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Six VC trends this year: How to navigate a changing landscape

Accion Venture Lab shares key trends that could shape the inclusive fintech industry this year

AUTHOR

The fintech landscape is constantly evolving, with new trends and innovations emerging each year. 2025 is no exception. As we look ahead to the rest of this year, it’s crucial for our fellow investors, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and fintech companies to stay ahead of the curve to navigate changes effectively. From infrastructure improvements to new use cases for AI in fintech, we’re exploring six key trends that highlight opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

1. Reaching small businesses through verticalized, embedded finance

Over the last few years, we have seen how financial services have become more embedded into the ways underserved small businesses and consumers access credit, payments, insurance, and more. With so many different use cases, the benefits from embedded finance are clear. In 2025, we continue to be excited about how finance can be embedded into different industries, especially in massive, fragmented industries that remain manually driven and reliant on small businesses (e.g., construction and agriculture). Verticalized software as a service (SaaS) companies can bring much-needed digital tools, as well as access to financial services, to these businesses. An example from our portfolio is Licify in Colombia and Mexico, which provides embedded software for the construction industry.

2. Solving the digital payments problem

Over the last decade, we have seen significant progress in digital payment adoption across the globe – real-time payments in India and Brazil have revolutionized the payments landscape, and mobile money has been bridging financial gaps across much of Africa. The continued rise of e-commerce, supportive regulations, and improved payments infrastructure have all driven new innovations in the payments landscape globally. Yet, challenges in payments persist. Small businesses in the US still rely to a shocking degree on paper checks, while consumers and small businesses across emerging markets must navigate an increasingly complex payments landscape of bank transfers, cards, cash, mobile money, wires, and more. Managing fraud remains challenging and making payments across borders affordably and efficiently is far from solved.

How do you help underserved small businesses and consumers navigate this complex world? We’re looking at companies working to address these issues in 2025. Our portfolio company, TransBnk, which is helping simplify recurring payments through UPI autopay, processed 7.5 million transactions in December 2024 alone. By streamlining automated payments, TransBnk is improving payment reliability and accessibility, particularly for businesses and consumers who rely on seamless, recurring transactions.

3. AI for underwriting and customer engagement

We’re seeing new use cases for artificial intelligence in emerging markets that are enabling small business owners and underserved consumers to better access financial services. AI is by no means new to fintech, but in 2025, we’re excited to see innovations around underwriting and customer engagement. For example, instead of sending agents out to shops to underwrite loans, we now can enable small business owners to take photos of their shop, its location, and the stock on their shelves, and provide data that can then be used to underwrite loans and insurance and predict how much inventory is needed to keep shelves stocked without overbuying. Other major applications of AI include compliance, fraud detection, and simplifying KYC processes, helping financial service providers better manage risk while expanding access.

Beyond automating, compliance, and improving underwriting, we believe AI can offer much better assistance in extending access to commerce and affiliated financial services. Accion Venture Lab invested in SUKHIBA, an AI-powered conversational commerce platform streamlining sales for African brands, manufacturers, distributors, and customers. SUKHIBA leverages the widespread use of WhatsApp to make it easier for small businesses to connect with their suppliers, access real-time information, and place orders. This helps shops maintain optimal stock levels and allows brands, manufacturers, and distributors to improve their sales and customer retention by providing a more efficient and responsive service.

4. Infrastructure: Solving big access gaps for small companies

Enabling strong infrastructure is critical for embedding financial services, creating more inclusive solutions, and opening greater access at scale. Solving infrastructure issues and filling gaps can benefit everyone, including the underbanked. We especially see opportunities to improve infrastructure around payments, data, access, identity, and know-your-customer (KYC).

We invested in Mexican data integration platform Moffin because they enable financial service providers to access more diverse information for underwriting underserved customers at a much lower cost. Another of our infrastructure plays is TransBnk in India, which solves bottlenecks for small entrepreneurs in complex multi-party bank transactions by offering treasury management solutions.

5. Climate resilient fintech solutions

VC money is primarily going to climate mitigation, which is incredibly important, but the biggest question for underserved populations is how to adapt and build resilience in the face of growing climate challenges. Our portfolio company Verqor helps farmers across Mexico adapt to climate risks and build resilience by embedding climate insurance into their credit products. They also gather information on their customers’ farming practices to understand how they can better manage soil health on their land.

As another example, our portfolio company in India, AquaExchange, is piloting a calamity insurance product for shrimp farmers to protect the farmers from financial losses due to climate disasters like floods. We’re also looking at other companies in Africa and Asia that are helping smallholder farmers and other vulnerable groups to finance assets that will help them be more resilient.

6. Considering the bigger picture

The world in 2025 will be shaped by continued uncertainty – a new US administration, trade tensions, continued global conflicts, and more will have significant implications for venture capital and for fintech. While we’re seeing upticks in the funding of fintech startups and the public markets last year, there is no going back to 2020-2021 fintech funding levels. In 2025, I see three trends:

Growth stage investor expectations are high: Growth investors will deploy more into successful fintechs, but the bar is high for companies. Knowing the right metrics and setting targets well in advance of fundraises will be more critical than ever.
Continuing to do more with less: As they go to market, companies must focus on scaling sustainably. Managing cash and focusing on the core drivers to growth over experimentation will be critical to raising. And even if companies don’t reach profitability, they should have a clear eye toward that path.
More M&A: We’ll see more consolidation in fintech this year as companies across the US and emerging markets explore the broad range of growth opportunities. That will mean not only raising more capital to grow organically but exploring expansion into new markets and products via merging, acquiring, or being acquired.

Follow Accion Venture Lab on LinkedIn for more updates on inclusive fintech, and check out our podcast for a deep dive into topics like AI, climate fintech, and more.