David Penn, Author at Finovate

Crux Analytics Secures $2.2 Million in Seed Funding

By David Penn Posted on September 24, 2026
Categories: Crux Analytics, Funding

New York-based Crux Analytics has raised €1.9 million ($2.2 million) in seed funding.
The investment in the relationship intelligence platform was led by Castle Creek Launchpad and also involved three credit union investment funds, Chartway Ventures, One Washington Financial, and Curql.
Crux Analytics made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2025. The company was founded in 2023 by Jacob Bennett (CEO) and Nathan Bennett (CTO).

Relationship intelligence platform Crux Analytics has raised €1.9 million ($2.2 million) in seed funding, bringing the company’s total capital raised to €2.8 million. The round was led by Castle Creek Launchpad, a joint venture fund with 35 community banks as limited partners. Chartway Ventures, One Washington Financial, and Curql, three credit union investment funds, also participated in the round. Crux said that it will use the additional capital to grow its team and accelerate product development.

Crux combines workflow automation and business-specific insight to enable bankers to focus their energy on driving proactive engagement instead of the administrative and logistical work behind those relationships. The company’s technology relieves bankers of this logistical burden, providing them with a sales execution engine that helps users identify, research, and prioritize prospects with the greatest potential. Crux then enables them to execute targeted, personalized outreach to these prospects and monitor those relationships as they grow and expand.

“We built Crux for community banks and credit unions, and what we learned there is that the same relationship problem exists across the small business economy,” Crux Analytics CEO and Co-Founder Jacob Bennett said. “Alternative lenders, commercial insurers, and real estate operators all win on relationships, and they all lose time to the operational work that sits behind them. We’re giving those teams the infrastructure to act on what they know about their clients, so growth comes from deeper relationships rather than bigger headcount.”

Because serving small businesses is a relationship-driven process, it typically demands a significant amount of human capital. Larger financial institutions meet this challenge simply by hiring more people, but smaller financial institutions are often more constrained. For these banks and credit unions, technology that can boost the productivity of their existing employees is key, enabling them to focus on building their relationships as trusted advisors without needing to significantly add to headcount.

“Having worked closely with community banks through our strategic limited partners, we’ve seen how these institutions are built for relationships but lack the operational tools to deliver on that promise at scale,” Castle Creek Launchpad’s Jurgen van de Vyver said. “Driving outbound sales has always been a challenge for community banks, which historically have relied on referrals from their local networks. More banks are now looking for new ways to chase organic growth, and their business relationships are crucial to achieving that. Crux Analytics unlocks that potential by automating the manual work so community banks can focus on what matters most, building meaningful relationships with local business owners.”

Founded in 2023 and headquartered in New York, Crux Analytics made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2025 in San Diego. At the conference, the company unveiled its flagship platform that sources, qualifies, and engages small business leads with personalized outreach on behalf of the bank. Crux then monitors every relationship in the portfolio, delivering a complete picture of which businesses to prioritize, when to engage them, and which products are best suited for their specific needs.

Photo by Redd Francisco on Unsplash

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Fintech After the Midterms: 3 Thoughts on How Politics Might Impact Policy

By David Penn Posted on September 23, 2026
Categories: David's column, List series

With the midterm elections only six-odd weeks away, control of the US House is one of the questions that will shape the next Congress. I wanted to think a little about what a future Democratic House might mean in terms of policymaking for banking, fintech, and financial services.

New Sheriffs with Old Badges

The biggest difference could be in the leadership of various House committees. For example, the House Financial Services Committee is currently chaired by French Hill, a Republican from Arkansas. Maxine Waters, a Democrat from California and the committee’s current ranking member, previously chaired the committee. If the Democrats control the House, Waters could again become chair.

As chair, Waters previously emphasized consumer protection, affordability, diversity/inclusion, and congressional oversight. More recently, she has raised concerns about bank safety and soundness, cybersecurity and the financial risks associated with AI, as well as cryptocurrencies and digital assets.

What could the committee accomplish? Oversight would be one of the committee’s most significant tools, along with the ability to issue subpoenas and compel testimony from banks, other financial institutions, and regulators. Hearings, investigations, and committee reports could provide additional opportunities to examine financial policy and bring those issues before the public and the press.

Community Banks and Regulatory Clarity as Common Ground

Given the acrimony between the parties, are there any opportunities for a Democratic House and the Trump administration to work together on banking policy?

While Democrats and Republicans have very different priorities when it comes to banking and finance, there are some areas of potential compatibility. Both Democrats and Republicans have said that they support efforts to help reduce regulatory burdens on smaller financial institutions. The devil is in the details, but it is not impossible to imagine a compromise in which reduced regulatory burden on community banks and credit unions was paired with a commitment to continued, if not intensified, oversight when it comes to the big banks and larger financial institutions. In fact, Hill and Waters actually worked together on the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which included provisions benefiting community banks.

