The UK Fintech Funding Slump and Your Website or App: A Guide for Hospitality Businesses in UK

Direct answer: UK fintech funding has fallen to its lowest level since 2016, but investors are still writing checks for companies that can show a clear, working AI angle. For hospitality businesses in the UK, that means the payment and booking infrastructure you rely on is consolidating around fewer, more AI-capable vendors, and your own website or app needs to be built to plug into that shift rather than fight it.

Bloomberg and Crowdfund Insider both reported in August 2026 that UK fintech funding has dropped to its lowest level since 2016, even as investment keeps flowing into companies with a credible AI story. This is not a story about fintech dying — it is a story about capital getting far more selective. Money is not disappearing from the sector; it is concentrating into a narrower set of bets, and those bets are increasingly AI-tied payment, fraud-detection, and financial-infrastructure companies rather than the broader wave of consumer fintech apps that raised freely a few years ago. For a hospitality business — a hotel group, a restaurant chain, a serviced-apartment operator, a booking platform — this matters more than it might first appear, because your guest-facing payments, deposits, loyalty wallets, and booking flows almost always run on third-party fintech rails underneath your own brand. When the vendors building those rails go through a funding contraction, the ones left standing tend to be the ones that have already rebuilt around AI-native infrastructure, and the weaker, less differentiated players either get acquired, shut down features, or quietly stop investing in their product. Understanding that shift now, rather than after a payment provider disappears from under you, is the difference between a smooth transition and a scramble.

What's Actually Happening in UK Fintech Funding

The headline figure — lowest funding level since 2016 — is a signal about risk appetite, not about fintech losing relevance. Investors are still active; they are just no longer funding fintech broadly on the assumption that "financial technology" is automatically a growth category. What has changed is the bar for what gets funded. A precise breakdown of exactly how much of the remaining capital is flowing to AI-tied fintech versus traditional fintech is not publicly available in the source reporting, but the general pattern described — capital piling into AI-linked companies while overall funding falls — is consistent with what has been happening across UK tech more broadly through 2026. Investors are rewarding companies that can point to a working AI system reducing fraud, automating reconciliation, personalizing offers, or cutting operational cost, and pulling back from companies whose pitch is simply "we digitized a financial process."

For hospitality specifically, the fintech layer touches almost every part of the guest journey: card capture and PCI compliance at booking, deposit holds, dynamic pricing engines, loyalty point ledgers, split-bill and tipping tools at the point of sale, and increasingly embedded lending or "book now, pay later" options for larger stays or event bookings. Many small and mid-sized hospitality operators built their tech stack on a patchwork of these third-party fintech tools, often chosen years ago and left untouched. A funding slump changes the survival odds of the companies behind those tools. Some will get acquired and merged into larger platforms with different terms and APIs. Some will slow their roadmaps or sunset less profitable features. A few will disappear outright. None of that is catastrophic on its own, but it does mean the ground under your booking and payment stack is shifting whether you're paying attention to it or not.

Why AI Is the Deciding Factor

The reason AI-tied companies are still attracting capital while general fintech isn't comes down to a simple investor calculation: AI capability is now read as a proxy for defensibility. A payments company that can demonstrably use machine learning to cut chargeback rates, detect anomalous booking patterns, or automate the reconciliation work a finance team used to do by hand is seen as building a moat. A payments company that is essentially a nicely designed checkout form is not. This is the same logic playing out across other sectors — we've covered a related dynamic in Shadow AI in 2026: Why It's Become SaaS Security's Biggest Blind Spot, where the pressure to adopt AI tooling quickly is creating new categories of risk alongside the new categories of investment. The pattern is consistent: capital and attention are moving toward AI-native infrastructure across financial and software tooling alike, and hospitality businesses sit downstream of both trends because they depend on external vendors for payments, booking engines, and increasingly for AI-driven personalization and revenue management.

Why This Matters for Hospitality Businesses in the UK Specifically

UK hospitality operators are in an unusual position relative to this trend. Unlike a fintech-adjacent SaaS company, most hospitality businesses don't build their own payment infrastructure — they buy it, embed it, and trust it to keep working. That makes you a downstream consumer of fintech health, not a participant in it, which means the funding slump reaches you indirectly but not less seriously.

