M&A and VC In Digital Payments
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When the cost of capital changes, the entire grammar of dealmaking has to change with it. Between 2023 and 2026, that grammar was rewritten twice — first by the most aggressive rate-hike cycle in four decades, which compressed fintech valuations by more than half, then by artificial intelligence, which silently rebuilt the criteria investors use to decide what is worth funding and what is worth acquiring at all.
The numbers tell the story before any narrative does. Global fintech VC fell from a 2021 peak of ~$92B to ~$43B in 2023 — a six-year low — before recovering to ~$52B in 2025. Digital payments alone collapsed from $51B to $17.2B (down 66%) before rebounding to $31B. Checkout.com, valued at $40B in January 2022, was repricing at $9.35B eighteen months later. The valuation reset was not partial. It was foundational.
Our report, FinTech M&A & VC in Digital Payments (2023–2026), traces this two-stage reset across both private and public markets. We map the four phases of VC funding from peak to reset to selective to "bigger, fewer," contrast pre- and post-2023 dealmaking through paired case studies (Checkout.com vs. Plata on the VC side; Global Payments/EVO vs. Global Payments/Worldpay on the M&A side), and examine how AI moved from operational feature to core valuation driver — now embedded in roughly 25% of $5B+ deals and commanding valuation premiums of 2–3x over non-AI peers.
What emerges is a market that has not slowed so much as restratified. Founders are being forced into an efficiency-first posture before they can raise. Investors back only models where AI is the underwriting engine, not a marketing layer. Strategic acquirers, facing a "higher for longer" rate environment, are choosing buy over build — acquiring hardened payment infrastructure at compressed multiples rather than financing R&D against an uncertain future. The market is smaller than it was in 2021. It is also significantly more disciplined.
The Bocconi Students Fintech Society chose digital payments as the lens for this report because no other fintech vertical translates macro conditions into deal structure as directly. When rates move, payments dealmaking moves first — and the way it moves now tells us what the rest of fintech will look like by the end of the cycle.
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Published in June 2026
Project Team
Project Leader: Nour Khoury
Junior Analysts: Antonio Verolla, Anthony Kozlowski, Hridika Deb, Jan Czyrko, Darien Weber, Enrico Mosmann Cecchini, Thiago Forgas Ulm, Leonidas Kemper
Association Board :
Neil Maaouni (President & Head of Data Analysis), Mathilde Castagine (Vice President & Head of Events), Guillaume Abaz (Senior Advisor to the board), Andrea Botero (Head of M&A and VC), Antonina Bojanowska (Head of Generalist), Noé Wierzba (Head of Operations), Lucas Médina (Head of Corporate Analysis) , Alexandra Minca (Head of Communication)
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