Author: David Penn

Three Top Takeaways from the HSBC, Google Cloud Partnership

Three Top Takeaways from the HSBC, Google Cloud Partnership
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Google Cloud Platform, HSBC, List series

A newly announced, multi-year partnership between HSBC and Google Cloud will enable the financial institution to work with engineering teams from Google Cloud and DeepMind to develop new AI-powered tools and capabilities. The partnership will allow HSBC to benefit from access to Google’s latest agentic AI capabilities including Gemini and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.

The agreement will enable more than 200 new AI use cases for HSBC over the next two years, with a focus on the highest value initiatives for investment and delivery. HSBC estimates each of these could return more than $100 million in either direct revenue gains or broader efficiency improvements.

“AI is becoming one of the defining technologies of our time, allowing us to create a personalized experience for each customer, delivered in real time and at scale, while keeping human judgment, decision-making, and accountability at the core,” HSBC Group CEO Georges Elhedery said. “A partnership like this one with Google Cloud helps us empower our colleagues with the tools they need to be future-ready, and supports our work in building a simple, agile, faster, and more personal HSBC.”

These new opportunities fall into three main categories: wealth management, fraud and financial crime, and support for frontline/relationship manager client service. Here is a closer look at each element of the new partnership and its implications for AI in banking and financial services.

Hyper-personalized wealth management

The partnership will enable HSBC to combine smarter, AI-driven insights with the expertise of relationship managers. This will transform the way the bank serves its wealth management clients and empower thousands of relationship managers to provide proactive, customized financial support and real-time advice to customers at every stage of the client journey.

What this says about AI: The ability to achieve hyper-personalization is increasingly regarded as the Holy Grail of customer engagement. AI enables banks and other financial institutions to leverage their data to better understand the unique needs of individual customers, businesses, and enterprises. This allows them to not only develop customized solutions and services that directly respond to each client, but also to respond quickly to shifting preferences and even anticipate emerging trends and circumstances that customers might not immediately recognize.

What this says about banks: More and more banks are realizing the opportunities in delivering wealth management services. This is driven by a number of factors, from the so-called Great Wealth Transfer and the growing number of high-net-worth households to the democratization of wealth management brought about by fintechs and robo-advisors.

Wealth management is also an area where more banks and financial institutions can provide greater value, especially for mid-tier and non-HNW customers for whom bespoke, concierge-level wealth management services are typically out of reach. AI plays a key role here, helping translate client data—from financial records to conversations with advisors—into actionable insights that lead to better and more accurate financial guidance. The fact that AI is able to provide this at a competitive cost means that these higher-value, higher-margin services can be offered to a wider range of customers.

Stronger financial crime risk management

HSBC will leverage its relationship with Google Cloud to deploy both generative and agentic AI to build a financial crime architecture that identifies fraud risk as early as possible. The bank’s goal is to detect and intervene twice as quickly once risk is detected across the nearly one billion transactions monitored by the bank every month for financial crime and fraud.

What this says about AI: Helping financial institutions detect fraud faster, including real-time monitoring, is one of the most broadly accepted use cases for AI technology. AI is able to analyze vast amounts of data in real time to detect suspicious patterns and activities that traditional, rules-based systems can miss, while also providing predictive analytics that can enable institutions to anticipate potential financial crime risks before they materialize.

What this says about banks: For banks and other financial institutions, financial crime risks have only grown larger in recent years. The Nasdaq Verafin 2026 Global Financial Crime report indicated that the economic impact of financial crime internationally has grown by $1.3 trillion in the past two years from 2023 to 2025. With regard to fraud-specific losses, fraud scams were the fastest-growing category costing $62 billion in 2025 alone. In the face of this, moves like HSBC’s to embrace AI-powered solutions for fighting fraud have become increasingly common. The 2026 Global Financial Crime report noted that 75% of financial institutions said they planned to boost their use of AI for financial crime detection.

Enhanced client service for frontline and relationship managers

Courtesy of the partnership, HSBC’s frontline staff and relationship managers will have expanded access to an AI-powered decision assistant that has already proven capable of reducing administrative and client meeting prep times from hours to minutes for thousands of users. HSBC will also codify regulatory procedures into an AI structure to give bankers consistently structured options and analysis to enhance decision-making and provide faster insights without losing human judgment and oversight.

What this says about AI: One of the great promises of automation and AI is freeing human labor and talent from mundane, often tedious, and inefficient manual processes. The fact that so much of AI innovation is being designed for in-house use by frontline workers and employees to enable them to better serve their clients underscores that AI, in its best light, actually creates space for more human connections between customers and service providers.

What this says about banks: Empowering frontline workers and relationship managers with AI-powered tools is helping a growing number of banks boost efficiency and reduce costs. From enhancing underwriting analysis to streamlining workflows, financial institutions are increasingly comfortable with AI-powered tools. This is especially the case when institutions deploy these solutions as complements to existing systems rather than as replacements for them.

Photo by Kit Suman on Unsplash

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Zocks Launches Client Queries to Transform Advisor Conversations into Actionable Insights

Zocks Launches Client Queries to Transform Advisor Conversations into Actionable Insights
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Zocks
  • AI platform for financial services Zocks has launched its Zocks Client Queries solution.
  • Zocks Client Queries enables financial advisors to uncover potential growth opportunities and respond to unmet client needs by querying data using plain language.
  • Founded in 2022 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Zocks made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2026. Mark Gilbert is Co-Founder and CEO.

