“Picks & Shovels” of Fintech: The Invisible Infrastructure Companies Behind Apps (M&A Focus)
- Jun 28
- 2 min read
In fintech's short history, attention has always flowed to the interface — the app, the wallet, the checkout screen where a customer taps "pay." But the companies capturing the most durable value are the ones the customer never sees. They own no app icons and no end-user relationships. They sit one layer below, providing the rails, licenses, and decision engines that everything visible runs on top of. They are the picks and shovels — and increasingly, they are what acquirers are paying for.
Our report, "Picks & Shovels" of Fintech: The Invisible Infrastructure Companies Behind Apps, maps the M&A logic across five infrastructure verticals — fraud detection, embedded finance, card issuance and processing, payment processing, and core banking. Each occupies a mission-critical position in the value chain, and each shares the same structural advantages: recurring transaction-based revenue, deep client integration, and switching costs high enough to make migration genuinely painful. A fraud model trained on years of local data, a regulated E-Money license, a settlement system wired into a bank's ledger — these are not features a competitor can replicate over a weekend.
We dissect six recent deals to reveal what buyers are actually acquiring. Experian–ClearSale bought proprietary fraud data and a foothold in Brazil. Allica–Kriya marked the shift from B2C fintech toward B2B infrastructure delivered through APIs. Marqeta–TransactPay made the bottleneck explicit: the regulatory license, not the technology, is the real leverage. Across every case, the recurring logic is the same — capability, control, and scale.
But attractive infrastructure is not the same as a good deal. The strongest assets combine deep integration, regulatory embeddedness, and accumulated data, and the closer an asset sits to the ledger, the harder it is to replace. Yet legacy migration, compliance remediation, and partner concentration can quietly erode the synergies that justified the price. A good asset is not always a good acquisition.
The Bocconi Students Fintech Society chose infrastructure as the lens for this report because the question defining the next phase of fintech M&A is no longer who owns the customer. It is who owns the bottleneck the customer never sees — and what that ownership is worth when the technology is commoditized but the license, the data, and the integration are not.
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Published in June 2026
Project Team
Project Leader: Arthur Dupont
Junior Analysts: Niccolo Bonifati, Cristobal Basadre, Antonio Verolla, Samuel Escobar, Riccardo Caruso
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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