Three concrete exposures are worth naming:

1. Vendor consolidation risk. If your booking engine's payment processor, your PCI-compliant card vault, or your loyalty wallet provider is a smaller UK fintech that hasn't clearly built an AI differentiator, it is statistically more exposed in this funding environment than a larger, AI-native competitor. An acquisition or shutdown means migration work, new integration contracts, and potential downtime during a guest-facing peak period — none of which any hotel or restaurant group wants to handle reactively.
2. Slower innovation from squeezed vendors. Even fintech companies that survive a funding contraction tend to slow feature development while they extend runway. If you were expecting your booking payment provider to ship better fraud tooling, faster settlement, or multi-currency support this year, that roadmap may quietly slip. Hospitality businesses serving international guests — a meaningful share of UK tourism revenue — feel this acutely, because currency handling, fraud screening on cross-border cards, and instant refund processing are exactly the features likely to get deprioritized.
3. A widening gap between AI-capable and AI-absent vendors. As capital concentrates around AI-tied fintech, the products that survive and thrive will increasingly offer AI-driven fraud detection, dynamic pricing signals, and predictive no-show/deposit risk scoring as standard features. Vendors without that capability will fall further behind, and hospitality businesses stuck on those platforms will lack tools their competitors are already using to protect margin.

None of this requires panic, but it does require a plan. The businesses that come out ahead won't be the ones that picked the "safest" fintech vendor years ago — they'll be the ones whose own website and app are architected flexibly enough to swap payment and booking providers without a six-month rebuild.

It's also worth being honest about the timeline here. Fintech consolidation doesn't usually announce itself with a single dramatic event. It shows up as a support ticket that takes longer to resolve than it used to, a feature that was promised for "next quarter" and quietly disappears from the roadmap, or a terms-of-service update that changes fee structures with thirty days' notice. Hospitality operators who are watching for a big, obvious warning sign will likely miss the smaller signals that actually precede a vendor's decline. That's precisely why the practical response here is architectural rather than reactive — building your booking and payment systems so that any single vendor's health, good or bad, has a limited blast radius on your guest experience.

There's also a scale consideration worth naming. A boutique guesthouse with one property and a single payment processor faces a fundamentally different risk profile than a regional hotel group running a shared booking engine across a dozen properties, or a restaurant group managing point-of-sale across multiple brands. The smaller operator has less integration complexity to untangle if a vendor issue arises, but also fewer resources to respond quickly. The larger operator has more resilience built in simply through scale and negotiating leverage, but a vendor failure touches more properties and more guest relationships at once. Neither position is inherently safer — both benefit from the same underlying discipline of knowing exactly what you depend on and how hard it would be to replace.

What Changes in Practice for Your Website or App

This is the part that is directly in your control, and it's where most hospitality operators are underprepared. If your booking flow, payment capture, and guest account system are tightly, non-modularly wired into one fintech vendor's SDK, you inherit that vendor's risk completely. If they are built with clean abstraction between your guest-facing experience and the payment/booking backend, you can absorb a vendor change with weeks of integration work instead of months of rebuilding.

Auditing Your Current Dependencies

Start with an honest inventory: which parts of your booking flow, deposit handling, loyalty system, and point-of-sale integration depend on a single fintech provider, and how deeply is that provider's SDK woven into your codebase? Many hospitality websites and apps built five or more years ago hardcode a specific processor's checkout widget directly into the booking page, with no abstraction layer separating "take a payment" from "talk to Provider X's API." That pattern was fine when funding was abundant and vendor churn was low. It's a liability now.

A well-built hospitality app or website should treat payment and booking-engine integrations the same way any modern software is architected — behind an interface, not hardwired to one vendor's specifics. This is the same underlying discipline that makes a site resilient to any kind of infrastructure change, and it echoes what we've written about the value of building flexible, adaptable foundations in Why Responsive Web Development Matters for Your Business: a site or app built rigidly around today's assumptions becomes expensive to change the moment those assumptions shift, whether that shift is a new device format or, in this case, a vendor disappearing from under you.

Where Mobile Apps Fit In

For hospitality businesses running or considering a dedicated guest app — for direct bookings, loyalty, in-stay ordering, or contactless check-in — this is precisely the moment to build (or rebuild) with modular payment architecture from the start. A native or cross-platform app gives you more control over how deeply a fintech SDK is embedded than a third-party booking widget ever will, but only if that control is used deliberately. This is squarely where structured Mobile App Development pays for itself: an app built with a clean separation between guest experience and payment backend lets you switch processors, add a second payment provider for redundancy, or integrate a newer AI-driven fraud-screening layer without touching the guest-facing flow guests already trust. Our team builds hospitality apps through exactly this lens at Mobile App Development — treating the payment layer as swappable infrastructure rather than a permanent foundation.

