Blog - Finovate

Sustainability, Quantum, and Cloud: Three Dogs That Did Not Bark at FinovateEurope 2026

By David Penn Posted on February 18, 2026
Categories: FinovateEurope 2026, List series

Great conferences are defined largely by what does happen: what themes are discussed, what trends generate the most passionate conversations. But great conferences are also defined by what doesn’t happen: by those topics and trends that have become exhausted, failed to live up to the hype in the first place, or simply aren’t ready for prime time.

Having just looked at some of the main topics of discussion at FinovateEurope, today we’re taking a quick tour through the pound to learn more about the dogs that did not bark at FinovateEurope 2026 last week.

Sustaining Sustainability in the Age of AI

Sustainability has been a stronger theme among fintech innovators in the UK and the EU compared to the US—and arguably all the more so given the fusillade of disincentives from the Trump Administration. Past Finovate conferences have showcased fintechs such as Connect Earth (UK), ecolytiq (Germany), and Little Blocks (India) that are helping institutions and individuals calculate their environmental impact; reduce carbon emissions via online marketplaces, and align their investing and banking preferences with their attitudes toward the environment.

While never a large fraction of the demoing companies at any given show, it was notable that no companies focused on sustainability on the demo stage. This likely reflects at least in part the shift in emphasis toward AI and blockchain-related innovations, especially as these innovations are increasingly moving from the experimental to real-world use cases. Even as these enabling technologies appear to be in their earliest stages, the fact that they already are responding to real problems in financial services makes them an especially attractive field for innovation compared to sustainability.

It is important to note that this does not necessarily mean that there has been a decline in interest in sustainability and climate-related fintech innovation. In fact, investment in climate-related fintech—and climatetech in general—increased from 2024 to 2025. Europe represented a significant amount of the $103 billion raised globally at 56%, with US-based funds contributing 16% toward the international total. But sustainability is increasingly being seen less as a standalone solution, and more as a cost-cutting feature to be integrated as in embedded finance or as part of a broader risk and data analytics package. Those looking for sustainability to return to the center stage will likely need to see the rise of stronger regulatory mandates such as those for stricter environmental financial disclosure or other incentives. Technological innovation alone may not do it.

Quantum Computing: Waiting for the Great Leap Forward?

While there was a sole presentation on quantum computing at FinovateEurope, the discussion of this technology still remains limited in most fintech forums. This is despite the conviction by analysts that quantum computing will make a significant impact on all technology—including financial technology—in the years to come. It is also interesting insofar as we are seeing emerging, enabling technologies in AI and the blockchain that continue to surprise detractors and outperform expectations when it comes to practical use cases. Why not quantum computing?

First, credit where credit is due: Day One of FinovateEurope featured Amal Nazar, Head of GTM at Wultra, a firm that provides post-quantum authentication solutions to financial institutions around the world. Nazar’s Special Address emphasized that it was important for banks and other financial institutions to transition to post-quantum cryptography in order to secure long-term digital operations. With regulators urging firms to complete this shift by 2030, it is clear that whatever conversations we are not yet having with regard to quantum computing will likely begin sooner than we think.

But not quite yet. Unlike AI and blockchain-based technologies like stablecoins, quantum computing is still significantly “pre-commercial,” meaning that while there is considerable investment interest, practical commercial applications in financial services have yet to materialize. There are a number of reasons for this, but essentially the issue is developmental (read: hardware) rather than software or regulation-related in the cases of AI and stablecoins, respectively. Arguably, when it comes to quantum computing, this technology as it applies to financial services is about where AI and stablecoins were seven to ten years ago: long on hype and promise, but short on use cases. Those use cases are developing; as Nazar’s presentation suggests, cryptography is one of the primary areas where we should anticipate quantum computing use cases emerging. But compared to AI and stablecoins, quantum computing may experience the “always a bridesmaid, never a bride” syndrome for a few more seasons, at least.

“Nobody Here But Us Cloud Companies …”

If you suspected that the inclusion of “cloud” as a theme that was underrepresented at FinovateEurope was little more than a ruse to talk about AI, then I confess to being guilty as charged. But the comparison between the “cloud revolution” and the “AI revolution” was one I heard from Finovate delegates and on-stage experts alike, and an interesting notion to add to this conversation on fintech trends.

No company demoing declared themselves a cloud company this year. That’s because, in a sense, they are all “cloud companies.” The ubiquity of cloud technology in fintech has rendered the descriptor almost obsolete. And increasingly something similar is happening with AI. While we did go through the obligatory period when companies felt the need to append “ai” to their names, we are nevertheless seeing an impressive urgency with which companies are seeking to leverage AI to improve efficiency for both their own workers as well as for their customers. Perhaps not since the early days of digital banking has as much attention been paid and innovation devoted to both sides of the customer experience at the same time.

What this means, as Senior Finovate analyst Julie Muhn remarked to me in the run-up to FinovateEurope this year, is that there is less and less a conversation about “AI,” and more and more a conversation about generative AI, or explainable AI, or agentic AI, or ethical AI … You get the point. The evolution in our way of talking about AI reflects nothing more than our growing understanding of the diverse ways AI technology can be deployed, as well as the myriad responsibilities involved in deploying it. So while we won’t stop hearing about “AI” anytime soon, we should be prepared for a new way of talking about the technology as our relationship to it evolves.