Providing fintechs with greater regulatory clarity over issues like bank-fintech partnerships, for example, is another area where a Democratic House and the Trump administration may be able to find commonality. But one major sticking point might be crypto, where there is a great deal of suspicion about the role of digital assets—including meme coins—among many Democrats, as well as concerns and questions over President Trump and his family’s own involvement in the cryptocurrency industry. As such, policies focused more on stablecoins, which occupy a more specific policy and payments question compared to digital assets as a whole, represent a more fertile ground for bipartisan discussion.

Policy Debates and Paradigm Shifts

Most importantly, Democratic control of the House of Representatives next year would set the stage for a broader debate on the country’s financial priorities. Under the Trump administration, deregulation and lowering compliance costs have been central, along with limiting the authority of regulatory agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). For Democrats, fortifying these agencies is a major goal, as is restoring an emphasis on consumer protection, financial stability, and regulatory independence.

What is interesting to me is how current concerns and controversies—the pace of AI development, the proliferation of prediction-market and gambling activity, concerns over government ethics and conflicts of interest, and the broader affordability debate—could interact with the traditional stances politicians on both sides of the aisle have championed and defended. How much will concerns about the longer-term risks of AI change the debate over regulation in financial services and other sectors? And, in a divided-government scenario, where will there be enough common ground for Congress and the administration to address specific problems facing banks, fintechs, and their customers?

Photo by terry bazemore iii

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Baselayer Raises $35 Million for its Agentic Identity Technology

By David Penn Posted on September 23, 2026
Categories: Baselayer, Funding

Identity network and fraud intelligence platform Baselayer has secured $35 million in new funding. The Series A round was led by M13, and featured participation from Torch Capital, Picus Ventures, Afore Capital, and Matt Thompson of fellow Finovate alum Socure.
Along with the investment announcement, Baselayer unveiled its Agentic Identity Suite, an interoperable trust layer that helps institutions verify autonomous AI agents.
New York-based Baselayer made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2026.

Business identity network and fraud intelligence platform Baselayer has raised $35 million in Series A funding. The round was led by M13 with participation from Torch Capital, Picus Ventures, Afore Capital, and Matt Thompson of fellow Finovate alum Socure.

In addition to the investment, Baselayer announced the launch of its Agentic Identity Suite, an interoperable trust layer and agentic fraud consortium for the global agentic economy.

“Every era of commerce has required a new trust layer, but historically that infrastructure gets built only after fraud and abuse make the problem impossible to ignore,” Baselayer Co-Founder and CEO Jonathan Awad said. “Agentic commerce is moving too fast for the industry to repeat that mistake. We already help one in five US financial institutions answer, ‘Can I trust this business?’ Now we’re building the infrastructure they need to answer, ‘Can I trust this agent, who does it represent, and what is it allowed to do?”

Agentic commerce is growing rapidly. According to Stripe, 70% of the commands used to access its data through its API now come from AI agents. Major card networks like Visa, Mastercard, and American Express have launched agent commerce protocols, and Shopify has activated agentic sales channels by default for approximately one million merchants. At the same time, agentic commerce is moving faster than the trust infrastructure necessary to ensure safe and secure transactions. Current financial infrastructure is built to recognize individuals and companies, not autonomous AI agents operating for them. This means that banks, merchants, and platforms need to know who an agent represents, what it is authorized to do, and whether the party the agent is acting on behalf of can be trusted.

Baselayer already answers these questions for businesses, providing identity verification and risk infrastructure to more than 2,300 financial institutions and payments companies. Now, the company is extending that same identity and risk infrastructure to autonomous AI agents.

“Agents don’t carry ID, and the infrastructure built to verify humans and businesses simply doesn’t recognize them,” Baselayer Co-Founder and CTO Timothy Hyde said. “Static fraud controls end up blocking good customers while sophisticated attacks walk through. We built the Agentic Identity Suite so any institution can know, cryptographically, which agent it’s dealing with, who that agent represents, and whether its own agent can safely proceed with any transaction.”

Baselayer was founded in 2023 and is headquartered in New York. In its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring earlier this year, the company demonstrated its Portfolio Monitoring solution that continuously monitors current business customers for material changes. These include Secretary of State status updates, dissolutions, officer changes, new UCC/tax liens, bankruptcy filings, litigation, adverse events, fraud signals, and sanctions list additions. Portfolio Monitoring integrates with the full Baselayer platform and delivers configurable alerting via API or email notification to enable proactive risk management and early warning of customer deterioration without requiring manual periodic reviews.

Baselayer’s funding and product launch announcements follow news that the company has partnered with agentic payments infrastructure company Nevermined. The partnership brings Baselayer’s identity and risk infrastructure into Nevermined’s delegated payment environment, enabling agents to acquire Baselayer API access autonomously while the companies work toward establishing trusted identity for agents and their counterparties.

Photo by Nathaniel Shuman on Unsplash

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Go.AI Secures $85 Million in Series A Funding

By David Penn Posted on September 22, 2026
Categories: Alumni News, Funding, Go.AI

AI infrastructure provider for regulated industries, Go.AI, has secured $85 million in Series A funding in a round led by Updata Partners. The investment takes the company’s total funding to $90 million.
The capital will enable Go.AI to grow its engineering team, accelerate development of its key solutions, and scale go-to-market efforts beyond regulated industries.
Go.AI made its Finovate debut earlier this year at FinovateSpring 2026 as Go Abacus. The Chicago-based company returned to the Finovate stage for FinovateFall 2026 in September.

