What Makes a Great Fintech Product Manager in 2025: Thoughts from My Journey so Far
A few years ago, I stepped into the world of Fintech product management with excitement, curiosity, and a healthy dose of impostor syndrome. Fast forward to 2025, and I’ve come to appreciate just how dynamic, complex, and rewarding this space is.
As a PM, I’ve worn many hats: part strategist, part diplomat, part therapist (for both customers and stakeholders). I’ve navigated chaotic sprints, endless requirement docs, tough prioritisation calls, and the constant balancing act between user needs, business goals, profitability and regulatory constraints.
But recently, I’ve been asking myself: What actually makes a Fintech PM great in 2025? Not just competent, not just experienced, but truly standout?
Here’s my take, shaped by late-night conversations with founders, product post-mortems, product roundtables, and a lot of lessons learned the hard way.
So, What Is a Fintech PM Anyway?
Let’s start here, because Fintech is its own universe. Fintech (short for financial technology) refers to the use of digital tools and platforms to reinvent how people manage, move, save, borrow, and invest money, think mobile banking apps, investing platforms, crypto wallets, and peer-to-peer payments. It’s all about making financial services faster, smarter, and more accessible.
At the core, we as PMs are the translators between abstract, often intimidating financial systems and intuitive digital experiences. We live at the intersection of finance, tech, regulation, and user empathy.
We don’t just ship products, we’re crafting experiences that people trust with their money, often their livelihoods. That alone raises the stakes.
What Separates the Good from the Great in 2025?
1. Owning Outcomes, Not Just Output
In 2025, shipping features isn’t the job, it’s the starting line.
Great Fintech PMs don’t define success by what gets launched. They define it by what drives measurable value, for the customer and the business. That means going deep into financial KPIs like customer lifetime value, unit economics, fraud rates, repayment success, and churn reduction. You're not just launching a savings feature; you're making sure it actually improves savings behaviour and drives retention. You're not just adding a new payment option; you're tracking its impact on conversion rates across risk segments and geographies. Think of yourself as the thread that weaves it all together: strategy, execution, compliance, and outcomes. You're not just managing a backlog. You're making sure every item on it has a clear path to impact.
2. Technical Fluency Is Table Stakes
In Fintech, a shallow understanding of tech can sink you fast. You're not expected to code, but you do need to understand how your products work at a systems level. Why? Because in this space, technology isn’t just the delivery mechanism, it’s core to the product's integrity, compliance, and risk exposure.
Here’s what a Fintech PM in 2025 must be fluent in:
Blockchain & Distributed Ledgers: Whether you're building crypto products or not, you need to understand how decentralised systems affect transaction finality, custody models, tokenisation, and fraud detection. For example, how does a blockchain-based remittance product compare in speed and cost to a SWIFT-based one?
APIs & Open Banking: With PSD3 and global equivalents gaining traction, PMs need to understand how open banking APIs are changing the playing field, enabling partnerships, data portability, and embedded finance. You should be able to architect a customer journey that integrates third-party data sources securely and effectively.
Cybersecurity: In Fintech, security is a feature, not a backend concern. Phishing, credential stuffing, and data breaches are daily threats. PMs must prioritise secure-by-design principles and understand threat vectors, even if they’re not engineers.
Data & Infrastructure: Whether you're building underwriting models, cashflow forecasting tools, or transaction categorisation engines, your product lives and dies by its data. Light SQL, data modelling literacy, and an understanding of how data flows through your systems are critical. Can you explain to a stakeholder how your credit scoring model uses transaction metadata? You should.
3. Compliance Isn’t a Hurdle, It’s a Feature
Early in my career, I saw compliance as “the team that slows things down.” I couldn’t have been more wrong.
In Fintech, regulatory alignment is not just mandatory; it’s a competitive advantage when handled strategically. PMs who treat compliance like a design partner can unlock faster launches, fewer reworks, and products that earn customer trust by default.
Here’s what this looks like in practice:
Designing with KYC/AML in mind: You’re building onboarding flows that maximize conversion while satisfying anti-money laundering laws. Great PMs know how to test different verification flows for drop-off rates and regulatory acceptability.
Navigating financial licenses: Whether it’s a lending license in Canada or an e-money license in the EU, PMs must understand how these shape their feature set, customer base, and expansion timeline. Want to launch P2P payments in a new market? You’d better know what local licensing and reporting obligations exist.
Mitigating algorithmic bias in AI-powered decisions: Launching a credit decisioning tool? Then you're accountable for understanding how your training data may reinforce socioeconomic biases, and how to build systems that are fair, explainable, and auditable.
Fintech PMs who ignore compliance aren't just naive, they're dangerous to the company.
4. Risk Management Is Core to the Craft
Unlike many other verticals, Fintech isn’t just about usability; it's about trust, and trust is tightly linked to risk.
PMs in this space must be risk-aware by design. That means knowing not only what could go wrong, but how to quantify, prioritise, and build safeguards around it.
A few examples:
Credit Risk: If you’re building lending products, how are you segmenting your customer base? What’s your risk tolerance? Are you over-relying on proxy data like gig income without stability indicators?
Fraud & Abuse: Are you launching a promo that could be exploited via synthetic identities? How are you thinking about device fingerprinting, behavioural analytics, or rate-limiting APIs?
Operational Risk: What happens if a partner API goes down? Do you have fallback mechanisms or comms plans in place?
Scenario planning isn’t a “nice to have” in Fintech; it’s part of your product’s architecture. If your product is a house, risk management is the foundation.
5. AI Literacy Is No Longer Optional
In 2025, the best Fintech products will be built with AI, but also around AI.
From real-time fraud detection to personalised financial coaching, machine learning is fundamentally reshaping the Fintech experience. But Fintech PMs have a unique responsibility: applying AI with prudence and purpose, not just because it’s flashy, but because it solves real customer and business problems.
I’ve seen this firsthand. At my current company, I helped improve our unit economics by making a tough but necessary call: sunsetting a legacy SaaS product that had outlived its margin potential, and instead building AI-supported internal tools that scale better and cost less to maintain. That shift didn’t just optimise resources, it unlocked smarter decision-making and leaner operations across the board.
Here’s what it means to apply AI responsibly as a Fintech PM:
Understanding where AI adds real value: Does your chatbot actually solve customer pain, or is it just deflecting support tickets? Does your AI-powered recommendation engine meaningfully improve financial outcomes, or is it just noise?
Owning data quality and governance: AI is only as good as its training data. Fintech PMs must work closely with data science, compliance, and legal teams to ensure clean, compliant, and unbiased inputs, especially when building models that impact customer access to financial services.
Balancing innovation with explainability: When you're using AI for credit scoring or automated approvals, customers deserve to understand why they were approved or denied. PMs must prioritise explainable AI and design interfaces that educate, rather than obscure.
AI in Fintech is powerful, but it’s also high-stakes. A great Fintech PM doesn’t just chase the trend; they apply AI in ways that are ethical, transparent, and aligned with long-term value creation.
Wrapping It All Up
The fundamentals haven’t changed; empathy, strategic thinking, and clear communication are still core. But in Fintech, the bar has definitely risen.
In 2025, a great Fintech PM is someone who:
Thinks in systems, not just features
Speaks both tech and finance fluently
Treats compliance as a strategic asset, not a blocker
Plans for risk instead of scrambling to fix it
Understands the downstream impact of the tools and algorithms that we put into the world
It’s complex work. And it’s not always easy. But that’s part of what makes it so rewarding.
If you're already in this field, or thinking of diving in, know this: the learning curve is steep and unrelenting. But so is the opportunity to make a real difference in how people manage, move, and trust their money.
And honestly? That’s what keeps me hooked.