Finovate Blog

• Bill Harris, fintech pioneer and former CEO of Intuit, PayPal, and founder of Personal Capital, has unveiled a new digital RIA focused on affluent and high-net-worth investors.
• Evergreen Wealth combines agentic AI advice with fiduciary advisors, offering Dynamic Portfolios designed for hyper-personalization and advanced tax optimization.
• Moving beyond early roboadvisors, Evergreen Wealth blends human expertise, AI analytics, and tax-efficient strategies to meet changing expectations of younger, affluent clients.

Serial entrepreneur Bill Harris unveiled his newest fintech yesterday. The new wealthtech, Evergreen Wealth, is a digital Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) that provides investment management with a tax-forward mindset.

The launch builds on Harris’ long track record in both wealth management and tax innovation. On the wealthtech side, he founded Personal Capital in 2009, one of the first hybrid roboadvisors, which grew to manage $23 billion in assets before selling to Empower in 2020 for $825 million upfront. On the tax side, Harris led TurboTax and later served as CEO of Intuit in the late 1990s. He also briefly served as an early CEO of PayPal in 1999, cementing his reputation as a serial fintech entrepreneur.

Harris said that the launch comes at a time of changing market environment and consumer expectations. “Younger, affluent investors want more than traditional products and quarterly meetings—more than half don’t want their parents’ advisors,” said Harris. “They demand sophisticated tax and investment services, available on their schedule. We built Evergreen Wealth for this generation of investors.”

As a new wealthtech in the AI era, Evergreen Wealth offers agentic AI-powered financial advice to affluent and high-net-worth clients. The company is differentiating itself with its Dynamic Portfolios that contain hundreds of individual securities that can be tax-optimized and hyper-personalized to match the clients’ goals.

Tax optimization is a key focus for Evergreen Wealth. The company leverages multiple tax strategies, such as direct indexing, to help offset, reduce, defer, and even eliminate taxes on their investments. This is important for high-income taxpayers in high-tax states when they are trying to beat the market.

Along with its emphasis on tax efficiencies, Evergreen Wealth also focuses on offering a high-touch approach. The company’s advisors are fiduciaries that leverage research from Evergreen Intelligence, the company’s financial knowledge base, in order to deliver personalized advice to their clients. These tools allow advisors to offer each client personalized insights and advice.

“We combine human expertise with AI analytics to create a new model for financial advice,” said Harris. “It’s the best of both worlds—experienced advisors plus advanced technology.”

Today’s launch solidifies an era of change in the wealthtech space. While early wealthtechs leveraged the roboadvisory strategy, today’s consumers want an even deeper approach when it comes to managing their wealth. By offering a tax-forward mentality combined with agentic AI tools and a high-touch, personal approach, Evergreen Wealth is adapting to consumers’ changing preferences.

Photo by Trace Hudson

• Swift is launching a blockchain-based shared ledger with Consensys to enable instant, always-on cross-border transactions.
• Swift is leveraging its 50 years of experience providing global financial messaging to offer the same standardization and trust for tokenized assets as it has for payment instructions.
• The ledger will emphasize trust and compliance while being interoperable by working with both public and private networks.

Swift announced this week that it is launching its own blockchain in partnership with blockchain software company Consensys.

Swift’s new blockchain-based shared ledger will facilitate instant, always-on cross-border transactions. Today’s announcement comes after Swift prototyped the blockchain with more than 30 financial institutions across the globe. The experience with those firms is helping Swift design and build the ledger, which is starting with a prototype powered by Consensys.

This move builds directly on Swift’s five-decade history as the backbone of cross-border financial messaging. Since it was founded in 1973, Swift has grown from a consortium of 239 banks in 15 countries into what it is today: a global standard for secure interbank communication that connects more than 11,000 institutions worldwide.

Just as Swift’s original network created a common language for banks to exchange payment instructions, its new ledger is designed to provide standardization and trust for tokenized assets. Swift anticipates that its new ledger will expand its focus on infrastructure. The member-owned cooperative plans to work with banks on leveraging the ledger infrastructure.

The launch also reflects rising demand for always-on settlement, interoperability between blockchains and fiat rails, and the need for a trusted global standard in digital finance. “We provide powerful and effective rails today and are moving at a rapid pace with our community to create the infrastructure stack of the future,” said Swift CEO Javier Pérez-Tasso. “Through this initial ledger concept we are paving the way for financial institutions to take the payments experience to the next level with Swift’s proven and trusted platform at the centre of the industry’s digital transformation.”

The new ledger will work with existing and emerging networks to record a secure, real-time log of transactions that take place among financial institutions. Swift will place a great emphasis on trust and compliance, leveraging its long-standing reputation. It will also ensure interoperability between distributed ledger transfers and existing fiat rails, by orchestrating between different systems and supporting both private and public networks.

“As digital assets continue to develop and mature at pace, Swift’s blockchain-based ledger provides the foundational infrastructure needed for trusted, real-time cross-border payments alongside existing ways of moving money,” said NatWest Head of Group Payment and Digital Asset Strategy Lee McNabb. “By partnering in this initiative, we are shaping solutions that allow our clients benefit from greater speed, transparency and crucially, flexibility in the digital age—without wavering on robust compliance and risk management.”

Swift’s ledger is not just an evolution of the company. It is also an example of how the wider industry is changing along with technology. In this case, the same rails that have carried payment messages for 50 years may soon carry records for tokenized funds, as well.

Photo by Noah Wilke

• Bolt launched its all-in-one SuperApp, combining digital banking, crypto trading, ecommerce, and peer-to-peer transfers in a single platform.
• The company has partnered with Midland States Bank and Zero Hash for FDIC-insured banking services and crypto infrastructure under one roof.
• The app has added agentic AI and dual-rail transactions give users seamless fiat and crypto payments, personalized shopping, and integrated rewards.

Identity and ecommerce fintech Bolt launched its all-in-one app to bridge the gap between traditional finance (TradFi) and decentralized finance (DeFi). The new app offers users a singular way to shop, spend, save, earn, and invest.

Bolt is calling the app its SuperApp because it provides crypto trading, peer-to-peer transfers, digital banking capabilities, and ecommerce, with Midland States Bank providing FDIC-insured banking services and Zero Hash powering crypto custody and trading infrastructure.

“The future of money and commerce isn’t siloed—it’s seamless,” said Bolt Founder and CEO Ryan Breslow. “Today’s consumer shouldn’t have to juggle multiple apps for fiat, crypto, rewards, or shopping. Our SuperApp brings it all together in one secure, intuitive platform. By building rewards, banking and commerce directly into a single app, we’re creating not just another wallet, but a financial operating system for the modern consumer. Bolt is delivering the infrastructure to make this future real, scalable, and accessible to everyone.”

The app, which is launching out of beta today, offers a virtual and physical debit card with the ability to lock and unlock the card using the app. Users automatically earn rewards, including personalized rewards boosts that let users optimize earnings across everyday spending categories like restaurants, travel, groceries, transit, and fuel.

Crucially, in addition to debit and credit functionality, the app offers dual-rail transaction support for both fiat and crypto, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, USDC, and more. Additionally, Bolt’s crypto trading is available on more than 40 major cryptocurrencies.

Bolt is leveraging agentic AI by introducing an AI agent that helps users search, compare, and products products based on personalized preferences, intent, and constraints. The new app offers integrated shopping and spending that brings commerce, payments, and tracking in a single experience.

Bolt was founded in 2014 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company offers both retail and commercial payment tools, such as conversion and loyalty solutions for retailers and one-click checkout for more than 80 million shoppers.

Photo by Liliana Drew