FinTech-marktonderzoek

---

With digital disruption reshaping traditional financial services, businesses must navigate this dynamic terrain with agility and insight. FinTech market research emerges as an indispensable tool in this endeavor, offering deep insights into emerging trends, regulatory landscapes, and disruptive technologies.

In a rapidly evolving digital landscape, where financial transactions are increasingly digitized, the need for insightful FinTech market research has never been more crucial… But, how are businesses navigating this dynamic environment? What insights can be gleaned to stay ahead in this competitive arena?

Fintech Market Research: How Leading Firms Convert Signal Into Strategie

Fintech market research has matured from category sizing into a precision instrument for capital allocation. The leaders treat it that way.

The firms winning in payments, lending, and embedded finance are not the ones with the most data. They are the ones asking sharper questions of better-defined respondents. They separate durable behavior from funded hype, and they pressure-test commercial assumptions before product roadmaps harden.

This is where fintech market research earns its keep. It clarifies which corridors, segments, and partner economics justify investment, and which are noise dressed as opportunity.

Why Fintech Market Research Demands a Different Operating Model

Traditional financial services research mapped relatively stable institutions, products, and regulators. Fintech moves on a different clock. Open banking adoption, account-to-account payments, scheme tokenization, and stablecoin settlement reshape category boundaries inside a single planning cycle.

That speed creates two practical problems for VP-level decision makers. First, syndicated reports describe yesterday’s market structure. Second, internal analytics describe internal customers, not the addressable population a new product must convert.

The operating model that works treats research as a continuous evidence layer rather than a project. It pairs structured B2B expert interviews with merchant, treasurer, and consumer fieldwork, then feeds findings directly into pricing, partnership, and roadmap decisions. The cadence is quarterly, not annual.

The Segments Where Fintech Market Research Creates the Most Lift

Five areas consistently reward disciplined primary research because public data understates the variance between winners and laggards.

Embedded finance. The economics shift dramatically by host platform, vertical, and underwriting model. Vertical SaaS platforms attaching payments, lending, or insurance see materially different attach rates and net revenue retention than horizontal players. Research clarifies which verticals genuinely monetize.

Payments and acquiring. Merchant acquiring margin compression is real, but uneven. Card-not-present fraud, scheme tokenization economics, and ISO 20022 migration costs land differently across mid-market and enterprise merchants. Win/loss analysis at the merchant level exposes where pricing power still exists.

Cross-border flows. Corridor-level research, not global averages, drives the decisions. A corridor between the US and Mexico behaves nothing like one between Singapore and Indonesia in terms of FX spread tolerance, settlement preference, and compliance friction.

Core banking modernization. Buyer intent surveys collapse without segmentation by asset tier, charter type, and existing core vendor. Community banks, credit unions, and regional banks evaluate Thought Machine, Mambu, and 10x against incumbents on entirely different criteria.

Crypto and stablecoin infrastructure. Treasurer and CFO interviews now matter more than retail sentiment. Use cases tied to B2B settlement, payroll for distributed workforces, and merchant payouts are advancing while retail speculation cools.

What Separates Useful Fintech Market Research From Decorative Research

Three disciplines distinguish the work that changes decisions from the work that fills slide decks.

Respondent precision. A study on real-time payments adoption is only as credible as the seniority and function of the people interviewed. Treasury operations leads at Fortune 500 corporates produce different signal than fintech product managers. The leaders specify both.

Behavioral evidence over stated intent. Stated willingness to switch banks, adopt buy-now-pay-later, or accept account-to-account payments routinely overstates actual behavior. Conjoint exercises, controlled trade-off tasks, and ethnographic observation of payment selection at checkout produce defensible elasticity estimates.

Competitive intelligence with named players. Useful research names the relevant set: Stripe, Adyen, Block, Plaid, Marqeta, Brex, Ramp, Wise, Revolut, Nubank, and the incumbents they pressure. Generic “fintech disruptors” framing produces generic strategy.

