St. Clair. “It appears that companies now hope to be rewarded by focusing on multiples of EBITDA rather than multiples of revenues.”
Factors influencing investor appetite
While IPO appetite appears to have been gradually rising from the lulls of 2022 and 2023, some companies have been deterred from going public due to factors outside their control.
Crystal explains: “IPOs require reasonably stable markets, and a company can spend years preparing to go public only to have the window close in a matter of days. Management can’t control the window. It can control whether the business is ready when the window opens.”
One such area impacting markets is geopolitics. Ozdalga notes: “Geopolitics is nervy to say the least, but as usual, institutional investors find it very hard to price geopolitical risk, and hence to some extent this tends to get avoided until it stares you right in the face.”
Regulation can also play a key role when it comes to IPOs. Evidence of this can be seen in the US, with Ozdalga stating that frameworks such as the GENIUS and CLARITY Acts have been a “big tailwind, especially for stablecoins, which is a hot fintech area”.
Meanwhile, in the UK, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) recently simplified the country’s IPO rules in a bid to enhance London’s appeal as a destination for companies pursuing public listings.
Another factor impacting investor appetite is interest rates. However, St. Clair finds that while “higher interest rates present many problems for companies that depend on access to funds (lenders, fintech start-ups, refinance fintechs), some fintechs tend to flourish in this environment, especially those that generate revenues from idle client cash or deposits (neobanks, brokerages)”.
Ultimately, St. Clair believes that “if a fintech has proven itself worthy of the valuation being presented, offers a service that appeals to investors and has successfully focused on profitability and a sustained business model, investors can look past the noise of world events in order to participate”.
Future predictions
As we move further into the second half of 2026 and look toward the new year, Ozdalga asserts that “the main thing to watch is how the big names (SpaceX, but also OpenAI and Anthropic) will trade”.
He notes: “If the big names do well, capital will likely rate into other sectors more broadly. We see the fourth quarter of 2026 as a litmus test for fintech IPOs.”
Crystal states that firms providing fintech, payments, and financial infrastructure will “continue to produce public companies”. “There are also strong businesses in wealth, trading, and digital assets that have now reached enough scale to be evaluated on their actual economics. I would put insurance high on the list as well,” continues Crystal.
Crystal adds that he does not think the IPO market “needs another 2021”, explaining: “Good companies need to come public, hit their numbers, and trade well. If that happens, there are plenty more behind them.”
For St. Clair, fintech companies that “monetise their revenues across multiple revenue streams” are going to prove to be the most successful. He believes that the front-runners will be wealthtech and brokerage infrastructure firms, explaining that “their combination of recurring platform fees, transaction activity, interest income, securities lending, and advisory services creates a diversified revenue model that is hard to beat, particularly as asset values continue to grow”.
However, while macroeconomic factors such as the “inflation outlook” and “geopolitical powder kegs” remain, these uncertainties make it “difficult to predict what the IPO landscape will look like over the next couple of years”, says St. Clair.
Overall, St. Clair holds the view that we will see a “robust IPO market ahead”, driven by the “exciting technology being developed every day and enhanced exponentially”. He concludes: “As long as investors exist, there will be compelling opportunities in the IPO market.”
The article was originally published on Fintech Futures – read here.
