A $100,000 retirement rollover can sit out of the market for 60 days when a worker changes jobs. The lifetime cost to that investor: $76,000. That number, shared by Betterment CEO Sarah Kirshbaum Levy, was one of many that stuck with me at Banking On The Future: The Next Era of Fintech, hosted by the Financial Technology Association and Semafor in Washington, D.C.
The event brought together a room that doesn't often share a stage: Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.), Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee; Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), Ranking Member; Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) of the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Digital Assets; Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wis.), Chairman of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Fintech, and AI; OCC Comptroller Jonathan Gould; Revolut CEO Cetin Duransoy; and Wise CTO Harsh Sinha. Policymakers, regulators, and operators in the same room, talking about the same problems.
As someone who advises fintech companies on how to communicate in a complex regulatory environment, events like this are invaluable. The gap between what is happening in Washington and what fintech companies understand about it is often wider than it should be. Here is what I heard.
Retirement savings infrastructure is overdue for a reckoning
The $76,000 figure Levy cited is a structural failure baked into a process that most people never examine closely enough to question. When a worker changes jobs, their retirement savings can sit in limbo for up to 60 days during the rollover transfer process. Retirement savings infrastructure is fraught with legacy systems, a lack of standardization across institutions, and no real urgency to modernize the handoff.
That is starting to change. For fintech companies operating in wealthtech, payroll technology, or benefits administration, this represents one of the more significant near-term opportunities in the market. Whoever reduces rollover friction first can capture assets that would otherwise sit idle for months.
Crypto and digital assets regulation is finally moving
The decade-old jurisdictional question – SEC or CFTC, security or commodity – is closer to resolution than at any prior point. The GENIUS Act and the Clarity Act are both in motion, and the broad outlines of where Bitcoin and most digital assets will land are becoming clearer. Regulatory certainty, whenever it arrives, could unlock institutional capital, spur product development, and drive more meaningful consumer adoption.
Open banking remains unfinished business
Consumer data portability, the idea that your financial data belongs to you and should move where you tell it to, has been years in the making and remains unresolved. The regulatory framework intended to formalize those rights has stalled. In the absence of clear rules, the cost and complexity of consumers actually sharing their own data with the apps and services they choose keeps rising.
Fintechs have always competed on product quality. Open banking makes that competition fairer and faster. When customers can move their financial data to a better app in minutes instead of months, incumbents' biggest advantage, inertia, erodes. Every fintech company that has ever lost a customer to friction should be paying close attention to where this goes.
What Revolut and Wise can teach fintech about regulatory strategy
Two conversations at the event offered an instructive window into where the most ambitious fintech companies are headed.
Revolut CEO Cetin Duransoy described a company that is regulated in 39 countries and adding new banking licenses nearly every quarter, with a stated goal of becoming the first truly global bank. Wise CTO Harsh Sinha has spent years building direct central bank relationships and local payment rails market by market, quietly dismantling the slow, expensive correspondent banking model that has dominated international finance for decades.
What makes both models instructive is the underlying strategy they have in common. Both companies made long-term bets on regulatory infrastructure at a time when many fintechs were chasing the fastest path to market. They now possess a structural advantage that is not easy to replicate.
Bank charters are back on the table
For roughly 18 years, the practical reality of obtaining a bank charter in the United States was close to impossible. Fewer than four applications were approved per year.
Comptroller Jonathan Gould is determined to change that. The OCC has set a KPI of preliminary approvals within 120 days and is reportedly hitting it. For fintech companies that have considered a bank charter and walked away because the odds felt impossible, the calculus has shifted.
The communications takeaway
Washington is not always the most intuitive place for fintech companies to focus their attention, but the decisions being made there right now will shape the competitive environment for years.