--- title: "Top Fintech Apps 2025: The Ones That Held Up" canonical: https://aaliyaan.com/blog/top-fintech-apps-2025/ pubDate: 2026-07-01T00:00:00.000Z author: "Aaliyaan Chaudhary" description: "I tested the top fintech apps 2025 across banking, budgeting, and investing, with real pricing and user numbers, not marketing claims." tags: ["fintech","apps","banking","investing","tech-news"] --- I tested a stack of fintech apps this year, on my own accounts and while helping a client pick a vendor. A handful made the cut for what I'd call the top fintech apps 2025. Most didn't. The gap between marketing pages and daily use is wide. An app can have millions of downloads and still be a pain once your transaction history gets messy. This list only includes apps that stayed installed on my phone past the first month. ## How I picked the top fintech apps 2025 I didn't rank these off download charts or press releases. Every app here is one I opened at least weekly for two months. If an app looked good in a demo but I dropped it within a few weeks, it's not on this list. Funding size or headline valuation didn't get an app onto the list either. Daily usability did. ## Digital banking: Revolut and Chime lead on users Revolut is the clearest growth story in the group. It crossed [70 million customers worldwide](https://www.businessofapps.com/data/revolut-statistics/) in January 2026, after adding about 16 million new users in 2025 alone, a 30% jump year over year. Chime sits in a different bucket. It has about 25 million customers, though only 8.7 million are active in a given month. Chime went public in 2025 and posted a net loss just over $1 billion for the year. Most of that came from IPO costs, not the core banking business. In my experience, Revolut wins on breadth. Currency exchange and budgeting sit in one app, with crypto layered on top. Chime wins on simplicity if you just want a checking account with early paycheck access and no monthly fee. If you run a business instead of a personal account, the picture changes. I already compared [Mercury, Brex, and Novo](/blog/fintech-business-banking-comparison/) for startups, and none of the consumer apps here fit that use case. ## Budgeting apps worth paying for Mint shut down years ago, and its replacement market split into three real contenders: Monarch Money, Copilot Money, and Rocket Money. Monarch Money charges $14.99 a month or $99.99 a year. It's built for couples who want a shared budget without merging every account. Copilot Money costs about the same, $13 a month or $95 a year, but it's iOS only and leans harder into automatic categorization. Rocket Money is the outlier. Its base plan is free, and the paid tier runs $7 to $14 a month on a pay-what-you-want model. It's built around subscription cancellation and bill negotiation, not budgeting itself. I tried all three over a few months. Rocket Money caught two forgotten subscriptions worth $340 a year combined. Monarch is the one I kept for actual budgeting, mostly because the shared view works better for a household than a solo tracker. ## Investing apps: Robinhood versus Wealthfront Robinhood remains the easiest app to open and fund. Account setup takes under 10 minutes, and fractional shares let you start with $1. It has 10.8 million users placing trades, and Gold members earn 4.5% APY on uninvested cash plus an IRA match worth $210 at the 2026 contribution limit. Wealthfront takes the opposite approach. It's a robo-advisor first, with a flat 0.25% management fee and a portfolio line of credit added this year. If you want an app that decides for you instead of one you actively trade in, Wealthfront fits better than Robinhood. Whichever you pick, the app is only as good as the bank connection behind it. I've written about how [Robinhood's account linking](/blog/robinhood-plaid/) actually works and what to do when that link breaks, since most people never think about it until it fails. ## The top fintech companies 2026 to watch The apps you install are just the surface. Behind them sits a different list: the top fintech companies 2026 that build the infrastructure everyone else runs on. CB Insights' eighth annual [Fintech 100 report](https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/top-fintech-startups-2025/) tracks that layer. This year's winners span 26 countries. Seventeen of them now use AI to run accounting, payroll, and treasury work that used to take a full finance team, up from just 10 companies the year before. Forbes' [2026 Fintech 50](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkauflin/2026/02/19/the-50-hottest-fintech-startups-in-2026/) tells a similar story from a different angle. Stripe made the list for its 11th straight year, now valued at $107 billion. Rain, which handles stablecoin infrastructure for companies, tripled its valuation to $1.95 billion in five months. Hyperliquid, a decentralized trading exchange, now handles roughly 80% of the entire perpetual futures market in crypto. None of that shows up on a phone's home screen. But it explains why consumer apps keep adding stablecoin transfers and instant settlement. They're renting infrastructure from companies like these. If you're evaluating one of these vendors for your own business instead of your own phone, the checklist is different from picking a consumer app. I wrote up [what I check before trusting](/blog/how-i-evaluate-a-fintech-saas-platform/) a fintech SaaS platform with company data. ## Bottom line Pick one app per job: a bank account, a budgeting tool, and an investing app. Adding a fourth or fifth app for the same job just means more logins and less signal. My own stack right now is Revolut for banking, Monarch for budgeting, and Robinhood for the small trades I make casually. Wealthfront handles retirement money I don't want to touch. Open a free tier on Rocket Money or Monarch this week and connect one account. You'll know within two billing cycles whether it's worth paying for.