There are only so many current account switchers left to win. Starling, Monzo and Revolut fought that battle and won it; Revolut and Monzo both ran secondary sales in 2024 that turned early employees into millionaires, and Accel and Dealroom counted 625 startups founded by alumni of European Fintech unicorns. The consumer surface of Fintech is crowded, well-funded and largely solved. What isn't solved is everything that has to work correctly behind a licensed financial business as it scales: reporting to regulators in every market it operates in, managing its own cash properly, and moving money at the speed its customers now expect. That's where three of our most recent additions to the portfolio sit: Complyfirst, Round Treasury and Ralio. None of them are consumer apps but all three are betting that the next decade of Fintech value is in the parts nobody outside the industry ever sees.

We wrote in 2024 about Detected, which handles KYB onboarding - verifying a business and getting it into the system in the first place. Onboarding is a single event. The more expensive, less visible problem is what happens after: ongoing regulatory reporting that scales with every new jurisdiction, product and client a financial services firm takes on. A payments company operating in ten markets doesn't file one report, it files variations of the same report ten different ways, on ten different schedules, to ten different regulators, indefinitely.

We backed Complyfirst earlier this year and they are turning  compliance  into software rather than headcount. It has built two products around the problem: one that takes structured regulatory returns - a business uploads its data, the platform validates it and generates a regulator-ready filing - and a second, AI-built workflow tool for the messier, process-specific reports like suspicious activity reports, which it builds around how a compliance team already works rather than forcing them onto a template. The company's own case studies show what that looks like in practice: SumUp went from onboarding to fully live and validated on Complyfirst within 48 hours, cutting its reporting effort by 90%, and payments processor Decta submitted clean regulatory returns with zero issues inside 24 hours of going live. As one client CFO puts it: "I've worked at large banks with entire teams managing returns. With Complyfirst, we had it done in days."

The founders built the product after living the problem themselves - copying data between spreadsheets at 11pm before a filing deadline - which is why support still comes directly from them rather than a ticketing system. These are founders that have lived through the problem in the trenches and understand it on an intrinsic level. 

Treasury has always been the unglamorous end of finance: cash sweeps, FX exposure, and liquidity decisions that sit with a finance director and a spreadsheet, checked once a week if it's lucky. Round Treasury automates it with AI agents across treasury, accounts payable, payroll and multi-entity cash visibility, plugging into a business's existing bank accounts and ERP rather than asking it to rip anything out. The company has already processed more than $500m for customers, who see an average 4x yield on idle cash compared with a standard business savings account and a 75% cut in per-invoice processing time, typically going from signup to a fully automated payment run within five days. The team ship product at a pace we haven't seen since the early days of Revolut.

We liked the product enough to use it ourselves. Love Ventures holds some of the company’s own operating cash in Round's money market account - not a portfolio company we're cheerleading from the sidelines, rather a partner we pay to manage our own cash, sitting inside our Xero books like any other financial provider. That's a better endorsement than anything we could write about them.

We've since started introducing Round to CFOs across our own network, from co-investors to founders in the portfolio. The pitch is straightforward once you've used it: this is a company doing to treasury what Starling did to business current accounts a decade ago, for the finance function rather than the consumer.

Ralio solves a different problem: an AI agent can already connect to a payment API and move real money, but on its own it's uncontrolled, unverified and unaccountable - no spending limits, no way to prove the request came from a trusted agent rather than a compromised one, and no record of which agent did what. Ralio sits between the agent and whatever rail it's trying to use - bank transfers over FPS, BACS or SEPA, card networks, or stablecoins including EURC, USDT and USDC - and decides whether the payment actually goes through. Every transaction passes a chain of checks: tool permissions, request evaluation, spend limits, intent verification against a saved beneficiary, and a full audit log, with a human only pulled in above an agreed threshold.

Co-founder Ghali Bennani Laafiret has bigger ambitions than the guardrail layer alone - he wants AI agents doing full account-to-account payment flows, not just humans clicking a checkout button - and the company was accepted onto the FCA's Innovation Pathways programme in June.

None of this works without a settlement layer that moves at the speed of software. Card rails settle in days and switch off outside banking hours; a BACS payment doesn't run on a Sunday. An AI agent negotiating and paying for compute, data or a subscription doesn't observe office hours, and it has no reason to wait three days for funds to clear. Stablecoins are tokens issued on a blockchain and pegged one-to-one to a currency, usually the dollar, so a holder can redeem one for a dollar at any time; because they move on public rails rather than through a bank's own ledger, they settle in seconds, at any hour, anywhere in the world. That's presumably why Ralio already treats stablecoins as just another rail sitting alongside FPS, BACS, SEPA and the card networks, rather than as some separate crypto product bolted on the side.

The UK's regulatory regime for stablecoin issuance and custody, built by the FCA and Bank of England under the Financial Services and Markets Act framework, has moved from consultation towards implementation over the past two years, and the card networks have stopped treating stablecoins as a threat to design around. Visa and Mastercard have both been piloting stablecoin settlement rather than fighting it, which tells you which way the incumbents think this goes. We expect every company in this piece to end up touching stablecoin rails in some form, whether they describe themselves as crypto businesses or not: compliance software will have to report on them, treasury platforms will have to hold and move them, and payments infrastructure will have to settle in them alongside sterling and dollars.

The founders building this layer aren't asking anyone to download an app. Complyfirst, Round Treasury and Ralio all sell to other businesses, all solve a problem that's expensive and tedious  rather than exciting and visible, and all become harder to remove the longer they sit inside a client's operations. That's arguably a better business than another neobank chasing the same current account switchers they have already fought over for a decade.

We have previously backed the neobanks and payments networks that made the last decade of Fintech visible. This decade's version is less photogenic - reporting dashboards and treasury dashboards rather than sleek banking apps but it's where we're putting our attention, and in Round's case, our cash too. If the last wave of UK Fintech was about proving people would trust software with their money, this one is about proving software can be trusted to run the money without anyone watching at all.

We'll keep backing the compliance layer, the treasury layer and the payments rails underneath every visible Fintech success story, because that's where the switching costs sit once a client is live. Complyfirst, Round Treasury and Ralio are three bets on that thesis, and we're actively looking for more of the same.

We'll keep backing the compliance layer, the treasury layer and the payments rails underneath every visible Fintech success story, because that's where the switching costs sit once a client is live. It's the plainest version of our own thesis: back the founders propelling UK productivity.

A compliance team no longer re-keying the same numbers into ten report formats, or a finance director who's stopped thinking about cash sweeps altogether, gets that time back for work that really grows the business. Complyfirst, Round Treasury and Ralio are three bets on that idea. If you're building innovative products in financial infrastructure, or know someone who is, please get in touch with our investment team, we’d love to meet you!