News and insights from the Ingo team.

There is a phrase Dan Schulman used to say when he ran PayPal that has stuck with me for years: “It is expensive to be poor in America.” If you are part of the banked elite, money moves freely. You deposit a check on your phone, it clears instantly, and it costs you nothing. You are swimming in liquidity. But if you are part of the other America—the 60 million people we call the “Labor Economy”—the financial system is an obstacle course of fees, delays, and friction. As we look toward 2026, we spend a lot of time in this industry talking about “fintech innovation” in the context of luxury. We talk about instant payouts for sports betting winnings or digitizing B2B supply chains—nice-to-haves that improve the customer experience for the comfortable. These things sit in the “Land of Luxury.” But there is another land: the “Land of Survival.” And my forecast for 2026 is that this land is not shrinking; it’s growing. And, it’s about to force the entire fintech industry to answer a very old question: “Where’s the beef?” The “Where’s The Beef?” Moment for Fintech I’m looking at our revenue numbers for October 2025, and they tell a story that directly contradicts the rosy “soft landing” headlines you see on CNBC. We are seeing a massive resurgence in our check-cashing business. Since February, volumes have surged, hitting record highs month after month. Why is a 95-year-old product like check-cashing growing in the age of AI and crypto? Because people are struggling. Well, and partly because we are the only solution in the market where you can get instant funds anywhere you want from your check on a mobile phone.  But beyond that, the reality is that 50% of the consumer spending in this country is being driven by the top 10% of the population. The stock market is booming for them. They are buying luxury goods and traveling. For the rest of America, inflation has made it expensive just to exist. It costs too much to eat out. It costs too much to buy groceries. In 2026, the “Where’s the Beef?” moment is coming for fintechs that built flashy user interfaces without solving real problems. When the economy tightens, the “just-in-time customer” relies on us more for things like check-cashing and instant payouts, not less. They can’t wait three days for a check deposit to clear or worse, risk that it might be clawed back after they’ve spend the money. They need that money as good funds and they need it tonight to buy milk and diapers. For them, speed isn’t a luxury feature. Speed is liquidity. And liquidity is survival. The “Wage to Wallet” Disconnect Our Wage to Wallet Index, produced with PYMNTS Intelligence, found that the average worker in this segment has just $5,737 in liquid savings. That is their entire safety net. This data drives my primary forecast for 2026: The Death of the Bi-Weekly Pay Cycle. The traditional pay cycle is a relic of the mainframe era that creates debt. It forces workers to borrow money they have already earned but can’t wait two weeks to receive,  just to survive the gap between pay periods. We see this in the gig economy, but we also see it in the “transactional workforce” – the server at Taco Bell, the Uber driver, the warehouse worker, the freelancer. I could go on. The point is, many of these folks are piecing together gigs and jobs to make ends meet. The “No Tax on Tips” movement that gained bipartisan traction last year was a symptom of this. It wasn’t all about taxes. Really, it was about workers fighting for every single dollar of liquidity they could get their hands on. In 2026, I predict that Continuous Payroll will move from a “perk” to a baseline requirement for hiring.  For example: If you are a hospitality chain or a restaurant facing $5,700 in turnover costs per employee, you cannot afford to pay every two weeks. You have to pay every day, because your employees are demanding it or they’re leaving to work for a competitor. Regulatory Maturity: The End of the Wild West This shift toward instant access is also being cemented by regulation. For years, Earned Wage Access (EWA) operated in a gray area. Was it a loan? Was it a payment? In 2026, that debate is largely over. We have seen states like Nevada and Indiana lead the way with licensing frameworks that explicitly classify EWA as a non-loan product, provided there is a “no-cost” option. But, it’s not consistent across the country; conversely, states like Maryland have taken a harder line. This regulatory patchwork is forcing the industry to