What fintechs actually spend their money on

Revenue is the number every fintech puts in a press release. It is also the least interesting one. Two companies can book the same billion and run businesses that have almost nothing in common - because what happens to that billion between the top line and the bottom line is where the business actually is.

So we read the annual reports. Every company in the NeoBase directory whose group publishes an audited profit and loss account, or files one with the SEC, is transcribed line by line below. No estimates, no modelled figures: if a number is not in the primary document, it is not here.

Who publishes enough to be read

The first finding is about disclosure, not money

Coverage follows what companies are obliged to publish, not how big they are. A listed group files a 10-K or a 20-F. A licensed bank in the UK or the EU files audited accounts. Almost every large crypto exchange files nothing at all - Binance, OKX, Bybit, KuCoin, MEXC, Bitget, HTX, Crypto.com, Blockchain.com, MoonPay, SwissBorg and Bitstamp publish no audited group financials, so they are absent here rather than estimated.

Even inside the cohort the lines do not line up. A US-listed group breaks out sales and marketing because its filing template asks for it; a UK bank folds identical spending into administrative expenses and never names it. That is why the comparison below only counts a company in a category it actually reports. A missing entry means an unreported line, not a spend of nil.

Where the money goes

Grouping the differently worded lines into themes, and expressing each as a share of everything the company took in that year, gives the one view that survives the differences in accounting language.

Licensed banks pay for deposits before anything else. For Atom Bank and Allica, interest paid to savers is not one cost among several - it is the largest single outflow in the accounts, ahead of staff, technology and marketing combined. That is not inefficiency; it is what a balance-sheet business is. It also means their cost-to-income ratio is answering a different question from a payments company's.

Payments companies pay the networks. For Block - the parent of Cash App - and for PayPal, cost of revenue and transaction expense dominate everything else. Their margin is set less by how much they spend on engineers than by what the card networks and processors take on the way through, which is why both run cost-to-income ratios well above the exchanges.

App-first challengers pay engineers and advertising. Chime, Coinbase and Robinhood put a far larger share of income into technology than any licensed bank here does - the banks do not even break the line out - and marketing sits close behind. Where a bank's biggest line is interest, theirs is the people building the product and the people acquiring the customer. Gemini tops both categories, but for the opposite reason: its cost lines are large relative to a small income, which is what a 428% cost-to-income ratio looks like from the inside.

Lenders pay for risk. Affirm books more than a quarter of its income against credit losses. No bank in the cohort comes close, because lending against a consumer instalment book is a different risk than lending against a secured SME loan.

What survives

Cost-to-income is the blunt version of the same story: how much of every unit that came in was consumed before tax. It is only comparable within a business model, but the spread is still worth seeing in one place.

Method

Every figure is transcribed by hand from the primary document and stored as the company reported it, in millions of its reporting currency. Nothing is converted between currencies: a share of income needs no conversion, and a cross-currency total would need a rate we would then have to defend. Adjusted and summary reports - Kraken and N26 - are shown for completeness but excluded from every comparison, because a single lump labelled "costs" would top whichever category it fell into.

Themes group lines that mean the same thing under different names. Lines too coarse to classify are left out of the themes rather than swept into overheads.

The full money-flow diagram for each company sits on its profile, and side by side on the annual reports page. The interactive version of this comparison, with a bar chart per cost theme, is at what fintechs spend most on.