The financial technology industry has become a world of haves and have-nots.

Take San Francisco payments company Stripe, which helps millions of merchants accept credit cards, process stablecoin transactions and manage billing tasks. In 2025, it brought in $6.9 billion of net revenue and $1.2 billion of earnings before factoring in interest, tax, depreciation and amortization expenses, according to a person familiar with its finances. Revenues were up more than 30% from 2024.

That’s world-class scale and growth, but its recent valuation of $159 billion, which has afforded each of the Collison brothers a $17.5 billion fortune, means its private backers think it’s worth nearly five times Adyen, a Dutch fintech and close competitor. Unlike Stripe, Adyen is publicly traded. It processed $1.6 trillion in payments last year compared with Stripe’s $1.9 trillion. Stripe loyalists will point out that it has more business lines than Adyen and is growing faster off of a larger base. But the chances that Stripe could maintain a $159 billion valuation if it went public today are slim. Public investors value e-commerce platform Shopify at $165 billion, and it grew nearly as fast as Stripe last year and had more than double the profits. A Stripe spokesperson declined to comment.

New York-based corporate-card company Ramp is another “have” among fintechs that carries a head-scratching price tag. In September 2025, it announced $1 billion in annualized gross revenue and two months later, fetched a $32 billion valuation. Here’s what many observers don’t realize: its gross sales figure doesn’t subtract out the card-swipe interchange fees and rewards that Ramp gives back to banks, other partners and customers. So Ramp’s net revenue, the top-line sales metric reported by most publicly traded payments companies, is likely at least 40% lower than its........

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