Photo by Anoir Chafik on Unsplash

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TreviPay Leverages AI to Help Businesses Anticipate Buyer Behavior

By David Penn Posted on February 18, 2026
Categories: Alumni News, TreviPay

B2B payments platform TreviPay is introducing a new solution to help suppliers keep customers engaged and spot dormant buyers.
The new offering, TreviPay Growth Center, leverages transactional data, behavioral insights, and predictive insights to help businesses identify early signs of buyer dormancy, enabling teams to intervene with targeted outreach and new incentives.
Based in Kansas, TreviPay made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2022 in New York.

A new offering from B2B payments platform TreviPay will help companies identify buyer needs and trends, respond to buyer dormancy, and optimize critical steps in the order-to-cash (O2C) process. TreviPay’s Growth Center, located within the TreviPay Client Portal, features a range of customizable add-ons designed to help companies deepen buyer relationships and enhance engagement.

Many suppliers face challenges not just in acquiring new buyers, but in keeping current buyers engaged. The TreviPay Growth Center combines transactional data, behavioral insights, and predictive intelligence to enable customers to identify early signs of customer dormancy, allowing sales, operations, and finance teams to engage these buyers before any impact on revenue occurs.

“TreviPay’s network was built to help businesses grow,” TreviPay Chief Product and Technology Officer Dan Zimmerman said. “The Growth Center helps clients use predictive insights to spot changes in buyer behavior, re-engage customers, and measure the impact of incentives, without adding work for other teams. It’s part of how we deliver value clients can’t easily replicate and help protect long-term program performance.”

TreviPay’s Growth Center is the latest example of how AI is being used as an intelligence layer, anticipating risk, preventing revenue leakage, and fortifying buyer-supplier relationships. Growth Center offers buyer insights to help sellers understand purchasing trends and engagement signals. It provides predictive insights to help spot buyers that may be at risk of going dormant so that companies can engage them with targeted outreach and fresh incentives. The new offering also includes tools to support testing and iteration, empowering teams to improve campaign performance over time. It also features rebate management with easy-to-configure incentives and automated tracking and reporting.

TreviPay Growth Center is expected to be generally available in Q2 2026. The company noted that it is continuing to develop the technology, highlighting a recent pilot test with a US-based retailer during which TreviPay’s AI and machine learning models accurately predicted which buyers would go dormant. TreviPay reported that all of the tests resulted in new spending increases, including nearly 60 previously dormant buyers that made a combined $103,946 in purchases within eight days of outreach triggered by TreviPay’s predictive signals.

Founded in 1980 and headquartered in Overland Park, Kansas, TreviPay made its debut at FinovateFall 2022. At the conference, the company demonstrated its Small Business Supplier Payments Network (SBSN), which enables banks to offer new products to their small business clients by leveraging the B2B trade credit market for small businesses.

TreviPay began 2026 with the launch of its Pay by Invoice solution that enables Visa issuers to leverage their Visa credentials for supplier payments. The collaboration combines TreviPay’s order-to-cash automation technology with Visa’s commercial payment capabilities to help issuers transition from disconnected B2B spending processes to strategic, issuer-financed, invoice-based transactions.

“For years, banks have been looking for a scalable way to capture the significant share of B2B payments still happening off-card,” TreviPay CEO Brandon Spear said. “TreviPay Pay by Invoice unlocks that opportunity. By integrating our order-to-cash automation with Visa’s network capabilities, issuing banks can now offer their commercial clients a modern credit solution that automates invoicing and delivers the flexibility we know business buyers expect.”

Photo by Alla Kemelmakher on Unsplash

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Successfully Implementing AI in Banking: Insights from Allica Bank CEO Richard Davies

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on February 18, 2026
Categories: FinovateEurope 2026, Interview, Sponsored

This article is brought to you in collaboration with Gregory.

AI is rapidly reshaping the competitive landscape in banking, and for many institutions, the real challenge lies not in experimentation, but in implementation. Richard Davies, CEO of Allica Bank, has been focused on exactly that: how to successfully deploy AI across an organization and drive meaningful adoption at scale.

Founded in 2020, Allica is a digital bank focused on established small and medium-sized businesses. To date, it has lent over £3 billion and been twice named by Deloitte as the UK’s fastest growing technology company. In 2025 the Financial Times identified it as the second fastest growing company in Europe.

Richard delivered a fascinating keynote address at FinovateEurope, titled: “Successfully Implementing AI & Scaling Adoption: What Are the Challenges Around Rolling Out to Production?”. Afterwards, we sat down with him to talk about what it really takes to embed AI into a bank’s operating model.

Tell us a little more about your role as CEO of Allica Bank and what you’re focused on at the moment?

Richard Davies: Allica is a fintech bank focused on established small and medium-sized businesses. We typically define that as businesses with five or more employees or at least £500,000 in revenue. So we’re not talking about the very smallest microbusinesses, but those that are at a point where things start to get more complex and there are multiple staff to support.

We find these businesses fall into a gap between the corporate banking divisions and retail banking divisions of the major banks. That’s the space we focus on.

