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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
Plaid and ID.me are teaming up to help US government agencies verify both benefit recipients’ identities and ownership of the financial accounts receiving payments.
The partnership combines identity and account verification into a single flow, helping agencies reduce manual processes, duplicate payments, and the risk of funds being diverted.
Connecting identity with payment destination could help modernize government benefits, enabling legitimate recipients to receive funds faster while strengthening fraud prevention and auditability.
Plaid has selected digital identity network ID.me to enable US government agencies to verify both the person requesting a benefit and the associated financial account receiving it.
Plaid is leveraging ID.me’s digital identity wallet to solve the identity piece and is using its own financial account verification tools to help state and federal agencies verify that the account receiving a benefit payment belongs to the recipient before funds move.
“Identity verification tells an agency who is asking to be paid, but it does not tell them where the money is going,” said ID.me CEO and Founder Blake Hall. “That gap is where benefits go missing, and it’s costing our government and everyday Americans billions of dollars. Through our partnership with Plaid, agencies would be able to confirm the account belongs to the verified person before a dollar moves, and eligible people get paid faster.”
For beneficiaries, the partnership allows users to verify their identity using ID.me and securely link their bank account, eliminating the need to upload bank statements or wait for manual verification. For agencies, account ownership information is sourced directly from the recipient’s financial institution and matched with their verified identity before funds are released. The solution creates a dated record linking the verified recipient with the account that received the payment, while limiting the financial information shared with the government.
The partnership will help agencies consolidate legacy capabilities, reduce the possibility of duplicating payments in error, and make it easier for beneficiaries to receive funds they are entitled to.
“For too long, getting benefits to the people who qualify for them has meant a slow, manual process that fraudsters have learned to exploit. Agencies have gotten very good at confirming who someone is. What’s been missing is the same confidence about where the money actually lands,” said Plaid COO Eric Sager. “By partnering with ID.me, we’re closing that gap so eligible people get paid in minutes, and every dollar reaches the person it was meant for.”
Fraud prevention in government payments has long relied on multiple, often disconnected layers of verification. Identity verification alone is not enough if agencies cannot also verify the destination of the funds. By connecting those two layers, Plaid and ID.me are helping government agencies modernize benefit delivery in a way that could make payments both faster for legitimate recipients and harder to divert fraudulently.
Coinbase and Stablecore are teaming up to help community and regional banks and credit unions offer digital asset services, including trading, custody, and stablecoin payments.
The partnership reflects the broader rebundling of financial services, bringing capabilities that once required separate crypto platforms back inside customers’ existing banking relationships.
Coinbase is positioning itself to benefit either way; it can either own the customer relationship, or it can provide the infrastructure that allows banks to retain it.
Crypto exchange platform Coinbase is teaming up with crypto and DeFi banking infrastructure company Stablecore to help banks and credit unions offer digital asset services through their existing banking platforms.
Under the agreement, Coinbase will tap Stablecore’s expertise to bring digital asset services such as trading, custody, and stablecoin payments to Stablecore’s 3,000+ bank and credit union partners. The goal of the solution is to help traditional financial institutions offer regulated digital asset products without rebuilding their infrastructure. Crucially, the new launch also allows bank customers and credit union members to participate in the decentralized economy without having to leave their existing banking platform.
“Community banks and credit unions shouldn’t have to choose between staying local and staying current,” said Coinbase Head of Infrastructure Business Alec Lovett. “Together with Stablecore we are helping put them on the cutting edge of payments technology—cheaper, faster money movement, and the tools they need to stay strong for the communities they serve.”
Founded in 2025, Stablecore exclusively serves community and regional banks and credit unions. The Texas-based fintech offers white-labeled solutions that integrate into existing banking technology to bring together all of the necessary components so financial institutions can offer tokenized deposits, stablecoins, and digital asset products.
Among the financial institutions piloting the digital asset offering is Amarillo National Bank. Leveraging the new tool, the Texas-based bank can offer digital asset services under its own brand and on its own terms, while keeping deposit and lending relationships within local institutions.
“Banks and credit unions should not have to move to completely new technology platforms to support digital assets for their clients,” said Stablecore Co-Founder and CEO Alex Treece. “We built Stablecore to bring together all of the pieces so they don’t have to.”
