Finovate Global Africa: Stablecoins, Digital Payments, and Funding Infrastructure

Finovate Global Africa: Stablecoins, Digital Payments, and Funding Infrastructure
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Finovate Global, MasterCard, Revolut

This week’s edition of Finovate Global highlights recent fintech headlines from Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa.

Circle and Sasai Fintech team up to boost adoption of USDC

Digital asset platform Circle announced a new partnership between one of its affiliates and Sasai Fintech, a business of Cassava Technologies. The partnership is designed to boost adoption of Circle’s USDC stablecoin and expand internet-native financial infrastructure across Africa.

“Africa’s digital economy is entering a new era, propelled by entrepreneurship, a mobile-first generation, and the acceleration of intra-regional trade,” Cassava Technologies Founder and Executive Chairman Strive Masiyiwa said. “By integrating with the trusted and widely adopted USDC network, we can drive financial inclusion and open transformative opportunities for businesses and consumers alike.”

Stablecoin adoption in Africa is accelerating due to increases in the number of mobile-first consumers, the growth of cross-border commerce, and the overall expansion of the digital economy. USDC is a fully-reserved, transparent payment stablecoin redeemable 1:1 for US dollars. The stablecoin has been used to power programmable payments and financial applications around the world. This week’s partnership announcement between Circle and Sasai Fintech calls for further exploration into practical applications for USDC. The two companies will also investigate ways that Circle’s full stack platform can lower costs, friction, and settlement time for Sasai’s enterprise and retail customers.

“Emerging markets are at the forefront of stablecoin adoption, and Africa represents a significant opportunity for internet-native innovation,” Circle Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO Jeremy Allaire said. “Working with Cassava, we can extend the benefits of USDC and on-chain infrastructure into high-growth payment corridors to deliver always-on global connectivity.”

Sasai Fintech is a pan-African digital payment solutions provider. Headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa, and founded in 2021, Sasai Fintech has enabled more than 250 million wallets and more than 85,000 POS terminals. A division of Cassava Technologies, Sasai Fintech has 20+ enterprise partners and is active in 30+ cross-border markets.

IFC Partners with Cashi to expand digital payments infrastructure

International Finance Corporation (IFC) has teamed up with digital payment infrastructure company Cashi. The fintech offers a digital payment platform that allows users to send and receive money via mobile phones, point-of-sale devices, and SMS-based tools. Cashi’s platform links users with banks, telecoms, and other financial institutions in a single interoperable ecosystem that makes everyday transactions easier in an economy that still relies heavily on cash and faces significant obstacles to accessing comprehensive banking services.

“IFC’s upstream support allows us to adapt our proven, crisis-tested platform to the realities of central Africa,” Cashi CEO Tarneem Saeed said. “This partnership enables us to work closely with regulators and ecosystem partners, build trust with local merchants, and deliver practical financial tools that people can use in their daily lives, even in low-connectivity environments.”

Cashi’s platform helps address and alleviate digital infrastructure bottlenecks in economies that are cash-dependent and underbanked. The company offers a range of financial products and services that enable businesses and individuals to send, receive, and spend money. Cashi offers instant settlement, reliable uptime, and dedicated support for both merchants and users. Founded in 2022 and headquartered in Khartoum, Sudan, Cashi operates as part of Alsoug.com, the country’s largest digital classifieds and marketplace.

Financial infrastructure startup Littlefish raises $9.4 million

A South African fintech infrastructure startup, littlefish, has scored $9.4 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Partech, and featured participation from TLcom Capital, Flourish Ventures, and Proparco. The investment is the latest fundraising for the company since its 2021 seed round, and the firm expects to use the new capital to grow its team, advance product development, and enter new markets such as Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia.

“This raise is a validation of our belief that the best way to serve Africa’s small businesses is to work with the institutions they already trust, not around them,” Brandon Roberts, Co-Founder and CEO of littlefish, said. “We’ve proven the model in South Africa, and this capital gives us the runway to deepen those relationships and bring what we’ve built to millions more merchants across the continent. The little guys deserve world-class financial infrastructure, too, and we’re building it.”

Littlefish offers a merchant operating system that empowers banks to deliver fintech products and services to small businesses by integrating payments, POS software, CRMs, APIs, and more into a unified layer. This enables banks and other financial institutions to offer modern, digital services to merchants without disrupting their existing relationships with customers. Littlefish helps banks deliver more services to their business customers more efficiently, and gives small businesses the opportunity to gradually modernize and digitize their operations.

Littlefish counts institutions such as Standard Bank, First National Bank, and Absa among its clients. The company was co-founded in 2021 by Roberts and Miod Davith Kahwa.

Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.

Latin America and the Caribbean

  • Mexico-based digital commerce platform, Clip, introduced Tap to Pay functionality on the iPhone.
  • Mastercard executed a series of live, end-to-end agentic payment transactions across Latin America and the Caribbean.
  • Cross-border payments technology company Reap obtained a Money Transmitter Registry in Mexico.

Asia-Pacific

  • Singapore-based fintech Fingular unveiled Shariah-first digital financing brand in Malaysia, Tazee.
  • Enterprise on-chain settlement infrastructure company Capital Layer forged a distribution partnership with Taiwan-based domestic system integrator Stark Technology Inc.
  • Vienamese police dismantle fraudulent cryptocurrency scheme that cost investors billions of dollars.

