[DigitalToday reporter Chi-gyu Hwang] Has fintech, which once shook up banking by pushing mobile and cloud, reached the end of its life as an investment field?

Fintech expert and influencer Simon Taylor (사이먼 테일러) made that claim in a recent post on social media platform X (Twitter) titled "Fintech is Dead".

Mobile apps, cloud services and APIs instead of branches that made fintech firms stand out 10 years ago have now become basics that any financial company has, he argued. If the approaches fintech promoted are all accepted, fintech is no longer the future but a reality that has already arrived.

That situation is also visible in the numbers. Fintech's share of total venture investment deals fell to 12.3 percent in 2025 from 14.5 percent in 2021. Even within fintech investment, money flowed into AI companies. He said, "The share of AI companies jumped from around 10 percent to 70 to 80 percent."

Taylor breaks all financial products into decision, record and distribution. In the 1800s, branch managers set loan rates themselves and wrote them in paper ledgers. Customers had to visit branches. He said those three elements are changing again now.

In decision-making, AI models running on tokens are taking over judgments once handled by people and spreadsheets.

He said, "Revolut developed its own foundation model, 'PRAGMA', using transaction data from more than 80 million customers. Its ability to detect bad-credit risk improved by 130 percent, and fraud detection improved by 65 percent." He added that British company Allica, which specialises in small and medium-sized business loans, used an AI agent to complete half of loan screenings during its first operating period in an average of 12 minutes.

Records are moving from ledgers locked inside companies to value tokens such as stablecoins and tokenised assets. Taylor said, "Everyone sees the same record, and the market runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Visa used to settle with U.S. card companies only on weekdays, but now it settles with the stablecoin USDC seven days a week without weekends. Robinhood stock tokens are traded in more than 120 countries," he said.

For the final element, distribution, it is worth noting that customers are shifting to AI agents with wallets. Robinhood opened an MCP server for agents, and 100,000 users have already entrusted to agents accounts with preset limits. Taylor said, "People come with interest, but agents come with a mission."

Taylor also stressed that the boundary between money and tokens is disappearing, citing Stripe as an example.

Stripe agreed in August to acquire AI model routing company OpenRouter for more than $7 billion. On the same day, fintech startup Ramp also launched 'router.com'. Taylor said, "A router is where you price AI units of work that move probabilistically with units of value that are fixed. This is a financial market."

That does not mean existing giants are collapsing. Taylor said JPMorgan, armed with deposits, licences and financial strength, would be the first to become a $1 trillion bank. Still, he argued that the moat it once had is no longer the only moat. Taylor said, "The first fintech put banks into smartphones. The next change digs into underwriting, ledgers and work processes that remained behind app screens."