Go.AI, an AI infrastructure provider for regulated industries, has raised $85 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Updata Partners with participation from existing investors GFT Ventures and LAUNCH. The investment takes Go.AI’s total funding to $90 million. In a statement, the company said it will use the funding to grow its engineering team and accelerate development of both its operating system, Go.OS, and its hardware line. The company will also scale its go-to-market efforts, expanding beyond regulated industries such as financial services and defense into a broader range of compliance-oriented organizations.

“When Lisa Gillespie and I co-founded the company, we were two people with a big idea,” Moscatelli said. “Today, we have over 50 team members, and the company we’ve built is doing exactly what we said it would do for the institutions that trust us most. This funding lets us keep building at that pace, but the thing I’m most proud of isn’t the growth number, it’s the education. AI doesn’t have to be something people fear or don’t understand. Done right, it works alongside the people who use it. That’s what this round lets us prove, at scale.”

Go.AI offers an on-premises AI appliance that puts enterprise-grade AI inference directly into a bank’s or financial institution’s own environment. Featuring zero cloud dependency and zero data egress, Go.AI’s Go1 is SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and HIPAA compliant, making it purpose-built for regulated industries. This allows institutions to run AI on sensitive data while remaining compliant and auditable. Go1 is paired with Go.AI’s operating system, Go.OS, which automates model management, GPU allocation, and serving without any cloud connection. Go1 provides full model lifecycle governance, including versioning, rollback, and real-time monitoring. Go.AI’s customers are currently running on-premises AI deployments that are processing more than 12.5 million queries a day.

Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, Go.AI made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2026. The company returned to the Finovate stage earlier this month for FinovateFall. Go.AI’s funding news comes just a few weeks after the company announced its rebrand from Go Abacus to Go.AI. In a statement, Moscatelli said the company’s work in on-prem AI, security, and safety “has matured into a category-defining position” and that the company has succeeded in making “that complexity feel simple, without ever compromising trust or control. Go.AI is the name that finally matches that ambition.”

Photo by Diego Alberto Martínez Mendoza

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Earnix Launches Agent Hub for Insurance-Specific Agents

By David Penn Posted on September 17, 2026
Categories: Alumni News, Earnix

AI-powered insurance decisioning firm Earnix launched its Agent Hub this week.
Integrated within the company’s AI Orchestration System, Earnix AIOS, the Agent Hub enables insurance-specific agents to directly access Earnix pricing, underwriting, and customer decision solutions to automate workflows and enhance business performance.
Headquartered in Boston, Earnix made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2016.

Insurance decisioning firm Earnix unveiled its Agent Hub this week. Located within Earnix AIOS—the company’s AI Orchestration System powering pricing, rating, underwriting, and customer engagement—Agent Hub will enable more intelligent workflows by bringing together more than 25 insurance-specific agents and apps.

Agent Hub builds on Earnix’s multi-modal AI strategy, enabling agents to work across an insurer’s existing technology environment rather than as standalone assistants. Agents can draw on context from policy administration systems, data platforms, underwriting workbenches, and customer portals, while maintaining defined permissions, traceability, and human oversight. These specialized agents can then be used for high-value insurance workflows, accelerating execution, enhancing consistency and auditability, and facilitating faster, better-informed decisions, while keeping humans in the loop to ensure accountability.

Earnix’s new offering arrives at a time when insurers are facing a volatile insurance environment that is challenging their ability to grow, achieve profitability, and improve portfolio performance. AI is enabling insurers to analyze, recommend, and act faster, but this intelligence also brings with it higher standards for governance, explainability, and accountability.

“Agentic AI changes the equation because, for the first time, AI is moving from informing people to acting within insurance workflows,” Earnix CEO Robin Gilthorpe said. “That creates enormous potential to shorten the distance between intelligence and action—but it also raises the standard for trust, governance, and accountability. The winners will not be the insurers with the most agents. They will be the insurers that can turn agentic AI into better business performance while remaining firmly in control.”

Examples of the insurance-specific agents available via Earnix’s Agent Hub include a model feature mapper that connects model features to the right data variables to improve transparency and auditability for pricing and actuarial teams, and a product expert advisor that uses approved product information to provide real-time answers to product queries to facilitate faster customer guidance. Another is a premium explainer that provides easy-to-understand, personalized explanations of policy premiums.

“Agentic AI becomes much more powerful when it can work with the data, models, and business context relevant to the task,” Earnix Chief Product and Technology Officer Be’eri Mart said. “The opportunity is not simply to automate a task, but to keep the information current as risk, customer behavior, and market conditions change. That is how insurers become more agile without losing control.”

Founded in 2001, Earnix made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2016. Today, the Boston, Massachusetts-based fintech processes more than four billion transactions annually and serves customers in the insurance industry in more than 35 countries across six continents.

Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash

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FinovateFall and AI’s Coming of Age Moment

By David Penn Posted on September 17, 2026
Categories: FinovateFall 2026, Thought Leadership

Did FinovateFall 2026 reflect a “coming of age” moment for AI?

It is probably too much and too soon to say that the current discourse around AI represents a milestone in–or, much less, a reckoning with–all the challenges and opportunities that AI technology presents. But the split-screen of last week’s conference was difficult to ignore: four days (including our Leaders+ pre-conference event) of sober, sophisticated discussion on what needs to be done to take our use of AI to the next level at the conference, while outside in the broader media landscape, the conversation is essentially a bet on how quickly AI will kill us all.

I don’t want to dismiss the concerns of those who are calling for a “slowdown” in AI development. And I certainly don’t want to suggest that those who are (and have been) working in AI for years have everything figured out. That said, we are clearly experiencing some sort of “coming of age” moment in our evolving relationship with AI. From the demoers to the keynote speakers, FinovateFall 2026 articulated several different versions of what that moment looks like and what it means.

The Other AI Reckoning

The existential debate aside, a different reckoning is clearly underway in the AI industry, and that reckoning involves reconciling the millions of dollars already invested in AI projects with the mixed return on investment many of these projects have produced. As the “gold rush” stage of the AI era subsides, it is no longer good enough for an AI pilot to work; financial institutions need to see results that are in line with goals and expectations, creating efficiencies, generating revenue, and boosting profitability.

This is how Inbenta CEO Melissa Solis and Chief Technology Officer Merlin Bise framed it for me during a Finovate studio interview at the conference week. The transition from AI pilots to AI production means that AI investments will come under increased scrutiny. While this will inevitably be painful in many instances, the shift in focus from promise to proof represents important evidence of maturation in this space.

Another reckoning that has received relatively short shrift in the conversation about data centers and AI-driven extinction is the old fear that AI will be a job-killer, especially for middle-class, white-collar jobs in customer service and call centers, for example. This was an issue that Solis was particularly concerned about, noting that the “human side” of AI is not just about putting humans in the loop of AI decision-making, but also about ensuring that humans are net beneficiaries of the technology rather than casualties of it. This is true whether their labor is enhanced by AI or, ultimately, replaced by it. For those industries where the latter is likely, businesses need to be prepared to help those workers transition to new roles.

Scenes from the Stages

Was there a single AI presentation that did not at some point underscore the importance of governance?

If so, I must have missed it. From the mainstage to the industry stages, I was struck by the number of times keynote speakers and panelists referenced not just what AI can do—a common theme in presentations in recent years—but what companies and innovators need to do to ensure that AI is delivering on those capabilities. From the special address that referenced the origins of American football to explain the importance of creating playbooks for AI agents to panels that highlighted the role of AI orchestration and the importance of governance and auditability, if there was one word that summed up the attitude toward AI coming from the FinovateFall stage last week, it might be “controls.”

This is not to say that there still isn’t a sense of near-giddy excitement over the opportunities that AI presents. Jon Lakefish of the Lakefish Group delivered another standout keynote on the current state of AI tools and solutions, followed by a standing-room-only workshop on practical applications of these resources. Statements like “I’m blown away!” “Please can you send me the materials?” and “You’ve just saved me $40,000!” were a small sample of the kinds of responses Lakefish’s AI workshop received.

Learning from the Demos

I’ve always found reviewing the companies that won Best of Show to be a good way of understanding which fintech innovations are making an impression. This year’s FinovateFall gave us a lot to think about, particularly in relation to the spread of AI in general and agentic AI in particular throughout the industry.

AI-powered solutions were present, but they did not dominate the innovations of the Best of Show-winning companies. Clockout, which secured its second Best of Show win in as many appearances, leverages embedded finance to help financial institutions better serve customers and increase deposits. Young Early Starters, picking up a Best of Show award in its Finovate debut last week, offers an investing and education app and platform that is engaging without relying on gamification, or on AI for that matter. That said, a number of firms did leverage AI for key functions such as executing marketing campaigns (Vertice AI), or providing co-pilot assistance to developers operating in legacy environments (Tweezr).

When AI was on display, it was often in the form of agentic AI, which featured prominently among the deployments demoed. Interestingly, many of these deployments are about augmenting human action rather than replacing it—from supporting developers in legacy environments, optimizing marketing campaigns, and guiding customer service and call center workers through complex processes and procedures. In many ways, AI is simultaneously a bridge from the current way of working to a new one and a new technological environment in its own right.

Photo by Emmanuel Olguín on Unsplash

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Baselayer Partners with Nevermined to Bring Identity Verification to Agentic Payments

By David Penn Posted on September 16, 2026
Categories: Alumni News, Baselayer

Business identity and risk intelligence firm Baselayer has partnered with agentic payments infrastructure company Nevermined.
The partnership will bring identity verification to agentic payments, enabling agents to obtain the authority they need to make transactions on behalf of users.
Baselayer was founded in 2023 and made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2026 in San Diego.