Sub-Saharan Africa

  • Operating system for African banks and merchants, Littlefish, raised $9.5 million in Series A funding.
  • Western Union partnered with Sasai Fintech to bring digital remittance access to South African consumers.
  • African financial ecosystem platform Moniepoint acquired cloud-based restaurant management platform Orda Africa.

Central and Eastern Europe

  • Georgia-based TBC Bank partnered with GDS Link to power credit decisioning for retail lending.
  • German fintech Solaris announced plans to become an “AI-native bank,” cut 20% of its workforce.
  • PA Turkey looked at the strength of fintech investment in Turkey in 2025.

Middle East and Northern Africa

  • Saudi Arabia’s central bank issued its first Major Payment Institution license for open banking services to Lean Technologies.
  • Vault22 announced plans to launch its Islamic finance platform Hafiq in the UAE by the middle of 2026.
  • Banque Misr inked a Memorandum of Understanding with Microsoft Egypt to launch an open fintech innovation program for the Egyptian market.

Central and Southern Asia

  • Sri Lanka-based commercial bank Hatton National Bank enabled its debit cards to be added to Google Wallet.
  • Indian employee health and insurance platform Plum raised $20.6 million in Series B funding.
  • Revolut announced plans to boost its India-based workforce by 5,500 by the end of 2026.

Photo by Adrien Olichon

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Five Companies Advancing Credit Access and Lending Infrastructure

Five Companies Advancing Credit Access and Lending Infrastructure
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: FinovateSpring 2026, FinovateSpring 2026 Demo Companies, List series

One of the great promises of fintech innovation is the idea of democratizing finance. This includes everything from helping more deserving borrowers secure access to credit to helping a new generation of savers and investors learn good habits that will ensure financial wellness from young adulthood through retirement. As much of the fintech world becomes increasingly—and understandably—obsessed with the latest developments in AI and decentralized finance, a sizable contingent of innovators continues to solve practical problems for students, young savers, and credit-starved small businesses.

This year at FinovateSpring 2026 in San Diego, May 5 to May 7, we will introduce five fintechs that will show how their latest innovations use advanced technologies to simplify international payments for students, boost financial literacy for teens and their families, and enhance small business lending with AI-powered underwriting and alternative data.

Crebit Pay

Crebit Pay is a stablecoin-powered FX platform enabling low-cost, near-instant global payments for students, while helping credit unions onboard and serve international members.

Crebit Pay’s platform provides near-instant settlement and is 4-10% cheaper than traditional FX. It serves underserved corridors ignored by major providers, offering a stablecoin infrastructure that is fully invisible to users, fiat in and fiat out.

Founded in 2025, Crebit Pay is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

GenAspire

GenAspire offers real-world banking for the next generation. The company’s values-driven teen banking app and financial literacy program is trusted by more than 2,200 schools, designed for families, and built for community financial institutions. Designed for credit unions and community banks, GenAspire’s technology gamifies teen banking and incentives financial literacy.

Headquartered in Boynton Beach, Florida, GenAspire was founded in 2025.

Nextvestment

Nextvestment enables safe self-service exploration while guiding advisors to intervene at the right moments, improving client engagement and advisor productivity without changing advisory models. The company’s generative AI platform, designed for financial institutions, family offices, and individual advisors, delivers real-time insights, proactive compliance, and personalized client experiences.

Founded in 2024, Nextvestment is headquartered in Singapore.

PROVIDR

PROVIDR approves more qualified SME loans faster and cheaper but without additional risk through AI-driven, alternative-data underwriting, while reducing costs, improving accuracy, and growing market share. The company’s agentic credit platform gives loan officers the resources they need to make faster lending decisions, with more accuracy and full control.

Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, PROVIDR was founded in 2025.

Vine Financial

Vine Financial enables lenders to scale commercial portfolios without adding staff, accelerate deal approvals, and adopt responsibly—turning underwriting from a manual bottleneck into a strategic advantage. The company’s platform lets financiers and borrowers collaborate more effectively, orchestrating the process to ensure that deals flow smoothly.

Founded in 2019, Vine Financial is headquartered in Austin, Texas.

Why banks should care

Expanding access to underserved markets, enhancing financial literacy, and improving operational efficiency and productivity are three areas where fintechs like these can help banks reach more customers, boost engagement, and generate better margins. At a time when it is becoming increasingly difficult for financial institutions to differentiate themselves from the crowd, strategies that can help them attract new customers and empower current customers to become better stewards of their own financial lives are critical.

All of these goals also represent practical opportunities to use technologies such as AI and decentralized finance. AI is making it easier for lenders to analyze both traditional and alternative data to uncover qualified borrowers that traditional underwriting strategies have tended to overlook. Decentralized finance is poised to revolutionize payments, making low-cost, near-instant payment options more broadly available, helping financial institutions better serve international customers while creating new potential revenue streams. Lastly, the ability of AI and DeFi to help eliminate inefficiencies and reduce costs is another main reason why banks and other financial institutions should look closely at the real-world applications of these still-evolving technologies.

If you are enjoying our preview of the companies demoing at FinovateSpring this year, then join us in San Diego on May 5 through May 7. Tickets are on sale now. Save your spot. Book your room. And bring your sunscreen!