We have been building Allica for five or six years now and provide a full stack of services, including current accounts, cards and all types of lending. Increasingly, we are moving into financial operations areas such as spend management and cash flow forecasting. Alongside that, we have been thinking hard about how we can apply AI to power many elements of what we do across the organisation.

In your keynote, you spoke about successfully implementing AI and scaling adoption. What do you see as the biggest challenges for banks when it comes to rolling AI out in practice?

Davies: I would group it into three main areas:

First, ensuring that AI adoption happens across the whole company, rather than sitting in an innovation lab or small specialist team. A big focus for us has been getting people bought in, upskilled and confident, and encouraging teams to create their own simple, agentic use cases. I am a big believer that bottom-up adoption tends to win over purely top-down mandates.

Second is software engineering and product development. Around a third of our staff are in engineering, and that is probably the area that has seen the greatest progress in AI tooling. We have focused on helping people move towards more T shaped or full stack roles, and ensuring our tech stack is AI enabled to unlock significant productivity gains. Depending on what you measure, we are seeing productivity improvements of two to ten times.

Finally, there are more complex agentic use cases. We have specialized teams working on these, and we have been learning a lot over the past two years about what it takes to get them live in production. It’s exciting because beyond engineering, you start solving real world problems that consume a lot of human time and can be inconsistent when done manually.

A lot of banks are investing in AI at the moment. How should they decide where it makes the most sense to focus first?

Davies: My view is that you should not overly narrow your focus. If you pick two areas, you are neglecting ten others, and those areas will fall behind.

Perhaps I have the luxury of leading a fintech organization that is naturally inclined towards this, but I think AI needs to be embraced across the company. Where you do need focus is on infrastructure, including data quality, enabling access to different AI models and ensuring that is done company wide.

If I had to pick one area with immediate and certain benefit, it would be engineering. The productivity unlock in software development is huge. If teams are still working in traditional ways, they need to move quickly, not just for the company’s benefit, but for their own careers. The industry is shifting rapidly, and people need the skills and experience to keep up.

Beyond the technology itself, what changes do banks need to make internally for AI to really become part of how they operate?

Davies: Culture is a big part of it. People need to lean into it. You need the infrastructure in place, as well as training and upskilling so people feel confident using AI.

At the same time, organizations need to remain risk aware. Different AI use cases carry different risks, and teams need to understand those.

In many ways, it’s similar to previous organizational transformations, such as moving from traditional waterfall practices to agile. The enablers are not conceptually different, but it does require deliberate leadership and a clear view of how you enable the organization to change.

From what you’ve seen at FinovateEurope so far, what themes or conversations around AI in banking have stood out to you the most?

Davies: Some of the most interesting conversations have been happening off stage. Recently, we have seen software company valuations come under pressure following major AI model releases, with the view that people can now build their own software more easily.

At the same time, traditional banks have re-rated quite significantly over the past year. In the UK, share prices are up roughly 80 percent. It creates an interesting dynamic.

Fintech has at times in the past been viewed by investors as a poor relation to software, but in reality, building a fintech is much harder than building a pure software company. You have complex regulatory requirements and balance sheet considerations that software firms do not.

It feels like there may be a shift happening in the relative valuation of where companies with real assets versus asset light software companies. For many fintechs, particularly those with strong fundamentals, that could ultimately be a net positive.

Photo by Google DeepMind

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FinovateEurope 2026 in 1,046 Photos

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on February 17, 2026
Categories: FinovateEurope 2026

FinovateEurope 2026 wrapped up last week, but the fintech conversations are still flowing across social media. The two-day event was packed with meaningful conversations, fast-paced demos, a reunion of familiar faces, and new connections.

And while speakers and attendees were busy talking and learning about all things fintech and banking, Finovate’s photographer was capturing the event in more than 1,000 photos.

The photos are broken down into three categories, and we’ve pulled in a few photos as well as highlights to help summarize FinovateEurope via pictures. If you’re looking for a full content summary, check out our event summary blog post.

The FinovateEurope experience

Some of the best discussions happen off stage. And with almost a dozen networking sessions baked into the event, there were a lot of valuable ideas exchanged in the hallways and on the networking floor. Heightening this experience were a live caricaturist and, even though fintech has a magic of its own, a magician.

The sessions

Between panel discussions, fireside chats, and keynote presentations, the FinovateEurope stage hosted some of the brightest minds in fintech (and I’m not just saying that because I was on stage). We heard from founders on their biggest challenges, venture capitalists on the state of funding as we move into 2026, and bankers on how they actually measure the value of AI pilots.

The demos

The more than 20 companies that demoed their newest technology on stage showcased some of the most cutting edge ideas in fintech. From identity verification to core modernization, banks and fintechs face a lot of challenges. These fintechs took the stage to show their newest technology in under seven minutes.

You can view the entire photo album on Finovate’s Flickr page.

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FinovateEurope 2026: From AI Hype to Operational Reality

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on February 17, 2026
Categories: FinovateEurope 2026

If you attended FinovateEurope in London last week, you may have noticed that the energy of the event felt different.

In previous years, the conversation leaned heavily toward experimentation. This year, it shifted toward execution. Across the demo stage, panel sessions, and hallway conversations, it was clear that fintech is maturing. And that maturity is reshaping how banks create, partner, and serve customers.

