Embedded Finance Index 2026 · 6,646 fintech stacks analyzed

Evidence from subprocessor lists, regulatory footers, trust pages, customer announcements, and ~607 press articles — produced by Apideck with content partners Open Banking Tracker and Embedded Finance Review.
15.9% of the 6,646 fintechs in the Embedded Finance Index 2026 publicly disclose their sponsor bank (1,055 companies) — the most-disclosed layer in the stack, because naming it is effectively a regulatory requirement.
Only 6.8% of fintechs publicly name their KYC/identity vendor (454 of 6,646) — 2.3× lower than sponsor-bank disclosure, making compliance the most under-disclosed layer in the embedded-finance stack.
Evolve Bank & Trust is the most-named BaaS provider in the dataset, linked to 67 companies through their public disclosures and provider customer lists.
Stripe is the most-named PSP, linked to 685 companies through their public disclosures and provider customer lists.
For each layer of the embedded-finance stack: what share of 6,646 analyzed fintechs publicly named a vendor? The gap between the green and red rows is the dark half of the stack — the layers regulators, integrity researchers, and journalists can’t audit from outside.
The 6,646 fintechs in this dataset split into 9 working categories. Infrastructure providers (BaaS, card issuing, PSP) sit alongside the platforms that consume them (vertical SaaS, marketplaces, B2B fintech) — the report is a snapshot of an ecosystem where buyer and seller often appear in the same chart. 777 entries were excluded as non-fintech (investor/advisory firms, non-financial orgs, press fragments) before this breakdown.
Every non-bank fintech that holds customer balances or issues cards sits on top of a US regulated bank charter — the “sponsor bank.” This is the single most-disclosed layer in our dataset because it’s a regulatory requirement to name. No single sponsor bank dominates. The top 5 (Evolve Bank & Trust, Cross River, Sutton Bank, Pathward, Celtic Bank) together back 29% of disclosed relationships — the rest spreads across 396+ smaller banks.
A handful of providers dominate every category — and the share of the leader tells you whether the layer is a winner-take-most market or still fragmented. Click a region below to filter to that market.
Public-company evidence that platforms which embed financial products end up out-earning their software business. From the comprehensive PDF report.
BaaS, open finance, and sponsor banking look almost completely different depending on where the company is incorporated. Disclosure norms vary even more — US fintechs name their stack far more often than the rest of the world (see the sponsor-bank gap below), an artifact of regulatory disclosure rules (FDIC member badges, BSA/AML attestations) that don’t exist elsewhere.
Most fintech companies rent their banking, card-issuing, and payment infrastructure from a vendor. But a growing tier of category leaders has crossed the threshold and now operates that infrastructure themselves — through an owned bank subsidiary, an in-house clearing entity, or a self-issued payment product.
When a company graduates from vendor relationship to owned stack, the economics flip: margin retained, latency controlled, but compliance, capital, and operational burden internalized. 422 of 6646 companies in our dataset have crossed that line for at least one layer.
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Payment processors and BaaS providers are routinely named on trust pages and subprocessor lists. The compliance layer — KYC, fraud, sponsor banking — is far more guarded. Comparing public disclosure rates across the dataset is itself the finding.
Why the asymmetry: sponsor-bank disclosure is regulator-driven (FDIC Section 18 “Member FDIC” signage rule, OCC third-party-risk-management OCC 2023-17); KYC-vendor identity is treated as competitive information under the GLBA Safeguards Rule (no disclosure obligation). One layer is forced into the open; the other is allowed to stay private. The data reflects exactly that.
Six named failures since 2023. Each one took partner fintechs offline, locked out customers, or revealed pooled-account architectures with no independent source of truth. The compliance layer goes dark in normal times — and it’s the layer that fails first.
The infra layer either breaks in public or ships something concrete in public — same layer, same stakes, opposite outcome. Same bar as the failures above: every result here is a number or a before/after, not a marketing adjective.
Sponsor-bank relationships surface because they’re a regulatory requirement to disclose. Identity-verification providers are treated as trade secrets — and the rest of the compliance stack (fraud orchestration, sanctions screening, transaction monitoring) is darker still. The vendor catalog you can build from public evidence is therefore systematically biased toward the payments side and away from the risk side.
46 applications tracked since the OCC reopened de novo chartering: 15 application filed, 25 conditional approval, 4 approved, 2 denied. The ten most recent are below; the full queue has every row with its filing and decision record. Most are national trust banks — custody and stablecoin settlement under one federal supervisor instead of 50 state licences — not deposit-taking banks. Each one is a sponsor-bank relationship that ends when the charter opens.
14 industry alliances tracked — 8 operational, 6 forming. Distinct from a company’s own bilateral partnership (that lives on its dossier): this is several organizations jointly building a shared standard or a new, jointly capitalized entity. The full page has every member and source.
A USD-denominated stablecoin (OUSD) built as shared, co-owned payments infrastructure rather than a single company's product — mintable and redeemable at par with no fees or volume caps, live on Ethereum, Solana, Base and Tempo. Founding partners share governance and reserve income rather than a