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Opentech Powers New Money Transfer Solution PayInit AG for Viseca, Cornèr Bank

Opentech Powers New Money Transfer Solution PayInit AG for Viseca, Cornèr Bank
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, OPENTECH
  • Italian fintech Opentech will power a new peer-to-peer money transfer solution under development by Viseca Payment Services and Cornèr Bank.
  • Viseca and Cornèr Bank will leverage Opentech’s OpenPay Send technology, an all-in-one platform that orchestrates card-based transfers across multiple schemes and endpoints.
  • Opentech most recently demonstrated its technology at FinovateEurope 2026 in London. Stefano Andreani is Founder and CEO.

Viseca Payment Services and Cornèr Bank have teamed up to develop a new open industry solution for international peer-to-peer money transfers leveraging Mastercard and Visa payment cards. The new offering, PayInit AG, will streamline direct, cross-border transfers between individuals, enabling them to send money from their payment cards to other cards, digital wallets, and bank accounts.

The two companies will also create a recipient directory (alias directory) to allow end customers of participating card issuers and mobile payment solution providers to send money directly to each other using phone numbers or email addresses from the directory.

“With PayInit, we are creating the foundation for worldwide P2P money transfers based on Swiss payment cards,” Viseca CFO and Chairman of the Board of Directors of PayInit AG, Michael Walther, said. “This closes an important gap in the Swiss payment card market and opens up new opportunities for the entire industry.”

To this end, the two firms have selected Opentech as their technology partner for the project. Opentech, which most recently demoed its technology at FinovateEurope 2026 in London, is a specialist in providing digital services for banks and other financial services providers, and will bring its OpenPay Send technology to Viseca and Cornèr Bank’s new initiative. OpenPay Send is an all-in-one money transfer solution that combines money movement and alias directory services from leading payment networks to deliver a modern P2P and cross-border payment experience for customers. OpenPay Send enables fast and secure money transfers to billions of endpoints around the world, including bank accounts, cards, wallets, and cash-out locations.

“The mission of PayInit AG aligns perfectly with the core values of Opentech: making payments more accessible, interoperable, and simpler,” Opentech Chief Executive Officer and Founder Stefano Andreani said. “As a technological innovation driver through the OpenPay Send platform, Opentech supports another initiative that once again demonstrates the Swiss financial sector’s role as a global pioneer while creating genuine value for all stakeholders.”

The commercial launch of the PayInit AG solution is slated for the end of 2026. The collaboration comes months after Viseca and Opentech announced a strategic partnership designed to deliver new cross-border, peer-to-peer money transfer options for the Swiss market.

A Finovate alum since 2013, Opentech supports digital transformation for banks and card issuers with secure, compliant, and scalable payment solutions. Most recently, at FinovateEurope 2026, the company demonstrated how its OpenPay for Merchants (O4M) solution embeds Buy Now, Pay Later functionality directly into the merchant digital channels, across merchant apps and checkout journeys. O4M boosts conversion and engagement for merchants, and provides banks with a distribution channel to deliver consumer financing options to pre-engaged customers at the moment of purchase. Founded in 2003, Opentech is headquartered in Rome, Italy.

Viseca is a product and service provider in the cashless payments field, issuing both payment cards via Viseca Card Services and providing services to support the card business for issuers via Viseca Payment Services. Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, Viseca is owned by major Swiss and cantonal and retail banks, including all cantonal banks, the Raiffeisen Group, Entris Banking, Migros Bank, Bank Cler, regional banks, and private/commercial banks.

Founded in 1952, the Cornèr Group is a private and independent Swiss banking group that offers the services of a universal bank. These services include private banking, credit financing, credit and prepaid cards (Visa, Mastercard, and Diners Club under the Cornèrcard brand), and online trading (Cornèrtrader). The group consists of parent company Cornèr Bank AG in Lugano, Switzerland, as well as its subsidiaries Cornèr Bank (Overseas) Limited, Cornèr Europe AG, Finpromotion SA, and Allegra Vermögensverwaltungs AG. 

Photo by Henrique Ferreira on Unsplash

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Feedzai Launches RiskFM to Enhance Financial Crime Detection

Feedzai Launches RiskFM to Enhance Financial Crime Detection
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Feedzai
  • Financial crime and fraud prevention specialist Feedzai unveiled its RiskFM (Risk Foundational Model) solution this week.
  • RiskFM covers a broad range of financial data to provide risk decisioning across fraud detection, anti-money laundering, and other financial crime.
  • Headquartered in New York and founded in 2008, Feedzai made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2014 in London.

Financial crime prevention innovator Feedzai introduced its RiskFM (Risk Foundational Model) solution this week. The new offering leverages a Tabular Foundation Model that is purpose-built for financial data and risk decisioning, changing the way that financial crime is detected and prevented.

Spanning across fraud detection, anti-money laundering (AML), and other financial crime-related risk decisions, RiskFM is trained on a broad, deep, global dataset covering onboarding, digital activity, payments, fund transfers, and AML workflows to enable institutions to identify, prevent, and adapt to financial crime quickly and accurately.

The solution is designed to handle some of the special challenges of dealing with transactional data. In their statement announcing the new offering, Feedzai compared this challenge with large language models (LLMs) and their ability to deal with domains such as language, audio, and video. These domains, the company noted, all have finite grammar and a certain linear causality. By contrast, financial transactions are far less predictive, in large part because the consumer behavior behind these transactions, from payment types to fraud modalities, can and does change—frequently.