AI moves from experimentation to operationalization

Agentic AI dominated the agenda in a pragmatic way that eschewed hype for reality.

Speakers discussed the importance of governed agentic AI that protect users with guardrails, auditability, and human oversight. Among these protective barriers, trust, explainability, and regulatory alignment were highlighted as central design principles when implementing agentic AI tools. It is clear that the conversation has shifted from “Can AI agents work?” to “How do we deploy them safely inside regulated institutions?”

Fraud and identity also pulsed throughout conversations about AI, as new technologies are evolving these elements from singular checks to continuous behavioral intelligence. The topics of responsible AI and the impact of AI on the future workforce were also front and center, with standing-room-only crowds on the AI stage discussing governance, skill atrophy, and ethical deployment.

As one attendee said, “When it comes to AI, speed may win attention, but trust wins the relationship.”

Customer experience: from product-centric to embedded

In the Analyst All-Stars session, much of the conversation centered on customer-centricity. Banks are moving from product-centric models to embedded, predictive, and contextual financial experiences.

In my panel discussions on embedded and challenger banking, we explored how digital lending is moving closer to the customer as part of the journey. Executing embedded lending is about being present at the moment of need in the correct channel.

Other panel discussions and keynotes offered more insights around improving the customer experience:

Customers compare bank journeys to every digital experience they have.
Onboarding remains a major friction point.
Personalization and channel choice are now expectations.
Balancing compliance, risk, and conversion requires smarter orchestration.

Challenger banks continue to influence customer expectations, especially when it comes to how they think about brand and community. Many conversations along these lines considered the benefits of collaboration. In fact, over 70% of fintech product launches now involve strategic partners, and panels on platform banking reinforced that partnerships are structurally necessary to compete.

Payments, tokenization, and agentic commerce

Many of the payments discussions highlighted the fact that instant payments are becoming mainstream, but geography and behavior matter. By increasing the speed of payments, fraud also accelerates. This shift is pushing institutions toward implementing “friendly friction,” with biometrics and AI-powered detection.

While not highlighted quite as much, the topic of agentic commerce was brought up in the payments track. If (or when?) bots become customers, banks must rethink identity verification and value-chain control. With ISO 20022 becoming the common language for blockchain-based value exchange, tokenization and programmable money will become key pieces of infrastructure.

Capital is maturing

Most of the investors on the networking floor and up on stage agreed that fintech funding rebounded globally in 2025. Today, capital efficiency and unit economics have returned to the center of strategy. To keep up, founders are tightening business models and refining their distribution strategies. Additionally, panelists mentioned that community-backed capital structures, which add accountability, are increasingly being used alongside traditional venture funding.

Beyond the stage

The Women in Fintech panel was one of the most popular sessions. The overflowing crowd was a reminder that inclusion plays a role in organizational growth. Geopolitical risk, national security strategy, and regulatory shifts also underscored the fact that financial services innovation does not happen in isolation.

Thanks to all of our speakers who braved the stage to share their insights, and to everyone who attended. You all make up such a great community and we truly could not do this without you all!

We’ll see you in San Diego on May 5 through 7 for FinovateSpring, in New York on September 9 through 11 for FinovateFall, or back in London in 2027.

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Bluefin and Basis Theory Offer Unified Token Strategy Across Digital and In-Person Payments

By David Penn Posted on February 17, 2026
Categories: Alumni News, Basis Theory, Bluefin

Payment and data security infrastructure company Bluefin and tokenization and vaulting platform Basis Theory have announced a strategic partnership.
The partnership will enable businesses to implement a unified token strategy to help them manage payment fragmentation between cloud-native tokenized platforms and in-person environments.
Bluefin made its Finovate debut at our developers conference FinDEVr SiliconValley. Basis Theory debuted at FinovateSpring 2022.

A strategic partnership between Bluefin and Basis Theory will enable businesses to deploy a unified token strategy across environments. Spanning in-store, call center, online, and backend systems, the partnership aligns Bluefin’s PointConex platform with Basis Theory’s tokenization capabilities to securely and consistently capture, tokenize, and use sensitive payment data across channels. This will enable firms with hybrid and omnichannel payment methods to manage payment fragmentation between cloud-native tokenized platforms and in-person payment environments more effectively. Enterprises can implement the strategy without expanding PCI scope or introducing additional integration-related complexity.

“As organizations expand into hybrid payment experiences, PointConex provides a standardized way to secure in-person payment rails without adding new compliance or integration complexity,” Bluefin Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Ruston Miles said. “By aligning with modern, independent tokenization platforms like Basis Theory, we enable a consistent approach to protecting payment data across all channels while preserving flexibility and data ownership.”

Bluefin’s PointConex platform provides processor-agnostic, card-present orchestration with PCI-validated P2PE. The platform is designed as a no-code proxy instead of a gateway or API-based integration, and supports more than 125 certified devices across leading manufacturers. PointConex enables service providers to access certified in-person payment rails without interrupting existing workflows or increasing compliance burdens. Basis Theory’s platform securely captures and vaults sensitive payment data via modern APIs for enterprise companies and SaaS platforms. Through the strategic partnership, customers will be able to expand their digital token strategies into in-person payment environments, enabling them to participate in a future-ready payments architecture while maintaining control over their data.

