The global fintech industry has raised roughly $500 billion over the last decade. Most of that capital went after a very specific customer: urban, educated, already banked, smartphone-equipped, with a government ID and a credit history. In other words, the people who needed financial innovation the least.
I've spent twenty years building payment infrastructure in MENA — from PayPal's India business to QR payment rails in the Gulf to advising the UAE Central Bank on digital currency frameworks. And the thing that keeps me up at night is not the next neobank or the next embedded finance platform. It's a simpler question: who are we actually building for?
The Number That Should Embarrass Us
According to the World Bank's Global Findex 2025 report, released in July 2025, 1.3 billion adults worldwide remain completely unbanked. Not underserved. Not poorly served. Completely outside the formal financial system.
Meanwhile, the fintech industry poured hundreds of billions of dollars into building better savings products for people who already had savings accounts, smoother onboarding for people who already had credit histories, and instant transfers for people who were already connected to the global payment grid. We optimised financial inclusion — for the already-included.
This is not an accident. It's the product of who builds fintech and who they build it for. Silicon Valley's version of the world assumes everyone has a stable home address, a passport, a mobile data connection, and a bank account to link. Most of humanity has none of these. So the default customer ends up looking like the founder.
Ahmed in Sharjah
Let me make this concrete. There's a construction worker I'll call Ahmed. He's in Sharjah. Every month he sends money home to Pakistan. According to World Bank Remittance Prices Worldwide data for the UAE-Pakistan corridor, he's paying 5–7% in fees. He's spending three hours at a physical exchange counter — because that's what payday on a Friday looks like in the industrial areas of Sharjah, where the queues stretch out the door.
This happens in 2026. With all the innovation we've built. Ahmed is not a niche case. He represents one of the world's largest and most important remittance corridors. And the infrastructure serving him is roughly the same as it was twenty years ago.
The irony is that Ahmed — and the hundreds of millions of workers, vendors, and smallholders like him — represent the single largest untapped opportunity in financial services. The Atlantic Council estimates the global market for serving the financially excluded at roughly $3 trillion. McKinsey, Deloitte, and the WEF have all reached similar conclusions from different methodologies. This is not a charity problem. It is the largest single addressable market in financial services that remains substantially uncontested.
Why Capital Flows to the Wrong Problems
The venture capital model optimises for distribution, not access. A product that reaches 10 million educated urban users with recurring subscription revenue is a cleaner pitch than infrastructure for migrant workers in informal settlements. The KPIs don't translate easily. The unit economics look different. The regulatory complexity is higher in emerging markets. So the money goes where the models fit.
The WEF's analysis of VC capital concentration in fintech makes this explicit: investment has systematically tracked toward higher-income markets and higher-income customers within those markets. The 90/10 problem — where the majority of capital serves a minority of the world's population — is not a natural law. It's a structural outcome of how the industry has chosen to allocate risk and reward.
Who's Getting It Right
Some models are breaking the pattern. Mobile money in East Africa — M-Pesa and its successors — built from scratch for people with no banking relationship and proved that 200 million users are accessible if you meet them where they are. QR-based payment rails in South Asia and Southeast Asia have collapsed the cost of digital transactions for merchants with no card terminal and no credit history. Agent network banking in rural India has extended deposit and withdrawal services to villages that no bank branch would ever reach on a pure P&L basis.
These are not fintech edge cases. They are the proof points for a fundamentally different model: build for the customer who is hardest to reach first, and the infrastructure you create will also serve everyone easier to reach above them. It's an inversion of the usual product strategy, and the markets that have embraced it are generating the fastest financial inclusion progress in the world.
The Next Decade Belongs to Whoever Solves This
The next wave of fintech value creation will not come from the tenth iteration of a neobank product. It will come from whoever figures out how to serve Ahmed in Sharjah, the corner shop in Lagos, the street vendor in Manila, and the agricultural worker in the Nile Delta — at scale, profitably, and through infrastructure that actually works in the conditions those customers live in.
That is where the real scale is. And the capital, the talent, and the policy frameworks are finally starting to align around it. The question for anyone building in financial services right now is whether they're going to be part of building that infrastructure — or whether they're going to spend another decade optimising products for customers who already have enough options.
Further reading on punitthakker.com: CBUAE's Five Principles for AI Governance: What UAE Financial Institutions Must Do Now · Real World Asset Tokenization in GCC: How the Gulf Is Building the Infrastructure for a $500 Billion Market · mBridge at $55 Billion: The Multi-CBDC Rail Reshaping MENA Payment Corridors