“Next transactions are far less predictable than the next word in a sentence,” Feedzai Chief Science Officer Pedro Bizarro said. “Consumer spending habits, payment types, and fraud modes change continuously. More importantly, financial risk is an adversarial domain; fraudsters actively adapt to evade detection in real time.”

The ability to operate across multiple institutions and geographies at the same time is one key feature of RiskFM, and when used to power a customized model for a single customer, RiskFM matches the performance of high-tuned, supervised models while avoiding time-consuming, manual feature engineering. RiskFM outperformed traditional models based on Gradient Boosting and Deep Learning strategies, and is built for the full range of financial crime prevention, from mule account detection to anti-money laundering. The company refers to the technology as the “foundational AI layer for financial risk,” ensuring institutions have an intelligent, scalable solution that grows as they do.

“RiskFM proves our multi-year investment in foundation models is paying off,” Feedzai Chief Product Officer Pedro Barata said. “We’re not just part of the conversation; we’re defining how it applies to the complexities of global financial crime prevention.”

Feedzai made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2014. Headquartered in New York and founded in 2008, Feedzai today offers an AI-native financial crime prevention platform that helps banks, payment networks, acquirers, and other financial services providers detect and prevent financial crime, fraud, and money laundering in real time. The company’s platform serves more than one billion consumers, processes 90 billion events, and secures $9 trillion in payment volume annually.

In the wake of its RiskFM announcement, the company since reported that it has been named to Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Companies 2026 roster. “We at Feedzai are honored by this prestigious recognition of our innovation and research in trusted AI to build a world of safer money,” Feedzai Co-Founder and CEO Nuno Sebastiao said.

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Celebrating the Women of FinovateSpring 2026: Founders, Leaders, and Innovators

Celebrating the Women of FinovateSpring 2026: Founders, Leaders, and Innovators
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: FinovateSpring 2026, Women in Fintech

Finovate’s celebration of Women’s History Month continues!

This year FinovateSpring 2026 will feature a dozen female fintech founders and co-founders in its demo company line-up. Today, as part of our commemoration of Women’s History Month, we are excited to showcase these innovators, whose solutions are helping banks, credit unions, and lenders bring new financial products and services to their customers and members.

“I’m thrilled to welcome these incredible female founders to FinovateSpring,” Finovate VP and Director of Demos Heather Stowell said. “Their innovative technologies and groundbreaking ideas are a testament to the transformative power of diversity in fintech. It has been inspiring to seek out and encourage these companies to apply to demo, and I can’t wait to see their vision come to life on stage.”

Meenakshy Iyer, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, ContexQ

ContexQ is forensic Graph AI that detects fraud, money laundering, and hidden beneficial ownership by seeing the relationships every other AI misses. Headquartered in Singapore, ContexQ was founded in 2024.

Simmi Sen, Co-Founder, Crebit Pay

Crebit Pay is a stablecoin-powered FX platform enabling low-cost, near-instant global payments for students, while helping credit unions onboard and serve international members. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Crebit Pay was founded in 2025.

Anna Joo Fee, Founder and CEO, Goodfin

Goodfin expands access to institutional-grade investing opportunities. Its platform opens doors to private equity, venture capital, pre-IPO deals, and alternative asset classes that are typically reserved for large institutions or ultra-high-net-worth clients. Headquartered in San Francisco, Goodfin was founded in 2022.

Kelly Waltrich, Founder and CEO, Intention.ly

Intention.ly’s Advisor Brand Builder delivers a completely differentiated brand, website, and content engine in days, helping advisors attract ideal clients and outpace competitors. Headquartered in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, Intention.ly was founded in 2021.

Alisha Chowdhury, Founder, Kiro Money

Kiro Money helps financial institutions grow deposits and product adoption by embedding intent-aware guidance that converts user uncertainty into action inside their platforms. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Kiro Money was founded in 2024.

Zarina Tsomaeva, Founder and CEO, Loquat

Loquat enables banks and credit unions to scale faster by digitizing onboarding, cutting review times by 80% and unlocking new deposit growth. Headquartered in Miami, Florida, Loquat was founded in 2018.

Annabelle Lin, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer, Nextvestment

Nextvestment enables safe self-service exploration while guiding advisors to intervene at the right moments, improving client engagement and advisor productivity without changing advisory models. Headquartered in Singapore, Nextvestment was founded in 2024.

Lisa Pent, Founder and CEO, PentEdge

PentEdge‘s AIMS gives community banks and examiner-ready AI governance platform—purpose-built for the $500 million to $100 billion institution navigating today’s federal AI risk guidance. Headquartered in North Creek, New York, PentEdge was founded in 2025.

Kathleen Craig, Founder and CEO, Plinqit

Business HYS by Plinqit levels the playing field for banks looking for much-needed deposit growth and for SMBs looking to do more with their cash. Headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Plinqit was founded in 2015.

Riya Jagetia, Co-Founder and CEO, Socratix AI

Socratix AI helps financial institutions cut fraud losses, reduce false positives, and scale operations without adding headcount—driving efficiency, trust, and stronger customer relationships. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Socratix AI was founded in 2025.

Ashley Parekh, Co-Founder and CEO, Syntex

Syntex is digital onboarding software for banks that verifies documents, tracks approvals, and reduces small business onboarding from weeks to days. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Syntex was founded in 2025.

Caitlyn Truong, Co-Founder and CEO, Zengines

Zengines modernizes off mainframes without losing critical logic, satisfying auditors faster, and making legacy systems searchable so transformation and compliance don’t stall. Headquartered in Bedford, Massachusetts, Zengines was founded in 2020.