“Our partnership helps merchants connect customer spending data across in-store and online channels,” Basis Theory CEO and Co-founder Colin Luce said. “Merchants gain a more consistent checkout experience, wherever customers choose to pay, while maintaining strong security and flexibility across their payment environments.”

Making its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2022, Basis Theory demonstrated how its technology helps developers securely work with sensitive data. The company showed how its solution gives developers a secure and compliant environment to interact with their most sensitive data to conduct KYC, initiate bank transfers, or query the data without decrypting it.

Basis Theory’s partnership with Bluefin comes on the heels of the firm’s announcement that it has teamed up with Checkout.com in an alliance that will help merchants securely capture, store, use, and update payment data without adding additional compliance burdens with a broader PCI scope. Last fall, Basis Theory secured $33 million in funding in a round led by Costanoa Ventures, Stage 2 Capital, and Moneta VC.

Founded in 2007 and headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, Bluefin introduced itself to Finovate audiences at our developers conference, FinDEVr SiliconValley 2014. In the more than a decade since then, the company has grown into an end-to-end payment infrastructure company with 35,000 clients across 60 countries and more than 300 integration partners.

Photo by Francesco Ungaro

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Fintech Rundown: A Rapid Review of Weekly News

By David Penn Posted on February 17, 2026
Categories: Backbase, Feedzai, Fintech Rundown, Jack Henry, Payoneer, Plaid, Temenos, VISA

We’re fresh off an outstanding FinovateEurope conference in London (meet our Best of Show winners!) and already gearing up for our Spring event in San Diego. In the meanwhile, here’s a look at some of the fintech headlines that have crossed the wire in recent days. Be sure to check back here at the Fintech Rundown all week long for updates!

Digital banking

Oklahoma-based Blue Sky Bank partners with Jack Henry, deploying the fintech’s Banno Digital Platform along with other integrated solutions.

The Bank of Beirut UK goes live with Temenos for core banking and payments.

Fraud prevention

RiskOps platform provider Feezdai and regtech Neterium collaborate to enhance transaction screening for instant payments

Licensed payment institution Paytently partners with SEON for advanced fraud prevention and anti-money laundering controls.

Mortgagetech and proptech

UAE-based protech innovator Rentify launched its rent-native infrastructure player, Rentify Pay.

Digital savings and mortgage platform Tembo secures £16 million in growth funding in a round the featured new investor Gresham House Ventures.

Open finance

Backbase and Plaid team up to bring open finance to AI-powered banking.

Insurtech

UK-based embedded insurance company Wrisk acquired real-time financial intelligence platform Atto to build an integrated embedded finance platform.

DeFi

Payoneer teams up with stablecoin infrastructure platform and Stripe company Bridge to support its launch of new embedded stablecoin capabilities.

Netherlands-based paytech and stablecoin issuer Quantoz teams up with Visa, enabling the firm to issue irtual Visa debit cards as serve as a BIN-sponsor for third-party fintechs and platforms.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

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FinovateEurope 2026 Best of Show Winners Announced!

By David Penn Posted on February 10, 2026
Categories: Best of Show, R34DY, Serene, Tweezr

London called—and our FinovateEurope 2026 demoing companies answered!

After a full day of live fintech demonstrations showcasing solutions for challenges in lending, payments, wealth management, and more, the attendees of FinovateEurope have made their decision as to which companies will receive Finovate’s highest honor: Best of Show.

As Finovate VP and Master of Ceremonies Greg Palmer noted, this year’s competition was as tough as it has ever been—which reflects well not just on the winners, but also on all the companies that demoed their latest innovations before our audience of fintech and financial services professionals from around the world. Nevertheless, as the saying goes, there can only be one (or, in this case, three)—and here they are: the winners of Best of Show for FinovateEurope 2026!

R34DY for its ABLEMENTS solution that enables rapid AI transformation, allowing banks to achieve faster delivery, lower IT costs and comprehensive differentiation via context-aware modernization.

Serene for its technology that transforms a compliance burden into sustainable growth, with insights that optimize collections, reduce arrears, empower front-line teams, and safely expand lending to underserved markets.

Tweezr for its solution that helps organizations transform and grow by accelerating TTM and increasing developer productivity for both legacy system maintenance and modernization (or even obviating modernization all together).

A hearty congratulations to our trio of Best of Show winners and a profound thanks to all of the companies that demoed their latest fintech innovations on the Finovate stage this week. It seems as if each year the competition just gets tougher, and we salute those companies—from scholarship-winning startups to veteran incumbents—whose innovations bring greater personalization, security, and value to individuals, businesses, and communities.

Next up for Finovate is our event in sunny San Diego—FinovateSpring 2026—scheduled for May 5 through 7. We hope to see you there!

Notes on methodology:

1. Only audience members NOT associated with demoing companies were eligible to vote. Finovate employees did not vote.

2. Attendees were encouraged to note their favorites during each day. At the end of the last demo, they chose their three favorites.

3. The exact written instructions given to attendees: “Please rate (the companies) on the basis of demo quality and potential impact of the innovation demoed.”

