A fintech investment fund doesn’t have the luxury of pretending. Capital either compounds or it leaks. Over the years We’ve learned to focus on a handful of signals that cut through noise and make decisions simpler, faster, and—most importantly—more right than wrong. None of this is mysterious. It’s practical, sometimes unglamorous, and it tends to show up in the day-to-day rhythm of a team rather than on a slide with a perfect gradient.
How a fintech investment fund reads real demand
Markets whisper before they shout. The mistake is waiting for the shout.
What we often look for first is demand that already exists and won’t vanish when a cheaper alternative appears. Founders who have spent real time close to the problem almost always talk differently: fewer buzzwords, more verbs. They describe the moment a payment actually cleared for a merchant who’d been stuck for weeks, or the first clinic that stopped chasing paper because reconciliation suddenly worked. They can open a dashboard and show me where the pull is densest—one segment, one use case, one behaviour that keeps repeating. If they can’t, it’s usually because the pull isn’t there yet.
Price is a tell. Not the headline rate, but the willingness to pay inside a cohort that sticks. Contracted revenue and net revenue retention that bends above 100% matter more to me than a thousand free trials. If you can name the customers who would be angry to lose your tool tomorrow, you’re onto something. If you can’t name them, you’re still auditioning.
Defensibility lives in the boring places
People love to point at UI. Copycats love UI too.
What tends to hold up in fintech is the part you don’t notice when it’s working: the ledger that never falls out of balance; the risk engine that keeps learning; the operational run-book that catches fraud spikes at 2am without waking the full team. If you underwrite, I’ll ask for the shape of your losses by cohort and the exact cut-offs you use when demand gets tempting but risky. If you move money, I’ll want to know how you manage false positives so you don’t protect the business at the expense of your best users.
A simple question clears a lot of fog: if a capable competitor cloned your interface next month, what would they still be missing? If your answer starts with “our brand,” we’re not done.
Regulation as a moat, not an obstacle
You can tell a lot about a company by how it talks about regulators. The best teams treat them as partners who keep the rails sturdy. That mindset shows up in the prep: licensing maps that make economic sense; clean documentation; conversations with supervisors that started early and stayed constructive. These companies don’t scramble when something changes; they adjust. When we ask for evidence, they don’t hand-wave. They show meeting notes, remediation items, and the steady habit of closing the loop.
In emerging markets this is even more critical. A brilliant product with a naive licence plan is fragile. A solid licence plan with a good product is resilient, and resilience is what compounding feels like from the inside.
Governance is scale infrastructure
Good governance isn’t a board calendar and a catered lunch. It’s a rhythm. The same few numbers, reported the same way, on time, every time. Growth. Margin. Risk. Liquidity. People. When these five threads are tight, everything else tends to hold.
Concentration risk is the silent killer. Revenue stuck in one customer. A single supplier who can’t be replaced. The gifted engineer who “owns” underwriting logic in his head. I have a simple threshold—if any point of concentration edges over twenty percent, the plan to dilute it needs to be more than a footnote. It should be visible in the roadmap and in the hiring plan; otherwise you don’t have a plan, you have a hope.
Pacing, reserves, and the company you keep
Money can be intoxicating. It can also be a sedative. I’ve learned to prefer a steady release of capital tied to proof rather than promise. Licences granted. Risk models that meet their accuracy targets outside the demo environment. Margins that hold when volumes double. When these gates are clear up front, founders move faster because decision-making gets simple.
Reserves matter because outliers deserve a second swing. We keep enough back to double down on the companies that keep clearing gates with room to spare. And syndicate quality is not a vanity metric; it’s a risk control. Partners who bring discipline and hard questions tend to bring customers and hiring pipelines too.
The metrics that survive scrutiny
There’s a difference between numbers and measures. The former fill reports; the latter change behaviour.
I care about revenue quality, not just revenue. Contracted versus transactional. What retention looks like at cohort level. The contribution margin after risk and servicing costs—not “after we scale,” but now. I want to see how fraud and loss curves bend over time and how quickly you spot a drift. Efficiency matters as much as ambition: revenue per FTE, engineering focus, payback periods that are grounded in reality rather than a deck’s optimism. Liquidity posture isn’t a finance exercise—it’s the oxygen tank. The cash conversion cycle, the dependency on settlement delays, and the honest plan if those delays lengthen.
If your data dictionary is one page and your team actually uses it, that’s a quiet sign of maturity.
People: the real concentration risk
When a product roadmap lives in two heads, you don’t have a roadmap—you have a queue. I look for overlapping ownership in the critical systems, not to slow teams down but to keep them alive when the market gets expensive and recruiters get active. Documentation is boring until it isn’t. Cross-training is overkill until the one person with the keys gets flu, or a better offer. I have never regretted backing a team that invested in these things early.
What founders can do this quarter
If you’re preparing to raise, make it easy for serious capital to say yes. Strip your story back to the load-bearing parts. One page is enough: the problem that won’t go away; the wedge you’ve chosen; the system you’re building; the defensibility that doesn’t rely on adjectives; and the proof that someone is paying, staying, and telling their friends.
Clean your data room so it reads like you run your company. Cap table that is legible. Contracts that are real. Licensing status that is documented. A model with scenarios rather than fantasies. Board packs that match the pitch, not contradict it.
Then pick one milestone that reduces real risk and go and knock it down. Maybe it’s a licence, maybe it’s moving a key segment from pilot to contract, maybe it’s lifting model accuracy to a target you can live with under stress. Whatever it is, make it visible. Investors don’t mind risk; they mind surprises.
FAQ's
When revenue repeats, even modestly, and the next gate is clearer than the last. If you can show demand density, a credible route through regulation, and a cadence that turns decisions into shipped work, we should talk.
Incoherent numbers, thin documentation, and a story that changes with the audience. None of those are terminal, but together they say: not yet.
Lead with licensing and compliance. If those steps come second, you’ll spend more time apologising than selling.
Where to go next
If you want the more formal version of our approach, read our Strategic Approach page. Founders can share a data room via Submit Your Pitch. Institutional partners will find the practical details under For Institutional Partners. The article you’ve just read is the way we actually work, not the way a deck wishes we did.