Catch these and many more innovative fintech founders and CEOs this year at FinovateSpring 2026 in San Diego, May 5 through May 7! Tickets are on sale now. Save your spot. Book your room. And bring your sunscreen!

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Fintech Rundown: A Rapid Review of Weekly News

Fintech Rundown: A Rapid Review of Weekly News
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Eltropy, Extend, Fintech Rundown, Plaid, SplitIt, Sumsub, VISA

Spring has sprung, March Madness is in the air, and the fintech headlines are filled with new payment solutions to enhance face-to-face commerce, new developments in the tokenized asset space, and a range of announcements on agentic AI including new tools, new partnerships, and new deployments.

Be sure to check back with Finovate’s Fintech Rundown all week long for the latests in fintech news!

Payments

European financial services provider Mollie announces the UK launch of its in-person payments solution, Tap.

Payments technology company Splitit unveils its Splitit Go mobile and API-based solution that brings card-linked installment payment options to in-person commerce.

Fraud prevention and identity verification

Digital identity and compliance platform ComplyCube unveils its expanded fraud intelligence suite.

Finix and Plaid team up to enhance bank verification and streamline money movement.

Sumsub and ComplyAdvantage announce strategic partnership to enhance anti-money laundering screening for compliance teams.

Agentic AI and AI infrastructure

Eltropy highlights new authentication and account services on its Agentic AI platform.

Starling Bank launches new agentic AI tool to manage personal finances.

F5 and agentic commerce platform Skyfire announce technology partnership to make the use of verified AI agents safer.

Australian fintech Vivi Money chooses Pismo’s infrastructure to launch new AI-native financial solution on Visa’s global payment network.

Constant AI, an agentic AI firm that specialists in lending operations for credit unions, launches AI Skip-A-Pay agent, Nia.

AI platform Go Abacus unveils The Go1, an on-prem AI hardware solution to give banks data sovereignty. Catch Go Abacus in its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2026 in San Diego.

Insurtech

AI assistant for financial advisors, Zocks, introduces its new AI assistant for life insurance. See Zocks make its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2026 in San Diego, May 5-7.

DeFi

Q2 partners with digital asset platform Stablecore to enable banks and credit unions to offer stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and other digital asset products.

TAPP Engine and KoreInside team up to bring financial stablecoins to private capital markets.

Nasdaq wins SEC approval for trading tokenized securities.

Apex Group and Coinbase Asset Management introduce tokenized Coinbase Bitcoin Yield Fund on Base.

Small business financial management

Spend and expense management platform Extend announces support for Sage Intacct, Xero, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Photo by Davide Aracri on Unsplash

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Finovate Global Canada: Mortgagetech, Real-Time Payments, and Top Investment Trends

Finovate Global Canada: Mortgagetech, Real-Time Payments, and Top Investment Trends
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Finovate Global, NCR Corporation, Ripple

This week’s edition of Finovate Global showcases recent fintech news from Canada.

Royal Bank of Canada acquires mortgagetech Pinch Financial

The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) has acquired Toronto-based mortgagetech Pinch Financial. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed, but the move is designed to accelerate the decisioning process for mortgage borrowers throughout the country.

“This acquisition helps us deliver on our commitment to bring the best solutions to clients on their path to home ownership,” RBC SVP of Home Equity Financing Janet Boyle said in a statement. “Pinch’s technology will help us accelerate our digital roadmap to deliver a quicker, more streamlined mortgage experience for Canadians.”

Founded in 2016, Pinch Financial offers banks, lenders, and other financial services providers a platform that allows them to verify data and automate mortgage applications. The company’s technology verifies identity, income, assets, liabilities, source of the down payment, and creditworthiness to establish whether a borrower meets the requirements—from TDS and FICO to LTV and net worth—for rate and underwriting eligibility.

RBC already plays a major role in Canada’s mortgage market. The acquisition of Pinch Financial will help the bank serve customers who prefer to apply for home loans online instead of in-person at a branch.

“We started Pinch to make mortgages more relevant and familiar for digital-first consumers—making the qualification process faster, simpler, and more transparent for borrowers,” Pinch Financial CEO Andrew Wells said. “This acquisition gives us the opportunity to bring our technology to more Canadians while being part of a team that shares our vision for innovation in financial services.”

Canada’s largest bank by market capitalization and assets—and one of the largest banks in the world—RBC serves more than 19 million clients in Canada, the US, and 27 other countries. Headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, and boasting more than 101,000 employees, RBC reported total assets of $1.9 trillion CAD as of October 31, 2025. Dave McKay is President and CEO.

Wealthsimple becomes first Canadian fintech to join SWIFT

Canadian fintech Wealthsimple has secured a big “first” and a big “second” this week. The firm became the first Canadian fintech and the second non-bank fintech in the world to become a member of the SWIFT global financial messaging network. The company is currently completing final technical integration and security certification ahead of a full launch with clients expected later this spring.

“Many Canadians rely on international wire transfers, and yet to date, the experience has been clunky and expensive. We want to fix that,” Wealthsimple VP of Payment Strategy Hanna Zaidi said. “Our SWIFT membership is going to unlock faster, simpler, and more transparent international money transfers for the more than three million Canadians who trust Wealthsimple.”