4. The three companies appearing on the highest percentage of submitted ballots were named “Best of Show.”

5. Go here for a list of previous Best of Show winners through 2014. Best of Show winners from our 2015 through 2025 conferences are below:

FinovateEurope 2015

FinovateSpring 2015

FinovateFall 2015

FinovateEurope 2016

FinovateSpring 2016

FinovateFall 2016

FinovateAsia 2016

FinovateEurope 2017

FinovateSpring 2017

FinovateFall 2017

FinovateAsia 2017

FinovateMiddleEast 2018

FinovateEurope 2018

FinovateSpring 2018

FinovateFall 2018

FinovateAsia 2018

FinovateAfrica 2018

FinovateEurope 2019

FinovateSpring 2019

FinovateFall 2019

FinovateAsia 2019

FinovateMiddleEast 2019

FinovateEurope 2020

FinovateFall 2020

FinovateWest 2020

FinovateEurope 2021

FinovateSpring 2021

FinovateFall 2021

FinovateEurope 2022

FinovateSpring 2022

FinovateFall 2022

FinovateEurope 2023

FinovateSpring 2023

FinovateFall 2023

FinovateEurope 2024

FinovateSpring 2024

FinovateFall 2024

FinovateEurope 2025

FinovateSpring 2025

FinovateFall 2025

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Finovate Global: Meet the International Alums of FinovateEurope 2026!

By David Penn Posted on February 5, 2026
Categories: Finovate Global

FinovateEurope 2026 is only days away!

With its home in London, it is no surprise that FinovateEurope often showcases the highest number of demoing companies headquartered outside of the United States. What’s especially interesting about this year’s cohort of FinovateEurope demoing companies, however, is the percentage of non-US companies compared to the total: more than 77% of this year’s demoers hail from countries other than the US. Check them out below and then join us next week for FinovateEurope 2026!

FinovateEurope 2026 kicks off at London’s Intercontinental 02—February 10 and 11. Tickets are still available. Visit our FinovateEurope 2026 hub to register and save your spot!

AAZZUR—Berlin, Germany

Founded in 2019, AAZZUR empowers brands to launch embedded finance solutions with a single integration, unlocking new revenue streams and enhancing customer engagement.

Candour Identity—Oulu, Finland

Founded in 2021, Candour Identity boosts onboarding conversions, reduces fraud losses, enables daily biometric use, and supports regulatory complaince to help instituions scale their digital offerings.

FINTRAC—London, England

Founded in 2024, FINTRAC automates workflows to deliver stronger controls, richer analytics, and lower costs across the model lifecycle. The company’s Model Ops platform helps banks and other financial institutions manage their most complex models and calculations.

Francis—London, England

Founded in 2025, Francis empowers financial institutions and fintechs to make the most of open finance by leveraging AI. The company’s technology turns fragmented financial data into actionable wealth insights.

Hagbad—United Kingdom

Founded in 2025, Hagbad digitizes trust-based savings, enabling compliant engagement, expanding customer reach and driving financial inclusion via regulated, culturally aligned financial infrastructure.

Intuitech—Budapest, Hungary

From simple workflows to complex cases such as commercial loans and mortgages, Intuitech delivers AI agents capable of automating over 90% of manual tasks, shortening approval times and lowering costs. The company was founded in 2018.

Keyless—London, England

Keyless replaces outdated multi-factor authentication (MFA) with biometrics, improving the user experience and saving millions. Founded in 2019, Keyless was acquired by fellow Finovate alum Ping Identity.

Maisa—Valencia, Spain

Maisa boosts business efficiency by automating end-to-end processes with traceability, hallucination-resistance, and governance, in regulated industries such as banking and financial services. Maisa was founded in 2024.

Mifundo—Tallinn, Estonia

Mifundo enables banks and other financial institutions to grow their business volume by up to 15% by enabling them to better serve foreign and cross-border customers throughout Europe. The company was founded in 2022.

MyPocketSkill—London, England

Founded in 2020, MyPocketSkill is a digital technology company at the nexus of fintech and edtech that offers solutions to help Gen Z to save, invest, and become more money savvy.

Neuralk AI—Paris, France

Founded in 2024, Neuralk AI makes predictive capability a viable option at every point where tabular data is available. The company’s technology delivers superior performance compared to traditional machine learning and large-language models.

Opentech—Rome, Italy

Opentech partners with banks and card issuers, supporting digital transformation with secure, compliant, and scalable payment solutions. The company combines UX design with software engineering via a co-design model that accelerates delivery while ensuring equality and reliability.

R34DY—Budapest, Hungary

Founded in 2019, R34DY offers an automated system, ABLEMENTS, that enables rapid AI transformation for banks, enabling them to deliver new products faster, lower IT costs, and differentiate themselves via context-aware modernization.

Sea.dev—London, England

Sea.dev provides embeddable AI for business lending. The company’s technology automates underwriting workflows, to enable credit analysts to focus on higher-value analysis, faster decision-making, and growth. Sea.dev was founded in 2024.

Serene—London, England

Founded in 2023, Serene combines behavioral insights, predictive intelligence, and financial data to enable institutions to identify and understand early signs of fraud, vulnerability, and financial stress.

Skill Studio AI—Dublin, Ireland

Founded in 2025, Skill Studio AI transforms training documents into engaging, AI-powered learning experiences. The company’s platform reduces training costs, accelerates compliance readiness, and scales globally.