It's also worth zooming out on why capital markets are behaving this way at all. The same forces reshaping where investors put fintech money are reshaping currency and macro positioning more broadly — we discussed a related capital-flow shift in De-Dollarization in 2026: Why the Dollar's Reserve Share Just Hit a 30-Year Low. Hospitality businesses serving international travelers are exposed to both currents at once: the fintech vendors handling their multi-currency guest payments are themselves navigating a tighter funding environment, at the same time as the broader currency landscape those payments settle into is shifting. Neither trend is something a single hospitality operator controls, but both point toward the same practical response — build guest-facing payment and booking systems that are flexible enough to adapt as the vendors and rails underneath them change.

What to Do About It

The practical response breaks into four steps, roughly in priority order.

First, map your fintech dependencies. List every third-party provider touching payments, deposits, loyalty balances, and point-of-sale on your website and app. Note which are smaller UK fintechs without an obvious AI differentiator versus larger, well-capitalized, or clearly AI-native platforms. This tells you where your exposure actually sits.

Second, assess integration depth, not just vendor risk. A vendor with modest funding risk but a shallow, well-abstracted integration is less dangerous to you than a well-funded vendor whose SDK is hardcoded into every page of your booking flow. Integration architecture matters as much as vendor stability.

Third, prioritize modularity in any new build. If you're commissioning a new booking engine, guest app, or website redesign, insist on an architecture that treats payment and booking-engine connections as swappable modules, not permanent fixtures. This is standard practice in well-engineered software and should not be treated as an optional extra for a hospitality-specific build.

Fourth, treat this as an ongoing watch item, not a one-time audit. Fintech consolidation triggered by a funding slump doesn't happen all at once. Build a habit of checking in on your key vendors' funding and product health twice a year, and keep your technical team aware that a vendor swap may become necessary with limited notice.

It's worth adding a fifth step that many hospitality operators skip: document the migration path before you need it. Once your dependency map and integration audit are done, write down — in plain terms your operations team can follow, not just your developers — what a vendor swap would actually involve. Which systems would need reconfiguring, which guest-facing pages would need testing, how long a cutover window would realistically take, and who owns the decision to trigger it. Having that document ready turns a potential emergency into a planned project, even if you never end up needing it. Most hospitality businesses only think through a migration path after a vendor has already announced a shutdown date, at which point the available runway for a careful, tested transition has already shrunk considerably.

It's also worth resisting the temptation to treat this purely as a defensive exercise. A funding slump that pushes weaker fintech vendors out and rewards AI-capable ones is also an opportunity to upgrade the guest experience you offer. If you're already reviewing your payment stack for resilience reasons, that's the natural moment to evaluate whether a newer, AI-driven fraud-screening or dynamic-pricing tool could meaningfully improve margin or reduce chargebacks compared to what you're running today. Treating the audit as purely risk mitigation misses half the value of doing it in the first place.

What This Kind of Work Typically Falls Under

Hospitality businesses auditing or rebuilding their booking and payment architecture generally land in one of these tiers, depending on scope:

Tier	Typical scope	Fits this scenario when...
Essential ($1,000)	Payment integration audit, dependency mapping, targeted fixes to decouple a hardcoded SDK	You need clarity on exposure and a scoped fix, not a full rebuild
Growth ($2,000)	Rebuilding booking flow or app payment layer with a modular, swappable integration architecture	You're actively redesigning your booking engine or guest app and want it built resilient from the start
Enterprise ($4,000+)	Multi-property or multi-brand guest app with redundant payment providers, AI-driven fraud/risk scoring, and loyalty system integration	You operate across multiple properties or brands and need enterprise-grade resilience and AI capability built in

These figures reflect what this category of work typically falls under as a starting reference, not a fixed quote — actual scope depends on your existing stack and how many vendors are involved.

