Payments
This per-transaction fee (set by the card networks and paid to the cardholder's issuing bank) is the single largest component of what a merchant pays to accept a card.
What is interchange?
Interchange is a pass-through cost. Always ask whether a payments company quotes gross revenue or net revenue after interchange and network fees.
This is generally the percentage of total revenue Stifel is comfortable lending revenue accounting for.
What is 20%?
Lending is a goal of most fintechs, but if it accounts for 100% of your revenue, there is uncertainty around the enterprise value without a source of capital to finance originations.
Money customers keep at a bank and the cheapest source of funding a lender can have.
What are deposits?
We love these at Stifel and need them to keep growing!
Wealthtech companies help people do this with their money, the opposite of just leaving it in a checking account.
What is investing?
Money a company owes to its suppliers and the process of paying it. This is the single most automated function in the CFO stack.
What is AP (accounts payable)?
Payments companies love to lead with this gross dollar figure moving across their platform, but it tells a venture lender nothing about the take rate applied to it.
What is TPV (total payment volume)?
This bank-provided facility, secured by a pool of originated loans, is what lets a fintech lender scale originations without burning equity.
What is a warehouse facility?
Important to know 1) what is the borrower's enterprise value without a warehouse facility and 2) where does the warehouse sit relate to our venture facility?
A bank makes money on the gap between what it earns on loans and what is pays on deposits. This three-letter term is that gap.
What is NIM (net interest margin)?
This wealthtech app made stock trading free and put investing on a phone screen.
What is Robinhood?
This revenue characteristic is why the CFO stack is the most bankable of the six subsectors.
What is subscription revenue?
Contracted subscription revenue earns the highest ARR multiples and loosest covenants.
Quarterly transaction volume in these dollar-pegged tokens topped $5T in Q2'26 with SoFi, Zelle, and MoneyGram all launching their own.
What are stablecoins?
Loans a lender formally accepts it will not collect and removes from its receivables after a set period of delinquency. We also call this a realized credit loss.
What is a charge-off?
Charge-offs are when a credit risk turns into an actual cash loss. It bodes poorly for the company and if charge-offs increase, it may mean the company is not underwriting properly.
A "now or never" wave of these applications has come from mature fintechs seeking lower funding costs, direct payment rails, and control of custody.
These two companies accounted for 67% of Wealthtech funding in Q1'26 with $3.9Bn in deal value.
What are Kalshi and Polymarket?
Prediction markets are an emerging sector with large volumes and unresolved regulation.
The corporate card and spend-management company that reached a $44Bn valuation in June 2026. Hint: we used to partner with them to offer credit cards to our clients.
What is Ramp?
Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and OpenAI are all building protocols that let software autonomously transact, verify intent, and manage funds in this emerging category.
What are agentic payments?
This is how many alternative lenders Stifel has in the portfolio.
What is zero?
A fintech without its own charter must rent one from this partner in order to hold FDIC-insured deposits and issue cards.
What is a sponsor bank?
Sponsor bank concentration is an existential dependency.
Wealthtech revenue generally scales with this top-line metric and can make it susceptible to market downturns.
What is AUM (assets under management)?
AUM-linked revenue is typically recurring but not contracted. If the general market is in a downturn, AUM can shrink and impact revenue.
Rippling and Gusto both automate this. It's the biggest recurring cash outflow in almost every company.
What is payroll?
Payments venture funding reached this T12M deal value through year-end 2025 (up 84% YoY) across 329 deals.
What is $6.4Bn?
Payments funding reaccelerated in 2025 on stablecoin rails and agentic checkout.
This Swedish buy-now-pay-later lender priced the largest fintech IPO of 2025 at $40 per share, raising $1.37Bn at a $15.1Bn valuation against a $45.6Bn private peak in 2021
What is Klarna?
A good lesson in the valuation reset from 2021. Nearly 1/3 of the 2021 peak is the hurdle to exiting for many later-stage fintechs.
This business model packages charter, compliance, and ledger into APIs so non-banks can embed accounts, card, and payments in their own products.
These businesses recruit advisors away from wirehouses like Merrill and Morgan Stanley, hand them modern software and back-office support, and split the client fee.
What are tech-enabled RIAs?
We've looked at some of these including Savvy Wealth.
The CFO stack (which includes spend management, A/P and A/R, and treasury) had this much in venture funding across 353 deals in 2025 (up 41% YoY).
What is $6.1Bn?