Comparing Fintechs in the Age of AI: Ecosystems, Valuations, and a New Challenger?

In the ever-evolving financial technology space, artificial intelligence has accelerated not only how fintechs build, but how they scale, pivot, and survive. The age of AI has rewritten the rules: rapid iteration, modular product ecosystems, smarter fraud detection, hyper-personalization, and real-time risk modeling are now table stakes.

So where do the current titans stand? And is it too early --or too naïve-- to bring up new players in the same conversation?

Let’s dive in.

Revolut: The Product Octopus

Revolut has built a robust offering, from currency exchange and crypto to stock trading and budgeting tools. Their AI-powered features are mostly embedded in fraud detection and user analytics, and they shine in user growth and global brand visibility.

Yet Revolut’s valuation has long baffled analysts. With 50 million customers and roughly $2.2B in revenue, it holds a valuation higher than Nubank, which has double the users and nearly five times the revenue. Revolut’s vertical stack is powerful, but its profitability remains an open question.

Nubank: Scale Without Hype?

Nubank is the quiet titan of Latin America. With over 100 million users and north of $9.5B in revenue, it operates with operational efficiency that rivals legacy banks. While less flashy on social media or international press circuits, Nubank is the embodiment of disciplined execution. Their AI usage powers credit decisioning, operational automation, and customer service at massive scale.

Yet somehow, they're still valued lower than Revolut. It's the kind of paradox that feels endemic to fintech, where narrative sometimes outpaces numbers.

Vepo: The Silent young Challenger

Enter Vepo Platforms. With over 21,000 users signed up before even a public app store launch, this Botswana-based upstart is quietly building an AI-driven super-app ecosystem inspired by (and strategically diverging from) giants like Revolut and Nubank.

Its approach is frugal, intentionally so. No massive burn rate. No inflated CAC. Instead, it’s operating in a playbook closer to TikTok's early global infiltration, targeting mid-tier economies with high populations, built-in demand, and broken financial systems.

The founder, Martin B. Joseph, is barely out of his teens. Which raises valid questions: Is it too early to mention him in the same sentence as fintech powerhouses? Can a recent 20-something from a small market truly understand the intricacies of global fintech warfare?

But perhaps that’s the very skepticism that will age poorly.

After all, in an age of AI, timing isn’t just everything, it's compressing. Startups don’t need a decade to catch up anymore.

And in the blurred lines of valuation vs value, of flash vs fundamentals, perhaps what we're seeing with Vepo is something similar to that Revolut-Nubank paradox.

Only this time, it’s just getting started.

Disclosure: This piece was written with publicly available information. The author has no current affiliations with any mentioned company.