The partnership is another example of how firms are rebundling financial services across the industry. Digital assets initially developed largely outside the traditional banking ecosystem, requiring consumers to establish separate relationships with crypto exchanges and wallets. Infrastructure providers like Stablecore are helping reverse that fragmentation by bringing those capabilities back inside the bank. The rebundling will offer community financial institutions an opportunity to remain the primary financial relationship by incorporating new products, especially as customer expectations evolve.
What’s interesting here is who is offering banks access to crypto. As a third-party fintech, Coinbase competes directly with this product. Consumers could go directly to Coinbase for digital assets, but the fintech is also making its capabilities available through banks so that the bank can retain the interface and relationship. In that sense, Coinbase is positioning itself to benefit from the rebundling trend rather than fight it. If consumers increasingly prefer to access digital assets alongside their other financial products, Coinbase doesn’t necessarily need to own the customer relationship; it can own the infrastructure powering it. For banks, the partnership offers another way to defend their position as the place where customers manage their broader financial lives.
American Express launched a 2.95% APY Business Savings account with no minimum balance or monthly maintenance fee.
Amex is deepening its business banking offering with card-rewards deposits and a forthcoming Gusto-powered payroll solution with AI-driven insights.
Amex is positioning itself to compete with fintechs like Mercury, Brex, and Bluevine as a more complete financial operating system for businesses.
American Express is bolstering its offerings today with the launch of the high-yield American Express Business Savings account.
The high-yield savings account comes with an APY of 2.95% and does not require a minimum balance or charge a monthly maintenance fee. Users will be able to make and receive transfers online or through the Amex app and can make instant transfers to and from an American Express Business Checking account with no transfer fee.
Additionally, later this year, Amex’s Graphite Business Cash Unlimited card members, who earn 2% rewards on each transaction, will be able to redeem those reward dollars for deposits into their Business Checking accounts. Plus Amex is adding a new Gusto-powered payroll solution later this year.
The new payroll solution, which will be available to Business Checking account customers for a monthly fee early next year, will help customers enroll, manage, and run payroll within American Express Business Checking, keeping everything in a single place. Leveraging Gusto, Amex will offer AI-powered insights on payroll.
These developments are part of American Express’ efforts to expand its Amex Business Membership by offering business customers more value with integrated solutions. The new tools integrate with accounting software and link the Amex accounts with existing bank accounts to make it easier to move money and keep financials up to date.
“Businesses are looking for more value from their banking services, including competitive returns and simple tools that help them automate processes and fit seamlessly into how they operate,” said American Express Executive Vice President of Global Commercial Services Eva Reda. “With Amex Business Banking, businesses now have banking tools that make it easy and rewarding to manage their finances, all in one place.”
For American Express, these launches signify more than just adding another high-yield deposit product. The business banking space has become increasingly crowded, with fintechs and traditional banks racing to become the financial operating system for a company, rather than simply holding their checking account.
Fintechs such as Mercury, Brex, and Bluevine have raised expectations by combining deposits with tools such as payments, cards, expense management, cash management, accounting integrations, and financial automation. Amex is using its existing strength in business cards as the starting point for a broader banking relationship. Connecting card rewards directly to Business Checking, adding savings, and embedding Gusto-powered payroll gives customers more reasons to keep both their money and their day-to-day financial activity inside the Amex ecosystem.
That makes the real competitive advantage less about the 2.95% APY itself and more about integration. Business banking providers are continuing to rebundle financial and back-office functions. Players that can reduce the number of external systems a business owner has to manage stand a better chance of becoming that customer’s primary financial relationship.
This is a sponsored blog post by AI software company ElevenLabs.
The first generation of automation in financial services was a cost decision, and customers could tell.
Decision tree chatbots and IVR menus reduced volume by deflecting it, and the experience taught a generation of policyholders and account holders to say “agent” and wait for the queue.
Institutions are adopting AI agents for a different reason:a better category of customer experience: every contact resolved on the spot, at any hour, in any channel, or handed to a person who already knows the customer and the situation – with the savings reinvested in the human service that matters most.
Admiral, one of Europe’s largest insurance groups, frames its own ambition as building the most trusted customer experience in insurance, and is explicit that this is a customer experience transformation.
That framing matters for the question every institution asks – build in-house or buy a platform – because the two goals set very different bars.
Automation built to cut cost only has to be cheaper than the queue. An agent built to carry the customer relationship has to be as good as the business’ best people, or better.
Once that is the bar, the useful question is no longer build versus buy. It is which parts of the experience only the institution can supply, and which parts are already solved.
