AI in Finance—Charitarth Sindhu—February 22, 2026

Author: Charitarth Sindhu, Fractional Business & AI Workflow Consultant The EU AI Act's August 2, 2026 deadline is closing fast. For fintech companies using AI in credit scoring, automated lending, or insurance underwriting, this is not a distant regulatory event. It is a hard compliance wall with fines reaching €35 million or 7% of global turnover.

Market Insights—Charitarth Sindhu—February 22, 2026

Author: Alena Sarri, Owner Operator, Aquatots Swim schools don't show up in fintech trend reports. They probably should. Australia has over 600 registered swim schools teaching roughly 1.5 million kids a year. Swimming is the number-one participation activity for children under four in this country. And almost every one of those schools has quietly gone

Industry Trends—Charitarth Sindhu—February 21, 2026

Author: Charitarth Sindhu, Fractional Business & AI Workflow Consultant The neobank hype cycle is over. After years of burning through venture capital to chase user growth, the digital banking sector is hitting a wall. Roughly 76% of neobanks worldwide are still losing money. Only 23 out of 453 global digital challenger banks are operationally profitable. The

Regulatory Updates—Charitarth Sindhu—February 21, 2026

Author: Charitarth Sindhu, Fractional Business & AI Workflow Consultant The EU's DAC7 directive came into force on January 1, 2023. Since then, it has quietly turned freelancer payment management upside down for businesses operating across Europe. We asked four industry leaders how DAC7 has changed the way they handle freelancer payments, onboarding, and reporting. Their answers

Corporate Acquisitions—Charitarth Sindhu—February 20, 2026

We asked industry leaders what separates the fintechs that sell for premium multiples from the ones that end up in fire sales. Here is what they told us. The fintech M&A market is back. Global investment hit $116 billion across 4,719 deals in 2025, bouncing back hard from a seven-year low the year before. But

Regulatory Updates—Charitarth Sindhu—February 19, 2026

Author: Hasan Can Soygök, Founder, Remotify.co If you earn money through platforms like Upwork, Fiverr, Airbnb, or even selling stuff on Vinted, there's an EU tax rule you need to know about. It's called DAC7, and it went live on 1 January 2023. Here's what it does and why it matters, even if you don't live in

Industry Trends—Charitarth Sindhu—February 19, 2026

Stablecoins are no longer a crypto experiment. They are becoming the plumbing behind how businesses pay each other across borders. B2B stablecoin payment volumes grew 733% year-over-year in 2025, reaching $226 billion. That is still a fraction of global B2B payment flows, but the trajectory is hard to ignore. Visa launched stablecoin settlement in the

AI in Finance—Charitarth Sindhu—February 19, 2026

Author: Charitarth Sindhu, Fractional Business & AI Workflow Consultant Agentic AI is no longer a pitch deck buzzword in financial services. It is in production. Banks, fintechs, and lending platforms are deploying AI systems that do not just flag problems or spit out predictions. They investigate, decide, and act. We asked five industry leaders a simple

Market Insights—Charitarth Sindhu—February 18, 2026

Author: Hasan Can Soygök, Founder, Remotify.co Most founders think growth means adding. More features. More services. More markets. But a growing pile of evidence says the opposite is true, especially for bootstrapped companies. The ones that win tend to be the ones that cut. The pattern keeps showing up ConvertKit launched in 2013 as a

AI in Finance—Charitarth Sindhu—February 18, 2026

AI-powered fraud is moving faster than the companies trying to stop it. Deepfake videos that fool live identity checks. Fake people with perfect credit histories. Bots that learn how fraud detection works and then dodge it. These are not future problems. They are happening right now. We asked five industry leaders one simple question: what

Industry Trends—Charitarth Sindhu—February 17, 2026

The finance world is going through a quiet revolution. Not the flashy, crypto-bro kind. The kind where the boring stuff, how loans get approved, how data moves between systems, how decisions get made, is being rebuilt from the ground up. We asked founders and executives across fintech and tech what trends in finance they're most

Market Insights—Charitarth Sindhu—February 17, 2026

The grind is dead. Or at least, it should be. In 2022, the fintech world got a wake-up call nobody could ignore. The Federal Reserve hiked rates, cheap capital dried up overnight, and some of the biggest names in the game watched their valuations crumble. Klarna went from $45.6 billion to $6.7 billion. Stripe took