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, licenses, cards, stablecoins, geography and niches. Every figure reproducible from the open dataset. New edition every month.

read the opening chapters free → get the full PDF ↓
57
designed pages
15
chapters
15+
original charts
357
neobanks covered

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 license 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
Cover of The State of Neobanks — July 2026 report
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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 ten lines of code against the 357-entity snapshot this edition was built from. The live data.json has moved on since, which is the point of pinning the snapshot. 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.