mature. The “wild west” days of fee-heavy, direct-to-consumer advances are ending. My forecast is that 2026 will be the year of the Employer-Integrated Model. By integrating directly with time-and-attendance systems, providers can verify exactly what has been earned, eliminating credit risk and solidifying the argument that this is a payout of an asset, not a loan. Bridging the Old and the New For a long time, the fintech industry—and yes, even Ingo—shied away from talking about checks. We wanted to be seen as a “payments company,” not a “check company.” We wanted to talk about the shiny new rails like RTP and FedNow. But here is my controversial forecast for 2026: The winners will be the companies that bridge the gap between the paper past and the digital future. Google SEO’s tools might be confused about whether Ingo is a payments company or a check company, but the consumer isn’t. To them, it’s the same thing. Whether they are cashing a paper payroll check or cashing out their gig earnings instantly to their debit card, the need is identical:  “I earned it, and I need it now.” We are seeing a huge spike in our revenue coming from consumers accessing our services through brand partners that Americans in the Labor Economy rely on – P2P, neobanking, and more. And, need I clarify, these aren’t corporate treasurers either. They’re people trying to navigate a financial system that wasn’t built for them. The companies that win in 2026 won’t be the ones building “crypto islands” that only tech-bros can use. They will be the ones building bridges—taking a paper check, digitizing it instantly, and pushing the funds to a wallet or card in seconds. Final 2026 Forecast Thoughts So, my prediction for 2026 isn’t about a specific technology. It’s about a return to reality. We are entering an era where value is defined by how well you serve the Labor Economy. If you can help a family avoid a $35 overdraft fee by giving them instant access to their wages for a smaller fee, you’re providing more than a service. You are providing a lifeline. We are going to stop being ashamed of the “old” rails and start celebrating the fact that we can turn any asset—a paper check, a digital tip, a gig payout—into spendable cash, instantly. That is what the back half of “Money Mobility” actually means. It means ensuring that no one has to pay the “high cost of being poor” just to access money that is already theirs. We may be the only company in America leveraging modern technology like AI to facilitate faster and safer access to hard earned transactional payroll for hard working Americans.  But it’s a noble cause and one whose future remains relevant.  In 2026, we are going to tell that story louder than ever. Because millions of Americans are listening.

If you told me five years ago that the most exciting conversation in fintech would be about “settlement finality,” I would have laughed. In 2021, the industry was drunk on yield farming, NFTs, and the promise of decentralized everything.  But here we are, approaching 2026, and the flash-in-the-pan crypto hype has been replaced by something far more powerful, albeit far less flashy: boring, reliable, regulatory-grade utility with stablecoins. And that’s, actually, very exciting!  For the past three years, corporate treasurers looked at stablecoins and saw “risk.” Today, thanks to the passage of the GENIUS Act (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins) in July 2025, they see “working capital.” Just a few months ago, the only thing anyone was talking about at Money2020 were stablecoins and how they could get started.  By clarifying that payment stablecoins are banking instruments—fully backed and supervised—Washington did more than just regulate the industry. They’re giving enterprise fintechs permission to enter it.   As we forecast the Money Mobility trends for 2026 (our second year doing this series), my forecast is the “Digital USD” is the death of the T+2 settlement cycle and the birth of “Programmable Settlement.” The End of “Trapped Liquidity” The defining friction of the legacy financial system has always been trapped liquidity. When a U.S. manufacturing firm pays a supplier in Southeast Asia via Swift, that money effectively vanishes for days. It is debited from the sender but not credited to the receiver.  In the zero-interest rate era of the 2010s, this float was annoying. But manageable. In the high-interest-rate environment that has defined the mid-2020s, having millions of dollars floating in the ether (and I don’t mean Ethereum) for 72 hours is an expensive inefficiency.   