The Global Fintech Report 2026 from Boston Consulting Group and FT Partners put a number on the sector’s largest missed opportunity. Fintech generates more than half a trillion dollars in revenue yet accounts for only around 4 per cent of a roughly 13 trillion dollar global financial services market, and B2B is the least penetrated segment: 3 per cent of B2B financial services revenue overall, with 11 per cent in payments, 3 per cent in lending, 1 per cent in deposits and close to zero in insurance. The report’s explanation is that the obstacle is not product capability but the difficulty of persuading businesses to replace financial infrastructure they already rely on.
Karine Martinez, head of strategic partnerships at Wallester, a European card-issuing platform, works with fintechs, lenders and embedded finance platforms to launch and scale card programmes. She answered eight written questions from The Fintech Times on whether the 3 per cent figure really is a trust problem, what a business looks at before it switches, and where implementations go wrong.
Martinez reads the figure as a trust deficit rather than a capability gap, and argues that is the more useful reading. Most fintech platforms are technically capable, she said, so if adoption were purely a capability problem it would be closing faster. What happens in practice is different: businesses are not comparing feature lists, they are weighing the operational risk of replacing infrastructure they already depend on. A young company with simple, recent processes can afford to experiment. A business running on workflows that have quietly held it together for years is making a different calculation, not whether the new option is better but what it costs if it fails and how hard it is to unwind. “Until a provider can answer that convincingly, the incumbent system wins by default, however imperfect it is.” That, in her words, is not a mundane adoption curve but a trust deficit with a very specific shape.
Trust is tested at the first real interaction
Businesses decide a provider is safe, she said, by watching how the first real interaction with the infrastructure goes rather than what is promised in the sales process. Her example is GF Money, a financial services provider operating across Scandinavia, which moved from a traditional credit-line offering into a card programme with Wallester that has grown to more than 27,000 cards issued across Finland, Sweden and Denmark. David Öhlund, its chief executive for Scandinavia, was quoted in Wallester’s release on the report: “By using a single API stack, we can now offer a virtual card during the application process. Within five minutes of completing the application, the customer can access the card and start using it.” For Martinez that is not a brochure claim but something the partner and its customers experienced directly.
Beyond the first launch, businesses look at whether the roadmap can flex as they grow, whether the relationship holds up when something needs fixing quickly and whether the team behind the API is easy to work with day to day. “Trust compounds with every smooth interaction after signature.” It is not, she said, a single decision made once during procurement.
Where projects fail after signature
Embedded finance projects most often fail in the transition from commercial agreement to implementation, and the technology is rarely the only problem. Responsibilities are unclear, operational or compliance requirements surface too late, and the scope starts to move once technical teams become involved. There is also a more fundamental issue. “If embedded finance is simply added as a standalone product, without strengthening the partner’s core proposition, improving the customer experience or creating meaningful commercial value, it is unlikely to remain a priority or succeed long-term.” Successful launches need clear ownership, realistic timelines and early involvement from product, technology, compliance and operations, together with a shared understanding of the outcome the partnership is meant to create.
Test the API before you sign
On API quality, her advice to buyers is direct. “Ask for real sandbox access, not a slide deck.” A buyer should be able to hit the actual endpoints, see how errors are handled and judge how complete and current the documentation is before any contract is signed. A good sign is documentation a technical team can work from without asking basic questions: clear endpoints, consistent behaviour, nothing that requires guesswork. A bad answer looks like delay in getting sandbox access, documentation that does not match what the API actually does, or a vendor that can only describe the product rather than let you test it. “If a provider is hesitant to give you hands-on access early, that hesitation usually tells you something about how the rest of the relationship will go.”
Three to four months, if the customer is ready
Across Wallester’s partners, launches typically take three to four months from signature to first card issued, with the fastest internal case at 28 days for virtual cards. Regulatory frameworks such as PSD2 and API-driven infrastructure have made the environment far more structured than it used to be, so the technical path is shorter than most people expect. What slips projects is customer readiness. Teams underestimate the compliance, regulatory and operational requirements of launching a card programme, which produces additional work once implementation has started, and changes in scope, late product decisions and new requirements extend delivery. “In practice, speed depends as much on organisational readiness and decision-making as it does on the technology.”
Lowering the operational risk of switching, in her view, means giving partners a way to prove it to themselves before they are fully committed: real sandbox access, a phased rollout instead of an all-or-nothing go-live, and reference points from partners who have already made the switch. Most providers ask a business to trust the pitch, and very few make it easy to de-risk the decision incrementally. Showing a partner a working, scaled example, such as GF Money’s move from a credit line to more than 27,000 cards, does more to lower perceived risk than reassurance in a sales conversation. “Proof beats promise every time in this category.”
Compliance becomes product architecture
Compliance is becoming one of the largest implementation workstreams for many programmes rather than an approval step at the end. Martinez cited ClearBank research finding that 49 per cent of senior leaders see regulatory compliance as a major challenge when implementing embedded finance. Customer expectations have moved the other way: whether opening an account, accessing financial services or embedding a payment method, customers expect the experience to be instant. Delivering that means designing compliance into the product and customer journey, from KYC and KYB checks and risk controls to transaction monitoring, without adding friction. The burden is rising as regulatory expectations tighten. She pointed to PwC‘s 2026 EMEA AML Survey, in which more than half of financial institutions expected significant disruption from sustained compliance pressure and around a third expected anti-money laundering costs to rise by 10 to 30 per cent. “Compliance is no longer an add-on. It has become part of the product architecture from day one.”
For the 3 per cent figure to move meaningfully by 2030, she does not expect a new feature or a bigger roadmap to be the cause. The shift, she said, will come from providers making execution provable rather than claimed: more standardised and faster onboarding paths, real transparency about timelines and what can go wrong, and enough proven case studies in the market that switching starts to feel like the safer choice rather than the riskier one. As more businesses see peers launch cleanly and scale without friction, the perceived risk of switching drops for everyone else. It is a confidence problem more than a technology one, and confidence, in her words, “moves slower than product development, but it does move.”
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