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Dec 18, 2025
The Ballad of the Fintech Metrics: 7 Numbers That Made (and Broke) Billion-Dollar Companies
TOTAL NO. OF WORDS (ONLY ALL FACTS COMBINED) = 2,170
Picture this:
A CEO walks into a board meeting. Her growth numbers are solid - up 32% year over year. Her gross profit is up 75%. She's raising at a $12B valuation.
Six months later, she's laying off 20% of the company.
She's also burning $17 million a month.
Here's the thing about fintech: a company can have explosive growth, massive scale, and a billion-dollar valuation. But fintech is built on thin margins. Spend $10 to make $11, and you're winning. Spend $10 to make $9, and you're in trouble. A single number - how much you're burning, how much customers cost, how much you keep per transaction - can erase $20 billion in market cap overnight. The story that sounds amazing is often not the number that matters.
A fintech can show you a million monthly active users. Seventy percent might be fraudsters running scams through the platform. A payment processor can report 32% transaction volume growth. Doesn't exactly mean it's making money. If it's burning $17 million a month to process those transactions, and doesn't make enough to cover those costs, growth is just digging a deeper hole. A loss-making fintech can IPO at one price and jump 30% by day's end, not because it's suddenly profitable, but because the market feels it can turn $152 million in losses into actual profits.
This is where metrics come in. Not every metric across the 3 financial statements, or the made-up ones. Just the numbers that reveal whether a company is actually winning or just looking like it.
The 10 metrics that follow? They've toppled companies. They've made billionaires. They've turned a $5 customer acquisition cost into a $50 billion IPO. They've shown which founders understand their own business and which ones are just hoping investors don't ask the right questions.
Each one has a story. Some are about scale. Some are about profit. Some are about risk.
Below are the 10 that define fintech.
Definition:
Total Payment Volume (TPV) measures the total monetary value of all transactions processed through a company’s payment platform during a specific period. It shows scale and traction - a rising TPV means more transactions and adoption.
Fact:
It was a cold afternoon in November 2024, the Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend had arrived. People everywhere were glued to their phones, fingers hovering over checkout buttons, racing to catch flash sales before they vanished.
But for Stripe, it meant something very different.
By the end of this weekend, Stripe would have processed 465 million transactions and more than $31 billion in total payment volume. This would be the biggest spike in its history.
For payment processors, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Singles Day - these events drive 5-10x higher transaction volume than normal.
These are the events where they make huge profits, but also where they break. If the system fails during a surge, it's catastrophic. It leads to lost revenue, lost merchants, and lost trust.
To survive these spikes, Stripe runs chaos testing. They deliberately break their own systems to uncover problems before production, preparing their infrastructure for exactly these moments. They've shared these practices in their public engineering talks.
That weekend, Stripe's systems held. The preparation worked.
Definition:
Take Rate is the percentage of a transaction's value that a platform keeps as a fee for processing the payment. It shows pricing power. Two companies with identical TPV can have vastly different revenue based on take rate alone
Fact:
August 17th, 2023. Adyen's stock crashed 39%, wiping out $20 billion in market cap, one of the largest single-day value drops in fintech history.
That same morning, the company released its earnings report for the first six months of the year. Revenue growth came in at 21%—half the 40% analysts expected.
Adyen revealed the reason in their H1 2023 shareholder letter: "Enterprise businesses prioritized cost optimization, while competition for digital volumes in the region provided savings over functionality.”
In plain words, Adyen had refused to cut take rates while competitors slashed prices. But the market didn't care about their strategy. Enterprise accounts had started walking out. One by one, to Stripe, to Square, to anyone cheaper.
Adyen had gambled that their enterprise customers would stay loyal. They believed their value justified premium pricing. They were wrong. By the time the stock collapsed, customers had already made their choice—they'd voted with their wallets for cheaper alternatives.
The market had spoken. When customers abandon you to save on fees, your premium pricing was never premium at all.
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