Navigating fintech innovation
Flagship Advisory Partners is a boutique strategy and M&A advisory firm focused on payments and fintech. We serve clients globally and have a team of 40+ professionals who have a unique depth of knowledge in payments and fintech.
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After a challenging quarter, the market is rebounding, with 9 of 14 tracked companies now posting positive 3-month returns. While growth continues,...
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27 June 2025
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Peter Taylor and Timothy Gallagher
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Q4 2024 SaaS Earnings Observations
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27 Mar 2025
Despite macro-economic headwinds and stock pricing pressure, large SaaS platforms have succeeded in continuing to drive top-line revenue growth while embarking on a transition to profitability. General Commentary & Highlights Challenging market conditions: Not one of our selected equities delivered a positive return over the last 3 months. Shift to profitability: Companies are responding to investors’ increased emphasis on profits by shifting priorities to efficient, profitable growth. Secular growth trends: All selected equities continue to deliver top-line growth despite slowing investment. Potential bargain hunting: Broad-based weakness across sectors creates potential bargains amid those growing top-line and driving improving operating leverage. Wide range of performance: 5 of the 13 selected equities with at least 3 years in public markets have outperformed the S&P 500 over that period. Those 5 have on average more than doubled the S&P’s return over that period, returning c.84% vs. c.36%. Restaurant & Retail Toast: continued its breakneck expansion, adding a record 28K net locations in 2024, while doubling down on efficiency and delivering its first year of GAAP profits. The company plans to expand into enterprise, international, and retail in 2025 and beyond. Shift 4: introduced Unified Commerce, enabling “one platform, one integration” for worldwide commerce. Combined with the recent acquisition of Global Blue, this unlocks an estimated $80M cross-sell opportunity across 400K merchants. Lightspeed: is doubling down on North American retail and European hospitality. Payments penetration increased to 38% (vs. 29% last year). Block: is restructuring its org to improve development velocity and predictability. E-Commerce Shopify: reported its highest GMV growth in the last three years, driven by continued strength in International and offline. Offline GMV reached a cumulative $100B since inception. B2B grew 140% YoY in 2024, though it remains a small portion of total GMV. WIX: delivered $57M of transaction revenue in Q4 (+23% YoY), driven by a meaningful step-up in take rates from further building out Wix Payments platform (GPV +12% YoY). GoDaddy: grew annualized gross payment volume by 55% in 2024 to $2.6B. B2B Bill: continues its effort to enter the mid-market by enhancing its platform functionality (e.g., procure-to-pay, tools for multiple entities, embedded 1099 reporting). Total payment volume grew 13% YoY, while card payment volume grew 23% YoY. Avidxchange: announced significant progress in virtual card automation across the front book and back book; goal is to reach 80% virtual card automation in the next two years, which should contribute to continued gross margin expansion. Intuit: total online payment volume grew 18% YoY. Other Verticals ServiceTitan: continued to demonstrate success, growing total revenue 29% YoY. Gross transaction volume grew 26% YoY to $17.0Bin fiscal Q4 2025. The company remains focused on expanding enterprise capabilities, penetrating the commercial sector, and capitalizing on the roofing industry’s demand for specialized solutions. Please do not hesitate to contact Peter Taylor at Peter@FlagshipAP.com or Tim Gallagher at Tim@FlagshipAP.com with comments and questions.
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The U.S. Land-Based Gaming Payments Opportunity
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8 Mar 2024
Land-based Gaming is a Unique Fintech Vertical, Now With IGT + Everi at its Core Land-based gaming is a unique payments opportunity with specific product requirements, an attractive revenue profile, and specialized set of providers. The proposed merger combines Everi’s market-leading set of verticalized payments products with a leading CMS and games proposition (IGT). The combined entity strengthens Everi’s competitive moat in payments and fintech and introduces compelling expansion opportunities. The combined company expects to deliver sustained mid-single-digit growth and improve operating leverage over time. Land-based Gaming Has Huge Scale, Solid Growth Gaming operators make more than $100B of gross gaming revenue from land—based environments (excluding online) in the U.S. alone. The US land-based gaming (LBG) market is significantly larger than US online gambling, but this is not consistent in Europe. 95%+ of LBG spend in the U.S. (excluding markers) remains cash-based. The opportunity for fintechs to drive displacement of this cash is massive. Land-Based Gaming Payment Methods and Utility Casinos remain cash-based today, given its ubiquity, anonymity, and profitability for casinos (who earn most of the cash access fees). TITO tickets are a good cashless substitute vs. coins but have the limitations of paper. Cards increase velocity of funds, including the cash advance option, but come with regulatory restrictions in gaming, issuer dependencies, and high cost. Wallets reduce friction and cover all use cases including integrations with loyalty, KYC, and gaming systems. Wallets are not yet reaching their potential in LBG, however, given more challenging sign-up and integration requirements, and patrons being used to cash. Wallets Hold Massive Potential to Drive a Cashless Casino Future Wallets hold a massive opportunity to displace cash in LBG. Wallets introduce powerful feature advantages for gamers (e.g. integrated loyalty), reduce friction and increase velocity for operators, and the often-native KYC helps to promote responsible gaming standards. However, the cash-to-wallet transition has been slow to date due to: Mixed operator incentives: Casinos today earn a great deal from cash access and advance fees; the shift to cashless will reduce this revenue stream. On the other hand, operators recognize the future is cashless and see the velocity benefits of a purely digital UX. Ingrained consumer behaviors take time to change: Casino patrons are ingrained in their behaviors for cash and tickets. Such ingrained behaviors can take many years to change. We see the operators as the key force for change with more active wallet promotions and value as the catalyst for the inevitable move to cashless. Various fintechs and casino platforms are competing to win the battle to own the wallet. Below we illustrate the different forms of wallets and key actors in this landscape. Please do not hesitate to contact Peter Taylor at Peter@FlagshipAP.com with comments or questions.
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Topics & Themes
A2A Payments
AI Artificial Intelligence
B2B Payments
Best Practices & Toolkits
Card Issuing
Compliance & Security
Credit
Embedded Finance & BaaS
Fintech & SaaS
Innovations
M&A
Open Banking
Payments Acceptance
Payments Orchestration
Perspective on Key Events
Processing & Technology
SaaS
X-Border Payments