According to SIS International Research, B2B expert interviews with senior payments, treasury, and risk leaders consistently surface a gap between board-level fintech narratives and operating-level adoption barriers, particularly around reconciliation, dispute handling, and ledger integration. That gap is where commercial bets quietly succeed or fail.

A Practical Framework for Prioritizing Fintech Research Investment

Not every question deserves primary research. The following matrix, used in SIS engagements with banks, networks, and fintech challengers, separates the questions that justify field budget from those that desk research can resolve.

Source: SIS International Research

How the Strongest Fintech Programs Use Voice of Customer

VOC programs in fintech work when they are tied to specific commercial decisions rather than tracking studies. The strongest applications fall into four patterns.

The first is pre-launch concept-product fit testing for embedded finance partnerships, where a card program or lending product is evaluated by the host platform’s actual end users before contracts are signed. The second is corridor-specific research for cross-border products, sized to the FX spread and settlement window the product proposes. The third is post-implementation reconciliation studies with treasurers and controllers, which expose whether real-time payments and ISO 20022 migration are delivering the operational savings the business case promised. The fourth is structured win/loss analysis after every enterprise sales cycle over a defined deal threshold.

SIS International’s competitive intelligence work across US and European fintech engagements indicates that win/loss programs run continuously, rather than as annual snapshots, produce materially better forecasting accuracy on enterprise deals and surface pricing concessions that procurement teams routinely underreport internally.

Where Fintech Market Research Is Heading

Three shifts are reshaping how serious buyers commission this work.

Regulatory clarity around open banking, Dodd-Frank Section 1033, and PSD3 is moving research priorities from “will customers share data” to “what permissioned-data products will they pay for.” That is a different research design entirely.

Stablecoin settlement is moving from speculative to operational, which makes corporate treasurer interviews and merchant acquirer perspectives more valuable than retail crypto sentiment data. The questions worth asking have changed.

AI-enabled underwriting, fraud, and servicing are creating new vendor categories where buyer evaluation criteria are still forming. Research that captures evaluation criteria while they are forming shapes category definitions, which is the highest-leverage research a challenger can commission.

The Decision This Research Should Inform

Fintech market research is most valuable when scoped to a specific capital allocation question: which corridor, which vertical, which partner, which acquisition, which price point. Research scoped to “understand the fintech market” produces interesting reading and weak decisions.

Leadership teams getting durable lift from this work share one habit. They commission fintech market research against named decisions with named timelines, and they treat the resulting evidence as the basis for commitment, not commentary.

Key Questions

What is fintech market research? Fintech market research is the structured collection of primary and secondary evidence on fintech buyers, competitors, regulators, and economics, scoped to inform specific commercial decisions in payments, lending, banking, and embedded finance.

When does primary research outperform syndicated reports? Whenever the decision involves pricing, partner economics, switching behavior, or emerging regulatory impact. Syndicated reports describe market structure; primary research reveals the variance that drives outcomes.

Which fintech segments most reward disciplined research? Embedded finance, merchant acquiring, cross-border corridors, core banking modernization, and stablecoin infrastructure, where public data understates the spread between winners and laggards.

Who should be interviewed in B2B fintech research? Function-specific operators: treasury operations leads, payments product owners, fraud and risk officers, merchant CFOs, and core banking architects. Seniority and function matter more than sample size.

How often should fintech research refresh? Quarterly for win/loss, competitive intelligence, and pricing. Annually for category sizing. Continuously for VOC tied to active commercial decisions.

Over SIS Internationaal

SIS Internationaal biedt kwantitatief, kwalitatief en strategisch onderzoek. Wij bieden data, tools, strategieën, rapporten en inzichten voor besluitvorming. Wij voeren ook interviews, enquêtes, focusgroepen en andere marktonderzoeksmethoden en -benaderingen uit. Neem contact met ons op voor uw volgende marktonderzoeksproject.