CNBC and Statista published the fourth edition of the World’s Top Fintech Companies on 22 July. Thousands of companies were assessed. 500 were named, across eight market segments. Two of them are our clients, and both are there on the strength of what they have built.
This one happens to be fintech. The mechanics are the same for the analyst grids in cybersecurity, the innovation lists in climate and mobility, the sector awards in manufacturing and health, and every other ranking a technology company wants its name on.
ThetaRay and dLocal
ThetaRay was named in Regtech, a category that didn’t exist as its own segment until this year. Its platform gives banks a single intelligence layer for financial crime compliance, pulling transaction monitoring, screening and customer due diligence together. Santander, ClearBank and Payoneer run on it. In January the company added Ray, an agentic investigation suite that works the alert queue itself: cross-referencing, risk reasoning and multi-step evaluation that an analyst would otherwise do by hand, with regulator-ready documentation at the end of it. “CNBC’s recognition comes at a moment of significant operational maturity for ThetaRay,” said CEO Brad Levy, pointing to Ray’s rollout and the company’s expansion across global markets.
Institutions that size don’t hand over transaction monitoring because a vendor markets itself well. They hand it over after evaluations, pilots, audits and reference calls with people who have already staked their own compliance record on the answer.
dLocal was named in Payments for the second year running, in its tenth year of operation. Its single API lets global merchants collect payments and send payouts across Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East without standing up an entity in every market. In 2025 the platform processed 3.5 billion pay-in transactions and $41 billion in total payment volume, and moved payouts to more than 100 million people. CEO Pedro Arnt credited the recognition to “the trust that global merchants place in us.”
That word is the useful one.
What the ranking is measuring
Statista built the ranking from publicly available data, including annual reports and media monitoring, alongside KPIs submitted by the companies, scored against business performance, market presence and technological innovation.
Read those inputs and the same thing sits underneath all of them. Revenue growth means customers renewed. Market presence means a service that held up when volume grew. Technological innovation means engineers who shipped something people could use. None of it can be assembled during a submission window, and none of it belongs to the communications function.
Swap the segment names and the criteria barely move. A cybersecurity ranking asks whether the product catches what it claims to catch. A climate list asks whether the technology works outside a pilot. A manufacturing award asks whether the line still runs at volume. Underneath every one of them are the same three questions: is the product real, is the team capable of delivering it, and does the service hold when a customer leans on it.
Worth saying plainly, because agencies tend to imply otherwise: a PR programme cannot win a place on a list like this for a company that hasn’t earned one. What it can do is make sure the company that has earned it is legible to the people doing the scoring.
Trust is the part you can’t file
Trust is what other people can confirm about you without asking you.
Take two companies with comparable products and comparable teams. One has a public record: executives who have explained their thinking in the trade press, customers willing to be named, funding and product news covered by outlets with no stake in the outcome, numbers that have survived contact with a sceptical reporter. The other had an equally good year and left no external trace of it.
An analyst checking the first company finds corroboration. An analyst checking the second finds a website.
The same asymmetry shows up wherever someone makes a decision about you: judging panels, procurement shortlists, investor diligence, and now the AI tools buyers use to draw up a vendor list, which reach for third-party sources far more readily than a company’s own pages.
Category timing is a real edge
Regtech becoming its own segment this year is worth watching, and the pattern repeats across every sector that has ever had a category split off from a broader one.
When a list adds a category, it creates room. Companies previously buried under a broad heading get assessed against a narrower field. Firms that had already spent a year being understood as regtech companies, rather than as generic compliance software, were in position when the segment appeared. The same thing happens whenever a market names a new thing, whether that is agentic AI, industrial decarbonisation or identity security.
Payments took 115 of the 500 places this year, the largest single segment. In a field that crowded, precision about what you are does a lot of work.
What we’d tell you to do now
If a list you want is a year out, the substance comes first. There is no communications answer to a product that doesn’t hold up, and it isn’t our job to pretend otherwise.
Assuming the substance is there: work out what you’d want an evaluator to already believe about you, then spend four quarters making it verifiable. Commit to a point of view your executives can defend in an interview. Put your numbers in a form a reporter can check. Let customers speak for you wherever they’re willing. Be reachable when something happens in your category and a journalist needs someone who understands it by six o’clock.
Then, when the form opens, the submission takes a week instead of a panic.
Where we come in
Strauss works with technology companies on the visibility half of this, in fintech and well beyond it: cybersecurity, climate, mobility, manufacturing, health. The product, the team and the service are the client’s.
Our job is to put those companies in front of reputational media, so the technology carries the credibility it has earned by the time somebody is weighing it. Sometimes that somebody is a panel scoring a segment for a list like this one. More often it is a buyer with a shortlist of two, checking what the outside world says about each of them before signing. The same body of coverage does both jobs.
Most of that work happens in the months when there is nothing to announce, which is the part companies skip.
Over the past year that work has included front-page CNBC coverage and more than 360 placements for a single client. ThetaRay and dLocal did the hard part themselves. We’re glad to have helped tell it.
If your reputation lags behind what you’ve built, let’s talk.