• Serhii Zakharov, Visionary FinTech Entrepreneur & CEO at PayDo


• 03.12.2025 03:00 pm
#FintechEcosystem #DigitalFinanceGrowth

Over the past decade, fintech has reshaped how businesses and consumers engage with financial services - expanding access, driving inclusivity, and challenging traditional models. Despite representing only about 3% of banking and insurance revenues, fintechs are growing three times faster than incumbents. But this acceleration has come at a hidden cost: payment fragmentation.

Today, even the most agile companies find themselves managing a patchwork of providers - one for banking, another for acquiring, separate systems open banking, e-wallets, and compliance. This isn’t just inconvenient; it’s a strategic bottleneck that drains resources, obscures data, and distracts leadership from growth. Having recently addressed this shift in keynotes at Sigma Europe in Rome, the FTT Fintech Festival in London, and MoneyLive in Amsterdam, I’ve seen firsthand how industry leaders are moving from fragmentation to unification. The next wave of fintech won’t be about just more features - it will be about fewer friction points.

How Fragmentation Became FinTech’s Silent Tax

The early fintech era rewarded specialisation. Point solutions excelled at solving isolated problems - whether acquiring, card issuing, or open banking connections. But innovation outpaced integration. Businesses expanded across borders, regulations multiplied, and payment rails proliferated. The result? A disconnected infrastructure that forces legal teams through repeated onboardings, drowns finance teams in incompatible reports, and traps engineers in maintaining brittle integrations.

This fragmentation isn't just operational - it’s strategic. It distracts leadership, inflates costs, and limits scalability. At PayDo, we hear it directly from clients: they’re tired of managing 10+ providers when they should be focusing on their product and growth.

The Correction Has Begun: Three Shifts Defining the Future
 

1. The Rise of the Unified Ecosystem

Businesses no longer want a stack of vendors - they want one platform, one contract, and one API. This isn’t about building monoliths, but about creating coherent foundations so innovation can thrive on top. Unified infrastructure eliminates repeated KYC, consolidates reporting, and strengthens resilience.

This is the vision I’ve architected at PayDo: the first unified ecosystem built specifically for online businesses. By bringing together banking, acquiring, e-wallet and cards into a single environment, we’ve enabled clients to replace complexity with clarity - processing over €5B annually with over 40% YoY growth as a quantifiable proof.

2. Direct Bank Payments & The C2B Revolution

Traditional card payments are layered with intermediaries, each adding cost and delay. The shift toward direct bank payments - powered by SEPA Instant, Open Banking, and request-to-pay frameworks - is changing the game. These rails move money in seconds, with lower fees and stronger security.

But technology alone isn’t enough. That’s why we pioneered the first dedicated C2B Open Banking collections accounts, allowing businesses to receive payments directly from customer bank accounts with instant settlement and proper categorisation where C2B inflows are treated as ecommerce transactions, rather than bank transfers. This isn’t just another integration - it’s a reimagining of the payment flow, built from the ground up to be faster, cheaper, and more transparent.

3. The Non-Redirect Experience: Where Checkout Meets Conversion

Fragmentation often reveals itself at the worst moment: checkout. Redirects to third-party pages break user experience, erode trust, and lower conversion. In response, we engineered the industry’s first non-redirect e-wallet, a seamless flow that keeps users on-site, preserves branding, and eliminates rolling reserves and chargeback liability.

This isn’t a front-end tweak - it’s a fundamental redesign of the payment experience, one that acknowledges that conversion is won or lost in the final click.

Building What’s Invisible, Delivering What Matters
 

True innovation in fintech is increasingly invisible. It’s not about flashy apps - it’s about the unseen infrastructure that makes money move reliably, cheaply, and instantly. In my keynotes across Europe, I’ve emphasised that the next decade will belong to ecosystem architects, not feature factories.

At PayDo, we’ve embedded this philosophy into our DNA:

• Building direct acquiring relationships with Visa and Mastercard

• Operating as a direct member of SWIFT and SEPA

• Engineering unified solutions that turn payment complexity into a competitive advantage

A Clearer Future: From Fragmentation to Flow

Fragmentation fueled fintech’s first act - but it cannot sustain its future. The market is now aligning around unification, direct access, and seamless experience. These aren’t trends; they’re essential corrections.

For businesses, this means choosing partners who build infrastructure, not just interfaces. It means prioritizing ecosystems over point solutions. And it means recognizing that the real cost of fragmentation isn’t in the fees you see - it’s in the growth you miss.

The future of payments isn’t more options. It’s fewer obstacles. And it’s already here.