The 4 Forces Rewriting Financial Services

Why 2026 is about forces—not products: capital regime shifts, on-chain rails, agentic commerce, and policy.

Financial services is being rebuilt in plain sight—but most of the industry is still arguing about products, not forces.

Here’s my FINTECHTALK map of what’s driving the rewrite in 2026:

1. A new capital allocation regime: America First finance - from Globalization to channeling capital into domestic production, re-industrialization, and Main Street growth.

2. Tokenization of real world assets + on-chain finance: stablecoins are step one, full-stack is the win

3. Next generation Banks + prediction markets + agentic commerce: from Native digital on-chain Banks to new price discovery venues to new commerce surfaces.

4. Policy as the accelerant: GENIUS Act + upcoming market structure bill + the APR cap as a steering lever

Each force is big on its own. Together, they form a single thesis:

The financial system is shifting from a Wall Street–optimized, globalization-era architecture to a domestically productive, Main Street–empowering architecture—built on programmable rails and enforced through policy.

One more framing point before we get into the four forces:

The next wave of “fintech” won’t be defined by technology-first. It’ll be defined by regulation-first.
The winners will be chartered, compliant, distribution-rich—and tech-savvy.

That’s why I increasingly think “fintech vs incumbent” is the wrong lens. We’re converging toward a single category: tech-savvy financial institutions operating on programmable rails.

And that’s the meta-story behind these four forces.

In the rest of this piece, our research breaks down the four forces—what they unlock, who’s positioned to win, and how Banks and Fintechs should respond and what investors should be watching and investing in.

Let me unpack all that.

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