For a long time, fintech has focused on access to payments, banking, and savings. They lowered barriers, removed friction, and brought millions of people into the formal financial system. But today, across markets like Nigeria and the United States, a new reality is becoming impossible to ignore. Access alone no longer answers the most important question users are asking: “How do I build wealth?”
People are not just asking how to move or save money anymore; they’re asking how to grow it, protect it, and use it to secure their future. As a result, wealth building is rapidly moving from the sidelines of fintech into the center of the conversation. This shift is driven by evolving customer needs, maturing infrastructure, and a clearer recognition that true financial inclusion must extend beyond access to enable long-term wealth creation.
The Evolution of Fintech Waves
Fintechs move in waves. The earliest wave focused on payments, making transactions faster, cheaper, and more reliable. The next wave brought digital banking and savings, giving users more control and visibility over their money. Now, a third wave is taking shape around wealth building. The industry is evolving toward something broader by helping people move from managing money to building long-term financial resilience.
In many markets today, people already have accounts, cards, and wallets, but do not have a clear path to long-term growth. For everyday users, wealth building often feels too complex, too risky, and too disconnected from their daily financial lives. In Nigeria, this shows up as cash sitting idle, informal savings cycles, or hesitation around investment products that feel opaque or inaccessible. In the US, it is seen as reliance on basic savings accounts, employer pensions alone, or confusion about where to start investing outside traditional systems. Across both markets, the underlying pain point is that people want to make better financial decisions, but they don’t feel confident, informed, or supported enough to do so.
Breaking Down Barriers to Investment
For many users, investing remains something you do in a separate app, on a platform that feels unfamiliar, with language that assumes prior knowledge. This separation creates friction. When investing is removed from everyday moments of users, it starts to feel abstract, but when it’s embedded into familiar financial journeys, it becomes more approachable and relevant. This is one of the reasons fintech is uniquely positioned to lead the next phase of wealth building.
Infrastructure That Enables Wealth Products
Historically, building wealth products came with significant barriers like high technical complexity, long timelines, heavy regulatory risk, and large capital requirements. These barriers made wealth products difficult for many fintechs to offer responsibly. That’s changing.
Across markets, modular infrastructure, API-driven services, and clearer regulatory frameworks are lowering the cost and complexity of launching investment experiences. This doesn’t remove the responsibility to build carefully, but it does make it feasible for more companies to participate. As a result, wealth building is no longer limited to traditional asset managers or standalone investment platforms. It’s becoming a capability that can be integrated into broader financial products.
What Successful Wealth Experiences Look Like
In both Nigeria and the US, successful wealth experiences increasingly share a few traits:
- Simple onboarding: Removing unnecessary complexity from the start
- Clear language: Making investment concepts accessible to everyone
- Low barriers to entry: Allowing users to start small and build confidence
- Goal-oriented design: Connecting investments to real life objectives
- Gradual progression: Creating a natural path from saving to investing
Measuring Success Beyond Features
The next measure of success for fintech will not be how many products were launched or how many features were shipped, but whether users feel more confident about their financial futures, whether they can move from saving to investing responsibly, and whether fintech helps them build resilience over time, raising the bar for what financial products should deliver.
At Bluum, we believe this shift will define the next era of fintech, and the companies that succeed will be those that treat wealth building not as a feature, but as a long-term commitment to their customers’ futures.