Key Takeaways

• UK fintech funding has hit its lowest level since 2016 (Bloomberg / Crowdfund Insider, Aug 2026), even as capital keeps flowing to AI-tied fintech companies — this is a selectivity shift, not a sector collapse.
• Hospitality businesses are downstream consumers of fintech infrastructure through payments, deposits, loyalty, and booking engines, so vendor consolidation reaches you indirectly but meaningfully.
• Audit which of your payment and booking integrations are hardwired to a single, less-differentiated vendor versus cleanly abstracted behind a swappable interface.
• New builds — especially guest-facing mobile apps — should treat payment and booking-engine connections as modular, replaceable components from day one.
• Multi-currency and cross-border card handling is especially exposed if your vendor slows feature development while extending runway.
• Treat vendor health monitoring as an ongoing practice, not a one-time check, given how quickly consolidation can move once it starts.

The fintech consolidation triggered by this funding slump will keep playing out through the rest of 2026, and the hospitality operators who adapt their booking and payment architecture now will spend far less time firefighting vendor changes later. If you want help mapping your current exposure or building a guest app with the right architecture from the start, book a meeting with our team.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does "UK fintech funding at its lowest level since 2016" actually mean?

It means the total capital invested into UK fintech companies in this period has fallen to a level not seen in roughly a decade, based on reporting from Bloomberg and Crowdfund Insider in August 2026. It reflects investor caution across the broad fintech category, not the disappearance of fintech as a sector.

Why are AI-tied fintech companies still getting funded if overall fintech funding is falling?

Investors are treating demonstrable AI capability — in fraud detection, reconciliation, pricing, or risk scoring — as a sign of a defensible, harder-to-replicate product. Companies without that differentiation are being seen as commodity infrastructure, which is where funding has pulled back hardest.

Does this trend mean my current payment provider is going to shut down?

Not necessarily, and there's no way to say that about any specific vendor without direct knowledge of their funding status. What it does mean is that smaller, less AI-differentiated providers face higher consolidation risk than before, so it's worth checking rather than assuming stability.

How do I find out if my booking or payment vendor is financially exposed?

Look at their public funding history, recent product announcements, and whether they've publicly discussed AI capabilities in their roadmap. A vendor that's gone quiet on new features or hasn't raised in several years warrants closer attention.

What's the single biggest risk for hospitality businesses in this situation?

Having payment or booking vendor SDKs hardcoded so deeply into your website or app that a vendor change would require a near-total rebuild rather than a swap. That architectural rigidity is the real risk, more than any single vendor's funding status.

Is this only a concern for large hotel groups, or does it affect small hospitality businesses too?

It affects operators of all sizes, but small and independent businesses are often more exposed because they're less likely to have multiple redundant payment providers or in-house technical oversight of their integrations.

What does "modular payment architecture" mean in plain terms?

It means your website or app talks to payment and booking providers through a clean internal layer, so swapping the provider behind that layer doesn't require rewriting your guest-facing booking flow. The guest experience stays the same even if the backend vendor changes.

How long does it typically take to decouple a hardcoded payment integration?

It depends heavily on how deeply embedded the current SDK is, but a scoped audit and targeted fix is often achievable within a few weeks, while a full booking engine rebuild with modular architecture is a larger, multi-month project.

Should I switch payment providers now, proactively?

Not necessarily. The priority is making sure your integration is flexible enough to switch if needed, not necessarily switching immediately. A well-abstracted integration with your current provider is often a better first step than a premature migration.

What role does AI actually play inside a hospitality payment system?

Common applications include fraud and chargeback risk scoring, no-show and deposit risk prediction, dynamic pricing signal generation, and automated reconciliation between bookings and settled payments. These are the capabilities investors are rewarding in the fintech vendors building them.

Does this trend affect loyalty point systems too?

Yes — loyalty ledgers are often run by the same or adjacent fintech vendors handling payments, and they face the same consolidation pressure. A vendor exit affecting your loyalty system can be disruptive to guest trust if balances or redemption aren't handled carefully during a migration.

What's the risk of doing nothing about this?

The risk isn't immediate failure — it's being caught flat-footed if a vendor you depend on is acquired, changes terms, or shuts down a feature you rely on, forcing a rushed migration during a peak booking period instead of a planned one.

How does multi-currency handling factor into this?

International guests generate cross-border card transactions that require more sophisticated fraud screening and currency conversion handling. These are exactly the kinds of features that get deprioritized when a fintech vendor is extending runway rather than investing in new development.

What should I ask a potential booking-engine vendor about their AI capabilities?

