If you work in fintech, you’ve no doubt often felt how hard it can be to constantly shift your stance as the regulatory ground changes under your feet. For years, participants in this sector have complained that financial regulation hasn’t kept pace with the pace of technological innovation. But in 2025 — and in 2026, regulation is picking up the pace. So now it is on fintechs to make sure they’re the ones keeping up.
Personally, I see a clear pattern emerging: watchdogs want more visibility, more data, and more direct control over how digital finance operates. And while this may sound intimidating to some, it can also become a competitive edge for firms that adapt early.
So, what’s actually changing? Which regulatory priorities will affect the EU landscape for fintechs the most in 2026 and beyond it? Let us work it out.
Supervision is moving towards centralization
If we look toward the EU, we can see that for years, this region’s model landscape was shaped by national regulators interpreting the same rules in slightly different ways. Now, however, that era is coming to an end, giving way to a demand for greater clarity.
ESMA is undergoing a major MiFID II/MiFIR review aimed at tightening market structure rules, so as to make trading in Europe less fragmented, easier to understand, and harder to manipulate. In October 2025, the watchdog issued a public statement that outlines revised transparency rules, showing that the review on the whole explicitly targets how transparent and open markets must be.
In broader terms, ESMA is looking at how markets are organized, how prices are formed, and how information is shared with investors. For fintechs, this means more detailed reporting, stricter data standards, and fewer grey areas in how trading services must operate.
At the same time, since around mid-2025, the regulator has been collecting feedback specifically focused on the customer journey. Whether any regulatory or non-regulatory barriers may be discouraging participation, how requirements operate in practice and shape investor experiences, and if any particular adjustments might help simplify things.
To me, this shows that the regulator is looking beyond just technical compliance and instead examining how people actually move through the entire investing process. It’s a strong sign that the next wave of rules will focus more on onboarding flows, disclosure formats, and how firms shape investor decision-making. Fintechs should anticipate tighter expectations for how their products are structured, explained, and distributed.
Finally, there is a strong push from the European Commission to give ESMA more direct control over exchanges, crypto firms, and clearing houses, instead of leaving most supervision in the hands of national regulators. The reason for this is simple: today, the same set of rules can be interpreted differently, depending on which EU member state they were dealing with. This tends to create a lot of confusion, slowing down cross-border business operations.
Should oversight become centralized under ESMA — and there’s a good chance that it will — those inconsistencies can be dealt away with. For fintech firms that operate across borders, it will also mean cleaning up their own internal processes and systems. Instead of using different reporting standards for different regions, they’ll need one consistent data setup that can report accurately to both ESMA and regulators in other countries. Companies that build with this unified structure in mind early on will find it much easier to scale across markets faster and avoid unexpected compliance issues later on.
Crypto is being absorbed into mainstream financial regulation
For a long time, the crypto markets have been something that regulators tried to move around, as they were too niche to really accommodate. Now, they are far from niche, and so the days of “light touch” are over.
Since the introduction of MiCA, Crypto Asset Service Providers (CASPs) in the EU are required to meet most of the same expectations as traditional financial institutions: capital requirements, governance, local presence, and formal authorization.
The transition period runs into mid-2026, but the expectations are already clear. ESMA has even warned firms not to “badge-wash” — as in, not to use their “MiCA-compliant” status to market unregulated products alongside regulated ones
And even if we look beyond the EU, there are also examples of other regulators taking a highly structured approach to regulating this market. In Dubai, for example, the DFSA has established its Crypto Token regime all the way back in 2022, and has been gradually updating it ever since.
The regime sets strict rules on governance, custody, disclosure and market abuse. It also recognizes only a curated list of tokens (around 80% of the global crypto market cap), and it can revoke recognition, instantly changing which assets a firm can legally support.
In other words, crypto infrastructure today increasingly needs to look and behave like FX or equities infrastructure. Same levels of surveillance, risk modelling, best execution, and reporting practices must be consistently applied. Firms that stop looking at crypto as a “special snowflake” and view it instead as just another instrument in their multi-asset stack will have an easier time in this regard.
Operational resilience is the name of the game now
Operational resilience used to be a topic that everyone agreed was important, but rarely invested in properly. That changed with the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), which became fully enforceable in January 2025. DORA mandates strong ICT risk management, third-party oversight, incident reporting, and regular resilience testing. And for the first time, regulators can directly supervise “critical” tech providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Bloomberg and LSEG — 19 major tech firms have been designated as such so far.
The DFSA in Dubai has taken a similar direction: its thematic review of Money Services Providers in 2024 emphasized operational frameworks and Strong Customer Authentication, and the authority already had long-standing and detailed outsourcing rules.
In simple terms: regulators now care exactly who runs your cloud, payment hubs, and connectivity providers — and how you will operate if they fail.
From the point of view of fintech firms, this means that “DIY infrastructure” will become a liability. Institutional clients will naturally prefer partners that already offer multi-region setups, full vendor-risk mapping, audit trails, and DORA-style incident reporting by default. Operational resilience will shift from a behind-the-scenes IT concern to a core part of commercial strategy.
The bottom line: 2026 will reward the ones who prepare
To put the long story short, regulation is becoming more coordinated, more data-driven, and more demanding across the board. And while it may appear intimidating, this is not at all a bad thing. In fact, clearer rules are exactly what mature financial ecosystems need, because they create clearer paths for growth.
The rules are changing quickly, yes. But with the right strategy, they can become a source of competitive advantage rather than a barrier. The firms that thrive in 2026 will be the ones that recognize these shifts early and build their internal processes accordingly.