What makes a good customer experience
What makes an agent feel trustworthy is largely invisible: turn-taking that holds up when a caller interrupts, latency low enough that pauses feel natural, background noise handling so that what a customer says is captured accurately without repeating themselves.
This orchestration layer is what delivers a natural conversation, meaningfully impacting whether customers engage with the AI agent and allow it to resolve their question or ask to be routed to a human.
Admiral did not build this layer. By starting from a platform with audio orchestration built in, the team went straight to production work on the use case itself rather than the infrastructure underneath it. The results followed: a loan settlement request that took around five minutes in the old journey now completes in roughly half the time, with customers rating the calls 4/5 or 5/5.
What Admiral built instead
Admiral concentrated its engineering on ensuring agents had the right knowledge, were programmed to follow the right deterministic workflows, and stayed compliant with insurance industry policies. That is where the work belongs – the knowledge, workflows and guardrails are Admiral’s expertise, and encoding them well is what turns a natural conversation into a resolved request.
It set the production bar at matching or beating its best human agents. It routes vulnerable callers and customers in arrears straight to a person while the team learns the edge cases.
The team describes the principle as raising the validation bar without lowering the compliance bar.
Most financial regulation is outcome-based, so this is also where the compliance case is won: what risk teams need are the right outcomes, evidenced and controlled, and the institution’s own standards are what define them.
Reaching customers, then improving in front of them
Experience is only transformed once agents are live, and in a regulated institution the constraint is rarely writing code – it is getting through review and earning customer trust.
Admiral pairs an engineer who knows the architecture with a business owner who knows the local market, and treats that pair as the deployment unit, so the agent reflects how customers in each market actually speak and the people who own the risk shaped the build.
From there, changes ship through staged rollouts measured in hours: a gap customers hit on Monday is fixed by Tuesday.
The pattern across institutions reaching production is consistent. They set the bar as a great customer experience, owned the standards and knowledge that make the experience theirs, and bought the layers where being different is impossible and being excellent is table stakes.
Admiral’s team recently walked through its production agents, testing approach, and rollout process in a live session. Watch the full session here.
EMVCo released a draft framework for card-based agentic payments designed to promote secure, interoperable, and scalable transactions involving AI agents.
The framework introduces Intent Services, a shared layer that would help payment participants register, retrieve, reference, and update consumer-authorized intent as it changes over time.
EMVCo is exploring additional agentic payment capabilities, including Know Your Agent (KYA) and Agentic Transaction Indicators, while seeking industry feedback on the draft through September 30.
Global technical organization EMVCoreleased the draft of a new framework to help promote secure, interoperable and scalable agentic payments.
Much of the conversation around agentic commerce has centered around the liability that occurs when an AI agent makes a purchase on the consumer’s behalf. EMVCo has discovered that, in agentic payment scenarios where intent needs to be managed over time, such as recurring purchases, cumulative budgets, and post-transaction activities, users may need to offer access to a shared intent “state,” which means multiple participants in a transaction may need a consistent way to determine what the consumer authorized, whether that authorization is still valid, and how much of it has already been used.
To address this, EMVCo’s proposed framework introduces “Intent Services,” a shared layer that would allow payment participants to register, retrieve, reference, and update consumer-authorized intent before, during, and after a transaction.
The framework is designed to complement, rather than replace, existing approaches to proving consumer intent. While cryptographic solutions such as Verifiable Intent can provide assurance that a consumer authorized an agent to act, EMVCo’s Intent Services would provide a common coordination point for participants to interpret and manage that authorization as it evolves over time. The framework outlines ecosystem roles and data fields for registering intent, maintaining lifecycle and state information, and allowing authorized parties to retrieve intent-related data.
“Card-based agentic payments require a globally interoperable foundation that consumers, merchants and issuers can all trust,” said EMVCo Executive Committee Chair Junya Tanaka. “This publication marks an important step forward by outlining a consistent approach for establishing and communicating intent alongside payment-related information, and we encourage participants from across the industry to share their feedback to shape its ongoing development.”
EMVCo has a dedicated Agentic Payments Task Force and is actively engaging with stakeholders, including EMVCo Associates and Subscribers. The organization is also collaborating closely with other industry partners such as the FIDO Alliance, the OpenID Foundation, the OpenWallet Foundation, and W3C.
EMVCo anticipates that creating a common foundation for card-based agentic payments will help identify potential future enhancements to other EMV technologies such as EMV 3-D Secure (3DS), EMV Payment Tokenization, EMV Secure Remote Commerce (SRC), and the EMV Digital Payment Credential (DPC).