The data supports this urgency. The global cross-border B2B payments market is projected to hit $42 trillion by 2026, yet nearly half of corporate finance teams still cite “lack of visibility” and “slow settlement” as their primary pain points.   In 2026, we are finally seeing the solution scale: Programmable Settlement. We are moving past simple transfers to smart-contract-enabled workflows. I’ve already talked to quite a few teams imagining a logistics payment that triggers automatically the moment a digital bill of lading is verified on-chain. Ones where the funds move in seconds—via PayPal USD (PYUSD) or USDC—and settle instantly. There is no float. There is no “check is in the mail.” There is only immediate, irrevocable value transfer.  For example: PayPal’s expansion of PYUSD into cross-border B2B payments and Visa’s integration of stablecoin settlement for merchant acquirers are not experiments. They are the new rails more and more enterprise business will be operating on.   The “Clean Hands” Doctrine: Compliance as a Moat All that said, this speed comes with a new requirement: radical transparency. The “wild west” era of using stablecoins to bypass compliance is over. The GENIUS Act made sure of that. The trend we are forecasting for 2026 is the market splitting into two parts: “Compliant Rails” and “Grey Market Rails.” Enterprises will only touch the former. The GENIUS Act explicitly prohibits the payment of interest on stablecoins to prevent them from competing with bank deposits, and it mandates 1:1 reserves in high-quality liquid assets like Treasury bills. This has effectively killed the “algorithmic” stablecoin models that caused so much destruction in 2022.   This means that the infrastructure powering these payments must be what I call “Glass House” architecture. It is not enough to move the token; you must be able to prove to a regulator, in real-time, exactly who owns it. We are seeing a massive shift away from “wrapper” fintechs—who obscured the ledger—toward vertically integrated platforms that offer sub-ledger visibility down to the individual transaction. We’ve heard countless times from our own banking partners the same ethos: If we can’t see the risk, we can’t bank it.   This “Clean Hands” doctrine is why we are seeing major financial institutions finally launch their own tokenized deposit pilots. They needed the regulatory air cover of the GENIUS Act to move forward. Now that they have it, they are looking for infrastructure partners who can bridge the gap between their legacy cores and public (or permissioned) blockchains.   The “Bridge” Economy: Fiat is Not Dead Despite the excitement, let’s be realistic about 2026: The world is not going to switch to crypto overnight. Suppliers in Vietnam or Mexico still need local fiat currency to pay their workers and their rent. This is why the most valuable companies in 2026 will be the Bridges. These are the payment orchestration platforms that can take a stablecoin payment from a US buyer, instantly convert it (off-ramp), and push it into the local banking rail (RTP, ACH, Push-to-Card) of the receiver. We are already seeing this with Visa’s expansion of its settlement capabilities. By supporting settlement in USDC and other stablecoins, they are allowing issuers and acquirers to settle obligations without waiting for the traditional banking window to open. In my view, this hybrid model (e.g. crypto speed with fiat utility) will be the “killer app” for B2B payments.   My Forecast: The Rise of the “Digital Treasury” My prediction for 2026 is we’ll see the first Fortune 500 companies retire their “International Wires” desk in favor of a “Digital Treasury” function. These teams won’t be holding Bitcoin on their balance sheets; that remains too volatile for most corporate governance policies. Instead, they will be utilizing stablecoins as a “pass-through” rail. They will hold dollars, convert to stablecoins for the 3 seconds it takes to move value across the world, and settle in fiat. They will effectively bypass the correspondent banking network, saving 2-3% in FX and fees per transaction.   For the executive reading this, the question is no longer:  “Should we have a crypto strategy?”  It is “What is our settlement strategy?”  If your answer relies on 40-year-old messaging standards and 3-day wait times, you are bleeding capital. Fortunately, the technology to stop the bleeding is here. 2026 is the year you simply have to turn it on.

