The Backlash Against Walled Gardens in FinTech Has Arrived

Fintech’s rush to bundle everything into sleek, API-driven platforms gives developers a faster path to market. But with every all-in-one solution comes a tradeoff: Convenience often comes at the cost of control. What looks seamless can quickly turn into a walled garden—easy to enter, hard to leave.

Martin Koderisch, Founder of ScalePoint Partners, has seen firsthand how bundled platforms promise acceleration, but often bring entanglement. Now, he’s helping fintech companies strike a better balance between speed and flexibility.

• Walls come down: "Customers don't want to be forced into a walled garden by taking the whole product suite from one vendor," says Koderisch. "They want to pick and choose the best elements and combine them. Even the giants are recognizing they must unbundle, or risk locking users in—and ultimately, losing them." Koderisch views this as a defining juncture for open finance's future.
• Locked in: Koderisch acknowledges the market’s natural progression from raw APIs to pre-configured, orchestrated solutions. "This is all great from a developer point of view. It's a real platform enabler," he explains. For consumers, while they might not directly feel the API orchestration, the benefits are clear: "Faster onboarding, smoother payments, fewer drop-offs. The consumer sees and experiences a quicker product to market," says Koderisch.

But Koderisch cautions there's a "potential tipping point where that enablement turns into platform control and a level of lock-in." The key, he suggests, is for API providers to "provide options to unbundle the pre-configuration."

• Stripe walks the line: Koderisch points to Stripe as a clear winner wrestling with this battle, built on superior developer experience. But the core tension, he emphasizes, remains. "The challenge for Stripe is not going so far that they're seen as locking users into an ecosystem that's hard to step away from," says Koderisch.

This awareness is reflected in Stripe's recent moves to offer services on an unbundled basis, "a direct response to what they're hearing from their customers who don't really want to have to take the whole Stripe experience," Koderisch explains. "They want to be able to pick and choose some elements and combine them with solutions from other providers."

• New rails, new rules: The tension between platform strategy and user choice is playing out amid major shifts in how money moves. Koderisch points to A2A payments—especially when paired with real-time infrastructures like FedNow and Faster Payments—as a powerful catalyst. "It’s a game changer," he says. "Real-time settlement, API-driven, and deeply embedded—it can transform treasury workflows and consumer experiences alike."

Cross-border isn’t immune to disruption either. "Stablecoins potentially could solve cross-border payments in a completely new way," Koderisch notes, citing their move from fringe to more regulated territory. While XRP has its place in instant settlement, he sees stablecoins as the real contender to replace legacy systems.

• Who’s driving? Innovation doesn’t happen in isolation, and policy isn’t always in the driver’s seat. While the U.S. has taken a more crypto-friendly stance, Koderisch sees real-time payment rollout as bank-led, not policy-led. "FedNow is something that really needs to be driven by the institutions," he says. He contrasts the U.S. market-led model with Europe’s regulatory-first approach, noting that while fragmentation is a risk, the path forward still exists. What’s needed is not just tech or policy but stronger incentives, risk frameworks, and infrastructure investment from banks and stakeholders.

"It’s the trade-off you make between choosing a partner you can build with quickly, and avoiding getting locked in," Koderisch says. That tension isn’t unique to finance; he sees it playing out across other tech sectors, especially in AI, "where it can happen even more, with so few large language models to choose from."