2025 marks a turning point for fintech leadership. AI hype and investor fatigue are rewriting the rules of survival on the global markets. Vasyl Soloshchuk, CEO of fintech accelerator INSART, shares a blueprint for founders who want to scale in permanent turbulence.
Vasyl, we’ve seen startups collapse not because of poor ideas, but because they couldn’t adapt fast enough. What does “adaptability” really mean in fintech today?
True adaptability comes from systems and culture that stay reliable even as the market shifts. When I look at the latest AI landscape, I don’t see a breakthrough line-graph or a hype wave – I see tectonic plates shifting beneath us. The 2025 AI Index Report shows how quickly the ground is moving: AI business usage grew up to 78% in just one year, and most studies confirm that AI is already improving productivity and closing skill gaps across industries. That’s becoming the new baseline.
Startups that treat adaptability as a personality trait – “we’ll just work harder when things change” – usually burn out. The ones that win treat adaptability as a system design. It’s in how they build their tech stack, how they structure their sprints, and how they talk to customers.
When we, at INSART, work with founders, I often ask them: if your main partner disappeared tomorrow, if the law changed next month, if AI rewrote your value proposition in a year – would your business still make sense? That’s what adaptability means today. It’s teaching your team to listen to weak signals and act on them early.
In fintech, regulations and technologies evolve faster than most startups can adjust. How can founders stay compliant and innovative at the same time without slowing down execution?
The biggest risk I see is confusing simplicity with safety. When a process feels easy, founders often skip essential checks – documentation, security audits, regulatory validation. These shortcuts usually lead to bigger costs down the line. In fintech, one compliance breach – whether regulatory or technical – can destroy credibility that took years to build.
If you want to succeed, you need to see compliance and risk management as strategic strengths, integrating them into everyday operations. I usually encourage founders to treat compliance as a core product feature. When it’s built into development through automation, audit trails, and secure data design, it strengthens your company. It shows investors and partners that you can innovate and scale responsibly.
So, to me, compliance isn’t separate from trust – and trust is what makes innovation sustainable.
Regulation often feels like a blocker – yet you call it a “hidden enabler.” Can you explain that?
People always paint regulation as the villain in fintech – something that slows you down, drains your budget, or kills creativity. But I’ve learned the opposite: understand regulation early, and it becomes your unfair advantage.
At INSART, we encourage founders to think “compliance-first,” because:
- it speeds up fundraising. Investors are tired of surprises. If you can show that your product already meets key regulatory standards – GDPR, SEC, FINRA, or regional equivalents – you instantly look more mature and lower-risk. That can cut months off your due diligence cycle.
- it builds credibility with partners. Banks, insurers, and payment providers want to work with startups that won’t expose them to fines. When you speak their regulatory language, you stop being “just a startup” and start being a potential long-term vendor.
- it future-proofs your roadmap. Most pivots fail because new rules arrive and the product can’t adapt. If compliance is baked into your architecture – data encryption, audit trails, access control – you can shift faster without rebuilding from scratch.
- it creates trust at the user level. A well-designed onboarding flow that communicates transparency and security can convert customers better than any growth hack.
So yes, regulation feels like a constraint, until you realize it’s also the blueprint for trust. The best founders don’t fight the rules; they use them as scaffolding to build something that lasts.
A lot of startups are racing to add “AI” to their pitch decks. Is AI still a source of competitive advantage or has it become a baseline capability?
AI has matured from hype to hygiene. Across the industry, it’s becoming standard practice. By mid-2025, roughly three-quarters of financial institutions already had AI operating inside their workflows, up from two-thirds earlier in the year. Analysts now value the AI-in-fintech segment at around $30 billion, growing more than 20% annually.
I’m seeing it firsthand: at Appli, where smart calculators guide customers through deposit flows and cut drop-offs; at ZorroFi, where algorithms scan loan files for fraud before a human even reviews them; and at newer players like Warrant and Kato, which use AI to automate compliance checks or handle servicing calls through secure, regulator-friendly voice systems.
To me, that means AI isn’t what sets you apart anymore. The real advantage comes from weaving it into the high-friction parts of the business, where performance, risk, and trust are really tested.
You’ve worked with dozens of fintech founders through your accelerator. What separates those who scale through chaos from those who burn out?
The difference between those two lies in a discipline issue. Chaos tempts founders to chase every shiny new thing: new trends, new tools, new promises. But the most successful ones stay anchored in their fundamentals. They obsess over their customers, not their competitors. They tell a story that’s consistent even when the market narrative keeps shifting.
I’ve seen founders who survive storms because they engineer calmly. Their teams know exactly what they’re building, why it matters, and how to measure progress when the world outside is noisy. Couplr AI is a perfect example – they didn’t rush to call themselves an “AI company.” They started with a painful, expensive problem in wealth management: the inefficiency of client–advisor matching. Then they layered AI where it actually created value. That’s discipline.
Another great story is MissionGranted. They operate in one of the least glamorous corners of fintech – grant management and compliance automation. Yet they thrived because they practiced what I call boring excellence. Their product didn’t chase headlines; it chased reliability. They listened to users, validated every feature, and refined processes until their traction spoke louder than their pitch deck.
So when I’m asked what separates the resilient founders from the rest, my answer is simple: they know that chaos is inevitable, but confusion is optional. They build rhythm into their workflow, honesty and transparency into their management, and passion into their code. Discipline, empathy, and engineering integrity make startups literally antifragile.
Many fintech startups today struggle with idea execution – especially when scaling their teams or implementing innovations under pressure. What’s the biggest execution gap you see among early-stage founders?
Execution remains the biggest bottleneck in fintech – not ideas or capital. Every founder I meet can articulate a vision, but far fewer can translate that vision into predictable and repeatable delivery.
The biggest gap I see is between ambition and process. Founders want speed, but they underestimate how much structure true speed requires. From my experience, the teams that move the fastest are not the ones with the largest budgets – they’re the ones with clear architecture, shared documentation, and consistent technical leadership. They run small experiments, gather data, and turn that learning into a process.
To close that gap, founders need to bring technical leadership closer to business decisions. When engineers understand the “why” behind every feature, and business leaders understand the real cost of change, everyone gets more aligned on the execution. That shared ownership between tech and strategy is what turns ideas into results.
AI and policy volatility put teams under enormous pressure. How do you build leadership that keeps people focused?
Leadership, especially in volatile times, is often mistaken for control, but I find control as a fragile function. What actually holds a team together is clarity.
For me, that clarity comes from structure. We set OKRs every quarter for each team member and review the action plans together. Every two weeks, the leadership team holds sprint meetings to share progress, talk about next steps, and stay aligned. We also have regular one-on-ones to address the most pressing issues quickly, and separate decision-making sessions to review ongoing strategic topics and make choices on what moves forward.
That rhythm keeps everyone accountable without the need for daily check-ins. Daily meetings, in my experience, only create noise and dependency. What works better is trust – giving senior leaders ownership over outcomes and the confidence to act.
If you had to give one piece of advice to fintech founders entering this new cycle, what would it be?
Nail the problems first. If you worked in a big financial organization, you probably spotted several major pain points. Write them down.
Now take those problems and validate demand before you build anything. Pitch one single feature that solves one specific problem. Use those conversations to define exactly what that feature needs to do.
Your target is five pilot deals. Sign them before you spend money building the product. Get those commitments upfront, then build what they’ve already agreed to test.
Too many founders do this backwards. They build first and hope someone will care later. The right sequence is problems, validation, commitments, then product.
