Slush → Slash: Why Finance Is Finally Growing Up

Published on December 5, 2025

There are tech conferences you attend for inspiration — and then there are those where you suddenly realise the industry has quietly changed the rules while you were still applauding last year’s slogans. Slush 2025 was exactly that kind of moment for me.

For years, Slush felt like a frozen smoothie of startups, decks, neon hoodies and promises of «the future of tech and finance» — sometimes inspiring, often confusing, occasionally entertaining. This year, however, something snapped. It didn’t feel like Slush anymore. It felt like Slash — someone took a knife and started cutting off everything unnecessary: the noise, the hype, the architectural obesity, the timelines that made no sense.

And no, this is not my poetic moment. The numbers back it. In just the first half of 2025, global fintech investment reached $44.7B, while the number of deals almost halved . It’s not that the money disappeared. It simply got tired of fairy tales. Nobody wants to fund «the future of payments» if what you actually offer is a slightly shinier card with a more sarcastic notification tone. The most common question from investors is “how much time do you need to launch your idea?”.

What people want now is plumbing. Infrastructure. The stuff that actually matters and ideally doesn’t require six teams, three time zones, and a sacrificial goat to configure.

Look at embedded finance. The World Economic Forum projects it may reach $7.2 trillion by 2030. Trillions are not called «trends». Trillions are what you call a continental tectonic plate that quietly moves under your feet and changes where the coastline is.

The real shift isn’t even about where money goes. It’s about what nobody is willing to tolerate anymore.

Today, everything runs at speed. Launching a CRM over a weekend? Normal. Shipping new flows daily? Expected. Updating a product without a year of integration hell? Mandatory.

And into this world walks fintech — the industry still proudly explaining why issuing a card should take nine months, six lawyers, a compliance pilgrimage to PSD2, and the emotional stamina of a Tibetan monk.

We’re not building rockets. We’re trying to push money from A to B without everyone suffering.

This is why the «API era» — which once felt like the final stage of fintech enlightenment — now feels the way DVD players felt in 2010. Yes, APIs were a revolution. Yes, they set us free. And yes, they also led to thousands of startups proudly showing docs with 200 endpoints and saying, «Good luck, integration starts Monday».

We’ve finally grown out of it.

The market has realised something painfully obvious: API is the engine room, but business teams don’t want to shovel coal. They want the lights on.

That’s where no-code — and more importantly, configurable finance — steps in. Not because people got lazy, but because complexity belongs under the floor, not on the desk.

This year at Slush, the most interesting companies weren’t the ones announcing «the next fintech experience», but those quietly offering ways to assemble financial products the same way you configure workflows in Notion or build prototypes in Figma. API didn’t die — it just moved down the stack. Nobody wants to “integrate” anymore. They want to compose.

Now, allow me to drag Gemba into this story — not as a commercial break, but as context.

Gemba is a Japanese word. It means «the actual place» — the spot where value is created, where work happens, where reality lives. In Japanese management, gemba isn’t the boardroom. It’s the workshop floor, the production line, the kitchen of a restaurant.

We’re not building rockets. We’re trying to push money from A to B without everyone suffering.

In other words: Gemba is where things stop being ideas and start being real.

This is precisely why we named the company that. Finance today is not the UI. It’s not the shiny app icon. Finance is the place where business actually happens — the core layer that nobody sees, but everyone relies on. We didn’t build Gemba to be another fintech destination. We built it because we were annoyed by a very stupid question: Why does every company that wants to add finance have to rebuild a bank? Why should an airline understand SEPA routing? Why should a marketplace decode PSD2? Why should every SaaS platform suddenly develop a religion around AML? That isn’t innovation. That’s collective masochism.

So we did the obvious thing: we built a system where finance behaves like infrastructure. Where you don’t ask for permissions; you switch it on. Where you don’t hire engineers; you configure. Where you don’t read API docs at night; you sleep.

We don’t take pride in exposing endpoints. We take pride in customers forgetting they exist. Because good infrastructure is invisible. And invisible things are either magic — or Gemba.

This is why Slush felt like Slash to me. The industry finally realised fintech is not a circus act, not a lifestyle brand, not a shiny card. It’s the layer underneath the economy, the quiet engine room of the digital world.

The first decade of fintech was people trying to scream louder than banks.

The next decade belongs to those who don’t scream — they ship.

Not a new neobank.

Not another app.

A new layer of reality.

// Vladimir Derevyagin - Co-founder