As fintech markets continue to stabilize, experts across the industry are hastening to explain just how the industry strayed so far from the boom it enjoyed over the last several years. To Mark Goldberg, partner at Index Ventures and a veteran of the front lines of fintech investment, there’s no special mystery to be solved. In fact, while things may still look grim for fintech, a downturn is far from the end of the line.
“Last year was the party and this year is the hangover,” said Goldberg in an interview earlier this month. “That’s really how it feels to me — that we’re starting to understand the excesses of last year. We’ve seen now the retrenchment period after the fact.”
Based on his years of experience in the fundraising side of fintech, Goldberg has been able to piece together a fairly comprehensive picture of where fintech goes from here. “I think we’re gonna see a lot of M&A, a lot of consolidation” over the next year, he explained, and the industry may never fully reach the same high water mark it hit at the beginning of 2022. But for all the belt-tightening, Goldberg said, the continuing fusion of financial technology and mass culture is a sign that fintech is here to stay.
“If you take a long-term view, I think next year — like mid-year — the market really reopens in a big way.”
