Is fintech about "move fast and break things"?

Early-stage startups and less experienced founders — myself included — have one job. Everything else is a distraction. Write code. Talk to users. That's how Y Combinator introduces the physics behind successful startups.

I share that view. You have to do things that don't scale (YC again) and care about one thing: talk to users, build and ship something imperfect quickly, learn, iterate. Repeat until you reach product-market fit.

The build it and they will come mindset has been thoroughly disproven. You have to build it — but you have to build it right.

Does it apply to fintech?

I don't have the full experience to answer with certainty, nor am I a genie holding a crystal ball. But based on what I know so far — it depends.

In some cases, yes. If your solution sits far from the metal of banking infrastructure and financial rails — if it's just software optimizing or orchestrating things — then the classic YC playbook travels well. Even here, founders need to know regulations and their boundaries, because the landscape is heavily regulated and every mistake carries weight.

For fintech founders building products that own distribution, hold money, or operate heavy balance sheet businesses providing financing — the environment is completely different. Here it's strict, demanding, and unforgiving. You operate under rules like PSD2 and MiCA, supervised by regulators like the FCA in the UK, BaFin in Germany, and Banca d'Italia.

Founders in this territory have to play an optimization game: ship an early MVP fast enough to learn, while staying regulatory-aligned at every step. Miss that balance and there's no market, no product.

Fintech and banking aren't about technology. They're about trust.

Does that mean you shouldn't talk to users?

Of course not. The YC advice still applies — it applies everywhere in the startup world. Those guys have found the mathematics behind startups the way Euler and Newton found calculus. The principles transfer.

The difference is that in fintech the game is more sophisticated, because you often have to learn without a product. The core features require licenses, capital, and infrastructure. How do you commit to all of that before anyone has used what you're building?

Can less experienced founders move fast here?

Or do you have to be a superstar raising a massive round in stealth?

I think less experienced founders can. If the play is smart, there's a real path.

There are plenty of workarounds to test an idea and validate market demand without writing a line of code, chasing licensing bureaucracy, or burning months pitching investors and private debt providers for capital. And today you can build a real MVP that simulates the full product vision.

The EU landscape is friendlier than ever

Regulators understand fintech's value. You no longer need grey hair and a suit to offer financial services.

• Regulatory sandboxes — controlled spaces to test MVPs. They don't exempt you from the rules, but they radically simplify the path to a bank license, EMI, or PISP authorization. Prove your value inside a sandbox and convincing regulators downstream gets meaningfully easier.
• BaaS providers in the EU and UK, or Column in the US — let you build on top of their licenses and infrastructure, so you can move fast without securing your own license from day one.

Fintechs are no longer just software suppliers to banks — that era is dead. They own the distribution.

The proof is in the founders

Exceptional fintech founders have proven the point:

• The neobank boom that scaled into full pan-European banks — Revolut starting as simple FX and travel banking, N26 going mobile-first.
• Online payments reinvented by Stripe and Klarna.
• The CFO tech stack redesigned by Brex and Ramp.
• Open banking and pay-by-bank rails built by Plaid and TrueLayer.
• And now stablecoin rails and agentic payments — Tempo, Stripe again.

Fintech is also hiding in plain sight. Shopify doesn't just connect buyers and sellers — it owns the full buying-and-selling suite, embedding lending and monetizing invoicing and payments. The majority of its revenue comes from fintech, not from the core commerce business.

Fintech is everywhere. It's making economies better, more efficient, and fairer.

Over to you

If you're a fintech founder or operator — what's your take? Can founders move fast and break things in fintech, or is compliance the ultimate speed limit?

Connect with me on LinkedIn and let's talk.