In today’s Finance Pulse, gain insight into how:

• Fintech’s next phase will favor real infrastructure, sustainable unit economics, and measurable improvements in financial outcomes over flashy UX and hype.

• VC firms now use AI to pre-filter startups, making consistent data and authentic founder narratives critical to winning capital.

• Global fintech rails are unlocking cross-border, retail-first investing, as fractional shares and emerging tokenization reshape who can access public markets.

Each of these articles is penned by members of Forbes Finance Council, key luminaries shaping the future of finance.

Fintech’s Next Act: From Shiny Apps To Real Outcomes

Much of fintech’s first wave focused on sleek UX layered on top of legacy rails. As cheap capital dries up, only businesses that genuinely improve financial outcomes are left standing.

Check out some insights for finance leaders:

💡 Innovation Test: True fintech innovation must measurably cut costs, increase access, improve speed/transparency, reduce risk, or enhance efficiency—not just offer a nicer interface.

🧱 Infrastructure Over Interface: Less-visible capabilities—banking-as-a-service, embedded finance, open banking, real-time payments and smarter compliance—are where durable competitive advantage is being built.

📉 End Of The Hype Economy: User growth, funding rounds and high valuations can’t substitute for sound unit economics. Scale only helps if the core model works without a permanent subsidy.

🛡️ Smart, Not Zero, Friction: Some friction protects customers and institutions (fraud prevention, KYC, transaction checks). The goal is to remove “stupid” barriers while optimizing necessary controls.

📊 Mature Fintech Metrics: The next phase rewards real customers, real revenues, sustainable profitability, and products that regulators can trust and businesses truly rely on.

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Raising Capital In The Age Of AI: How VCs Screen You Before You Walk In

AI now shapes which startups make it from inbox to partner meeting—and most founders underestimate how much that first filter matters.

Explore these key moves for founders:

🔍 Optimize Your “Signal Profile”: Align your market category, stage, and model across website, LinkedIn, deck, and press. Clean up old pivots and inconsistent funding data on Crunchbase/PitchBook to reduce noise in automated sourcing.

📊 Make Financials AI-Friendly: Use a single definition for each key metric everywhere, ensure projections clearly tie to assumptions, and keep a clean, logically structured data room. Consistency and parsability speed you through initial screening.

✍️ Stay Authentic In Written Materials: Avoid generic, AI-generated follow-ups that read templated. Investors can tell. Direct, concise founder voice builds more trust than overproduced responses.

🗣️ Win The Partner Room With Conviction: By the time you’re in the meeting, the numbers are largely verified. Partners are testing your command of unit economics from memory, your read on market timing, and your team’s right to win.

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Retail Investors Go Global: How New Rails Are Rewriting Market Access

For most of modern history, public markets were built for institutions and HNWIs—with high minimums, geographic limits, and intimidating gatekeepers. That architecture is breaking.

Check out these shifts reshaping who invests:

🌍 From Local To Global Access: New cross-border fintech infrastructure lets investors in regions like Southeast Asia and Latin America access U.S. and global equities/ETFs through regulated, purpose-built platforms—not work-arounds.

📱 Continuous, Embedded Investing: Retail investors now trade digitally, in small, recurring increments via fractional shares, micro-investing, and “spare change” tools. Investing is becoming continuous, not tied to quarterly reviews or life events.

📈 Retail’s Structural Rise: Retail traders drove about $5.4 trillion in stock/ETF activity in 2025, with roughly 21% of U.S. equity volume now from individuals—a level expected to grow as Gen Z enters markets earlier and more confidently than prior generations.

🔗 Tokenization & Trust At Scale: Next up are tokenized equities and ETFs enabling near-real-time settlement and 24/7 markets. To make democratization durable, infrastructure must be compliant, resilient under stress, and worthy of the trust of tens of millions of new investors.

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Wrapping Up

If these articles sparked your interest, we have a network that you will absolutely love: Forbes Finance Council.

This exclusive, vetted community brings together the brightest minds in finance—founders, CEOs, CFOs, and other finance team leaders.

Put yourself at the forefront of innovation with access to publishing opportunities on Forbes.com, a personalized, SEO-friendly Executive Profile, and the chance to network with other respected leaders in the field.

Join Forbes Finance Council today, and become part of a group driving transformation in finance.