I’m going to make a prediction that might make some of my friends in the industry uncomfortable: By the end of 2026, we will see a clear split in the community banking sector.  There will be the Platforms: agile institutions that have successfully decoupled their innovation from their legacy cores. And there will be the Zombies: banks that are technically solvent but operationally dead, unable to attract a single customer under the age of 50. The data we’ve been seeing is merciless. In 2024, digital-native competitors (neobanks) captured 44% of all new checking account openings. That trend hasn’t slowed; it has accelerated. The “relationship banking” model, while noble, is losing the war to the “convenience banking” model. If a community bank cannot offer instant account opening, real-time money movement, and modern digital experiences, it doesn’t matter how good their coffee is in the lobby.   The “Zombie Bank” Phenomenon What do I mean by “Zombie Banks”? These are institutions paralyzed by their own balance sheets. Following the aggressive rate hikes of 2023-2024, many community banks are sitting on massive unrealized losses in their securities portfolios (Accumulated Other Comprehensive Income, or AOCI). They aren’t insolvent, but they are stuck. They can’t sell those assets without taking a hit to capital, which means they can’t easily lend or invest in growth. While these banks are hunkered down “waiting for rates to fall,” the fintech market is stealing their future. The “Zombie” strategy is to do nothing and hope to survive. Heading into 2026, hope is not a strategy. The Legacy Core Trap: Why You Can’t Wait for Fiserv For decades, community banks have been held hostage by the oligopoly of legacy core providers. We all know the names. We’ve seen the reports of client churn and the stock volatility at the major legacy processors. The reality is that waiting for your legacy provider to “modernize” is a resignation letter.   These legacy cores were built for a batch-processing world. They cannot handle the real-time, event-driven demands of 2026 payments. And migrating off them is a nightmare—a multi-year, multi-million dollar “heart transplant” that fails more often than it succeeds.   In 2026, the winning strategy is Architectural Independence. The most forward-thinking banks are realizing they don’t need to rip out their mainframe to stay relevant. They are adopting the “Sidecar Strategy” (something my team has written about). They are standing up modern, cloud-native ledgers alongside their legacy cores to launch specific, high-growth verticals and partnering with new fintechs to help them. Things like: Want to support a gig-economy program? Don’t run it through the old core. Spin up a sidecar. Want to offer stablecoin (check out Lydia’s Fintech Forecast) settlement for local businesses? Don’t wait for the legacy vendor to build it. Partner with a cloud-native infrastructure provider.   This “Sidecar” approach allows a bank to innovate in weeks, not years. It creates a “speed boat” alongside the “cruise ship.” The “Partner or Perish” Pivot: The New Embedded Banking Model This brings us to the second major shift for 2026: The evolution of partnerships. The collapse of the “Middleware BaaS” model in 2024/2025 was a painful but necessary forest fire. The bankruptcy of major middleware players like Synapse burned away the unsafe “rent-a-charter” practices that attracted regulatory wrath. The FDIC and OCC made it clear: banks cannot outsource their risk management to a software company.   What has emerged from the ashes is the new Embedded Finance model. In 2026, banks are doing more than “sponsoring” fintechs via a black box; they are integrating with them via Direct Visibility. The “Platform Banks” of 2026 demand what we call the Glass House model. They utilize technology stacks that provide a shared, real-time ledger. The bank sees exactly what the fintech sees. Every transaction, every KYC check, every suspicious activity report is visible in real-time.   This regulatory compliance is actually a competitive advantage. Fintechs need banks more than ever to access payment rails and deposit insurance. Banks that can offer a compliant, transparent, API-driven partnership model are finding they can charge a premium for it. The Forecast: The Era of the Specialist 2026 will be the year of the “Specialist Bank.” The generalist community bank model is fading. The banks that thrive will be the ones that pick a lane—whether it’s payments, crypto-settlement (“PSC-as-a-Service”), or niche commercial lending—and build the specific tech stack needed to dominate it.   We are already seeing this with banks partnering with companies to offer stablecoin settlement services to their commercial clients. It’s a service the big money center banks are too slow to offer to the mid-market, and it’s a massive revenue opportunity. The “Zombie Banks” will keep waiting for the phone to ring. The “Platform Banks” will be too busy building API connections to notice.