With funding down for three straight quarters, profit has become the currency that matters. Two industry voices share the change that moved their numbers, and the big fintechs show which levers work.

For most of the last decade, fintechs were judged on growth. Profit could wait for scale. That bargain has ended. Fintech funding fell 18% to $11 billion in the third quarter of 2026, its third straight quarterly decline, according to CB Insights. As a result, fintech profitability now shapes who raises money and who does not.

So we asked industry leaders one question: what is one cost or revenue change that moved your fintech meaningfully closer to profitability in the past year? We wanted specific numbers and pricing changes over general advice. Several respondents answered, and we have used two. Below, we set their replies against the results of fintechs that have reached profit.

The levers behind fintech profitability

The public numbers on fintech profitability point to pricing first. In February 2025, Dave replaced optional tips on its cash advances with a mandatory 5% fee, capped at $15, and raised its monthly membership for new members from $1 to $3. Its net income rose 238% to $195.9 million in 2025. Revolut, meanwhile, reported a 2025 profit before tax of £1.7 billion on revenue of £4.5 billion, a 38% margin, with subscriptions among its fastest-growing lines, according to its annual results.

Paid plans helped Monzo’s fintech profitability too. It passed 1.6 million subscribers and reported adjusted profit before tax of £172.6 million for the year to March 2026. In the US, Chime posted its first profit as a public company in the first quarter of 2026, helped by its premium tier. SoFi also keeps raising its outlook, as our report on SoFi’s third quarter showed.

Price for what it costs

Our first respondent runs an AI image and video app, and pointed to a pricing problem many usage-heavy products share.

“The biggest change was linking pricing more tightly to usage, instead of letting heavy users sit on plans priced too broadly for what they consumed. In practice, that meant leaning harder into credits for generation-heavy work and being much stricter about what lower tiers include.

Compute costs get away from you fast if your pricing behaves like unlimited software while your costs behave like metered infrastructure. Broad plans convert well at first, but a small group of power users can eat most of the margin. The fix was mapping higher-cost actions to credits, tightening fair-use rules and cutting waste, so users weren’t burning infrastructure on low-value retries.

I’d repeat it. Revenue quality goes up and cost discipline improves. But be careful how fast you bring it in. If a product suddenly feels more restrictive, churn can spike. Grandfather existing users where you can, explain what uses credits and help customers forecast their spend.”

Kruno Sulić, Founder, Cliprise

His company is an AI content tool rather than a fintech, and he shared no figures. Still, the principle applies to fintech profitability. Any product with variable costs per user, from payments to lending, loses margin when pricing ignores those costs. AI products show the problem sharply. ICONIQ puts average AI product gross margins at around 45% in 2025, against 60% to 80% for traditional software. Dave’s fee change follows the same logic of charging in line with what each advance costs.

Cutting cost without cutting quality

Our second respondent runs a software development firm that builds for fintech clients.

“We improved net margins by about 12% over the last year by reorganising our engineering teams into domain-specialist pods, to cut the ‘knowledge debt’ that leads to costly rework. Our data showed teams without deep expertise in areas like financial compliance or payment gateways were running 18% higher costs from longer testing and design fixes. Requiring every engineer on a fintech account to have at least three years of financial services experience cut project rework by 25%.

We also audited our software spend. We found overlapping cloud monitoring and logging tools across delivery centres. Moving to one observability suite cut our annual licensing costs by 22%.”

Abhishek Pareek, Founder and Director, Coders.dev

His figures on fintech profitability are internal and cannot be checked, and Coders.dev is a vendor rather than a fintech. However, tool consolidation is a lever many fintechs use. The bigger cost levers for fintech profitability have come from AI in operations. Klarna says its AI assistant now does the work of more than 850 customer service agents. Monzo says AI self-service handles 62% of inbound chats.

Those savings have limits. Klarna later reintroduced human support as a premium option after customer feedback. Cost cuts that weaken service or compliance can cost more than they save. Monzo’s statutory profit, at £87.3 million, sat well below its adjusted figure, partly because of exceptional costs.

Failed payments are a quieter lever

Some smaller fintechs find a fintech profitability lever in failed payments. A debit that bounces for insufficient funds costs a processor fee of about $3 to $5, and repeated returns can breach Nacha’s network limits. Checking a customer’s balance through open banking before collecting a payment can reduce those returns. Plaid says its balance check can catch up to 45% of such failures before they happen. However, balance checks take seconds and cannot remove every failure, because balances change before the payment settles.

Interest income is a tailwind, not a strategy

Rate cuts are now testing fintech profitability built on deposit income. Starling’s interest income fell to £759 million in the year to March 2026 from £882 million. Its profit before tax slipped to £217.1 million, and it cut about 130 roles in July. Revolut’s subscription revenue grew faster than its interest income in 2025. Therefore, fintech profitability that rests on rates may not last as they fall.

Pricing moves in both directions. Revolut’s new UK personal loans, for example, carry rates well above its Irish pricing, as our report on Revolut’s UK loans showed.

What to watch next

Several signals will test fintech profitability in 2027. Further rate cuts in the UK and US will squeeze interest income at neobanks. Funding data for the fourth quarter will show whether investors keep rewarding profit over growth. Meanwhile, more fintechs are likely to follow Dave and Monzo into subscriptions and clearer fees.

Above all, the lesson from our respondents and the results is consistent. The changes that move fintech profitability charge for what things cost, and cut waste without cutting the service customers pay for.

FintechBits covers payments, banking and fintech developments for readers in the US and UK. This article is for information only and is not financial or investment advice. Views expressed are those of the FintechBits editorial team.