AI platform for financial services Zocks unveiled its Zocks Client Queries solution this week. The new offering is an agentic AI product that enables financial advisors and enterprises to uncover organic growth opportunities and unmet client needs in seconds, using plain language. Advisors can use Client Queries to ask questions such as “which clients have a 401(k) with a previous employer that we could consolidate” or “which clients have a review due this quarter with over $500,000 in held-away assets,” and Client Queries will deliver a list of clients who fit those parameters. The solution then presents advisors with a set of automated next steps, including sending a personalized email, creating opportunities in a CRM system, or scheduling a meeting.

Zocks Client Queries also helps advisors address potential service gaps. Advisors, for example, can inquire, “which clients have a significant age milestone in the next 90 days, and we haven’t spoken with them in the past 12 months?” or “which clients mentioned a major life change but haven’t updated their estate plan?” allowing advisors to deliver proactive service to all clients regardless of account size.

“Every advisor-client relationship and conversation contains signals that point to the next opportunity, whether that’s a life change, a servicing need, or a held-away asset,” Zocks CEO Mark Gilbert said. “With Client Queries, firms can query across personal and financial information to operationalize those signals for every advisor, and deliver on the scale and consistency that manual processes can’t. What once required hours of research can now happen in minutes, at a fraction of the cost.”

Zocks leverages AI-powered intelligence to continuously build and maintain a comprehensive profile for all clients, drawing from CRM records, financial plans, tax, portfolio, estate, and insurance data, as well as conversations, meetings, emails, and documents shared with advisors. Zocks Client Queries analyzes these profiles in real time to deliver actionable lists and automated workflows in seconds. This gives advisors the opportunity for deeper insights and greater personalization compared to traditional lead generation and prospecting strategies.

“For our advisors, Client Queries removes the friction between having an idea to engage clients and quickly acting on it,” RFG Advisor VP of Technology and Operations Jordan Hutchison said. “For the enterprise, it gives us a way to operationalize growth across every advisor’s book simultaneously.”

Founded in 2022 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Zocks made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2026. At the conference, the company demonstrated how its AI assistant for financial advisors automates administrative tasks including meeting prep, account opening, document processing, and more. Zocks’ technology transforms client conversations into structured insights that bolster relationships and support business growth.

Zocks’ AI assistant saves advisors more than 10 hours a week, enabling them to build plans and onboard clients faster, discover new growth opportunities, anticipate client needs, and scale their business. Zocks counts more than 5,000 firms as its customers, including six of the nine Barron’s Top Mega RIAs and two of the top three life insurance carriers.

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ACI Worldwide Integrates Wero, a New Payment Option for Merchants in Europe

ACI Worldwide Integrates Wero, a New Payment Option for Merchants in Europe
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: ACI Worldwide, Alumni News
  • ACI Worldwide has joined the European Payments Initiative (EPI) and will integrate EPI’s Wero wallet into its Payments Orchestration Platform.
  • The integration will enable merchants and financial intermediaries across Europe to offer Wero as a payment option at a time when instant payments are growing in popularity.
  • Founded in 1975 and headquartered in Nebraska, ACI Worldwide has been a Finovate alum since 2011. Thomas Warsop is CEO.

International paytech ACI Worldwide has joined the European Payments Initiative (EPI) as a technical service provider. As part of the strategic collaboration, ACI Worldwide will integrate EPI’s Wero wallet solution into its Payments Orchestration Platform, enabling merchants and financial intermediaries throughout Europe to offer Wero as a payment option.

“We are excited to announce our strategic partnership with EPI to make Wero a success across Europe,” ACI Worldwide Head of Europe Nick Craig said. “This collaboration leverages ACI’s advanced instant payment processing capabilities to address the fragmentation of payment methods in Europe, providing a unified solution which enables a seamless, secure, and efficient payment experience for consumers and merchants. Wero will be an important addition to ACI’s best-in-class Payments Orchestration Platform, which has the industry’s widest reach of acquirers and APMs.”

Running on SEPA rails, Wero is a new pan-European digital wallet solution. Launched in 2024, the offering is intended to unify and streamline payments throughout Europe, including peer-to-peer transfers, e-commerce and point-of-sale purchases, as well as other value-added services. The solution was launched by a consortium of 16 European banks and financial services companies and currently provides instant, account-to-account payments to consumers in Belgium, France, and Germany.

ACI Worldwide’s Wero announcement comes as analysts expect the new payment option to boost consumer adoption of instant payments across Europe. The EU Instant Payments Regulation (IPR) has been in effect since January 2025, mandating banks and payment service providers (PSPs) in the Eurozone to be able to send and receive instant payments. ACI’s own research, collected in its Prime Time for Real-Time report, indicated that instant payment transactions in Europe are expected to climb from 17.2 billion in 2023 to 38.6 billion in 2028. The report suggested that instant payment transactions will account for 13% of all electronic payments in Europe by 2028, an increase of more than 50% from 2023.

“Seeing ACI joining EPI members’ ranks is a new step towards massive availability of Wero across our core markets and beyond,” EPI CEO Martina Weimert said. “Through the integration onto ACI’s platform, all their merchants and their customers will be able to integrate Wero as a new payment solution, empowering their business and Europe’s resilience at large. Together, we are helping accelerate the development of a more connected, innovative, and resilient European payments ecosystem.”