SWIFT’s international messaging network serves 11,000 financial institutions around the world, facilitating trillions of dollars in payment volume. SWIFT makes the sending and receiving of international money transfers more seamless and efficient, while also providing end-to-end tracking visibility with real-time status updates.

Wealthsimple’s SWIFT membership is part of the company’s overall strategy to lower costs and boost efficiency for money movement in Canada. Wealthsimple also announced that it will be an early adopter of the country’s pending Real-Time Rail (RTR) payment system, making its clients among the first to benefit from instant money movement between institutions.

Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Wealthsimple offers a wide range of financial products and services, including managed investing, do-it-yourself trading, cryptocurrency, tax filing, spending, and saving. The company serves more than three million Canadians and has more than $100 billion in assets under administration. Co-founder Michael Katchen is CEO.

KPMG: Canada fintech investment “moderated” in 2025

The bad news is that investment in Canadian fintech slowed in 2025. The good news is that this moderating pace comes on the heels of record highs notched in 2024.

KPMG International recently unveiled its Pulse of Fintech H2’25 and FY25 report. The document depicts a fintech investment landscape in Canada that has returned to more historic levels, with “sustained interest in later-stage companies, platform acquisitions, and strategically important fintech subsectors such as artificial intelligence and digital assets.”

Specifically, the comparison is $2.4 billion across 113 deals in 2025 versus $9.9 billion across 161 deals in 2024. The report notes that much of the deal value in 2024 came from two sizable transactions: Nuvei’s $6.3 billion public-to-private buyout and Plusgrade’s $1 billion private equity deal. In 2025, the two largest investments in Canadian fintech were the $898 million private equity buyout of Converge Technology Solutions and Wealthsimple’s $536 million equity raise.

The report notes that investment activity in the sector picked up in the second half of 2025, especially with regard to gains in average deal value. Dubie Cunningham, a partner in KPMG Canada’s Banking and Capital Markets Practice specializing in fintech, indicated that she believed the strength in the second half of 2025 augured well for strength in 2026. “The investment appetite for Canadian fintechs will continue to grow in 2026, as investors prioritize quality, scale, and strategic fit, signaling a market that is maturing and aligning more closely with long-term value creation,” Cunningham said.

Read the full KPMG report for much more.

Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.

Central and Southern Asia

  • Pakistan-based digital banking platform Zindigi unveiled what it is billing as the country’s first “fintech credit card.”
  • Indian fintech Cred secured approval from the country’s central bank to operate as a payment aggregator.
  • IBS Intelligence looked at how fintech innovation in India is evolving from transaction rails to financial data rails.

Latin America and the Caribbean

Asia-Pacific

  • Cross-border payments platform Neema forged a partnership with China’s Alipay.
  • NCR Voyix agreed to sell its bank technology business in Japan to NTT Data.
  • An analysis of the Australian fintech sector by Deloitte Access Economics and FinTech Australia reported that the sector could grow to $71 billion in value by 2035.

Sub-Saharan Africa

  • Kenya and Rwanda inked an agreement that could enable digital payments companies licensed in one country to operate in the other.
  • South African fintech PayInc and First Capital Bank Botswana teamed up to launch instant cross-border payments.
  • The Fintech Times analyzed the fintech ecosystem of West African country, Burkina Faso.

Central and Eastern Europe

  • Part of Estonia’s Iute Group, IuteBank has begun operating as a regulated bank in Ukraine.
  • Lithuanian fintech PAYSTRAX announced an major expansion to its team, adding up to 150 new specialists.
  • Czech fintech Flowpay acquired Berlin, Germany-based SME financing firm Tapline.

Middle East and Northern Africa

  • Israel-based fintech Datarails launched a new solution to help companies reduce contract and subscription waste.
  • Kaspersky and UAE fintech Codebase teamed up to enhance digital banking security.
  • Moroccan fintech WafR secured $4 million in seed funding in a round co-led by LoftyInc Capital.

Photo by Guillaume Jaillet on Unsplash

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Tempo’s Payments Infrastructure and Protocol Goes Live

Tempo’s Payments Infrastructure and Protocol Goes Live
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Daily news
  • Tempo has launched its Mainnet and Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) to support AI-driven commerce, combining blockchain infrastructure with a standardized way for agents to initiate and manage payments across rails.
  • The protocol also introduces “session-based” transactions that remove the need for traditional checkout flows and enable real-time, pay-per-use models.
  • As agentic commerce and stablecoin adoption grow, Tempo is positioning itself at the forefront of development.

Payments blockchain Tempo unveiled its Mainnet this week, alongside a new payments standard designed for AI-driven commerce. Tempo Mainnet focuses on serving needs specifically in the payments space, offering instant settlement, low fees, and high throughput for transactions across the globe.

In addition to the Tempo Mainnet infrastructure, the company also released its Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), an open standard for agentic payments. MPP is payment agnostic and is able to work with stablecoins, cards, Affirm, Klarna, and other payment methods. While Tempo Mainnet provides the underlying blockchain infrastructure for settlement, MPP acts as the coordination layer that enables agents to initiate and manage payments across different networks and payment methods.

“We decided to launch MPP as an open standard so that machine payments can work consistently across services and payment rails,” the company said in a blog post announcement.

MPP provides a standardized way for AI agents and services to initiate, authorize, and settle payments programmatically. While traditional platforms build their own billing and checkout flow, MPP allows a service to request payment from an agent, which can then approve the transaction and complete it instantly from its wallet.

