Juniper Research's Fintech Future Leaders: What Makes a Winner?

November 2024

Fintech & Payments

Daniel Bedford

Senior Research Analyst

Juniper Research’s new Future Leaders 100: Fintech 2025 identifies 100 start-ups across six fintech sub-industries; ranking them to identify the companies with the most disruptive growth anticipated in the coming years.

The brand-new report format uncovers the latest trends and opportunities within the following sub-industries; providing extensive analysis of the 100 Future Leaders in the race to their global expansion and success in the fintech space.

• B2B Payments
• eCommerce Payments
• Digital-only Banking
• Emerging Payments
• Green Fintech
• Regtech

Understanding the Future Leaders Index 

The Future Leaders Index has previously featured in many of our reports as a tool to assess smaller vendors against each other or larger vendors entering new markets. It acts as a fairer way to assess the position and identify the strongest contenders in highly active markets, without necessarily comparing them to established market leaders.

In other words, it aims to identify the disruptive vendors which have the innovative potential to become future leaders in their respective markets. 

Source: Juniper Research

Future Leaders are ranked and scored against the entire 100, and their respective sub-industry, mapped across the Juniper Research Future Leaders Index. Innovative vendors are assessed on their growth potential including total raised capital, marketing approach, and how long they have been established. This is assessed alongside their disruptive potential, such as the scope of their product portfolio, creativity and innovation, and future business prospects.

This results in the ranking, in which start-ups are placed as either Future Leaders, Emulators, Niche Specialists, or Early-stage Vendors.

• Future Leaders: Scoring the highest in growth and disruptive potential, these vendors appear in the top-right corner of the index. These vendors have the strongest position for future growth. 
• Emulators: These vendors score well in terms of growth potential, but are limited slightly by a competitive edge such as creativity, innovation or strategic partnerships. 
• Early-stage Vendors: These vendors are typically at an earlier stage, with less elaborate product portfolios. 
• Niche Specialists: These vendors score highly on innovation and disruptive potential, but tend to have a smaller scope of solutions compared to their competitors. 

Who are the Future Leaders in Fintech for 2025?

#1: SteelEye

SteelEye triumphed due to its platform’s ability to use news, social media, mobile voice recording, and more market data to better scope and monitor financial services to detect market manipulation and compliance breaches.

#2: dLocal

dLocal provides international merchants with payment-processing platforms to accept local payments and facilitate cross-border transaction using API integration, catered to the preferences of consumers in emerging markets.

#3: Billie

Billie offers Buy Now Pay Later solutions for businesses, leveraging machine learning-enabled models to assess risk models and automate workflows. It has a five-year alliance  with BNP Paribas, which will see it scale its operations across new markets.

#4: Monobank

Monobank is a digital-only bank based in Ukraine, and has successfully implemented gamification. This strategy drives customer engagement and retention, utilising a playful cat mascot and achievement badges for completing banking tasks.

#5: Xapien

Xapien leverages AI and natural language processing to read and summarise open-source information from the Internet to provide insights on third-party risk. Its Fluenci tool excels not only at identifying knowledge in text, but in assessing how information interrelates.  

#6: Zuora

Zuora provides businesses with invoice and subscription-management solutions, effectively capitalising on the market shift to a subscription model. This allows businesses to benefit from regular and predictable incomes.

#7: Tabby

Tabby is the first consumer Buy Now Pay Later solution in the Middle East. Its ecosystem excels at integrating its shop, app, and card offerings to streamline the customer experience, setting a high standard for consumer platforms.

#8: Volt

Volt’s key strength is its leveraging of Open Banking, which it is using to power real-time payments, enabling it to streamline one-click payments. Volt offers a number of value-added services, such as fraud prevention and cash-cycle management.

#9: Mercury

Mercury accurately serves the niche of bespoke banking for start-ups, as demonstrated by its working capital and venture runway offers, providing unbiased lending across companies of different funding stages and industries. 

#10: BeZero Carbon

BeZero Carbon helps companies to achieve their sustainability targets by providing carbon credits. It excels at public transparency by making headline ratings and summaries publicly available to promote better public disclosure. 

For a further deep dive into the results of the Digital-only Banking sub-industry, download your copy of our complimentary whitepaper - which not only examines the biggest start-ups in this area, but how considers how they're using tools such as gamification, as well as how they're meeting the needs of underbanked communities.

Daniel analyses developments in financial and payments markets, and how these interplay with emerging technologies. His recent reports include KYC/KYB Systems, Core Banking Systems, and Banking-as-a-Service.