A parent in Manila looking for a loan online might never see the fintech company that could help them. A small business owner in Jakarta searching for a digital wallet could get results that simply skip the most relevant provider. The reason is technical, but the consequence is human.
A new study, published May 25 by conversion specialist Slobodan Manic, found that 36 percent of the world’s top fintech websites fail a basic test of visibility to AI agents. Those agents increasingly power the searches people rely on.
Manic measured 274 fintech homepages from the CNBC World’s Top Fintech Companies 2025 list. He ran two tests on each site. First, a raw HTTP fetch with no JavaScript execution.
Then a full browser render. The gap between those two readings is the gap an AI agent has to close on its own.
For over a third of these companies, that gap is wide. Their homepage delivers less than 80 percent of its content in raw HTML. That stripped-down version is what an AI agent sees first.
Most agents do not spend the compute to render the full page. They move on. The core problem is what Manic calls “rendering independence.” The Structure pillar of Machine-First Architecture states that critical information must not depend on client-side JavaScript.
This was a design principle until last week. Now it is a number, and the number is uncomfortable.
This matters because fintech has become a lifeline for unbanked and underbanked populations across Southeast Asia. These are families and small businesses that may not have access to traditional banks. They rely on digital financial services for loans, payments, and savings.
If the companies offering those services are invisible to AI agents, they risk being invisible in the search results people increasingly use. A fintech company that cannot be found by an AI agent might as well not exist in the digital economy.
Think about what that means. A parent in Manila needs a small loan. They search online.
An AI agent scans the top fintech websites. A third of them send back mostly empty HTML. The agent skips them.
The parent never sees that option. They take a worse deal, or no deal at all.
A small business owner in Jakarta wants to accept digital payments. Same search, same invisible gap. The business owner picks a provider that showed up, even if it is more expensive or less reliable.
The invisible companies lose customers they never knew were looking. This is not a future problem.
It is happening now. The report measured the CNBC World’s Top Fintech Companies 2025 list. These are not obscure startups.
They are the recognized leaders in the sector. If a third of them are invisible, the situation for smaller fintech firms is likely worse. The gap between what a site offers and what an AI agent sees is a gap in opportunity.
For communities across Asia that rely on digital financial services, that gap could mean being locked out of the next wave of online discovery. Manic’s research is a wake-up call for the industry.
The technology exists to fix this. Serve critical content in raw HTML. Do not make an AI agent render JavaScript just to see the company name and a button.
The fix is straightforward. The cost of not fixing it is lost visibility, lost customers, and lost trust.
For the unbanked and underbanked, the cost is losing access to services that could change their lives. The number is uncomfortable. The stakes are concrete.
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