How Fintech and AI Are Driving Business Transformation

Embedded finance is turning business software into a banking front door

Mexico Business News frames Latin America as a market where financial friction is not incidental but structural. The region is described as a mosaic of regulatory regimes and persistent gaps, with roughly 70% of adults underbanked or excluded from formal financial services. Small and medium-sized enterprises in economies such as Colombia, Mexico and Brazil are also described as struggling with working capital, cash-flow management and access to digital infrastructure.

That is the backdrop for embedded finance: credit, insurance, wallets and payment rails appearing inside non-financial platforms. In practice, the customer journey changes. A retailer, logistics platform, agricultural cooperative or healthcare operator does not simply refer users to a bank; the financial product becomes part of the service already being used.

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For users, this can reduce cognitive load. You are not forced to leave the workflow, repeat information and decode a bank’s interface just to get paid, finance inventory or manage risk. But there is a trade-off. When finance becomes “native” to another product, it can also become less visible. The fees, limits, data permissions and dispute paths still matter — even if the button is beautifully placed.

Open banking is making the data question harder to ignore

The same Mexico Business News piece points to open banking as another major wave. Brazil is described as having launched an open finance framework in 2020 and becoming one of the world’s more advanced open banking ecosystems. Mexico’s Fintech Law is said to have established a legal basis for open finance earlier, while Colombia is accelerating its own framework.

The business implication is straightforward: if customer-permissioned financial data can move more easily, underwriting, fraud detection, insurance pricing and account aggregation can all change. The excerpt also mentions cash-flow analytics for SMEs, instant credit scoring for the informal economy and financial wellness tools built on behavioral data.

This is where the fintech promise becomes both useful and uncomfortable. Better data portability can mean less paperwork and fewer arbitrary “computer says no” moments. It can also mean more decisions made from behavioral traces users barely understand. The practical question for businesses is not just “Does this app connect to my bank?” It is: what data is shared, for what purpose, for how long, and how easily can permission be revoked?

Cross-border payments show the new SMB toolkit

PYMNTS reports that 36% of internationally active small businesses now use fintech providers for cross-border payments, up from 30% in 2025, citing better digital experiences. Traditional banks still remain the dominant provider, according to the report, but the pattern is shifting: SMBs are not necessarily replacing banks. They are assembling a broader payments toolkit.

That detail matters. It suggests the modern business finance stack is becoming modular. A company may keep a traditional bank for reach or continuity, use a fintech for faster international payments, test accounting platforms with payment features, and consider other rails where appropriate. PYMNTS also reports projected adoption growth for accounting platforms with payment capabilities, from 26% to 29%, and for stablecoin and cryptocurrency platforms, from 11% to 17%.

The temptation is to call this disruption and move on. But for a business owner, it feels more like vendor sprawl with better interfaces. More choice can reduce friction only if the choices are legible. Otherwise, the user journey becomes a patchwork: one provider for invoices, another for overseas suppliers, another for cards, another for reconciliation.

Two other reports add to the broader signal, though with limited available detail: one says Nigeria’s next tech boom may lean toward enterprise software and digital infrastructure rather than fintech, while another describes an Atlanta fintech addressing business banking gaps for African and Latin American startups. Taken together, the theme is clear enough: the next phase of fintech may be less about a shiny neobank app and more about financial capability embedded into the operating system of business.

For users, that is progress only if trust keeps up with convenience. The winning providers will not be the ones that merely hide banking inside smoother screens. They will be the ones that make the financial layer understandable when something goes wrong.