2025 was wild. We 5x'd revenue, signed Uber and Marqeta, and processed £3 billion in payments. The first few months were rough but Q3 and Q4 exploded. We're entering 2026 already knowing we'll double revenue even with zero new sales.

Our CEO David Jarvis recently sat down to walk through our three major investment areas for 2026: stable coins, agentic finance and payments, and card issuing. Not because they're trendy, but because our customers are already pulling us there. Here are some major highlights:

Why stable coins

This isn't about chasing crypto hype. It's product-led. For cross-border payments, stable coins offer superior speed, pricing, and liquidity compared to traditional rails. We bank a significant number of cross-border payments businesses (remittance, trade finance, SME payments), and we're watching this evolution happen in real time. Some of our customers are already using stablecoins. Others have committed to stable coin based strategies since we started working with them. When you're actively working with companies at both the app layer (using stable coins) and the infrastructure layer (building stable coin rails), the next step is obvious: build native support so customers get everything from one place.

We're not building all of this ourselves, we're partnering with crypto-asset-registered custody providers and embedding that into the Griffin API. Customers get a consistent experience. We stay within our regulatory lane. Everyone wins.

Why agentic payments

E-commerce is the obvious first bet. From Amazon dash buttons to AI planning your entire holiday, people want agents to handle mundane purchasing decisions and complex booking workflows. The product doesn't exist at scale yet, but we believe it is coming.

We're betting on massive change in consumer behaviour within three years. Slower to start than we expect, then much faster than we expect. For Griffin, this means building infrastructure so AI agents can understand card credentials, check available funds, and execute payments autonomously. Whether it's card payments or interbank transfers, agents need to know what they're authorised to do and how to do it. Corporate treasury is the slam dunk use case. We've talked to people at banks who are terrified their entire treasury teams will get dismantled when this picks up. That fear is legitimate.

Why does Griffin benefit from all this? Because we're a modern infrastructure provider with microscopic market penetration. Anything that causes people to reevaluate their infrastructure partners is a net gain for us. Any change in behaviour means we win.

Why cards

Cards are obvious. They're just so obvious. It's how most consumers make most payments most of the time. Half of all the fintechs we talk to want card products. There's a clear business case too. It's also core to our land and expand strategy. Customers come to us for bank accounts (highly flexible, good interest rates, modern API). Once they're with us, they want more. Cards are the next obvious thing. Then FX. Then credit. Then custody. We want to be the single place customers get everything instead of stitching together 10 different partners.

What success looks like

Success would be delivering everything on time. David shared the 18-month product roadmap with Allen and asked: "Am I getting fired if I put this in front of people?" Allen: "It's ambitious, but it's not impossible."

Everything takes longer than you want when you're building infrastructure. We put an incredibly high premium on getting foundational decisions right the first time because the cost of rebuilding is unbelievably high. That means diligence, socialising, budgeting, building the business on paper, then hiring people to execute.

But we can't stand still. We're still day zero. We have so much to build. We want to get to a place where we can say: we've got you for FX, we've got you for cards, we've got you for credit, we've got you for accounts, we've got you for custody. One place. No stitching together 10 partners.

The growth we're about to see will move us from small specialist new entrant bank to meaningful market penetration. We'll touch the lives of a meaningful number of people in the UK by the end of this year. And we'll still be growing very quickly.

That's incredibly cool.

Listen to the full episode of our podcast where David covers all of this (and his personal philosophy on living without regrets).