A Finovate alum since 2011, ACI Worldwide delivers software solutions that provide intelligent payments orchestration, banking, merchant payments, and billing. The company has customers in 94 countries including the top 10 global banks, more than 80,000 merchants, as well as thousands of organizations using its billpay and fraud prevention solutions. ACI Worldwide processes more than 770 billion transactions a year, amounting to trillions of US dollars.

Founded in 1975 and headquartered in Elkhorn, Nebraska, ACI Worldwide is a publicly traded company on NASDAQ under the ticker ACIW. The company has a market capitalization of $4.6 billion.

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MassPay and Coinbase Ink Strategic Stablecoin Partnership

MassPay and Coinbase Ink Strategic Stablecoin Partnership
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Coinbase
  • Global payout orchestration platform MassPay has announced a strategic partnership with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.
  • The partnership will combine MassPay’s global payout network with Coinbase’s infrastructure and institutional-grade security of digital assets.
  • Coinbase was founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong. The company made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2014.

International payout orchestration platform MassPay and cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase have teamed up to give businesses around the world stablecoin-powered cross-border payout capabilities.

“Stablecoin rails are becoming the standard for how global businesses move money, and our partnership with MassPay is a great example of that shift in action,” Coinbase Head of Infrastructure Products Alec Lovett said. “MassPay’s enterprise clients can now fund in USD, settle in USDC, and pay recipients globally—all within the infrastructure they already use. Coinbase handles the custody, compliance, and onchain infrastructure in the background, so MassPay can stay focused on delivering high-quality service to their clients.”

The partnership will combine MassPay’s single-API global payout network with Coinbase’s regulated digital asset infrastructure and institutional-grade security, as well as the company’s extensive global licensing footprint. This will enable corporate customers, marketplaces, and platforms using MassPay to fund disbursements in USD—converting to USDC via Coinbase—or make deposits directly in USDC. These entities can then pay recipients in USDC, other digital assets, or in local fiat currency. While Coinbase’s APIs manage wallet infrastructure, custody, and the onchain layer, MassPay manages last-mile payout orchestration worldwide.

The integration is designed to remove the operational complexity of managing stablecoin onramps, wallet infrastructure, liquidity, and compliance independently. Instead, the strategic partnership between Coinbase and MassPay will give businesses a single, unified platform to move money and make payouts to anyone, anywhere.

“Stablecoins have moved from experiment to infrastructure—and businesses need a way to operationalize that shift without rebuilding their entire payment stack,” MassPay CEO Ran Grushkowsky said. “Our partnership with Coinbase gives enterprises a turnkey path to fund in USD, move value onchain, and pay anyone in the world in the currency that works best for them. That’s what the future of global payouts looks like, and we’re building it now.”

Founded in 2019 and headquartered in Las Vegas, Nevada, MassPay offers a payout orchestration platform that enables businesses, marketplaces, direct sales organizations, content creator platforms, and other companies to make payouts to local rails, stablecoins, mobile wallets, and more in 180+ countries. The company offers fast onboarding, customized solutions, and the ability to work with the customer’s payment provider of choice.

MassPay’s partnership with Coinbase comes just weeks after the company announced an expansion of its integration with financial platform Circle and its Circle Payments Network (CPN) Managed Payments settlement solution. The integration allows MassPay customers to fund, manage, and send payouts using stablecoins, without having to manage digital assets or blockchain infrastructure directly.

A Finovate alum since 2014, Coinbase today offers a wallet and platform for digital currency trading, staking, safekeeping, spending, and transferring. The largest US-based cryptocurrency exchange and the world’s biggest custodian of bitcoin, Coinbase has ecosystem partners in more than 100 countries, and has $294 billion in assets on its platform. Founder Brian Armstrong is Coinbase’s CEO.

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Oh KOHO! Canadian Fintech Reaches Unicorn Status Ahead of Bid for Banking License

Oh KOHO! Canadian Fintech Reaches Unicorn Status Ahead of Bid for Banking License
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: David's column

Canadian fintech KOHO has raised C$130 million in new funding, boosting the company’s valuation to C$1.33 billion and earning the firm unicorn status. The Series E investment provides KOHO with the initial capital base it requires to secure a federal banking license, and boosts KOHO’s total capital raised to $507 million.

The round featured participation from both new and existing investors. Among the former were Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi-based sovereign investor, and Savano Capital, an investment firm based in Baltimore, Maryland. Also contributing to the round were new investors Tobi Lütke, founder and CEO of Shopify, and Michael Linford, COO of Affirm. Existing investors involved in the funding were Portage Ventures, Drive Capital, BDC Capital, HOOPP, and Eldridge.

“We’ve spent years earning the trust of Canadians who deserve better from their financial institutions, and this investor group reflects a shared belief that we’re just getting started,” KOHO CEO Daniel Eberhard said. “We’ve focused on building the infrastructure, the regulatory relationships, and the trust with Canadians to do this right. The investor group we’ve assembled reflects a shared knowledge that the next great Canadian bank needs to be built differently, and that KOHO is the team to build it.”

This last point is what makes the KOHO news especially interesting. Unlike the US, Canada’s banking system is highly concentrated, arguably one of the most concentrated in the world. The so-called “Big Five” banks—Royal Bank of Canada, TD Bank, Bank of Nova Scotia, Bank of Montreal, and CIBC—hold more than 80% of Canadian banking assets and 84% of deposits, serving the overwhelming majority of Canadian households and businesses. When the country’s National Bank of Canada is added to the Big Five, creating the “Big Six,” the dominance of the country’s traditional banking firms is only more stark.

