It’s been five years since the Kalifa Review, and the UK fintech sector has a lot to be proud of. It's matured, created real economic value, and maintained its status as a global leader. But if there’s one thing everyone can agree on when looking at the UK's progress, it's this: now isn't the time for a victory lap. It's time to speed up.
From a Marqeta Europe perspective, the UK remains one of the most important markets in Europe for embedded finance, card innovation, and modern payments infrastructure. It is a market with deep talent, strong institutions, and a history of leading from the front. But leadership is not a permanent status; it has to be defended and extended.
What came through clearly in the five year review meeting, attended by Sir Ron Kalifa OBE himself, was a simple idea: the UK has built a lot of the right foundations. Now the focus has to be on execution at pace.
Looking back at what the Kalifa Review set out to do
The Kalifa Review came at a pivotal time for UK fintech.
The 2010s were, in many ways, a proof-of-concept decade. The UK produced standout fintech companies, helped shape regulatory innovation, and demonstrated that a more open, tech-enabled financial system could work at scale. But the sector was still at a stage where long-term leadership was not guaranteed.
The Review recognized that fintech growth was not something industry could deliver alone. It required coordinated action across government, regulators, investors, and private sector operators. It was never just about celebrating fintech success stories. It was about asking what needed to be true for the UK to become the best place to start, scale, and list fintech businesses.
That framing still feels right.
One of the most useful reflections shared in the room was that the Kalifa Review gave the industry and policymakers the right questions to ask, rather than pretending to offer a final set of answers. That is exactly what a strong strategy should do. It should create the conditions for alignment and action.
What has been achieved so far
There is a lot the UK fintech ecosystem can point to with confidence.
The UK has maintained its position as a global fintech leader and remains the number two market globally behind the US. It is still the clear fintech leader in Europe. That matters not only for founders and investors, but for the broader economy. Fintech is no longer a niche sector. It is a core economic engine with real-world impact on businesses and households.
The discussion also reinforced how much fintech is already delivering in the here and now. One of the strongest examples is SME lending, where fintechs and alternative lenders now play a major role in financing UK businesses. That is not a future promise. That is current infrastructure supporting growth and resilience in the real economy.
There has also been meaningful progress in the policy and regulatory environment. The Financial Conduct Authority’s continued willingness to engage with innovation, including tools like the digital sandbox, was repeatedly cited as a strength. The tone has shifted over time from regulation as a gatekeeper to regulation as an enabler, while still preserving the UK’s core strengths in oversight and trust.
Another important shift is the level of cross-sector engagement. Banks are now much more active participants in the fintech conversation than they were five years ago. Universities, incumbents, scaleups, and public institutions are collaborating more consistently. That matters because ecosystem strength is increasingly what separates the markets that produce innovation from the markets that scale it.
From a Marqeta Europe perspective, this is especially important. Embedded finance at enterprise scale depends on coordination across multiple stakeholders. Markets that can align regulators, infrastructure providers, banks, and technology platforms will move faster and win more.
Where the foundations have been laid
If the first phase was about proving the case for fintech, the current phase is about turning those gains into durable advantage.
The UK has laid strong foundations in several areas.
The first is institutional credibility. The UK remains one of the few markets that combines a globally respected regulatory system with a genuine willingness to support financial innovation. That combination is difficult to replicate and is one of the UK’s biggest strategic advantages.
The second is infrastructure thinking. The UK’s track record on payments modernization, direct access, and regulatory experimentation has helped create conditions for fintech growth over time. There is a clear recognition now that the next chapter will require further investment in national payments infrastructure and a stronger translation of innovation from sandbox to scaled deployment.
The third is ecosystem depth. The meeting highlighted that the UK fintech story is not just a London story. There are now over a thousand fintechs scaling across the UK, with regional hubs, universities, and financial institutions increasingly involved. That broad base matters for long-term resilience and talent development.
The fourth is a growing emphasis on collaboration. Organizations such as CFIT, which emerged from the Kalifa Review process, reflect a more coordinated approach to industry problem-solving and commercial opportunity creation. Examples like anti-fraud collaboration show what can happen when policy, industry, and delivery organizations align around practical outcomes.
These are meaningful foundations.
