Financial technology (Fintech) plays a pivotal role in driving contemporary technology, society, economies, and many other fields. The new-generation Fintech is Smart Fintech, mainly empowered and inspired by data science and artificial intelligence (DSAI) technologies. Smart Fintech combines DSAI and transforms finance and economies for driving automated, intelligent, personalized financial and economic businesses, services and systems, and the whole of business. The strength and growth of the country’s economy were evaluated with the accurate prediction of how many companies will succeed and how many will fail. Financial crisis prediction (FCP) has a considerable effect on the economy. Prior research focuses mainly on deep learning (DL), machine learning (ML), and statistical approaches for forecasting the financial health of a company. Thus, this study presents a hybrid hunter–prey optimization with a deep learning-based FCP (HHPODL-FCP) technique. The objective of the HHPODL-FCP algorithm lies in the effective identification of the financial crisis in enterprises or organizations. To accomplish this, the HHPODL-FCP method makes use of the HHPO algorithm for the feature subset selection process. In addition, the HHPODL-FCP technique employs the gated attention recurrent network (GARN) model for the identification and classification of financial and non-financial crises. The HHPODL-FCP method exploits a sparrow search algorithm (SSA)-based hyperparameter tuning process to enrich the performance of the GARN model. The simulation results of the HHPODL-FCP method are tested on different financial datasets. A wide range of experiments highlighted the remarkable performance of the HHPODL-FCP method over recent techniques under various measures.