Flagship Market Monitor: Credit Issuing Q4 2025
Credit products are adapting quickly as issuers and fintechs respond to shifting consumer preferences, competitive pressure from BNPL, and evolving digital commerce behavior. Experimentation with new credit products has accelerated in recent years, ranging from installment-first cards and ecosystem-driven co-brands, to AI-driven underwriting and embedded credit in everyday payment flows. While new products and redesigns […]
Credit Card Issuing Industry KPIs Q4’25
Underwriting Discipline Continues to Hold Credit Losses at Bay The fourth quarter of 2025 showed stabilization in the recent upward credit loss trend in bank credit performance, while portfolio growth remained intact despite mounting signs of consumer fragility. As non-credit card-focused banks demonstrated improving chargeoff stability and sustained risk appetite, credit card-focused banks continued to […]
Will AI Kill the B2B Software Industry?
The software industry is panicking as bears latch onto the theme of AI disrupting the software industry, assuming that AI will be able to develop custom code that is superior or lower cost. Investors are clearly spooked, the flight from software equities has been bloody as we illustrate in Figure 1 below. We agree that […]
Webinar: Stablecoins Go Mainstream
A panel discussion on the stablecoin landscape with Ben Brown (Partner, Flagship Advisory Partners), Nabil Manji (SVP, Head of Fintech Growth & Financial Partnerships, WorldPay), Ali Heiring (Director of Corporate Strategy, MoneyGram), and Ben Reynolds (SVP, Head of Big Business Banking, SoFi). Together, we explored how stablecoins are being applied across consumer and B2B payments, […]
What Happened to PayPal?
The recent replacement of PayPal’s CEO after only two years in the role has sparked passionate discussion on what caused the decline of the original fintech unicorn. While, in retrospect, there have been some real missteps, we believe the more interesting question is what PayPal could yet become. Despite a decade of strategic drift, the […]
Middle East: An Upcoming Fintech Growth Engine
Fintech in the Middle East is no longer emerging – it is scaling. Strong capital inflows, rising consolidation, and regulatory tailwinds are accelerating growth across payments, wallets, lending, and digital banking. We advise viewing the slides via the “PDF” icon button. ‹ › Key Highlights: Fintech funding has accelerated and a new cohort of regional […]
Embedded Fintech Vertical Snapshot: Accommodation Property Management
As part of our ongoing vertical series on vertical SaaS and embedded finance, we profile the accommodation property management segment, which is relatively mature in embedded payments acceptance but offers significant growth opportunities across broader embedded finance.
Flagship’s Annual Visa & Mastercard Card Scheme Performance Snapshot, FY 2025
Visa and Mastercard delivered another strong year, with GDV up 7–9% and net revenue growing even faster (12–16%), increasingly driven by value-added services like tokenization.
Capital One Acquires Brex: A Strategic Pivot in Bank–Fintech Convergence
Introduction On January 22, 2026, Capital One (a top-10 U.S. bank) announced that it will acquire Brex, a corporate spend management and treasury platform, in a $5.15 billion 50/50 cash-and-stock transaction, expected to close by mid-2026. The deal is one of the largest ever fintech acquisitions by a bank and latest in an active B2B […]
BNPL Landscape & Credit Dynamics
Buy Now Pay Later has moved from being a checkout novelty to becoming one of the fastest-growing forms of consumer credit. In 2025, BNPL originations passed $60 billion in the U.S. and $500 billion globally – with sustained volume growth more than double the rate of credit cards. Retailers love the incremental sales, consumers love […]