Ask specifically what AI or machine-learning features are live today (not on a roadmap), how they're used in fraud detection or pricing, and how recently those features shipped. Vague answers about "AI-powered" without specifics are a signal to dig further.

Is building a custom guest app worth it compared to relying on third-party booking widgets?

For hospitality businesses with meaningful direct booking volume, a custom app gives you far more control over payment architecture and guest data than embedding a third party's widget, which is a key reason to invest in dedicated Mobile App Development rather than staying fully reliant on external booking pages.

What's a realistic first step if I don't know where to start?

Start with a dependency map: list every fintech vendor touching your payments, deposits, and loyalty systems, and note how deeply each is integrated into your codebase. That map tells you where to prioritize.

How does this connect to broader AI adoption trends in software generally?

The same dynamic — AI capability determining which vendors and products keep investment and attention — is playing out across software tooling broadly, including in areas like SaaS security, where AI adoption is creating both opportunity and new categories of risk that need active management.

Will this funding slump reverse soon?

There's no publicly available basis for predicting a specific reversal timeline. The more useful planning assumption is that vendor consolidation pressure will continue for the foreseeable future, and building flexible architecture now protects you regardless of how the funding cycle moves next.

What happens to my guest data if a payment vendor I use gets acquired?

This depends entirely on your contract terms and the acquiring company's data practices, which is why it's worth reviewing your vendor agreements for data portability and breach-notification clauses now rather than during an acquisition announcement.

Does PCI compliance change if I switch payment vendors?

You'll need to re-verify PCI compliance scope with any new vendor, since compliance responsibilities depend on how card data flows through your specific integration. A well-abstracted architecture makes this re-verification simpler because the card-handling logic is isolated rather than scattered across your codebase.

How do I budget for this kind of architectural work?

Costs typically scale with how deeply embedded your current integrations are and how many vendors are involved — a focused audit is a smaller investment than a full booking engine or app rebuild, so scoping the work honestly upfront avoids over- or under-budgeting.

Are UK hospitality businesses more exposed than hospitality businesses elsewhere?

UK hospitality businesses are directly exposed because the vendors most affected by this specific funding trend are UK fintech companies, meaning UK-based operators are statistically more likely to have direct vendor relationships with the companies under this pressure.

What's the difference between fraud detection and risk scoring in this context?

Fraud detection typically flags transactions likely to be fraudulent after the fact or in real time at checkout, while risk scoring is broader — predicting likelihood of no-shows, chargebacks, or deposit disputes before they happen, often using booking pattern data.

Should smaller independent hotels worry about this as much as large chains?

Independent hotels often have less leverage to negotiate favorable terms with an acquiring company after a vendor consolidation, which can make proactive architecture planning even more valuable for smaller operators than for large chains with dedicated technical and legal teams.

How often should I review my fintech vendor dependencies?

A practical cadence is twice a year, with an additional review triggered any time you hear news of a funding round, acquisition, or leadership change at one of your key vendors.

What's the connection between this trend and dynamic pricing tools?

Many dynamic pricing engines used in hospitality are built or licensed from fintech-adjacent companies, and those companies face the same funding pressure — meaning your pricing tool's development pace could slow if its vendor isn't AI-differentiated.

Can I keep using an older, less AI-capable payment vendor if it still works?

Yes, functionally, but you should expect a widening capability gap over time as AI-native competitors pull ahead on fraud prevention and risk tools, and you should have a migration plan ready rather than assuming the status quo is permanent.

What questions should I ask my current web or app development partner about this?

Ask directly whether your payment and booking integrations are built behind an abstraction layer or hardcoded to a specific vendor's SDK, and how much work a vendor swap would realistically require today.

Is this relevant to restaurant point-of-sale systems, or just hotel booking engines?

It's relevant to both — restaurant POS and payment systems are built by the same category of fintech vendors facing this funding pressure, and the same architectural principles apply to keeping your ordering and payment flow flexible.

What does "embedded lending" or "book now, pay later" have to do with this?

These features are typically powered by specialized fintech partners, and that category has been one of the more capital-intensive, funding-sensitive corners of consumer fintech, making it worth checking the stability of any BNPL partner integrated into your booking flow.

How do I know if my website's booking flow is too tightly coupled to one vendor?

A quick test: ask your development team how many files or systems would need to change to switch payment providers. If the answer involves rewriting core booking pages rather than swapping a configuration or module, you're tightly coupled.

