What’s Next for Crypto and Fintech in 2027? Yuliya Barabash Breaks Down KPMG’s Latest Findings

Global fintech investment increased to $103.1 billion in H1 2026, up from roughly $72.2 billion in H2 2025, according to KPMG’s latest Pulse of Fintech report. Here, the headline number hides a more revealing detail in that the deal volume actually tumbled – from around 2,500 transactions to 2,100. A small handful of mega-deals accounted for most of the capital deployed. Digital assets alone pulled in $11.1 billion – already ahead of full-year totals from both 2023 and 2024.

1. KPMG reports that fintech investment reached $103.1B in H1 2026, while deal volume fell significantly. From your experience working with fintech and crypto businesses, what does this tell us about how the market is changing?

Yuliya: Honestly, the second number tells me a lot more than the first. While it’s clear that 
            money is back, what’s less obvious, and more important, is that easy money isn’t back 
            with it. It shows that while investors have far more capital to deploy, they’re also 
            significantly more selective about where it goes.

Per my observation, scaled, proven business-models and real infrastructure are winning out over early-stage bets. From where I sit, advising companies trying to get licensed and launched, that shift is actually healthy. It essentially rewards the businesses that can demonstrate real operational maturity, not just a compelling pitch deck.

I’d also like to point out that concentration like this changes what the so-called “raising capital” signals. A handful of mega-deals doesn’t mean fintech broadly is thriving. Rather, it shows that a narrow set of category leaders are pulling most of the oxygen. For everyone else, the bar to get funded has quietly gotten higher.

1. $11.1 billion went into areas such as stablecoins, B2B payments and custody. Why do you think investors are increasingly prioritizing practical financial infrastructure over speculative crypto products?

Yuliya: This is genuinely my favorite trend in the whole report. For years, everything in crypto  
            was projected as revolutionary. The future of money, disruptive, world-changing, and 
            what not. Now, it’s becoming something quieter – routine.

To say that stablecoins have been one of crypto’s most successful use-cases won’t be a stretch. They are increasingly being used to serve treasury management, B2B settlement, and cross-border payments, not just as crypto trading collateral. That’s exactly the kind of use-case regulators can underwrite, because it looks like infrastructure, not speculation – and infrastructure tends to attract the type of capital that doesn’t disappear the moment sentiment turns.

Banks want in too. Earlier this month, 21 heavyweights – Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citi, MUFG, Deutsche Bank, and UBS among them – said they’re teaming up to launch a USD stablecoin backed 1:1 by reserves. The joint venture should be up and running by end of 2026, with the token itself likely arriving sometime in H1 2027.

As a result, we may soon see two parallel models – tokenized deposits for banking infrastructure, and stablecoins for public blockchains, cross-border payments, and digital assets.

From a licensing standpoint, this shift actually makes our work more predictable. A payments-and-custody business has a clearer regulatory pathway than a purely speculative product ever did. Regulators know how to think about settlement infrastructure, but they’re still writing the playbook for pure speculation.

1. Do you think this concentration of investment signals a healthier, more mature fintech market — with investors now rewarding sustainable business models rather than growth at all costs?

Yuliya: Yes, and I’d even go a step further, and take the opportunity to say that this is what a
            maturing market is supposed to look like. Growth-at-all-costs was never sustainable. It
            just took a couple of down cycles for capital to recalibrate.

What I see in my own client base reflects this. Companies that come to us now asking serious questions about licensing timelines, banking relationships, and long-term jurisdictional fit tend to be the ones actually raising capital. The ones still chasing the fastest, cheapest path to market are increasingly the exception.

1. KPMG highlights the rise of agentic commerce. If an AI agent can make financial decisions or purchases on behalf of a person or business, who should legally authorize those transactions – and who is responsible if something goes wrong?

Yuliya: This is the question that actually stopped me when I read the report. It sounds like an AI
            trend on surface, but underneath it’s a financial services legal question we don’t have
            settled answers for yet.

Who authorizes an AI agent to spend money on someone’s behalf? How does a bank verify that a given transaction is legitimate when the “customer” initiating it isn’t a human? And when something goes wrong – fraud, an unauthorized purchase, a compliance failure – who actually bears responsibility? The agent’s owner? The platform? The financial institution that processed it?

We’ve spent the last few years asking how AI changes financial services. I think the more urgent question, starting now, is how financial services and their underlying legal frameworks need to change when the customer itself is an AI agent. Identify verification, fraud prevention, authorization chains – all of it needs rethinking.

1. Looking at the next stage of fintech and crypto, what should founders be thinking about from a licensing and regulatory perspective if they want to build a business that can scale internationally?

Yuliya: Building a fintech or crypto business is getting more expensive every year, and that’s not 
            really about licensing fees. Rather, it’s because launching properly now means real
            infrastructure – including custody, compliance, and banking relationships – not just a 
            license and a website. The typical founder we work with today isn’t a startup with a
            $10,000 budget. It’s a mid-sized or even large business budgeting $500,000 or more
            just to launch compliantly. 

Given that reality, here’s what I’d actually tell founders to do. First, ensure that you budget for infrastructure from day one, not as an afterthought after you’ve found traction. Retrofitting compliance onto a live product is far more expensive than building it in from the start. 

           Second, choose your jurisdiction based on where you’ll be in three to five years, not  m   
          where the license is fastest today, since relicensing later costs more than doing it right      
          once.

Third, if your product touches agentic commerce in any way, document your consent flows and audit trails now, before a regulator asks you to prove they exist. And fourth, keep a close eye on tokenization. Asset tokenization isn’t slowing down, and the founders building infrastructure for it early will have a real head start once it moves further into the mainstream.

A silver lining is that regulatory and licensing frameworks are becoming genuinely more transparent across a growing number of countries. That’s a real advantage compared to, say, five years ago, as you can plan around clearer rules now. The bar is just higher than it used to be, and founders should build for that bar, not the one that existed when the industry started.