The Future of Business Finance Is Hybrid – Not Either/Or

For over a decade, we’ve been building businesses in the affiliate marketing space. What began as one service company is now a group of three, operating under a single holding, serving clients across Europe, LATAM, the Middle East, and beyond.

In these ten years, we’ve seen affiliate marketing evolve at breakneck speed. But one shift has stood out: the rise of crypto. Five years ago, it was a niche tool. Today, over half of the companies in our ecosystem use crypto in their operations. 

In this article, I want to unpack why the affiliate space embraced crypto so quickly, why current tools are failing hybrid financial teams, and what the next generation of fintech should look like.

Why Crypto Took Off in Affiliate Marketing

Traditional banks still struggle to understand digital-first businesses, especially those dealing in non-physical goods like clicks, leads, and impressions. Even in 2025, when you say “we monetize traffic” or “we generate leads,” banks hear: “you sell air.” That’s why many businesses face frozen accounts, rejected applications and weeks of silence.

From Eastern Europe to the Balkans to LATAM, financial friction is routine. Even in markets like the UAE, banking setups for online ad networks trigger layers of compliance checks. 

But it’s not just about getting money in and out. It’s also about speed. Affiliate businesses don’t thrive on 3–5 day settlement cycles. You need to scale ad spend based on returns sometimes within a day. We’ve had cases in the UAE where we were required to keep a balance for days just to “prove” our legitimacy. Unfortunately, that kind of capital lock-up kills operational velocity.

In practice, affiliate businesses use fiat for payroll, taxes, and legal ops. But crypto, especially stablecoins, fuels the dynamic core of their revenue engine.

And the market is maturing. The affiliate ecosystem is moving towards regulated, transparent crypto use. Many teams are now structuring white-label crypto exchanges or working with licensed providers to stay compliant. 

The Frankenfinance Problem

Most hybrid businesses today are forced to juggle uncomfortable operations across systems that were never meant to work together. You might pay a contractor in USDC from a crypto wallet, receive revenue into a traditional bank account, track spending manually in Google Sheets - only to reconcile it all weeks later in QuickBooks. 

We call this the Frankenfinance. And it exists because most financial tools still treat fiat and crypto as fundamentally separate. There’s no native way to view your full financial picture in one place, track income and expenses accurately, or trust that your data reflects reality. It always feels like you’re one mistake away from misreporting.

What Modern Finance Tools Must Get Right

Hybrid finance is quickly becoming the default operating model for digital-native businesses. To catch up, the next generation of tools will need to fundamentally rethink how financial operations are structured.

First, reconciliation between fiat and crypto must become native. Whether you’re paying a contractor in stablecoins or receiving client revenue via traditional wire, those flows should converge in one place. A unified dashboard is essential for real-time accuracy and control.

Just as important is structural flexibility. In affiliate marketing and other high-velocity digital industries, companies often manage multiple legal entities, juggle dozens of wallets, and operate across jurisdictions. Static systems built for single-entity and linear cash flow simply can’t keep up. That’s why modern finance tools must be designed for fluid operations and be able to adapt to complexity.

And finally, artificial intelligence can genuinely lighten the load: surfacing anomalies, matching transactions across disparate accounts, and automating reports. It will help founders and finance teams reduce time spent on routine reconciliation meaning more time for strategy, oversight, and actual decision-making.

What This Means for the Next 5 Years

The finance software that succeeds in this new landscape will be the ones whose finance stacks reflect the reality of how business is done – fast, global, and hybrid by default.

Some teams are already working on tools that reflect this reality. In our own companies, managing finances across both crypto and fiat quickly became unmanageable using traditional software. We simply couldn’t find one that understood how our affiliate world actually operated. 

That’s why we started listening – and after speaking with more than 200 companies, it became clear that this was a shared problem in the affiliate industry – one we’re now working to solve.

So the next five years belong to the teams who can bring clarity to this complexity. Not by choosing fiat or crypto, but by building systems that are ready for both.