Founded in 2014 in Vancouver, British Columbia, and operating out of Toronto, Ontario, KOHO could be a very interesting player in the Canadian banking market should the firm obtain a federal banking license. The company currently serves more than one million Canadians with banking services including no-fee accounts, a prepaid Mastercard, credit-building tools, and services like overdraft protection and roundups. Having processed $20 billion in transactions since inception, and now an official Payments Service Provider member of Payments Canada, KOHO also benefits from having a digital-first advantage over its rivals in the Big Five (or Six). In recent weeks, the company has added features such as phone support and its first in-app contest, Double Your Pay, to boost its Direct Deposit offering. KOHO added cryptocurrency trading to its app in May, courtesy of a partnership with Canadian crypto trading platform Ndax.

Would Canadian banking customers be willing to switch to KOHO? A study released by JD Power last fall indicated that there was a widening “satisfaction gap” in which customer satisfaction with the country’s Big Five banks declined 7 points (on a 1,000-point scale) to 604. Compare this to the customer satisfaction score for the country’s mid-sized banks, which increased by 5 points to 649. The report noted that the difference in satisfaction reflects a growing preference for “high-impact banking experiences related to ease of use and personalization.” Younger customers, unsurprisingly, as well as higher-income households, digital-first consumers, and even recent immigrants have been among those most commonly indicating an interest in fintech alternatives that are associated with these preferences.

This is an area where KOHO could have an advantage. At the same time, issues such as trust and customer inertia are likely to stem any large-scale shift away from Canada’s big banks. Also, KOHO is unlikely to challenge these larger financial institutions in many of their key services such as mortgages, business banking, and wealth management and investment services—at least in the near term. As such, it might be more appropriate to see KOHO’s pursuit of a banking license as part of the company’s strategy to grow via new capacities, such as holding deposits directly, as well as offer a broader range of products, enhance unit economics, and innovate on the customer experience, rather than a direct threat to the country’s incumbents.

“One of my favorite things about KOHO is that the only way we win is if millions of Canadians choose us,” Eberhard wrote on the company’s LinkedIn page. “We cannot out-spend or out-market. We have to out-build. The progress we have made reflects the progress our users have made. So while we feel very proud of what’s behind us, we’re much more humbled by what’s in front of us.”

Photo by Praveen Kumar Nandagiri on Unsplash

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Finovate Global Egypt: Investing in Unicorns and Point of Sale Financing Startups

Finovate Global Egypt: Investing in Unicorns and Point of Sale Financing Startups
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Finovate Global

This week’s edition of Finovate Global features recent fintech developments from Egypt.

MNT-Halan Achieves $1.4 Billion Valuation with Latest Investment

An investment from Al Ahly Capital, the investment arm of the National Bank of Egypt, has boosted the valuation of Egyptian fintech MNT-Halan to $1.4 billion. The investment represents the first closing of a new round for the firm; a second closing is expected as part of the ongoing funding. Reports indicate that the company has received an initial infusion of $30 million out of what will be a $70 million-plus funding round. In any event, MNT-Halan noted that the capital will help the company expand its operations in Egypt, as well as support growth in the region.

Currently operating in Egypt, Turkey, and the UAE, as well as in Pakistan, where it owns a bank that serves micro and small businesses, MNT-Halan offers a range of digital financial services including both consumer and business lending, payments, e-wallets, savings, investments, and e-commerce tools. The company achieved unicorn status in 2023, becoming the first Egyptian fintech to earn a valuation above $1 billion.

“While we have partnered with more than 30 Egyptian banks and financial institutions, this is the first time a commercial bank has become an equity partner in our journey, making this a particularly important milestone for us,” MNT-Halan Founder and Chairman Mounir Nakhla said. “Together, we will redefine access to financial services for small and micro businesses, as well as people living in remote towns and villages across Egypt who have historically been underserved.”

Headquartered in Giza, MNT-Halan has more than 1.5 million quarterly active users. The firm has disbursed more than $15.5 billion in loans and served more than eight million customers globally since its founding in 2018.

Telda and Mastercard Team Up on New Integrated Payments Offering

A partnership between Mastercard and Cairo-based financial brand Telda will bring a new integrated financial services solution to consumers in Egypt. The new offering will seamlessly connect everyday payments and investment wallets within the Telda app for an experience that is inclusive, accessible, and integrated.

“By embedding Mastercard’s digital capabilities within Telda’s platform, we are creating a seamless bridge between everyday payments and investment opportunities, empowering users to manage, grow, and access their wealth instantly,” Mastercard Country Manager for Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria Mohamed Assem said. “Together, we are redefining financial inclusion and supporting Egypt’s vision for a fully digital, unified financial ecosystem.”

Designed for Millennials and GenZ consumers, Telda offers an app that enables users to send and request money as easily as sending a text message. The company’s Telda Mastercard can be used online or in-store, as well as to withdraw cash from any ATM worldwide. Telda offers instant payment notifications to keep users apprised of transactions, and spend categorization functionality to help users understand their spending habits better.

“Telda was founded with a bold vision to redefine the financial services experience,” Telda CEO Ahmed Sabbah said. “Today, the integration of daily payments and the investment wallet within a single app through our collaboration with Mastercard marks a significant leap forward, giving individuals immediate control over their money.”

