Talk to any engineering leader in payments or banking today and you’ll hear the same tension surface again and again: the business wants to ship faster, AI is reshaping what’s possible, and regulators keep raising the bar. PSD3, FIDA, and DORA aren’t abstract acronyms anymore — they’re active constraints shaping architecture decisions, release cycles, and hiring plans.
That’s exactly the tension Maxcode’s 2026 Tech Survey is built to measure.
What the survey covers
This year’s survey goes deeper into the areas fintech, PSP, payment gateway, embedded finance, and RegTech teams are actively navigating:
- Technology investment — where IT budgets are actually going, from AI-driven fraud detection to platform engineering and legacy .NET modernization
- Shipping speed & deployment — how often teams release to production, and how confident they are doing it without breaking things
- Compliance vs. speed — whether regulatory requirements are a genuine bottleneck, or whether teams have found a way to build compliance directly into their development process
- AI implementation & governance — how far AI/ML has actually moved from pilot to production, and what’s blocking wider rollout
- Vendor strategy — build vs. buy decisions, and what organizations look for when selecting a technology partner
- Talent & hiring — where the skills gaps are sharpest going into 2026
Why it matters
Most industry commentary on fintech technology trends is anecdotal — a handful of conference conversations or a vendor’s own sales narrative. This survey is designed to produce something more useful: an actual benchmark, built from the people doing the work — engineering leads, CTOs, product managers, architects, DevOps, and compliance teams across banks, PSPs, gateways, and embedded finance providers.
The result will show, in real numbers, how confident teams actually are when deploying to production, how automated compliance checks really are today, and what technical priorities are rising to the top for 2026.
Take part
The survey takes about five minutes. Respondents can get early access to the full benchmark report if they leave their email. That makes it easy to see exactly how your organization compares to the rest of the industry — on shipping speed, AI adoption, compliance automation, and vendor strategy.
