The Top 22 Personal Finance Trends of 2025

Demand for buy-now-pay-later services accelerates

As laws around marketing credit cards to young consumers have tightened and the weight and stigma of debt has grown, point-of-purchase credit has become more appealing to young consumers.

Affirm offers zero-interest loans for many online merchants and makes money from the difference in a negotiated price with the merchant and the list price the consumer pays, around 4% of the transaction. These companies are able to negotiate this commission because they're allowing businesses to tap into out-of-reach demographics that previously couldn't afford the products.

Interestingly enough, nearly 90% of purchases made using services like Affirm are with debit cards and many of the sites using these services target young consumers, like Forever 21 and Urban Outfitters. "The vast majority of millennials don't want to be on credit" says Afterpay – a similar company in the space.

With Afterpay, if the consumer doesn't end up paying back over time, they're charged a fee and barred from future participation, though further interest does not build and the merchant absorbs the loss. Afterpay says this is solely around helping with cost recovery and that 80% of their revenue comes from their commission. According to Afterpay, the default rates are low at around 1%. Some speculate that lower default rates among millennials are in part due to the rising paradigm of social scores across different channels that keep users accountable, like Uber ratings affecting rider behavior.

“Challenger banks” rise in popularity as they lure a younger, more online and credit-shy generation

The banking industry is still very much antiquated - the majority of the top 20 banks were founded over 100 years ago and 95% of bank accounts are still opened in person at a physical branch.

Unlike Chime, a new banking option for younger generations, older incumbents are tightly coupled to their physical footprint. Wells Fargo, for example, has 8,050 US branches, and large teams to support those branches and the associated operations. By trimming fat like this, Chime isn't bogged down with unnecessary costs.

The rise of services like Affirm and Afterpay highlight a fear of the big banks, and of credit in general, among younger generations. These services let online brands offer customers a payment plan rather than one upfront payment, so while the customers may think they're avoiding credit, it's really just being shifted from credit cards to point-of-purchase credit (Affirm, Afterpay, etc.). In fact, nearly 90% of purchases made using services like Afterpay are with debit cards and many of the sites using these services, like Forever 21 and Urban Outfitters, are targeting young consumers.

This demographic that leans heavily on debit cards is the same one that Chime is targeting.

Consumers associate switching banks with friction, so Chime needed to be strategic about who they initially targeted. By targeting the younger generation who shy away from credit and further wooing them with features like getting paid two days earlier, Chime has been growing rapidly.

Mobile-first banking models emerge as developing countries find ways around traditional branch-based systems

In developed countries, the banking business is heavily branch-based: prior to Covid, over 95% of bank accounts in the US were still opened in-person. Much of this is due to legacy economics: before widespread Internet access and ubiquitous smartphones, more transactions had to be started and settled physically. Developing countries can skip a step: as they get rich enough to need a more robust banking system, it can come into existence in a mobile-first way, skipping the branch phase entirely. Moniepoint is an African agent-based money transfer company that exemplifies this trend.

Moniepoint’s agents are independent contractors who use a point-of-sale device to record transactions. The device costs roughly $70 USD, and unlike many other payment models, each agent can set whatever transaction fees they want. For agents in urban areas, fees are generally low; they visit local bank branches frequently to settle up, and earn their profits on volume. Some agents, though, work in more remote areas; going to a bank can take hours, so they charge higher fees and settle accounts less frequently.

Since Moniepoint doesn’t know in advance what agents’ economics look like, a choose-your-own-fee model, means that their services are cheap enough to be competitive in dense areas, but worth agents’ time in more spread-out places. Moniepoint is not the only example of payment companies varying their prices—in gambling, and in adult sites like OnlyFans, payment transaction costs are much higher to account for the higher likelihood of chargebacks and fraud.

Agent-based banking has been a growing business globally, with the number of agents hitting over 5M in 2017, up ~10X from 5 years prior. In Brazil alone, there are over 400,000, and banks in India use agents to meet regulatory requirements for financial inclusion. In India, the government pushes for more people to have bank accounts, especially women and the rural poor. Consequently, banks sometimes use agents just to hit those quotas by paying a higher commission to agents who enroll people from underrepresented groups.

Military efforts are often said to be a strong source of world-changing inventions; from the internet to jet engines, digital photography, and even duct tape. But the finance industry is another one of these pioneers. The first successful Transatlantic cable line was built in large part to transmit exchange rates between London and New York (the value of the pound is still known as "the cable" in the foreign exchange business). Since mobile phone companies have grown fast, while regulated banks expand at a slower pace, there's a tech-enabled access layer that brings banking to more people.

Security deposits on their way out as they face disruption

Apartment rental security deposits tie up a staggering ~45 billion dollars every year.

It’s a huge sum of money that essentially sits idle and neither landlords nor tenants make much money off it. In fact, many states have laws that prohibit landlords from placing it into a traditional investment account.