Tweezr—Tel Avi, Israel and Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Tweezr empowers institutions to transform and grow by accelerating time-to-market and boosting developer productivity for both maintaining legacy systems as well as for modernization initiatives. The company was founded in 2024.

Photo by Lucas George Wendt on Unsplash

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Three Fresh Lending Tools that Are Redefining Credit Decisioning

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on February 4, 2026
Categories: FinovateEurope 2026 Sneak Peek, Intuitech, List series, Mifundo, Sea.dev

As banks digitize their lending processes and seek to expand credit access across borders, it is becoming increasingly difficult to make fast, accurate credit decisions. To mitigate risk, lenders need real-time insights into spending habits, automated functionality, and visibility into a broader set of data, especially as they seek to improve speed, enhance the customer experience, and maintain compliance.

At FinovateEurope 2026, a new group of fintechs will showcase how they are addressing these challenges by bringing intelligence and automation directly into the lending process. From sourcing alternative credit data to deploying AI-driven lending agents, the companies below are helping banks and lenders modernize credit decisioning while keeping risk in check.

FinovateEurope 2026 will take place at London’s InterContinental O2 on February 10 and 11. Tickets are available now. Visit our FinovateEurope hub today and save your spot!

Intuitech

Intuitech brings live AI agents into lending workflows to automate manual, time-consuming processes across origination and servicing. The company helps lenders streamline tasks including data collection, validation, and borrower interactions. This automation helps reduce operational burden while improving speed and consistency.

By embedding AI agents directly into clients’ lending operations, Intuitech enables them to scale their lending activity without requiring additional talent in-house. The automated approach helps bring modern credit delivery to lenders of all sizes.

Mifundo

Mifundo’s technology enables customers to assess cross-border credit risk by sourcing and standardizing credit data from across European markets. The company helps lenders better evaluate borrowers with international financial histories by assess creditworthiness for mobile, expatriate, and cross-border customers. Mifundo enables banks to reach more borrowers, as many are underserved by traditional credit systems and therefore are overlooked.

With remote work becoming more popular and the potential for cross-border lending increasing, firms are realizing that there is a gap in data for European credit markets. Mifundo closes this gap by expanding access to reliable credit information, ultimately helping lenders minimize risk while unlocking new lending opportunities across borders.

Sea.dev

sea.dev provides real-time risk insights designed to help lending teams make better credit decisions across the loan lifecycle. The company’s platform aggregates and analyzes borrower, portfolio, and market-level data to offer lenders clearer visibility into risk exposure, ultimately supporting faster approvals.

sea.dev enables lending teams to continuously monitor risk and adapt decisions as inputs change. The company’s more dynamic, insight-driven approach helps lenders explore more products and serve new borrower segments.

Why banks should care

With more consumer data available than ever before, lenders can now underwrite loans more effectively, especially for customers who were once considered risky or had limited credit histories. This abundance of data also introduces new challenges, including inaccurate, unclean, or cross-border information that can complicate analysis and require specialized expertise. Fortunately, new tools are emerging to help automate data collection, filtering, and validation. These tools have the potential to enable lenders of all sizes to expand their reach and better serve a broader customer base.

Photo by RDNE Stock project

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Sumsub Partners with Fireblocks to Ensure Travel Rule Compliance

By David Penn Posted on February 3, 2026
Categories: Alumni profile, Sumsub

Compliance and fraud prevention platform Sumsub has teamed up with digital asset infrastructure solutions provider Fireblocks to provide Travel Rule compliance.

The Travel Rule is a regulation mandated by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) designed to fight money laundering and terrorist financing. The rule requires financial institutions and Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) to share specific information about the sender and receiver of funds during certain transactions. Enacted to defend traditional financial transactions from money laundering and terrorist financing, the rule has been extended to cover cryptocurrencies and digital assets.

Courtesy of the partnership, Sumsub’s Travel Rule solution will be natively integrated into the Fireblocks platform. This will provide both financial institutions and VASPs with real-time, automated, and dynamic verification for virtual asset transactions. Fireblocks users will benefit from complete control over compliance workflows, enabling them to customize these workflows to fit their preferred risk profiles. The integration features automated and encrypted Travel Rule data exchange between VASPs, supporting faster and more secure stablecoin payments.

“We’re excited to partner with Fireblocks to bring native Travel Rule compliance directly into one of the world’s leading digital asset infrastructure platforms,” the company noted on its X page. “Together we’re setting a new standard for Travel Rule compliance—secure, automated, and designed for scale—helping businesses power faster, safer, and fully compliant stablecoin payments.”

The Sumsub/Fireblocks partnership comes at a time of increased interest in stablecoins, with stablecoin volumes nearing $1 trillion per month in 2025, twice the levels of the previous year. The rise of stablecoins has put pressure on the fragmented settlement rails and compliance workflows of VASPs and other financial institutions. Further, evolving regulations—from MiCA in the European Union to the latest moves from the FATF—are driving firms to improve their ability to manage financial risks associated with virtual assets, including both implementation and operationalization of the Travel Rule.

“As digital asset payments and stablecoin adoption accelerate, our customers need compliance solutions that are robust and operationally seamless,” Fireblocks SVP of Corporate Development & Partnerships Adam Levine said. “By integrating Sumsub’s Travel Rule solution directly into the Fireblocks platform, we’re giving institutions the flexibility to meet global regulatory requirements while maintaining efficient, streamlined transaction workflows.”

