Day 2 of the Daily Beat. Yesterday, we talked about the 95% opportunity — why AI agents have barely touched industries like lending, tax, and financial services. Today we're digging into one of the biggest earnings reports in our world and what it signals for SBA lenders. FIS reports strong Q4, Stripe hits $159B valuation, and a 10-week loan closing cycle reminds us why lending infrastructure still matters, and infrastructure companies are busier than ever
Fidelity National Information Services reported its Q4 2025 earnings today, and for a company that processes transactions for 95% of the world’s banks and serves 14 of the top 25 U.S. banks, their numbers tell us a lot about where our industry is heading.
The headline: $2.8 billion in revenue, 78% recurring. They announced a 4X surge in AI investment for 2026, launched a new AI transaction platform, and completed their Total Issuing Solutions acquisition while selling their remaining WorldPay stake. The stock barely moved — up about 1% — which in this market, for a legacy infrastructure company, is a win.
But the two numbers that jumped off the page for us at ModernTax:
62% increase in sales growth for lending. 70% increase in sales growth for payments.
These aren’t small moves. More lenders are locking into platforms like FIS to run more transactions, process more loans, and manage more of their workflow through centralized infrastructure. That’s the macro signal — lending is strong, capital is flowing, and the pipes are getting more volume.
Here’s where it gets interesting for us. Every major company reporting earnings right now — FIS, the big banks, the payment processors — all of them have AI investment line items. AI transaction platforms. AI-enabled workflows. AI this, AI that.
But when you look under the hood at how underwriting and risk assessment actually work day-to-day, very little has changed. As referenced yesterday, Anthropic reports that 50% or more of the use cases are related to code generation — the rest of the knowledge work does not have anything within 40% of that usage.
We see this firsthand. I was on a call today with a customer — their lender needs to close a loan by March 6th. They’ve been requesting information since December 15th. That’s a 10-week closing cycle, and the seller is ready to walk if it doesn’t close on time.
This isn’t an edge case. This is the norm. Banks are spending billions on AI infrastructure, but they’re not yet trusting AI tools to handle underwriting, compliance checks, or borrower verification at the level that would actually compress these timelines.
That FIS 62% lending growth number? It means more lenders are plugging into these platforms — and inheriting the same bottlenecks. The information still flows through fax and, in some cases snailmail. For offerings like ours, verification still requires manual review. The compliance still demands human sign-off.
That’s where we sit at ModernTax. The intelligence layer — tax verification, borrower readiness, document preparation — is still one of the most manual parts of the SBA lending workflow. And as more volume flows through platforms like FIS, the demand for faster, more reliable verification only grows.
FIS is building a cashflow compounder. Recurring revenue at 78%, AI investment surging, big acquisitions — they’re positioning for the long game. But the AI transformation in banking infrastructure is still early innings, especially in underwriting and risk.
Lending is strong. 62% sales growth in their lending segment tells us what we already see on the ground — businesses still need capital, lenders are still deploying it, and the demand for faster, cleaner processes isn’t slowing down.
The compliance perimeter is expanding, not shrinking. As more infrastructure gets AI-enabled, the audit and verification requirements around it will only increase. The question isn’t whether lenders will need better verification — it’s whether the current tooling can keep up with the volume.
Stripe dropped their annual letter today — $159 billion valuation, up from $92 billion. That makes them roughly one-fifth the valuation of OpenAI. Three years ago, the idea that another startup would quintuple Stripe’s size would have sounded absurd. The payments ecosystem is reshuffling in real time, and it connects directly to what we covered yesterday about agent authentication and how transactions will flow in an AI-first world.
That’s the beat for today. If you’re deploying capital to merchants — SBA, commercial lending, real estate — and you’re feeling the friction of long closing cycles and manual verification, reach out. We’ll give you a free assessment of where things stand and how to tighten the process.
Check us out at moderntax.io. See you tomorrow.
— Matt Parker, CEO, ModernTax
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