Blnk Secures $37 Million in Funding

Egyptian Buy Now, Pay Later outfit Blnk has raised $37 million in combined debt and equity. The equity component, led by Algebra Ventures and featuring participation from SANAD Fund for MSME, Endeavor Catalyst, and Emirates International Investment Company, amounted to $12.5 million. Debt facilities from local banks, totaling $24.6 million, completed the round.

“This new round of funding positions us to strengthen our profitability—expanding our reach, diversifying our offerings and doubling down on our commitment to unlocking financial access for millions of consumers in Egypt and beyond,” Blnk Co-founder and CEO Amr Sultan said.

Blnk offers inclusive financing programs for all Egyptians, less than 4% of whom have access to credit cards. This means that many Egyptians can only afford to buy products with cash or after borrowing money from hard money lenders at high interest rates. In response to this, Blnk’s point-of-sale financing options offer instant approvals in minutes and allow borrowers to apply with just their National ID and mobile phone number at the stores they are already shopping at.

“Since our seed round in 2022,” the company noted on its LinkedIn page earlier this week, “Blnk has grown to serve more than one million customers, built a loan portfolio exceeding EGP 1 billion, and reached profitability in 2025. Today, 75% of our customers were previously unbanked or underserved, while more than 35% are women.”

Blnk’s approach to financial risk assessment relies on dynamic, data-driven risk maps. The company’s proprietary AI analyzes hyper-local variables to identify patterns that guide precise credit decisioning. Blnk also leverages specialized machine learning models to provide real-time, precise Probability of Default (PD) predictions which support instant credit decisions with risk-based pricing.

Founded in 2020, Blnk is headquartered in Giza.

Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.

Latin America and the Caribbean

  • Montevideo, Uruguay-based cross-border payment company Bamboo teamed up with Swedish payment network Centiglobe to streamline cross-border B2B and B2C payments throughout Latin America.
  • Mexican fintech Clip unveiled its digital wallet ecosystem Mi Clip.
  • The Fintech Times looked at the current fintech landscape in Costa Rica.

Asia-Pacific

  • Singapore-based payments and treasury management platform Sunrate introduced Sunrate.AI, a new category of AI-native global payment infrastructure for complex enterprise workflows.
  • Three Japanese banks—MUFC, Mizuho, and Sumitomo Mitsui Bank—announced plans to issue a Yen-backed stablecoin in 2026.
  • XTransfer, a cross-border financial and risk management service company based in Shanghai, inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Societe Generale.

Sub-Saharan Africa

  • South Africa-based payments service provider (PSP) Kwik Payments has gone live on the ACI Payments Orchestration Platform.
  • MTN Group Fintech, the fintech arm of African telecom MTN Group, announced a strategic partnership with Ant International to enhance mobile money services.
  • A new proposal from Kenya’s legislature, Finance Bill 2026, could bring additional tax reporting and compliance requirements for virtual asset providers and digital payment platforms.

Central and Eastern Europe

  • Estonian white-label banking platform Wallester has been granted a license from the FCA to enable the firm to expand to the UK.
  • Lloyds Banking Group secured approval from the Bank of Lithuania to acquire electronic money institution Curve Europe.
  • The Fintech Latvia Association signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the UK’s Innovate Finance to foster knowledge exchange and joint business initiatives.

Middle East and Northern Africa

Central and Southern Asia

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Veritus CEO Joshua March on Deploying Compliant AI Voice Agents in Financial Services

Veritus CEO Joshua March on Deploying Compliant AI Voice Agents in Financial Services
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: FinovateSpring 2026, Speaker series

More and more banks and financial services companies are leveraging AI-powered communications to enhance the customer experience with faster response times and reduce operational costs. However, there is a wealth of key issues that institutions need to address in order to deploy technologies like AI voice agents safely and effectively while remaining compliant with an ever-shifting range of regulations.

In this interview, recorded at FinovateSpring 2026 in San Diego, California, earlier this year, William Mills, CEO of William Mills Agency, talks with Joshua March, Founder and CEO of Veritus, about how these challenges and how AI voice and text agents are transforming banking and financial services.

“The operational benefits from AI are so immense that no financial institution can really make the decision to be left behind. Everyone has to make this leap. So the question is not ‘are we going to do it?’ It’s ‘just how do we do it in a compliant and safe way.’ Our philosophy is that by being 100% focused on the needs of these regulated financial entities and building in all of the compliance capabilities—not just in how the AI agents are speaking and the guardrails around that to prevent hallucinations and ensure compliance, but also in, for example, a TCPA compliant outbound dialer, TCPA compliant on the channel orchestration—we’ve built multiple layers of compliance at every single step.”

Veritus enables lenders to deploy AI-powered compliant voice, SMS, andemail agents across the entire loan lifecycle, from origination to recovery. Founded in 2025 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Veritus helps lenders frustrated with stalled applications, limited service hours, rising delinquency costs, and other pain points. Veritus’ Negotiation Engine is a rules-based solution that dynamically offers payment plans, settlements, and hardship options based on individual company policies. Veritus helps providers increase the number of funded loans, improve recovery rates, scale instantly while maintaining brand consistency, all while remaining compliant with FDCPA, TCPA, FCRA, GLBA, and state-specific regulations.

Joshua March founded Veritus in 2025. He previously was Co-Founder and CEO of SCiFi Foods, a cultivated meet company backed by a16oz. Before that, March was Co-Founder and CEO of Conversocial, a call center software firm that was acquired by Verint.

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Feedzai Unveils Fraud Intelligence Network, Feedzai IQ Score

Feedzai Unveils Fraud Intelligence Network, Feedzai IQ Score
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Feedzai
  • Fincrime prevention company Feedzai has launched its Feedzai IQ Score, an AI-native, network-derived fraud risk solution for banks of all sizes.
  • The new offering provides banks and other financial institutions with real-time access to anonymized, aggregated insights from the company’s global transaction network.
  • A Finovate alum since 2014, Feedzai’s fraud prevention technology processes 120 billion events annually and secures $9 trillion in payments every year.

Financial crime prevention specialist Feedzai announced the availability of Feedzai IQ Score. The new offering is an AI-native network-derived fraud risk scoring solution for banks large and small. Delivered via a single API and available on the AWS Marketplace, Feedzai IQ Score provides banks with real-time access to anonymized, aggregated insights from the company’s $9 trillion global transaction network.

“Fraud has outpaced what any single institution can stop alone,” Feedzai Chief Product Officer Pedro Barata said. “Feedzai IQ Score puts an end to isolated defense by giving banks access to collective insights from across our entire network. Today, we open up this product to institutions of all sizes who now have a ready-made way to make smarter fraud decisions and modernize their defenses without the disruption of fully overhauling infrastructure.”

Feedzai IQ Score helps financial institutions deal with a paradox in the field of fraud prevention in which the data used to prevent fraud is typically restricted to internal sources. The growing sophistication of financial criminals has made this limited view of data untenable. Additionally, network-based fraud risk scoring can be a boon for regional and middle-sized financial institutions that may not have the internal data volume or resources to build sophisticated fraud models independently. Feedzai IQ Score enables these institutions to access anonymized, network-level intelligence, while keeping customer data secure. Feedzai noted that its new offering delivers proven detection gains with 4x more fraud detected and 50% fewer alerts compared to traditional rules-based strategies.

There is no historical data requirement for banks in order to use Feedzai IQ Score, nor is there a lengthy model training process or heavy operational lift. Via expert AI models that have been trained and validated across Feedzai’s network, banks and other institutions can move from integration to value realization in days.

“Network fraud intelligence sharing is becoming increasingly important in the monitoring of fragmented fraud signals within the financial ecosystem,” Chartis Senior Research Principal Philip Mackenzie said. “We considered this capability to be a key differentiator of Feedzai’s IQ Score solution, which combines real-time cross-institutional fraud insights and collective intelligence across a range of financial institutions.”

Founded in 2008, Feedzai made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2014. Today, the San Mateo, California-based company leverages trusted AI to defend consumers and transactions against financial crime, fraud, and money laundering in real time. Feedzai’s technology processes 120 billion events annually and secures $9 trillion in payments every year. The company’s Tier 1 bank clients have reported detecting 62% more fraud with Feedzai compared to their previous solution, 73% fewer false positives, and 25% faster model development. Co-founder Nuno Sebastião is Feedzai’s CEO and Chairman.

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Members First Credit Union Partners with Mahalo Banking

Members First Credit Union Partners with Mahalo Banking
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Mahalo Banking
  • Digital banking solutions provider Mahalo Banking has partnered with Members First Credit Union of Utah.
  • Members First CU will deploy Mahalo’s Thoughtful Banking platform as part of an overall modernization initiative that will also involve a transition to the Corelation Keystone core platform.
  • Mahalo Banking, based in Troy, Michigan, won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2023 in New York. Jim Stickley is CEO.

Utah-based Members First Credit Union has teamed up with Mahalo Banking as part of a technology modernization drive that will involve the financial institution deploying Mahalo’s Thoughtful Banking platform as well as transitioning to the Corelation Keystone core platform.

Members First CU CEO Darryn Hodgson indicated that selecting a digital banking provider that could evolve with the institution was key. Hodgson also praised Mahalo’s culture, level of commitment, and collaboration, noting that it reflected “the same member-first philosophy that drives our credit union.” Mahalo’s Thoughtful Banking platform will provide improved mobile functionality and a streamlined overall experience for the credit union’s members, with enhanced digital account opening capabilities to be introduced later after the initial launch. Hodgson added that ease of use was another major factor in choosing Mahalo, which is known for its incorporation of neurodiverse functionality that helps financial institutions serve customers and members with a range of cognitive and sensory challenges. “We have members across multiple generations,” Hodgson said, “and it was important to choose a solution that was approachable and easy to navigate.”

In addition to deploying Mahalo’s Thoughtful Banking, Members First CU will also transition to the Corelation Keystone core platform. Mahalo’s solution will serve as the member-facing digital experience for Members First CU, delivering online, digital, and mobile banking functionality.

“Credit unions today need technology partners that are flexible, responsive, and committed to continuous collaboration,” Mahalo COO Denny Howell said. “Members First is taking a thoughtful approach to modernization by aligning its digital banking and core strategies around long-term agility and member experience. We are proud to support its team with a platform designed to simplify the member journey while enabling faster innovation and stronger operational flexibility.”

A member-focused financial cooperative, Members First Credit Union was founded in 1958 and serves communities in northern Utah. Launched as the Thiokol Employees Credit Union, the financial institution has grown into a 13,000-member entity with more than $206 million in assets. Members First Credit Union offers a full range of financial services including deposit accounts, consumer lending, credit cards, home equity loans, and digital banking solutions.

Mahalo Banking won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2023 in New York. At the conference, the Troy, Michigan-based fintech demonstrated its online banking solution that fully integrates comprehensive neurodiverse functionality directly into its platform. The functionality enables credit unions to support a wider range of members, including those with unique needs due to autism, dyslexia, epilepsy, ADD/ADHD, color blindness, and more.

Mahalo Banking’s partnership announcement with Members First Credit Union comes just weeks after the fintech reported that CU Hawai’i Federal Credit Union had selected its Thoughtful Banking platform. The decision is also part of a strategic dual implementation that saw the credit union announce a core conversion to Corelation Keystone.

“The feedback we received from other credit unions about Mahalo’s platform and partnership approach was overwhelmingly positive,” CU Hawai’i President and CEO James Takamine said. “Beyond the technology, it was clear that Mahalo’s team and culture are truly aligned with how we serve our members. The dedicated focus on usability, security, and collaboration made Mahalo the clear choice for our long-term digital strategy, especially as we undergo our core conversion to Keystone.”

Photo by Nils Huenerfuerst on Unsplash

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3forge Unveils Application Fabric for Finance, 3forge Enterprise

3forge Unveils Application Fabric for Finance, 3forge Enterprise
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: 3forge, Alumni profile

For companies involved in the business of empowering developers to build business-critical fintech applications, the world has changed a great deal over the past decade. From the rise of AI to a sea-change in regulatory priorities that has increased scrutiny on third-party relationships, fraud and risk management, consumer data protections, and more, the task of providing fintech developers with the tools they need to innovate has only become more challenging.

This makes the recent news from 3forge, a New York-based fintech that has been empowering fintech designers and developers for 15 years, all the more interesting.

“We started 3forge in New York, in 2011, to build a transformative platform enabling your designers and developers to build applications in a fraction of the time and cost, with a focus on business-critical scale, performance, and interoperability,” 3forge Founder and Chief Technology Officer Robert Cooke said from the Finovate stage at the beginning of the company’s Finovate debut in 2022.

Today, the New York-based fintech announced the launch of its application fabric for finance. 3forge Enterprise unifies real-time data, business logic, AI, and application development in a single operational environment. This gives financial institutions a production-ready continuum from data to deployed application. 3forge Enterprise provides a data gateway that unifies current-state access to real-time and historical tables, streams, and procedures across data nodes in the 3forge fabric. The technology enables developers and applications to publish, subscribe, query, and insert data via native connectivity in Java, Python, and C++, and provides failover support and integrations across JDBC, Pandas, and SQLAlchemy libraries. 3forge Enterprise also provides MCP server and AI agent access, live prompting and agentic development, and an operations hub that centralizes the management of 3forge deployments.

“For years, financial institutions treated data platforms, business logic, and applications as separate architectural domains,” Cooke said. “That separation made sense operationally, but it is increasingly inefficient for high-value capital markets workflows. As AI raises the stakes, models and agents need more than disconnected data estates and fragmented application logic.”

3forge Enterprise uses three layers to transform platforms into an enterprise-wide fabric for financial systems: a governed real-time intake and exhaust layer for financial data, an application engine and AI-assisted development layer for building and running financial workflows that helps users move from data to production, and an operational control layer to facilitate managing deployments at scale. Combined, these layers enable vendor platforms, internal systems, and AI-powered applications to access real-time and historical data via unified queries, streams, APIs, and agents. At the same time, 3forge Enterprise preserves the entitlements, auditability, and production controls needed for capital markets.

“An application fabric brings data, decisions, execution, AI, and applications onto the same controlled, auditable foundation,” Cooke explained. “For tier-one financial institutions, 3forge Enterprise provides a way to extend and modernize complex existing infrastructure. For mid-market banks, broker-dealers, hedge funds, and asset managers, it provides access to a production-ready application fabric without having to build one from scratch.”

Founded in 2011 and headquartered in New York, 3forge made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2022. At the conference, the company showed how its Full Stack Enterprise platform enables developers to quickly build customized business-critical solutions with an emphasis on workflow transparency, real-time visualization, and data discovery without limitation.

Photo by Vincenzo Marotta on Unsplash

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Aeropay Integrates with Jack Henry to Extend Pay-by-Bank Capabilities

Aeropay Integrates with Jack Henry to Extend Pay-by-Bank Capabilities
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Jack Henry
  • Pay-by-bank provider Aeropay has teamed up with banking technology and modernization company Jack Henry.
  • Aeropay will integrate with Jack Henry Payments Orchestrator to boost its bank integration capabilities and enhance its pay-by-bank network.
  • Founded in 1976 and celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, Jack Henry has been a Finovate alum since 2010. The company is based in Monett, Missouri.

Pay-by-bank provider Aeropay announced an integration with Jack Henry that will help the company expand its instant payments capabilities and boost the resilience of its national pay-by-bank network. Aeropay is integrating with Jack Henry Payments Orchestrator (formerly Victor Technologies) to not only enhance its bank integration capabilities, but also to introduce new payment rail infrastructure throughout its ecosystem.

“Bank payments just got more reliable,” Aeropay noted on its LinkedIn page when the news was announced. “Aeropay just integrated with Jack Henry, expanding our real-time payment infrastructure and adding smart routing across our network. For merchants, that means even fewer failed payments and faster funds. The integration is live.”