Per the partnership, Fireblocks will remain the hub for transaction processing. Sumsub will provide secure, real-time Travel Rule data exchange to enrich the transaction workflow, facilitating access to 1,800+ VASPs across top protocols including GTR, CODE, Sygna, the Sumsub protocol, and more. The data sharing between counterparties in virtual asset transfers is fully embedded in the Fireblocks platform to ensure scalable, friction-free compliance.

New York-based Fireblocks is a digital asset infrastructure company that helps organizations build, manage, and scale their businesses on the blockchain. The company streamlines stablecoin payments, settlement, custody, tokenization, and trading operations across a large ecosystem of banks, payment providers, stablecoin issuers, exchanges, and custodians. Fireblocks counts 2,200 organizations among its customers including Finovate alums like Worldpay and Revolut. The company secures more than $10 trillion in digital asset transactions across 100 blockchains.

Founded in 2015 and headquartered in London, Sumsub (“Sum & Substance”) made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2020 in Berlin, Germany. At the conference, the company demonstrated its all-in-one technical and legal solution to help firms meet KYC/KYB/AML requirements. The company’s technology helps accelerate verification, reduce costs, and detect fraud, and is used by more than 4,000 companies around the world. Andrew Sever is company Co-Founder and CEO.

Photo by Pixabay

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Equifax Unveils Credit Abuse Risk to Combat First-Party Fraud

By David Penn Posted on February 2, 2026
Categories: Alumni News, Equifax

Data, analytics, and technology company Equifax unveiled Credit Abuse Risk, a new solution to help lenders fight first-party fraud.
The new offering leverages machine learning to identify common first-party fraud tactics such as credit washing and loan stacking.
News of Equifax’s Credit Abuse Risk predictive model comes on the heels of the launch of the company’s Synthetic Identity Risk tool. The solution empowers institutions to identify when fraudsters are using fake identities to set up credit accounts and obtain loans.

A new offering from international data, analytics, and technology company Equifax will help protect lenders from first-party fraud. Credit Abuse Risk is a new predictive model that leverages FCRA-regulated data to spot fraud tactics such as credit washing and loan stacking. The model will help lenders make more confident lending decisions.

“By focusing on application behavior in real time, Credit Abuse Risk quickly helps to reduce the potential for fraud and related costs,” Equifax Chief Product Officer for US Information Solutions Felipe Castillo said. “This supports a more confident lending environment and helps keep credit available for consumers.”

In a world of phishing and deepfakes, first-party fraud is a type of financial crime that often goes overlooked in conversations about fraud prevention. First-party fraud, unlike third-party fraud, involves fraud committed by the actual customer or account holder rather than by an external party impersonating someone else. Credit Abuse Risk is designed to detect two specific forms of first-party fraud: loan stacking, in which an individual applies for multiple loans in a short period of time with no intention of repaying the debt, and credit washing, in which an individual attempts to remove accurate but negative information from their credit report. Credit Abuse Risk identifies the behaviors associated with these types of fraud during prequalification, account origination, or portfolio review, enabling lenders to adjust loan terms based on FCRA-compliant insights.

Powered by machine learning, Credit Abuse Risk offers enhanced insights derived from behavioral indicators that detect atypical credit activity, and provides targeted decisioning that addresses the lifecycle of fraud. Credit Abuse Risk features comprehensive portfolio protection covering all credit tiers and actionable intelligence that empowers lenders to make real-time, regulated decisions on credit terms. This includes FCRA-compliant scoring with adverse action reason codes to ensure transparency in the event of application denials, restrictive credit term modifications, and related actions.

Credit Abuse Risk is part of Equifax’s suite of fraud solutions and works alongside the company’s Synthetic Identity Risk tools. Introduced earlier this month, Equifax’s Synthetic Identity Risk uses machine learning algorithms to detect fraud patterns—such as those related to synthetic identity fraud—that are often difficult to spot using traditional methods. Synthetic identity fraud occurs when a fraudster combines aspects of a real identity with fake data to create a new, fictitious identity. The fraudster then uses these fictitious identities to open credit accounts and secure loans on which they eventually stop making payments. The fact that these synthetic identities often include real data and appear in mostly legitimate means that these frauds can be difficult to detect and can persist for long periods of time. Equifax estimates that charge-offs per known synthetic identity cost companies on average $13,000.

“Synthetic identity fraud is a rapidly growing threat impacting the consumer lending ecosystem,” Castillo said. “With Synthetic Identity Risk, Equifax strengthens lenders’ fraud defenses, helping them to uncover hidden risks and ultimately shift from reactive loss recovery to proactive prevention. In doing so, they not only reduce their financial losses but they (also) safeguard and build long-term trust with their legitimate customers.”

Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, Equifax made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2011 in New York. The company’s differentiated data, analytics, and cloud technology help financial institutions, companies, employers, and public agencies make better decisions with more confidence. Along with Experian and TransUnion, Equifax runs one of the three major credit reporting agencies in the US, has nearly 15,000 employees around the globe, and operates or has investments in 24 countries in North America, Central and South America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region.

Equifax is publicly traded on the NYSE under the ticker EFX and has a market capitalization of $24 billion.

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