A new partnership between Baselayer and Nevermined is helping give AI agents the authority they need to act on behalf of human users.

In order for AI agents to transition from conducting research and making recommendations to taking action, they need three things: access to data, permission to access the solutions and services required to complete the task, and the ability to prove to the businesses they interact with that they are legitimate actors.

Business identity and risk intelligence innovator Baselayer has teamed up with agentic payments infrastructure company Nevermined, combining agentic payments and identity verification to enable agents to obtain the bounded authority they need to operate and the verified business context necessary for confident transactions.

“Agentic commerce requires more than giving an agent the ability to pay,” Nicole Dunn, Baselayer GM, Agentic Economy, said. “Agents need bounded authority to transact, and the ecosystem needs confidence in who is on either side of the transaction. Nevermined is building the delegation and payments layer while Baselayer establishes identity and trust. Together, we’re moving toward commerce where agents can act autonomously without sacrificing accountability.”

Typically, AI agent builders face a dilemma. They can create a process in which every tool call and purchase by an AI agent must be approved, which blunts agent autonomy and limits the efficiency gains made possible by agentic AI. The other option is to give AI agents access to all the credentials they could possibly need, potentially creating an unnecessarily broad scope of access and opening the door to out-of-control spending.

In contrast, Nevermined uses a budget and spending-boundary approach, in which users set spending and transaction duration limits in advance. The AI agent can then purchase access to Baselayer APIs as needed. This avoids both unrestricted access and the requirement that a human manually top up the account. Because the underlying payment instrument is a card, the transaction remains within familiar enterprise payment and reporting infrastructure. Baselayer will bring Nevermined’s card delegation experience into its Trusted Registry, linking agent identity with the authority to conduct transactions. Nevermined will leverage Baselayer to verify sellers in its marketplace to ensure that agents and their operators know who they are transacting with.

By delegating authority to AI agents in much the same way businesses delegate authority to human employees, the Baselayer/Nevermined partnership provides a better operating model for autonomous work and opens up new workflows for other operations. These could include onboarding and compliance agents, procurement and research agents, fraud and underwriting agents, and commerce agents.

“The most capable agents won’t just use the tools they were given, they’ll discover and purchase the capabilities they need to get a job done,” Nevermined Chief Revenue Officer Josh Wadinski said. “Nevermined gives agent builders a way to enable that autonomy with clear spending boundaries. By partnering with Baselayer, we’re pairing that delegated authority with trusted identity, so agents can transact more autonomously without giving up the controls enterprises require.”

Founded in 2022 by Don Gossen and Aitor Argomaniz and headquartered in Zug, Switzerland, Nevermined offers a commerce platform that enables AI agents to conduct transactions autonomously. Nevermined allows users to enroll a card and set a mandate, after which the agent can begin spending with any agent-enabled merchant. For their part, merchants connect their PSP and set their pricing. Agents then pay as prescribed, with payments settled before the service is delivered through the merchant’s existing rails.

This announcement represents the first phase of the partnership between the two companies. Baselayer and Nevermined plan to integrate identity more closely with agentic payments by verifying the sellers that AI agents can transact with, connecting spending authority with registered agents, and eventually establishing the identity of the people or businesses behind the agents.

Baselayer is a business identity network and fraud intelligence platform that provides KYB verification, fraud prevention, risk intelligence, and ongoing portfolio monitoring. The company’s flagship KYB solution is used by more than 2,200 financial institutions to instantly verify business identity. The technology matches applicant input data against authoritative Secretary of State (SoS) filings in all 50 states in the US, validates taxpayer identification numbers (TINs) with the IRS in real time, screens against Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and other sanctions lists, and provides risk assessments with confidence scores. The company made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2026, demonstrating its Portfolio Monitoring solution.

Photo by Trev W. Adams

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Torus Teams Up with SRM to Help Acquirers Recover Profits

By David Penn Posted on September 15, 2026
Categories: Alumni News, SRM Technologies, Torus

Payments profitability intelligence platform Torus and international advisory company SRM have partnered to help acquirers recover billions of dollars by improving fee transparency.
The partnership comes as a white paper from Torus highlights the challenges faced by acquirers due to growing fee scheme complexity and increased regulatory scrutiny.
Torus most recently demoed its technology at FinovateEurope 2025 in London. SRM made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2023 in New York.

Payments profitability intelligence platform Torus and international advisory company SRM have teamed up to help acquirers recover billions of dollars through greater fee transparency. The companies’ new joint offering, the SRM/Torus Acquirer Profitability Solution, gives acquirers transaction-level scheme fee assurance, automated reconciliation, and merchant profitability analytics. The solution will help acquirers address growing pressures from rising operating costs, complex and ever-changing card scheme fee structures, margin compression, and greater regulatory scrutiny.

“By combining SRM’s deep advisory expertise with the Torus transaction-level analytics platform, we’ve created a solution that addresses one of the industry’s largest hidden profit leakage challenges,” Torus CEO Kirill Lisitsyn said. “Our customers are already demonstrating that significant improvements in profitability can be achieved through better fee assurance, stronger pricing governance, and automated analytics.”

The SRM/Torus Acquirer Profitability Solution delivers interchange and scheme fee assurance through automated, merchant-level calculation and recovery, helping minimize revenue leakage and boost billing accuracy. The offering provides daily transaction-level reconciliation between schemes and merchant settlement files, giving acquirers complete visibility into discrepancies and enhancing financial controls. The new solution also features comprehensive daily profitability analysis across merchants, portfolios, and segments. This facilitates better pricing decisions, more effective commercial performance, and stronger management reporting.

The new offering comes as SRM’s new white paper, “Transforming Acquirer Profitability,” reviews the current commercial pressures facing acquirers and highlights the flaws in traditional approaches to scheme fee management. The report explains why many acquirers continue to rely on manual processes and aggregated reporting, even as these methods provide limited visibility into profitability, require significant operational effort, and can still lead to revenue leakage.

By contrast, the SRM/Torus Acquirer Profitability Solution enables financial institutions to accurately allocate scheme fees, reconcile settlements, identify under- and over-recovery, and enhance pricing governance. Torus and SRM indicated that one mid-sized European acquirer using the technology has improved annual scheme fee recovery by €4 million, representing approximately 10% of total scheme fee costs. SRM’s report includes an economic analysis that suggests that acquirers could recover $1 billion in operational costs over the next five years. An additional $3 billion to $5.5 billion in fee revenue could also be realized as a result of more accurate and transparent oversight of the data.

“The economics of acquiring have fundamentally changed,” SRM Europe Managing Partner John Berns said. “Growing scheme fee complexity means that traditional reconciliation processes are no longer sufficient. Financial institutions need transaction-level visibility to understand where revenue is being lost, ensure fees are accurately recovered, and make better commercial decisions. Our collaboration with Torus enables these improvements.”

Headquartered in Vilnius, Lithuania, Torus most recently demoed its technology at FinovateEurope 2025 in London. Founded in 2021, the company offers a SaaS intelligence platform for banks and fintechs that enables them to boost profits on card transactions by up to 50%. Torus’ technology helps financial institutions analyze scheme fees, reconcile transaction flows, control unit-level profitability, and optimize pricing.

Making its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2023, SRM is an international advisory and execution firm that enables financial institutions to add value in areas such as payments, digital transformation, core processing, digital assets, and overall operating efficiency. The company helps its clients modernize payments, shape enterprise strategy, and deploy transformative technologies to lower costs, create revenue opportunities, and increase productivity.

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PayNearMe Acquires Marr Labs, Envestnet Acquires Vestmark

By David Penn Posted on September 15, 2026
Categories: Alumni profile, Envestnet, Mergers & Acquisitions, PayNearMe

With PayNearMe’s acquisition of Marr Labs and Envestnet’s acquisition of Vestmark, we continue to see evidence that fintechs are conducting M&A at a faster pace than banks in 2026.

Payment experience management company PayNearMe has acquired Marr Labs’ technology and hired its ‘key employees.’ Founded in 2023 and headquartered in San Francisco, Marr Labs builds AI agents that provide compliant voice automation, document intelligence, intelligent workflow orchestration, and real-time compliance enforcement. The acquisition will enhance PayNearMe’s ability to deliver agentic AI automation to its clients, leveraging Marr Labs’ expertise in building and operating sophisticated AI systems at scale.

“PayNearMe has always focused on understanding and continuously improving the entire payment journey,” PayNearMe CEO and Founder Danny Shader said. “AI provides powerful opportunities to further improve the experience delivered by our PayXM platform. The Marr Labs team has proven its ability to build and deploy sophisticated AI systems at massive scale. Combining that expertise with PayNearMe’s deep understanding of our clients’ needs and challenges makes this combination so exciting.”

PayNearMe’s PayXM platform is designed to manage the payment experience from payment request through reconciliation. The company’s end-to-end approach accelerates the payment process and lowers the total cost of payment acceptance. By embedding agentic AI into the payment experience, and providing these agents with access to the right data, business rules, and workflows, PayNearMe is able to enhance every touchpoint in the payment journey. This enables the company to deliver highly configurable and specialized payment capabilities to credit unions, lenders, mortgage servicing firms, and more.

“We’ve spent years building AI that can work reliably at scale, and wanted to put that experience to work where it could have the greatest impact,” Marr Labs Co-Founder and CEO Dave Grannan said. “PayNearMe has built a trusted platform serving thousands of businesses and has a deep understanding of the payment problems they need to solve. Joining PayNearMe gives our team the opportunity to bring what we’ve learned to a much broader market and help shape the future of payments.”

PayNearMe offers a payments platform that facilitates self-service, reduces manual intervention, and lowers the cost of acceptance. The company’s Payment Experience Management platform powers payments for thousands of businesses around the world, and supports all major payment types and channels, including PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, Apple Pay, Google Pay, cards, and ACH to cash at 62,000+ US retail locations. Named to CNBC’s “World’s Top Fintech Companies for 2026” list and a three-time Finovate Best of Show winner, PayNearMe processes more than $50 billion a year.

Meanwhile, in the wealth management space, wealthtech firm Envestnet has agreed to acquire portfolio management technology provider Vestmark. AI may not be the headline here, but executives from both companies highlighted its role in the combined offering.

“For 25 years, Vestmark has focused on helping wealth management firms navigate increasingly complex portfolios with greater scale, personalization, and efficiency,” Roessner said. “Envestnet and Vestmark bring complementary capabilities and expertise to the market, and together we can create something neither company could deliver on its own.”

Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Wakefield, Massachusetts, Vestmark provides portfolio management solutions and outsourced services for financial institutions and their advisors. The company helps wealth management firms efficiently manage customized client portfolios via an enterprise-grade platform. With more than $2 trillion in assets and more than five million investor accounts, its clients include BlackRock, Invesco, and Vanguard.

The acquisition will enable Envestnet to support its clients across a broader range of products and services, from financial advice and planning through portfolio construction, personalization, trading, tax management, and ongoing portfolio management. The addition will give Envestnet enhanced capabilities and the modularity to serve sophisticated wealth management workflows in a single adaptive ecosystem with no forced migration. Post-acquisition, both companies will continue to invest in and develop their existing product lines. This includes VestmarkOne, VAST, Envestnet Enterprise, Tamarac, and MoneyGuide, as well as incremental investments in AI-powered workflows and automation.

“Wealth management offerings have been siloed for too long, with advisors, traders, and portfolio managers each locked into their own piece of the puzzle,” Envestnet CEO Chris Todd said. “Bringing Vestmark into the Envestnet ecosystem changes that. Wherever a firm sits today, and wherever they’re headed next, they’ll have a platform that can grow with them. We’re not slowing down to make this happen—we’re speeding up, protecting what makes each company great and putting even more behind the roadmap our clients are counting on. Our AI strategy unifies, orchestrates, and personalizes the advisor experience at Envestnet, and will extend across Vestmark’s workflows too. That’s a real reimagining of how advisors do their jobs.”

Envestnet serves more than a third of all advisors across its platforms and has $8 trillion in platform assets. Founded in 1999, the company most recently demoed its technology on the Finovate stage at FinovateFall 2021. Envestnet’s acquisition news arrives amid a flurry of announcements from the Pennsylvania-based fintech, including enhancements to its wealth management, portfolio reporting, and financial planning platforms.

Envestnet’s acquisition of Vestmark is expected to close in Q4 2026. Financial terms of the transaction were not immediately available.

Photo by Alan Aprilio on Unsplash

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Arva AI Unveils Research Lab to Help Banks Automate High-Risk Decision-Making

By David Penn Posted on September 14, 2026
Categories: Alumni News, Arva AI

Agentic AI company Arva AI has launched its Research Lab, a new division dedicated to building models and infrastructure to enable financial institutions to automate high-risk decisions.
The Lab has produced proprietary models for data enrichment, transaction analysis, and evidence-based reasoning, and infrastructure—AgentCore—that turns analyst insights into backtested, versioned system improvements.
Founded in 2024, Arva AI made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2026 in London.

Arva AI, a fintech startup that leverages agentic AI to enhance business verification, announced the launch of its Research Lab. The lab is a new research division within the firm dedicated to building the models and infrastructure that enable banks to automate high-risk decisions. After more than 5,000 hours of research, training, and evaluation, the Lab has produced proprietary models for data enrichment, transaction analysis, and evidence-based reasoning. The Lab has also built infrastructure—AgentCore—that transforms analyst corrections, insights, and case outcomes into system improvements that are backtested, evaluated, and versioned before they reach a live decision.

Arva’s first model, Arva Intel, was developed to research suspicious individuals and businesses online. Evaluated independently against frontier models, Arva Intel outperformed general-purpose models by 13% on precision. The model was benchmarked not solely on the final case outcome but on the accuracy of each component inside it.

“Banks keep humans in the loop because no AI has been accurate enough to remove them safely—that’s the problem the Lab solves,” Arva AI Founder and CEO Rhim Shah said. “Our models and AgentCore let us automate these decisions with the accuracy and control banks require, and this is just the start.”

The launch of Arva’s Research Lab comes at a time when financial institutions are exploring ways to use AI to help them manage and review financial crime and fraud cases, as well as other back-office operations where cumbersome manual review by large teams can expose firms to financial losses, customer harm, or regulatory breach. As such, having a human-in-the-loop has become a requirement with many AI deployments. Unfortunately, while general purpose models can provide some assistance to human analysts, they remain too inconsistent and inaccurate for high-stakes automation.

“We built the Lab to close that gap,” the company noted on its LinkedIn page. “Proprietary decisioning models purpose-built for the highest-risk parts of a decision, and AgentCore, infrastructure that turns analyst corrections and case outcomes into tested, versioned system improvements. These are already live in production with leading financial institutions and we’re excited to finally be talking about it publicly.”

Financial crime and fraud are the initial focus for the Lab. Over time, Arva anticipates that the Lab will expand into payment exceptions, disputes, and other customer-related investigations. Arva added that it plans to publish its benchmark methodology and research at academic venues soon, as well.

Arva AI made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2026 in London. Founded in 2024, the company is backed by Google’s Gradient Ventures, Y Combinator, and other leading funds.

Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash

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Fintech Rundown: A Rapid Review of Weekly News

By David Penn Posted on September 14, 2026
Categories: Bluefin, Coinbase, Finastra, Fintech Rundown, Worldline

FinovateFall 2026 is in the books! A huge thanks to all who attended our annual autumn conference. If you missed it, check out the companies that won Best of Show, and stay tuned for our wrap-ups and top takeaways in the weeks to come.

For now, we’re catching up on the latest in fintech news and announcements, including a major fundraising in the Buy Now, Pay Later space and continued innovation in agentic commerce. Be sure to check back with the Fintech Rundown all week long for updates!

Payments

Bluefin announces expanded Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) support across its payment security infrastructure.

Payments and banking hub xpate launches new API-based capability xpate Pro to enhance money management for digital businesses.

Wealth management

AI-powered portfolio management platform for financial advisors Pave Finance raises $15 million in Series A funding.

Trade finance

Finastra teams up with digital trade finance platform provider Komgo.

Fraud prevention

Klarna announces that its in-app Call Status Detection capability is now live for customers in the Nordics.

Agentic AI

Worldline enables agentic commerce payments via the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP).

Global financial platform Sokin launches its Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector to enable finance teams to run operations on their accounts through AI tools.

Lending

Saudi Arabian Buy Now, Pay Later fintech Tabby raises $233 million in a round led by Blue Pool Capital.

Digital banking

Stripe and Bank of Ireland ink digital transformation partnership.

DeFi and stablecoins

Coinbase and Moov team up to enhance stablecoin capabilities for community banks.

Photo by Nadia Vasil’eva

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FinovateFall 2026 Best of Show Winners Announced!

By David Penn Posted on September 10, 2026
Categories: Best of Show, Clockout, equipifi, FinovateFall 2026, Goodbuy, Neural Payments, ScreenSteps, Tweezr, Vertice AI, Young Early Starters

The demos are done and the votes have been counted: congratulations to the winners of Best of Show at FinovateFall 2026!

It is true that AI continues to be the most enabling technology in fintech, bringing new capabilities to payments, fraud prevention, lending, wealth management, and more. As one demoing company representative noted from the FinovateFall stage this week, there may not have been a single demo that did not in some way acknowledge the role that AI—and increasingly agentic AI—is playing in helping banks and other financial institutions become more efficient and more effective in serving individuals, families, businesses, and communities.

That said, if there is one commonality among the companies that won Best of Show at this year’s FinovateFall, then that commonality might be a laser-focus on what matters most to financial institutions large and small: growing deposits, boosting customer and membership growth, creating new revenue opportunities, and simplifying and streamlining operations that have been historically hindered by manual processes, siloed systems, and an inability to transform data into the kind of insights that lead to better experiences for financial services customers. Viewed through this lens, AI is just the latest technology to help bridge the gap between what customers want and what financial institutions can safely, compliantly, and consistently deliver.

With one more day to go in this year’s FinovateFall conference, we want to thank all of our demoing companies, our sponsors and partners, our top-notch AV team, and—perhaps most of all—our attendees for their continued support of what we believe is still one of the most unique events on the fintech calendar.

Our next conference will be FinovateSpring 2027 in San Diego, California, at the Gaylord Pacific Resort and Conference Center, from May 3rd through the 5th. Tickets are on sale now and you can save up to $600 if you register by November 6th.

Clockout for its solution that drives member and customer growth, increases direct deposits 10%-25%, generates $16-$50 monthly per-user revenue, and creates competitive differentiation through embedded financial wellness.

equipifi for its technology that enables banks and credit unions to offer flexible payments and Buy Now, Pay Later as a native capability within their digital banking platforms.

Goodbuy for its solution that transforms local small business engagement into a new growth channel—enabling financial institutions to drive account activation, deposits, and interchange through connected community commerce.

Neural Payments for its Payments Hub that connects banks and credit unions to every major US payment rail and wallet through a single, fully branded integration.

ScreenSteps for its performance enablement platform that helps financial institutions turn complex procedures into simple, real-time guidance employees can find and follow.

Tweezr for its technology 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.

Vertice AI for its OPTIMIZE solution that transforms institutional growth goals into optimized, AI-executed marketing campaigns with human approval at the strategic level.

Young Early Starters for its investing and education app that gives children real stock ownership, guided by learning and approved by parents.

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.”

New Sheriffs with Old Badges

Community Banks and Regulatory Clarity as Common Ground

Policy Debates and Paradigm Shifts

The Other AI Reckoning

Scenes from the Stages

Learning from the Demos

Payments

Wealth management

Trade finance

Fraud prevention

Agentic AI

Lending

Digital banking

DeFi and stablecoins

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 eight 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 2026 conferences are below: