monthly report · № 01 — july 2026
the state of neobanks
A 57-page, designed PDF on the industry as it actually exists: 357 verified-active neobanks, measured across custody, licences, cards, stablecoins, geography and niches. Every figure reproducible from the open dataset. New edition every month.
read the web edition free →
inside the july edition
- 01The three waves: taxonomy of an industry
- 02Founding waves — why the boom ended
- 03A short history, 2009–2026 (and the graveyard)
- 04The custody spectrum: who holds the money
- 05Regulation: the licence behind the landing page
- 06Cards & the anatomy of a "free" account
- 07Stablecoins: the 2.7% that will define the decade
- 08KYC, no-KYC and the agent-wallet frontier
- 09Scale: the user league table, honestly footnoted
- 10Geography: seven regions, seven playbooks
- 11The niche wave, fully mapped
- 12Transparency & the industry's broken paper trail
- 13Future narratives: agentic commerce, stablecoin payroll, tokenized deposits
- 14Outlook: five things we're watching into August
- 15Method, appendices & the full 357-entity directory
get the report — free
Subscribe and the PDF lands in your inbox
The download link arrives instantly with the welcome email, and every monthly edition after that ships to the same inbox. No spam, no paywall upsell — the newsletter is the gate.
already subscribed? the link is in your welcome email and in every edition post. · prefer to browse? read the web edition or grab the PDF on GitHub.
why this report exists
Most industry reports count announcements. This one counts survivors: the neobankbeat dataset is hand-verified, survivorship-filtered and open (MIT), so the report's core numbers — 26% licensed banks, 2.7% traditional-wave stablecoin adoption, 30% of the 2020s cohort self-custodial — can be checked by anyone with data.json and ten lines of code. July is edition № 01; every subsequent month reports the same baseline metrics with deltas, building a longitudinal record of the industry.
- Is it really free?
- Yes. Subscribing to the (free) newsletter is the only gate. Paid tiers don't exist.
- Can I cite it?
- Freely, with attribution: "neobankbeat, The State of Neobanks — July 2026". Journalists and researchers can get the PDF directly — email neobanks@swissintech.com.
- Where does the data come from?
- Regulatory registers, audited filings, official terms documents and provider sites — method chapter inside, dataset at /data.json, corrections via GitHub.
- When is the next edition?
- Early August 2026, and monthly after that. Subscribers get each edition automatically.
Prefer the short version? The ten headline findings are summarised in the blog post.