Peter Oakes
Founder, Fintech Ireland
Explore how Ireland’s fintech sector is reshaping finance with AI, digital payments, and stablecoins amid growing regulation, disruption and innovation across Europe and beyond.
Fifteen years ago, fintech exploded out of the ashes of the global financial crisis. This provided faster, cheaper and better online financial services than those of banks that caused the crisis and a trillion-plus dollar bailout.
Ireland’s booming fintech hub
Ireland, according to Fintech Ireland, is now home to more than 320 Irish-born fintechs and some 150 global fintechs operating from the country across Europe and further afield.
The central banks and regulators, including our own Central Bank of Ireland, have their work cut out keeping abreast of the pace of innovation, the speed of global money management and movement alongside juggling significant consumer protection and financial stability risks. The Irish regulator now licenses approximately 90 fintechs and is responsible for keeping an eye on many more that passport their services into Ireland from Europe.
Fintechs are investing in
an artificial intelligence (AI)
foundation model for payments.
AI-driven future of fintech
While fintechs have performed well disrupting traditional banks — think Ireland’s highly successful payments firm TransferMate and Lithuania’s full suite digital bank Revolut — fintechs cannot rest on their laurels. They too face the risk of disruption not only from competitors but from technology itself.
Total transaction value in the digital payments market is projected to reach a staggering USD 20.09 trillion in 2025. In response, fintechs are investing in an artificial intelligence (AI) foundation model for payments. Stripe, co-headquartered in Ireland and the US, recently announced its AI model, which is set to be trained on billions of transactions.
The idea is that, by being able to capture subtle signals about each payment, the AI model will further reduce fraud, make checkout experiences more personalised and improve the performance of payment systems.
Stablecoins challenge traditional finance
Cryptocurrencies also represent another threat to banks and fintechs, particularly the new technology of ‘stablecoins.’ This form of privately issued money is pegged to a major currency, such as Circle’s USD-C, thereby eliminating the volatility of unbacked crypto, such as bitcoin and political meme coins. Governments don’t like private money, which would explain why the European Central Bank has spent billions building a case for its own digital euro (a ‘public stablecoin’) to fend off the threat posed by ‘private stablecoins.’
While there is still much to play out here, it remains true today as it did a decade and a half ago: there is never a dull moment in fintech.
