Fintech Podcasters Declare 2025 the Year Banking Regulation Finally Mattered

Two fintech newsletter writers spent 98 minutes trying to make sense of what just happened to their industry, and the conversation keeps circling back to the same uncomfortable truth: the regulators are done playing nice.

Jason Mikula of Fintech Business Weekly and Alex Johnson of Fintech Takes released their annual year-end podcast episode on January 7, 2026, attempting to wrap 2025 into neat thematic boxes. What emerged instead was a portrait of an industry that spent twelve months discovering that the rules everyone thought were suggestions were actually, you know, rules.

The duo identified what they're calling "major shifts in the US banking regulatory landscape" as 2025's defining story, though neither the podcast description nor the episode itself offers specifics on which shifts mattered most. For CFOs at fintech companies or their banking partners, this vagueness is probably the point—when everything's shifting, nothing feels stable.

The conversation touched on stablecoins, which apparently experienced "explosive growth of interest" in 2025. (Interest from whom? Regulators? Investors? The podcast doesn't say, but the fact that it's now a year-end recap topic suggests stablecoins have graduated from crypto curiosity to something finance chiefs need opinions about.) They also discussed what Mikula and Johnson describe as open banking's "setbacks," though again, the published summary offers no details on what went wrong or why.

Perhaps most tellingly for finance leaders, the podcasters spent time on "why everything seems to be gambling now." This is the kind of observation that sounds flip until you're the CFO trying to explain to your board why your payments app needs to comply with gaming regulations in three states. The line between financial services and entertainment has been blurring for years; apparently 2025 was when people started noticing it's basically gone.

The episode also covered fintech IPOs, which is either optimistic or darkly funny depending on your perspective. After years of private fintech companies insisting they'd go public "when the time is right," 2025 presumably offered some data points on whether the time was ever right. The podcasters' decision to include this as a major theme suggests something actually happened in the public markets, even if the summary doesn't specify what.

Looking ahead to 2026, Mikula and Johnson offered predictions, though they hedged with the phrase "such as they are"—the verbal equivalent of filing predictions under "entertainment purposes only." For an industry that spent 2025 learning that regulatory certainty was a pleasant fiction, making predictions about 2026 probably feels like performance art.

The podcast is part of a monthly series where the two fintech observers "unpack some of the biggest stories in fintech, banking, and crypto." The format—two newsletter writers talking through industry developments—has become a minor genre unto itself, filling the gap between breathless startup press releases and the glacial pace of traditional financial journalism.

For CFOs and finance leaders, the real story here isn't what Mikula and Johnson said about 2025. It's that they needed 98 minutes to say it. When an industry recap requires an hour and a half, you're either in a period of genuine transformation or everyone's just very confused about what's happening. Based on the themes they highlighted—regulatory upheaval, compliance creep into new product categories, and the persistent question of whether anyone's actually going public—it's probably both.

The episode is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and the Substack app, for anyone with 98 minutes and a need to feel less alone in their fintech confusion.