The protocol also introduces “sessions,” which enable continuous, streaming payments that allow agents to pay incrementally for usage (such as in an API call) without requiring a separate transaction each time. Because it brings the payment logic into a shared standard, MPP enables agents to transact across different services and payment methods.

Creating a standardized approach to agent-led payments is increasingly important as developments and interest in agentic payments, combined with the increased use of stablecoins, skyrocket. Traditional checkout flows and billing systems are too slow and fragmented to handle a future in which AI agents purchase services, access data, and execute workflows autonomously. Tempo’s standardized way of enabling machines to request and settle payments across rails positions the company on the leading edge of agentic commerce.

Tempo, which has been trialing MPP since December of 2025, leverages partnerships with Anthropic, DoorDash, Mastercard, Nubank, OpenAI, Ramp, Revolut, Shopify, Standard Chartered, and Visa to bring global payments, cross-border remittances, embedded finance, and tokenized deposits use cases.

The California-based company also revealed plans to introduce more features designed to support enterprise payment workloads, and disclosed it will have “more to share” in the coming months.

Photo by KATRIN BOLOVTSOVA

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Express Wages Brings Earned Wage Access to Good Hands Home Care

Express Wages Brings Earned Wage Access to Good Hands Home Care
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Express Wages
  • Earned wage access provider Express Wages has partnered with Good Hands Home Care to give employees advanced access to their earned income.
  • Express Wages facilitates payday advances of up to $200 a day. Money transfer options include a no-fee Visa Prepaid card, and repayment is managed systematically via the Express Wages app and company payroll platform.
  • Memphis, Tennessee-based Express Wages made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2025 in San Diego.

A new partnership between earned wage access provider Express Wages and Good Hands Home Care will give caregivers and administrative staff access to a portion of their earned income in advance of their scheduled payday.

“We’re proud to partner with Good Hands Home Care,” Express Wages Founder and CEO Alfred Milan said. “Caregiving is deeply meaningful and important work, and strengthening financial stability plays a big role in helping care professionals stay focused on the people and families they serve.”

Express Wages offers a platform that provides employer-integrated, on-demand pay solutions. The company’s plug-and-play technology enables companies to give their employees immediate access to a portion of their earned wages before payday. For workers who are living paycheck-to-paycheck, this early access before payday can help them avoid high-interest predatory loans, unnecessary credit card debt, and overdraft penalties.

Employees can receive up to $200 a day via Express Wages payday advance, with money transfer options including a no-fee Visa Prepaid card. Next-day ACH transfers and instant transfers to debit cards are also available, with transaction fees of $3.95 and $4.95, respectively. Repayment is automatically deducted from the employee’s next paycheck via the app and payroll platform.

Companies using Express Wages can offer the service to employees without making any changes to payroll or experiencing negative impacts on cash flow. Built to ensure both easy integration and interoperability, Express Wages requires no software installation and connects with hundreds of human resources information systems including ADP, Gusto, QuickBooks, and more in a matter of a few days.

In its partnership announcement, Express Wages noted research from a 2025 Bankrate report that indicated that more than a third of Americans had to use funds from their emergency savings in the last year, with nearly one in five Americans having no emergency savings at all. These conditions are what can make consumers vulnerable to high-interest financing products at times of financial stress. In response, a growing number of companies such as Good Hands Home Care are leveraging solutions like earned wage access to give employees greater options when it comes to managing their finances.

“At Express Wages, we focus on building tools that benefit real working lives,” Milan said. “Earned wage access is about offering greater choice and control—giving people more ways to respond when unexpected expenses hit.”

Founded in 2023 and headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee, Express Wages made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2025 in San Diego. At the conference, the company showed how a new feature on its app delivers financial wellness experiences to help users improve their financial literacy.

Photo by Dulcey Lima on Unsplash

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

How Gradient Labs is Thinking About the Shift to Agentic Banking

How Gradient Labs is Thinking About the Shift to Agentic Banking
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Speaker series

The agentic banking future brings a lot of uncertainty. While some experts predict the user interface will be visual, others imagine a screen-free, voice-based user experience.

At FinovateEurope 2026, we sat down with Dimitri Masin, CEO of Gradient Labs, to discuss the evolution from mobile-first banking to agentic banking, as well as how banks should think about the build vs. buy decision in the age of AI.

Masin contends that while banks have spent the last decade perfecting digital interfaces, a major operational challenge still remains: the complexity of customer operations.

“Even though fintechs have created amazing apps, the second half of the problem remains unsolved. These companies still require gigantic human organizations to power those accounts… and that’s the source of many bad customer experiences today,” said Masin.

According to Masin, we are now entering a second major transformation in banking in which AI agents can take on complex, nuanced workflows that traditional automation couldn’t handle.

“With traditional automation, you just can’t automate many of the things banks need to do—they require judgment and nuance…. Now, with advances in AI, you can automate those messy processes that were only doable by humans before,” he added.

Dimitri Masin has spent more than a decade in fintech and banking, including early experience at Monzo, where he helped scale customer operations. His work focuses on applying AI to automate complex financial workflows and improve operational efficiency.

Founded in 2023, London-based Gradient Labs enables banks to embed AI agents directly into their systems to automate customer operations and complex workflows. By moving beyond rule-based automation, the company helps financial institutions reduce operational burden, improve customer experience, and prepare for an AI-first future.

