Author: Francesco Andreoli, Head of Developer Relations at Consensys & MetaMask

Translation: Jiahui, ChainCatcher

Everyone is counting financing rounds, but no one counts funerals. So I counted both sides once.

Six months ago, I started counting neobanks because I found no one could tell me how many companies are in this industry. Analysts charging $4,000 for PDF reports didn’t know, VCs investing didn’t know, and founders competing against each other didn’t know either.

The answer is: as of July 2026, there are 368 verified, still operational neobanks. I track each of these on neobankbeat.com, and all the data is open.

But the number that really changed my perspective on this industry isn’t 368, but how many companies I deleted to reach that number.

368 verified, operational neobanks

The rise is real. Let’s start with that.

If we add up the user numbers disclosed by all the companies in the dataset, these neobanks serve about 1.46 billion people. This isn’t a prediction or a number from a TAM chart; this is the actual number of reported clients.

The geographical distribution would surprise anyone used to Western fintech media:

Of these, 817 million users are in Asia. Just WeBank serves over 400 million people, more than all the neobanks in the US and Europe combined.

Nubank has 131 million clients, more than the total of all neobanks in the US.

Europe's star, Revolut, has over 50 million users. This achievement is impressive but remains a drop in the bucket compared to the numbers in Asia.

The marginal momentum of the industry is also shifting. Among the neobanks established in the 2020s and still operating, 30% are web3 native self-custodied applications, where user balances aren’t held by any company. In the batch from the 2010s, this ratio was only 4%. Regardless of how you view cryptocurrencies, builders have voted with their feet.

So yes, the rise is real: 368 companies, three structurally different waves (254 traditional challenger banks, 58 fiat and crypto hybrid applications, 56 web3 native applications), supported by 106 infrastructure providers and backed by 219 investors. All are marked on the map.

Next is the part that no one would write into a BP.

Out of the 368, only 127 have full banking licenses.

Read that again. Of those "banks" in your mobile app store, two-thirds are not banks. Their survival rights are rented, from a sponsoring bank, an electronic money license, or some issuing institution you’ve never heard of. And their customers almost never know on which side of this line they stand.

Bank Licenses

This isn’t a technical detail but a core structural risk of the entire industry, and people's lives are at stake:

WaveCrest, 2018: Visa revoked a card issuer’s qualifications, and dozens of crypto card projects died overnight.

Wirecard, 2020: A payment processor exposed a €1.9 billion gap, freezing the funds of a batch of "banks" across Europe, their only fault being that they were built on it.

Synapse, 2024: A BaaS intermediary went bankrupt, and regular Americans discovered that being "FDIC insured" wasn’t what they thought, because it was that very ledger recording who owned what that had issues.

Ready, 2026: The same movie with a new cast.

When a real bank fails, deposit insurance pays out. When the infrastructure of a neobank goes wrong, customers get a queue number in a bankruptcy process.

Deaths in this industry are silent. That is the real scandal.

After maintaining this dataset, one thing I didn’t expect was that deletions never stopped.

Who is in control?

Just this month, five entities disappeared from the list, either being liquidated, merged, or quietly transforming into something else. There were no press releases, no reviews. Neobanks don’t die with the fanfare of FTX.

Apps simply stop updating, customer service stops responding, and then one day the domain redirects to a landing page of some partner, with hundreds of thousands of customers either migrating or evaporating.

No one writes obituaries for neobanks. Fintech media report on product launches and financing rounds because that's where the advertising revenue and interview opportunities are. Hence, this graveyard remains invisible, and every new founder walks into the same five traps thinking they are the first to see through them.

This is why we track exit records as carefully as entries. Failure data is more valuable than funding data. You learn nothing from press releases.

"But AI will solve the profitability model issue." Really?

Now every new neobank BP will mention AI. So we reviewed each of the 368, cross-referencing with financial reports, regulatory disclosures, and evidence of actual deployment, rather than marketing pages.

67 passed. 18%. The remaining 300+ are either still in pilot, "exploring" or presenting their partner’s model as their own.

AI Neobanks?

The counterintuitive part is that the best work in AI is mostly done by lesser-known companies rather than those famous ones, such as lending institutions in emerging markets like Nigeria, the Philippines, Mexico, and Bangladesh. In these places, credit systems are virtually nonexistent, and a model that can offer credit to credit invisible individuals isn’t just a nice feature; it's the whole reason this business exists.

While the West discusses AI banks, the Global South is actually making it happen because they have no other choice.

What this map truly shows

Look at the infrastructure part of the map: 106 providers supporting 368 consumer-facing brands. In this box, a few sponsoring banks, BaaS platforms, and card processors, each holding dozens of logos above. The concentration invisible from the consumer side is precisely what breeds the next Synapse.

This is the most honest depiction of the industry in 2026: a spectacular rise that truly changes the world, with 1.5 billion people gaining bank services through one App, many for the first time in their lives; and all built on a load-bearing layer that the vast majority of customers have never heard of, with two-thirds of the companies not surviving a bad quarter from their landlords.

Two things are true simultaneously. That is what makes it interesting.

Three predictions I am willing to acknowledge might be wrong

The license gap will narrow from both ends. Strong unlicensed players will acquire or apply for licenses, while weak ones will become deletions in 2027. The middle ground will disappear.

The first AI credit explosion will happen within two credit cycles. Of those 67 deployed models, most have never experienced a real downturn in their current form. Some of them are about to learn what they are missing in their training data.

The next wave of customers will not be human. Banking infrastructure serving AI agents, including wallets operated by agents, cards issued by agents, and machine-to-machine payments, is currently only handled by 7 companies. It looks just like web3 native in 2021: very small, very strange, and structural.

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