What's the realistic cost range for adding a redundant second payment provider?

This typically falls into the Growth to Enterprise range depending on how many touchpoints (booking, POS, loyalty) need dual-provider support, since redundancy adds complexity at each integration point rather than being a single flat addition.

Does this affect how I should evaluate new booking software going forward?

Yes — vendor financial health and integration architecture should now be explicit evaluation criteria alongside features and pricing, given how directly they affect your operational resilience.

What's the timeline risk if I wait until a vendor issue actually happens?

Reactive migrations during an active vendor disruption typically take longer and cost more than planned ones, because you're working under time pressure with less negotiating leverage and often during whatever booking season the disruption happens to hit.

How does guest trust factor into vendor stability?

Any disruption to payments, refunds, or loyalty balances directly affects guest trust in your brand, even though the underlying cause is a third-party vendor issue — guests don't distinguish between your platform and your vendor's platform.

What's the first deliverable I should expect from a payment architecture audit?

A clear map of every vendor touching money or guest financial data on your site or app, an assessment of how deeply each is embedded, and a prioritized list of where to add abstraction or redundancy first.

Are there hospitality-specific AI tools worth adopting given this shift?

Tools for no-show prediction, dynamic pricing, and fraud screening tailored to hospitality booking patterns are increasingly available from AI-native vendors, and it's worth evaluating whether your current stack offers comparable capability.

How does mobile app development specifically help with this compared to a responsive website?

A dedicated app gives you tighter control over the payment SDK layer and how deeply it's embedded in your codebase, which makes architectural decisions like modularity easier to enforce consistently than across a broader multi-page responsive website.

What if I already have a responsive website but no dedicated app — do I still need to worry about this?

Yes — the vendor and architecture risks apply regardless of whether your booking flow lives on a responsive website or a native app; the underlying payment integration is what carries the risk, not the front-end format.

Is there a risk of over-engineering this and adding unnecessary complexity?

Yes, which is why scoping matters — a small independent property with one payment vendor and modest volume may only need an Essential-tier audit and targeted fix, not a full Enterprise-level redundant architecture.

How do currency fluctuations tie into vendor selection?

Vendors with stronger multi-currency and cross-border processing capabilities are generally the larger, better-capitalized players in this environment, which is another reason capability, not just brand familiarity, should guide vendor evaluation.

What's a warning sign that my current vendor might be struggling?

Slowing feature releases, unclear or unanswered questions about their AI roadmap, delayed support response times, or public reporting of funding difficulties are all signals worth taking seriously.

Should I involve legal review when auditing vendor contracts for this risk?

Yes, particularly around data portability, breach notification, and termination clauses, since technical architecture alone can't protect you from contractual gaps in a vendor transition.

How does this trend interact with UK data protection requirements?

Any vendor transition involving guest payment or personal data needs to be handled in line with UK data protection obligations, which is an additional reason to plan transitions deliberately rather than reactively.

What's the relationship between this fintech trend and broader economic shifts like de-dollarization?

Both reflect capital and confidence reallocating in response to structural shifts — investors reassessing fintech risk on one hand, and currency reserve composition shifting on the other — and hospitality businesses handling international guest payments are exposed to both currents simultaneously.

Can Scult help audit my existing booking and payment integrations?

Yes — this kind of dependency mapping and architecture review is exactly the sort of engagement that typically starts at the Essential tier, scaling up depending on how many systems and vendors are involved.

What if my booking engine is a widely used third-party platform rather than custom-built?

Even with a widely used platform, it's worth understanding how your specific configuration integrates with payment processing, since the platform's popularity doesn't guarantee your particular setup is architected for flexibility.

How quickly can a modular payment architecture be implemented for an existing app?

It depends on the current state of the codebase, but a focused refactor to introduce an abstraction layer around existing payment calls is often achievable without a ground-up rebuild, particularly if scoped as a Growth-tier engagement.

What's the biggest mistake hospitality businesses make with payment vendor selection?

Treating vendor selection as a one-time decision made years ago rather than an ongoing evaluation, which leaves businesses unaware of how exposed their stack has become as the vendor landscape shifts.

Where should I start if I want to act on this today?

Start with a vendor dependency map, review your top two or three payment and booking integrations for how tightly coupled they are to your codebase, and use that as the basis for deciding whether an audit or a rebuild is the right next step.