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Five Innovators Transforming Financial Decisioning with Data and Analytics

Five Innovators Transforming Financial Decisioning with Data and Analytics
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: FinovateSpring 2026, FinovateSpring 2026 Demo Companies, List series

How can banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions transform the massive volumes of data they process every day into actionable insights that can drive better decision-making, identify inefficiencies, and engage more customers? How will technologies like AI specifically help financial institutions challenged by competition from non-bank rivals, ever-evolving consumer expectations, and regulatory uncertainty?

This year at FinovateSpring 2026, we are showcasing five innovative fintechs that will demonstrate their solutions to help banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions boost productivity, manage risk, and create compelling experiences for their customers and members.

Bloomfire

Bloomfire transforms financial organizations by centralizing knowledge, accelerating decision-making, ensuring regulatory compliance, reducing operational costs, and driving revenue growth through improved productivity.

Founded in 2011, Bloomfire is based in Austin, Texas.

ContexQ

ContexQ is a forensic Graph AI that detects fraud, money laundering, and hidden beneficial ownership by seeing the relationships every other AI misses.

Headquartered in Singapore, ContexQ was founded in 2024. The company’s technology resolves fragmented identities across more than one billion entities in 12+ languages, predicts emerging fraud patterns using Graph Transformers, and unifies risk and revenue intelligence in one graph.

Finalytics.ai

Finalytics.ai enables financial institutions to instantly unleash the power of AI by offering segment-of-one digital experiences for visitors informed by behavioral, transactional, and third-party data.

Founded in 2021, Finalytics.ai is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Socratix.ai

Socratix AI helps financial institutions cut fraud losses, reduce false positives, and scale operations without adding headcount—driving efficiency, trust, and stronger customer relationships.

Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Socratix AI was founded in 2025.

Whatfix

Whatfix is an AI-native digital adoption platform that helps banks and other financial institutions accelerate system adoption, enforce compliance, and achieve measurable outcomes across mission-critical workflows.

Founded in 2013 and headquartered in San Jose, California, Whatfix offers technology that provides real-time contextual guidance powered by AI-driven ScreenSense, product analytics tied to workflow adherence and business outcomes, and mirror + AI roleplay for risk-free simulation and behavioral training.

Why banks should care

Managing risk, providing compelling personal experiences for customers, and keeping costs low are three paramount challenges for banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions in 2026. Fortunately, all three are areas where technologies such as automation, machine learning, and AI have proven their effectiveness in detecting fraud, customizing user journeys, and identifying workflow inefficiencies and bottlenecks.

Meeting these challenges by embracing fintech innovation is not only a way for banks to ensure regulatory compliance, stay ahead of fraudsters, and become more efficient—it also offers opportunities for specialization and differentiation within the field. At a time when more and more companies are adding financial services to their product mix, innovations that also help banks and credit unions stick out from the crowd are as valuable as ever.

If you are enjoying our preview of the companies demoing at FinovateSpring this year, then join us in San Diego on May 5 through May 7. Register today using this link and save 20%.

Photo by Markus Winkler

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Robinhood Ventures Invests in Stripe and ElevenLabs

Robinhood Ventures Invests in Stripe and ElevenLabs
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Daily news, Funding
  • Robinhood Ventures Fund I made early investments in Stripe and ElevenLabs, expanding its portfolio of private fintech and AI companies.
  • The fund, which began trading earlier this month on the New York Stock Exchange, gives retail investors access to private market opportunities traditionally reserved for institutional and accredited investors.
  • As part of its push to become a financial super app, Robinhood is building infrastructure to package and distribute private assets.

Robinhood Ventures’ first fund, Robinhood Ventures Fund I (RVI), announced it has closed investments in Stripe and ElevenLabs, just days after the fund began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol RVI.

Last week, RVI purchased $14.6 million of Class B common stock of Stripe in secondary transactions, and days later bought $20 million of Series D preferred stock of ElevenLabs in a primary transaction. Founded in 2010, Stripe enables businesses to accept payments, manage billing, and embed financial services into digital platforms. UK-based ElevenLabs is an AI research and product company focused on audio, voice, and realistic speech.

Robinhood launched Robinhood Ventures to enable its users to invest in private companies. The portfolio now includes Airwallex, Boom, Databricks, ElevenLabs, Mercor, Oura, Ramp, Revolut, and Stripe. Robinhood plans to add more private companies in the future.

“We’re excited to add Stripe and ElevenLabs to Robinhood Ventures Fund I and are proud to offer retail investors access to these frontier companies,” said Robinhood Ventures Fund I President Sarah Pinto. “They are helping shape the future of fintech and AI, and reflect RVI’s focus on investing in innovative companies operating at the forefront of their industries.”

In an era when valuable tech companies are staying private for longer, it is difficult for everyday investors to tap into that value. Instead, access has traditionally been limited to wealthy and institutional investors. But because Robinhood doesn’t require investors to be accredited or charge performance fees like traditional venture funds do, a wider variety of investors are able to participate.

Expanding its investment infrastructure is a key piece for Robinhood, which has recently disclosed its goal of becoming a financial super app. The California-based company is offering more than just investment access. It is building the rails to package, price, and distribute traditionally illiquid assets to everyday investors. If this infrastructure model proves successful, Robinhood could expand beyond venture equity into other private market categories such as credit, real estate, and tokenized assets.

Photo by Magda Ehlers

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook