How digital banks handle subscription management in 2025: An overview

The state of digital subscription management in 2025

We first attempted to answer this question in 2021. 

At the time, subscriptions were riding the Covid-19 wave, but subscription management capabilities were a very new thing. So new, in fact, that only three firms in our data set — bunq, Revolut, and Vivid —  had them. 

The world in 2025 is, of course, a very different place. With Covid lockdowns a thing of the past, subscription growth has slowed, and subscription fatigue is very real, particularly given ongoing economic uncertainty.

More to the point, banks and challengers have had four years to catch up with bunq, Revolut, and Vivid. 

So, the key question our new data set will answer is: have they used this time wisely?

To answer this question, we've run a platform-wide analysis. In other words, we've looked at all 245 firms currently available in our digital banking research platform FinTech Insights' database.

All in all, our research found that banks offer eight functionalities. We've grouped these into three broad categories for ease of reference:

• Create a subscription
• View a subscription
• Manage a subscription

Creating a subscription

Our research identified just two functionalities in this category:

• Add a subscription, which allows the customer to manually set up a regular payment: name, amount, frequency, and specific rules
• Set up a payment as a subscription, which allows the customer to add an already completed payment as a subscription

Two firms — UK's Plum and Australia's Up — support the former. Six banks — Up, Monzo UK and US, Revolut, US challenger Dave, and Greece's Optima Bank offer the latter.

Strictly speaking, these payments aren't necessarily subscriptions — that is, a regular payment to a subscription-based service like Netflix or Amazon Prime. That said, their usefulness lies in giving the consumer more visibility and control by allowing them to see every regular outgoing they have at a glance.

Viewing a subscription

This category includes the two most widely available functionalities in our data set:

• View all subscriptions, which enables the user to see a list of merchants they pay subscriptions to, and is by far the most offered subscription management functionality
• View subscription details — the second most offered functionality, allowing the user to see the merchant, amount, payment frequency, and other details of individual subscription payments

Out of all subscription management functionalities, these two are, without a doubt, the most basic, both from a budgeting and financial awareness perspective. For this reason, it's not surprising that they're the most popular. 

What's surprising is that, despite them being, by far, the most common, only a fraction of our data set offer them: 20 firms (a mere 8% of the data set) offer the former, and 17 firms (7%) offer the latter.

Managing a subscription

The most widely available category after viewing a subscription, this includes four functionalities:

• Block a subscription
• Unblock a subscription
• Remove a subscription 
• Update subscription payment details

The most common feature in this category is "remove a subscription", offered by eight firms. 

This is somewhat baffling, because, despite what its name might suggest, the feature doesn't prevent future payments, but only allows the user to stop the subscription from appearing in their list of upcoming payments. 

By contrast, block and unblock — two features which, given the research into how many consumers forget about subscriptions, address a significant pain point — are only offered by four and two firms respectively. Updating payment details, meanwhile, is offered by six firms. 

Who is leading the way in digital subscription management?

In 2025, Revolut — one of the trailblazers from our 2021 article — leads the pack with six out of eight functionalities. The only two functionalities it doesn't offer are "add a subscription" and "update a subscription's payment details."

The UK's Plum and Australia's Up tie for second with five out of eight. 

Notably, neither offers block or unblock subscription capabilities. Up doesn't offer "view all subscriptions" — the most widely available subscription management functionality — either. The third missing feature in Plum's offering, on the other hand, is "set up a payment as a subscription."

Vivid, the second of the three trailblazers from 2021, comes in third with four functionalities: block and unblock a subscription, "view all subscriptions," and "view subscription details."

In terms of firm type, credit unions lag considerably behind both fintechs and legacy banks, with just four out of the 36 in our database — Baxter CU, Canyon View CU, CEFCU, and Stanford CU — offering users only the ability to update payment details. 

Regionally, Latin America stands out as the only part of the world where no banks or challengers offer digital subscription management capabilities. Given that the region's subscription market is worth $20 billion in 2025 and expected to almost double in 2026, this is a significant gap. 

That being said, all in all, the gap between demand and supply remains very wide across the board. So, with the potential for subscription management to be such a big differentiator, why aren't more firms seizing the opportunity?