The integration enables request-for-payment (RfP) and real-time payment (RTP) capabilities, enhancing Aeropay’s multi-rail architecture. Aeropay will be able to dynamically route transactions based on performance, availability, and risk conditions. As RfP and RTP networks continue to expand to more and more US financial institutions, this architecture improves uptime, accelerates transactions, and offers greater flexibility for instant payment acceptance and settlement.

Chicago, Illinois-based Aeropay offers a national pay-by-bank network that outperforms cards, cash, and checks with a multi-rail payment infrastructure that includes ACH, RTP, RfP, and FedNow capabilities. Aeropay makes it easy for companies to add and scale bank connections, pay-by-bank, instant payouts, and AI risk prevention. The firm’s pay-by-bank offering lowers processing costs by 50% and helps accelerate cash flow with payments that settle same-day (or faster). Aeropay’s pay-by-bank network also features built-in risk prevention, preventing returns and eliminating chargebacks via real-time verification, AI risk scoring, network intelligence, and guaranteed settlement.

A Finovate alum since 2010, Jack Henry & Associates serves banks, credit unions, fintechs, and businesses with comprehensive, cloud-native solutions that unify core, digital, and other services into a single, adaptable ecosystem. Jack Henry offers financial institutions a range of internally developed modern capabilities as well as the ability to integrate with innovative fintech technologies. Currently celebrating its 50th year, Jack Henry serves more than 7,500 community and regional banks and credit unions with solutions for digital banking, payments, lending, fraud risk, and more. Jack Henry & Associates is headquartered in Monett, Missouri. Greg Adelson is President and Chief Executive Officer.

Photo by Chris Dickens on Unsplash

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Temenos Acquires Swiss Wealth Management Orchestration Platform additiv

Temenos Acquires Swiss Wealth Management Orchestration Platform additiv
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: additiv, Mergers & Acquisitions, Temenos
  • Banking technology company Temenos announced its acquisition of Swiss fintech additiv in a half-cash, half-equity transaction.
  • The acquisition will bolster Temenos’ wealth management franchise with additiv’s out-of-the-box orchestration and mass affluent capabilities.
  • Both Temenos and additiv made their Finovate debuts at FinovateEurope 2013 in London.

Banking technology firm Temenos has agreed to acquire Swiss fintech additiv. The 50/50 cash and equity deal is expected to be completed early in Q3 of 2026.

Additiv offers a specialist platform to orchestrate financial services. The company’s technology integrates process steps and data into a single orchestration layer for wealth and other financial workflows. With 30 clients in wealth management, banking, and insurance, additiv’s technology enables banks and wealth managers to rapidly design and launch wealth propositions that boost advisor productivity, orchestrate investment propositions, and provide consistent client experiences at scale.

With an extensive global client base in the wealth space, Temenos will benefit from additiv’s native mass-affluent capabilities and AI-enabled orchestration layer. The company’s fast, low-risk implementation model offers deployments in as little as 3-6 months compared to the industry standard of 12 months. With a high Net Promoter Score (NPS) above 90, Net Revenue Retention (NRR) of 138%, and double-digit growth over the past three years, additiv will enable Temenos to expand its client footprint within investment services in both developed and emerging markets, as well as provide Temenos’ wealth clients with future-ready, front office workflows.

“This acquisition strengthens our wealth proposition at a time when we see strong, growing demand for our products across tiers and geographies in the wealth segment, with financial institutions increasingly focused on launching scalable hybrid wealth models,” additiv founder Michael Stemmie said. “additiv’s orchestration capabilities complement our market-leading platform and support our strategy to help clients deliver personalized, regulatory compliant wealth services efficiently and at scale. Together, additiv’s AI-powered orchestration capabilities and Temenos’ existing front-end solutions create strong differentiation at the banking experience layer.”

Temenos offers a core banking suite and modular composable solutions to help banks and other financial institutions modernize their operations. Deployable on-premises, via the cloud, or as a SaaS solution, Temenos’ technology empowers financial institutions of all sizes to deliver innovative, AI-enhanced experiences to their customers. Founded in 1993 and based in Geneva, Switzerland, Temenos today serves more than 950 core banking and 600 digital banking clients. Thibault de Tersant is Temenos Chairman. Takis Spiliopoulos is Chief Executive Officer (and interim Chief Financial Officer).

Headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland and founded in 1998, additiv offers an API-first, cloud-based financial services orchestration platform that enables financial institutions and brands to launch, automate, and scale financial services from a singular solution. Empowering companies in wealth management, banking, credit, and insurance, additiv’s technology allows firms to expand their own offerings and introduce third-party products and services to their customers without having to replace core systems. A Finovate alum since 2013, additiv most recently demoed its technology at FinovateAsia 2017 in Hong Kong.

Earlier this year, additiv launched a new dedicated solution to help Germans navigate planned reforms to the country’s pension scheme. The reform calls for a new state-subsidized retirement investment account (Altersvorsorgedepot) that is offered digitally as a simplified, standardized solution, Standarddepot. Millions of legacy pensions (so-called “Riester” contracts) will be migrated to the new pension product, creating new urgency for institutions that seek to attract or simply retain these customers.

“This reform marks a genuine paradigm shift for German private pensions,” additiv CEO Nils Frowein said. “For the first time, capital market-based products are sitting at the heart of state-subsidized retirement savings. Institutions that are now establishing scalable digital infrastructure will secure long-term customer relationships—and with millions of Riester contracts up for migration, the window to act is open.”

Photo by Henrique Ferreira on Unsplash

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