Jetty is seeing growing success with a new model though: Rather than the renter paying up to several months of rent upfront and not being able to get it back for a year, Jetty lets renters pay a much smaller one-time amount upfront. The renter doesn’t get the money back, but for many – a staggering near-2/3rds of Americans live paycheck to paycheck – this is the more affordable move.

Behind the scenes, Jetty essentially uses part of the upfront payment to buy insurance and if the security deposit money is needed to pay for any damages incurred during the lease, the insurance covers it.

In what is a fascinating arbitrage, Jetty has spotted a large dislocation in the market: they’re able to make more money off the one-off payment upfront, even while using some of it to pay for insurance, than on the tightly controlled security deposit that’s essentially tied up for a year.

Creator economy monetization on the rise

The creator economy blurs the gap between paying for a service and making a donation: Substack or Kickstarter are closer to an explicit exchange of money for something of value, but for many people, the point is to support an artist they like, not to make a purchase. Buy Me a Coffee is a growing service with over 200,000 users that operates on this model; it lets creators—podcasters, artists, writers, YouTube performers, and more—frictionlessly accept tips from their fans.

Buy Me a Coffee goes to great lengths to make the process as simple as possible, both for creators and fans. The site asks for less information than Patreon does before signup—any site that allows peer-to-peer payments has to balance usability and fraud protection, but Buy Me a Coffee's size and use cases may make it easier to spot malicious payments. Branding the transactions as "buying a cup of coffee" rather than "making a donation" also reduces friction—for many people, the cost of a cup of coffee rounds down to zero, since the price of a cup of coffee is already the cost to spend half an hour with a friend at a coffee shop. It also makes it feel less transactional.

The low-friction model is powerful in a world where there’s a thin line between normal consumers and online celebrities. Someone who has 100 X followers and grows their following 1% a day will have 4,000 followers in a year and 143,000 in two years. Buy Me a Coffee makes it as easy to enter the creator economy as it is to become an influencer. It’s just one example of companies learning to monetize sudden online fame. Another recent example has been marketing agencies contacting X users with viral posts and paying them for one-time ads in the replies.

Buy Me a Coffee borrows a monetization model from live-streaming: "tipping" content creators and getting a response or gift from them in return. In fact, reports conclude that around half of the earnings from lifestyle streamers come from donations. It's easy for someone who gets a coffee from Buy Me a Coffee to thank the buyer on their next podcast or video stream, and the site also lets creators set up shops to sell merchandise. By starting with a low-price, low-friction tipping service and then expanding into t-shirts and other gear, Buy Me a Coffee is building out more tools to grow the creator economy.

The remittance industry flourishes as immigrant workers increasingly send money back to their families

In 2015, almost half a trillion dollars was sent by immigrant workers in wealthier countries back to their families in their home countries. The massive transaction volumes led to a growing industry called the remittance industry.

Today, there are 14 countries where remittances are over 20% of the GDP. Taptap Send, a money transfer app built for this exact use case – sending money back home – was able to grow so quickly in part by structuring their fees differently.

Low-income workers are often in a cash flow crunch. Much like the blue-collar bank DailyPay we featured in 2019 (400% growth since), which lets employees get paid early and more frequently, Taptap Send’s fee structure is designed so that it’s not expensive to send money at a more-than-typical frequency. By making it financially viable to send smaller payments more frequently, Taptap Send becomes much more appealing to those with families living paycheck to paycheck.

Cash flow problems abound domestically too. With nearly 80% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, more frequent payouts can help employees avoid late fees, payday loans, and other potholes.

Consumers increasingly ignore debt collectors not due to inability to pay but to avoid the hassle associated with traditional collection practices

A large segment of consumers who don't pay debts until they head to collections are simply ignoring them because of the headache involved, not necessarily because they can't afford to pay.

The debt collection industry is highly regulated, for example restricting who debt collectors can contact and what they can say. Paradoxically, these strong regulations have led to even shadier tactics. In order to sidestep the rules on how many times they can call borrowers, for instance, agencies often use "ringless voicemail drops", a method that lets them leave a voicemail without calling.

TrueAccord is a debt collection agency that avoids the traditional model of phone calls and letters, and tries to reach borrowers where they actually spend time: email. The company has taken an email-marketing-esque approach to debt collection and has so far reclaimed more than $100 million for its clients.

Because of the tight regulation, a human-agent-run collections agency is far more susceptible to compliance mishaps. With TrueAccord, the compliance handling is built into the automation flow so risk does not scale with the number of accounts, as it would with a traditional agency. In fact, 95% of accounts are resolved without any intervention from human agents.

Traditional players are also not adept at dealing with changing consumer behavior. Customers used to be annoyed with IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems, because they preferred talking to a human. This appears to be reversing though as consumers are more sensitive to roundabout conversations that may take up more time. Even traffic to GetHuman, once a top site for reaching customer service agents, peaked in 2015 and has since been on the decline.