The future is about pace and execution
The most consistent theme in the room was pace.
There was broad agreement that the UK has strong ingredients, but that competitors are moving quickly. Markets such as the UAE and India were cited as examples of places that are pushing hard on execution, policy responsiveness, and ecosystem positioning.
That does not mean the UK is falling behind by default. It does mean the margin for slow decision-making is shrinking.
From a Marqeta Europe perspective, this is exactly the right conversation to be having. Enterprise customers are not just evaluating innovation. They are evaluating speed, predictability, and operational readiness. They want to know whether a market can support real deployment, cross-border growth, and long-term investment.
That is why the future discussion needs to stay anchored in a few critical priorities.
Capital and scaleup funding
Capital came up repeatedly, and for good reason.
The UK has a strong fintech ecosystem, but there is still a persistent gap when it comes to domestic capital supporting scaleups at later stages. Too much funding is still coming from overseas, and while international investment is a strength, there was a clear view in the room that more British capital should be backing British businesses.
For scaleups, this is not an abstract issue. Capital availability shapes where companies hire, where they build, and where they choose to list.
If the UK wants to remain the best place to scale fintech and embedded finance businesses, scaleup capital has to be part of the strategy, not a side conversation.
Tax and founder incentives
Tax was another recurring theme, particularly in the context of entrepreneurship and long-term business building.
If capital, talent, and ideas are mobile, then tax policy becomes a competitive issue. Founders and growth-stage leadership teams make decisions based not only on market opportunity, but on the broader environment for building wealth, retaining talent, and scaling sustainably.
The message from the room was not simply that tax matters. It was that tax policy can either reinforce the UK’s fintech strengths or quietly undermine them over time.
For a market competing globally to attract and retain high-growth companies, this cannot be ignored.
Open banking and open finance
Open banking remains one of the UK’s most important contributions to global fintech. But one of the most pointed observations in the discussion was that while the UK built the model, other markets are moving faster in translating it into commercial outcomes.
The line that stuck was that the UK laid the railway tracks and then hesitated to run the trains.
The opportunity now is not just to celebrate open banking, but to accelerate practical deployment and move decisively toward open finance and broader open data frameworks. That next phase has the potential to unlock new embedded finance use cases, better risk decisions, stronger anti-fraud capabilities, and improved consumer and business experiences across sectors.
For Marqeta Europe, this is a significant area of opportunity. Open finance and card-based infrastructure are not competing stories. They are complementary parts of the next generation of financial services infrastructure.
Stability and confidence
One of the strongest advantages the UK still has is stability.
In a period of geopolitical uncertainty and rapid technology shifts, stability becomes a strategic asset. Founders, investors, and enterprise operators need confidence that the rules of the game will be understandable, consistent, and durable enough to support long-term decisions.
That does not mean slow. It means stable and capable of moving with purpose.
The challenge for the UK is to combine this stability with greater pace. The conversation made clear that many stakeholders now understand this. The opportunity is to convert that shared understanding into action.
What this means from a Marqeta Europe perspective
For Marqeta, the conversation reinforced why the UK continues to matter so much in the European embedded finance landscape.
The UK remains one of the strongest environments in Europe for building and scaling modern financial services. It has regulatory credibility, institutional depth, strong fintech talent, and a track record of infrastructure innovation. Those strengths make it a critical market for embedded finance growth.
At the same time, the next phase of leadership will not be won on history alone. It will be won on execution.
That means moving faster on capital for scaleups, creating more supportive tax conditions for founders and growth businesses, accelerating open banking and open finance outcomes, investing in national infrastructure, and preserving the stability that gives enterprises and investors confidence to build.
The UK has already shown it can lead. The question now is how quickly it can convert strong foundations into the next wave of global advantage.
Five years on from the Kalifa Review, the opportunity is still there. The urgency is clearer. And the case for coordinated action across government, regulators, industry, and investors at pace is stronger than ever.
Where do we go from here?
The UK fintech ecosystem has built the foundations. Now it's time to accelerate.
At Marqeta, we're committed to supporting that next phase of growth, working with fintechs, enterprises, and financial institutions across the UK and Europe to build the embedded finance infrastructure that scales.
Want to explore how modern card issuing and payment intelligence can power your growth? Get in touch.
