Emerging opportunities at the intersection of AI and B2B fintech
The productivity promise of the back-office
Financial technology revenues are expected to increase sixfold, rising from $245 billion to $1.5 trillion by 2030, according to BCG. Following a cool down from its 2021 peak, the sector's funding activity is on the rise again. In the first half of 2025, funding totaled $22 billion, an 11.1% increase from the second half of 2024, according to Crunchbase.
Despite a weaker global economic outlook, the financial sector – still the world’s largest - presents significant opportunities due to emerging AI capabilities and legacy workflows that are far behind other sectors.
While global M&A activity remains subdued, analysts expect the U.S. financial services and banking industry to see accelerated M&A activity later in the year. Additionally, after a prolonged downturn and a sluggish start to 2025, the IPO market is finally showing signs of recovery.
Banks and corporate finance teams are investing hundreds of millions on automated underwriting, loan management, real-time fraud detection, risk scoring, and other back-office processes.
While the last era of growth in fintech was led by payments, which continues to lead investment activity, SMB and enterprise solutions powered by agentic AI will lead the next wave.
Here are some of the most promising B2B fintech opportunities in 2025.
Streamlining legacy lending workflows with AI
Traditional lending processes are manual, error-prone, and labor-intensive. AI-native platforms automate most manual processes, turn decision making from days into minutes, and improve accuracy while reducing costs. This improves lender productivity across the entire workflow including loan origination, credit underwriting, claim management, improved personalization of offers, and regulatory compliance and risk assessment – across commercial, small business, and real estate lending.
Relevant companies: Casca, Parlay, Levr, Blooma, Zest AI
Agentic AI for accountants and accounts payable
A changing regulatory environment, complex tax codes, repetitive mundane tasks, human error, understaffed firms, and enormous amounts of documentation makes accounting especially well-suited for AI transformation by improving productivity, increasing accuracy and reducing costs and turnaround time. PwC reports its in-house teams have seen 20% to 40% productivity gains in accounting and tax. While the big 4 have started implementing in-house generative AI solutions, adoption across the industry is expected from small shops, major firms and corporate accounting departments – and it will be a necessity as the industry fundamentally evolves as a result. Furthermore, AI will particularly revolutionize accounts payable by helping teams more accurately manage cash flow, predict future outcomes, and better utilize enormous amounts of available data – transforming the entire AP process. According to Ramp, large businesses have increased AP by approximately 116% between July 2023 and March 2025.
Relevant startups: Basis, Truewind, Adaptive
AI platforms for financial analysts
Generative AI can analyze volumes of complex documents and datasets, synthesize siloed and unstructured internal data to identify trends, reduce errors, and provide real-time insights to greatly improve productivity and efficiency for finance teams. While the biggest financial institutions are building internal tools such as Goldman Sachs’ “Banker Co-pilot” and Morgan Stanley’s AI@MS Assistant, the opportunity to serve a broader portion of the market exists for emerging startups. Use cases include portfolio management and reporting, creation of investment materials, opportunity screening, data room management, private market research, and modeling.
Relevant startups: Hebbia, Rogo, Seek AI, Accelno, Decisional, Tolt IQ