PayFi has become a category everyone wants to be in.
Most of it is just two products glued together — a payment app on one side, a lending or yield product on the other, sharing a logo. The "fi" runs in a separate venue from the "pay."
That is not PayFi. That is fintech with adjacent rooms.
Real PayFi is the inverse. The finance happens inside the payment flow, not next to it. Yield comes from capital structurally embedded in how money is already moving — not parked beside it.
Once you draw the line that way, most "PayFi" projects fall out. What remains is a narrower question: where is there enough real, recurring payment flow that capital can actually live inside?
E-commerce disbursements are one of the few honest answers.