Author: Francesco Andreoli, Consensys & MetaMask Developer Relations Lead
Compiled by: Jiahuan, ChainCatcher
Everyone is counting funding rounds, no one is counting funerals. So I counted both.
I started counting neobanks six months ago because I found no one could tell me exactly how many companies are in this industry. Analysts selling $4,000 PDFs don't know, the VCs putting money in don't know, the founders competing with each other don't know.
The answer, as of July 2026: 368 verified, still-operating neobanks. I track each one of them on neobankbeat.com, with all data open.
But the number that truly changed my view of this industry wasn't 368, but how many I had to delete to get there.
368 verified, still-operating neobanks
The rise is real. Let's start with that.
Summing up all the user numbers disclosed by the companies in the dataset, these neobanks we track serve approximately 1.46 billion people. This is not a forecast, nor a TAM chart figure, but the real reported client numbers.
And the geographical distribution will surprise anyone used to reading Western fintech media:
817 million of those users are in Asia. WeBank alone serves over 400 million people, more than all the neobanks in the US and Europe combined.
Nubank has 131 million customers, more than the total of all US neobanks.
Europe's champion, Revolut, has over 50 million users. That's impressive, but still a small fraction compared to the Asian numbers.
The marginal momentum of the industry is also shifting. Among neobanks founded and surviving since the 2020s, 30% are web3-native self-custody applications where user balances are not held by any company at all. Among the 2010s batch, this proportion is 4%. Whatever your thoughts on cryptocurrency, builders have voted with their feet.
So yes, the rise is real: 368 companies, three structurally distinct waves (254 traditional challenger banks, 58 fiat-crypto hybrid apps, 56 web3-native apps), underpinned by 106 infrastructure providers, backed by 219 investors. All mapped.
Now for the part no one puts in their pitch deck.
Only 127 out of the 368 hold full banking licenses.
Read that again. Two-thirds of the "banks" in your app store are not banks. Their right to exist is rented—from a sponsor bank, an e-money license, or some card issuer you've never heard of. And their customers almost never know which side of this line they are on.
Banking Licenses
This is not a technical detail; it's the core structural risk of the entire industry, and it comes with a body count:
WaveCrest, 2018: Visa revoked a card issuer's license, and dozens of crypto card projects died overnight.
Wirecard, 2020: A payment processor collapsed with a €1.9 billion hole. Funds for a whole cohort of European "banks" were frozen, their only fault being built on top of it.
Synapse, 2024: A BaaS middleman collapsed, and average Americans found out "FDIC-insured" didn't mean what they thought, because what failed was the ledger recording who owned what.
Ready, 2026: Same movie, different cast.
When a real bank fails, deposit insurance pays out. When a neobank's infrastructure fails, customers get a number in the bankruptcy queue.
The deaths in this industry are silent. That is the real scandal.
One thing I didn't anticipate after maintaining this dataset: the deletions never stop.
Who is in control?
Just this month, five entities vanished from the list—liquidated, absorbed, or quietly pivoted into something else. No press releases, no post-mortems. Neobanks don't die like FTX.
The app just stops updating, customer support stops responding, and one day the domain redirects to a partner's landing page. Hundreds of thousands of customers either migrate or simply evaporate.
No one writes obituaries for neobanks. Fintech media covers product launches and funding rounds because that's where the ad revenue and interview access are. So the graveyard remains invisible, and every new founder runs headlong into the same five traps, thinking they're the first to see them.
That's why we track exits as meticulously as entries. Failure data is more valuable than funding data. You learn nothing from press releases.
"But AI will solve the profitability model." Really?
Now every neobank pitch deck mentions AI. So we reviewed all 368, checking against financial filings, regulatory disclosures, and evidence of actual deployment—not marketing pages.
67 passed. 18%. The remaining 300+ are either still piloting, "exploring," or presenting a partner's model as their own.
AI Neobanks?
The counterintuitive part: those doing AI best are often not the famous names, but emerging market lenders in Nigeria, the Philippines, Mexico, Bangladesh. Where credit bureaus are virtually non-existent, a model that can underwrite the unbanked isn't a nice-to-have feature—it's the entire reason the business can exist.
The West talks about AI banking. The Global South is actually building it because it has no other choice.
What This Map Actually Shows
Look at the infrastructure section on the map: 106 providers supporting 368 consumer-facing brands. Within this layer, a handful of sponsor banks, BaaS platforms, and card processors each carry dozens of logos on their shoulders. This concentration, invisible from the consumer side, is what breeds the next Synapse.
This is the most honest picture of the industry in 2026: a spectacular, world-changing rise where 1.5 billion people access banking through an app, many for the first time in their lives; all built on a critical layer most customers have never heard of, where two-thirds of the companies wouldn't survive one bad quarter from their landlord.
Both things are true. That's what makes it interesting.
Three Predictions I'm Willing to Admit I Could Be Wrong About
The license gap will narrow from both ends. Strong unlicensed players will acquire or obtain licenses. Weak ones will become 2027 deletions. The middle ground will disappear.
The first AI underwriting blowup will happen within two credit cycles. Most of those 67 deployed models have not experienced a real downturn in their current form. Some are about to learn what their training data was missing.
The next wave's customers are not human. Banking infrastructure serving AI agents—including agent-operated wallets, agent-issued cards, machine-to-machine payments—has only 7 companies working on it today. It looks like web3-native in 2021: tiny, weird, and structural.
