"The fintech industry is full of nepotism and privilege"
I’m the founder of a fintech infrastructure company focused on secure payments, fraud prevention, identity-based authorization, and financial access infrastructure. In the process of trying to build, pitch, and establish partnerships, I’ve seen what appears to be a broader pattern across finance and fintech: founders and operators are often judged less on product quality or commercial potential and more on pedigree, presentation, who introduced them, and whether they fit the image of someone the industry is comfortable funding or taking seriously.
From the founder side, there is a major disconnect between how finance publicly talks about innovation and how access actually works in practice. The system often favours people who already have proximity to power - former bankers, repeat founders, elite school networks, well-connected operators, or people with family money.
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By comparison, if you're a founder who didn't come from one of these groups, you will have spend a lot of time simply trying to prove that you belong in the room at all.
Because of this dynamic, the fintech industry is full of nepotism and privilege. If you don't come from a privileged group, you can't get initial meetings, you can't get banking relationships, you can't get investor attention. Your product is dismissed before it even gets started.
The issue isn’t just fundraising. It extends into partnership conversations, credibility with institutions, and the broader culture of gatekeeping around financial infrastructure. There is a real story to be told about how difficult it is to build in payments, banking infrastructure, fraud prevention, and compliance-heavy sectors if you are not already socially validated by the ecosystem.
This is completely different from the public narrative. That narrative is that the fintech industry rewards disruption and merit. This is not the case. It's really a closed network that rewards familiarity, status, and access. The ecosystem is effectively replicating the same exclusionary patterns that it claims technology is supposed to fix.
Kevin Verenhannes is a pseudonym
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