Fintech startups are making "a bunch of AI slop" but it's okay

You'd be hard pressed to find a fintech, or indeed any startup, not using AI in any capacity. It has taken the industry by storm, whether you like it or not. This is both a good thing and a bad thing.

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Speaking on a panel at the South by Southwest London conference yesterday, Richard Muirhead, managing partner of VC firm Fabric Ventures, said that the pace at which fintechs are building software is "going parabolic." This means that there's way more valuable applications being built, but also "a bunch of slop." 

Mariano Albera, fellow panelist and Checkout.com CTO, said that "everything touched by AI moves faster," but suggested that, in the payments industry, there's a tendency towards shiny object syndrome instead of developing all these ideas; "there are more prototypes, protocols and blog posts than agentic transactions," he said.

The most common application of AI is in technology teams. Albera said that "the majority of [Checkout's] software is built with AI now," but that there's a misconception that this is reducing workload for technologists. "Every engineer I know is working a lot more hours and a lot later."

At New York fintech Ramp, unlimited AI tokens are a company-wide benefit, and some teams use them much more than others. VP Jacob Wallenberg, also speaking at the conference, said that AI usage by non-technical teams has grown over the past year. Ramp's finance division is "the team that actually uses it the most now after engineering;" Wallenberg said they use Claude code to build "amazing apps that used to be these monstrosities in excel workbooks." Funding Circle CEO Lisa Jacobs, another attendee, said her fintech is "using generative AI across the business” to “enable us to be faster at getting to the market," but didn't expand on exact applications.

Other fintechs have used this productivity boost to justify mass layoffs. Coinbase cut 14% of staff last month in an attempt to become "AI-native." Jack Dorsey's Block cut ~40% of staff earlier this year, stating that modern tools are "enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company."

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