EMVCo is also considering capabilities related to Know Your Agent (KYA) and Agentic Transaction Indicators for future publications. These capabilities could help payment participants identify the agent involved in a transaction, communicate relevant attributes about that agent, and signal when a transaction involves an agent acting on a consumer’s behalf.
Anyone interested in providing feedback to EMVCo’s draft framework can leave their comments on the proposed framework by Wednesday, September 30.
Tyfone is acquiring ATTUNE to add consumer and business account opening, deposit funding, loan origination, and servicing capabilities to its digital banking platform.
The deal gives Tyfone a role earlier in the customer lifecycle, allowing it to support financial institutions from acquisition and onboarding through lending, payments, servicing, and ongoing digital banking.
The acquisition advances Tyfone’s evolution into a broader end-to-end banking technology provider, building on its history in mobile banking, payments, and multichannel digital banking.
Digital banking solutions company Tyfone is doubling down on its account opening and loan origination operations with the acquisition of New York-based ATTUNE.
Tyfone anticipates the acquisition will expand its platform with consumer and business account opening, deposit funding, loan origination, and servicing capabilities. Overall, the acquisition will allow the Oregon-based company to extend its digital experience from the first interaction through the entire, lifelong engagement. Additionally, Tyfone will use ATTUNE to help it build account opening and loan origination into its new lending platform.
“Community financial institutions have always differentiated themselves through trusted relationships, but today those relationships increasingly begin through digital channels,” said Tyfone CEO Siva Narendra. “This acquisition completes the digital financial relationship by bringing account opening, lending, payments, servicing, and AI-powered engagement together within a single platform. More importantly, it gives financial institutions the flexibility to compete digitally while preserving the personal relationships that have always been their greatest advantage.”
ATTUNE was founded in 2019 to offer end-to-end digital solutions for lending and home buying. The company’s Digital Origination Platform helps organize, manage, and process customers and financial products to help banks meet and stay ahead of their customers’ financial needs, and then intelligently provide logical product and service solutions. ATTUNE’s account opening and loan origination solutions are core and digital banking agnostic, which allows financial institutions to deploy them alongside their existing systems or integrate them with Tyfone’s nFinia Digital Banking Solution.
“When we founded ATTUNE, our belief was simple,” said ATTUNE Founder and CEO AK Patel. “Community financial institutions shouldn’t have to stitch together multiple vendors to deliver a modern digital experience. The future of banking belongs to institutions that can acquire, onboard, lend to, and serve customers through one connected platform. Joining Tyfone accelerates that vision by bringing together digital account opening, lending, payments, servicing, digital banking, and AI into a single open ecosystem.”
Integrating ATTUNE’s expertise and technology into its own platform will bring Tyfone’s bank clients a unified experience that simplifies operations by eliminating fragmented point solutions in order to help banks build stronger customer relationships. With ATTUNE’s technology, banks will be able to originate consumer and business loans, accept payments through Quick Pay, offer payment flexibility with Skip-a-Pay, and manage collections with Collect.
The acquisition comes as community banks and credit unions increasingly look to consolidate their technology stacks, replacing fragmented point solutions with platforms that can support more of the customer lifecycle. Adding ATTUNE will evolve Tyfone beyond its roots in digital banking by giving it a role at the very beginning of the customer relationship. Instead of first engaging with a customer after an account has already been opened or a loan originated, Tyfone can now support the relationship from acquisition and onboarding through lending, payments, servicing, and ongoing digital banking.
“Together, we’re helping community financial institutions compete on experience instead of size, deepen customer relationships, and innovate faster while preserving the personal service that has always been their greatest competitive advantage,” added Patel.
Tyfone is one of the earlier Finovate alums, having demoed at the first Finovate event to take place in San Francisco at FinovateSpring 2008. At the show, Tyfone Co-Founder Siva Narendra demoed a memory card for a mobile phone that facilitated contactless payments. The company, which used to focus on mobile-only solutions, began developing for multiple channels in 2014. A decade later, in 2024, Tyfone launched its Payfinia brand to provide instant payment solutions to both financial institutions and third-party organizations.
Interestingly, Tyfone has evolved from mobile payments to multichannel banking to instant payments to lending and digital banking. This week’s acquisition of ATTUNE marks another step in this progression, making Tyfone more of an end-to-end banking technology platform and less of a digital banking interface provider.
SettleMint has partnered with Ripple to integrate Ripple Custody into its Digital Asset Lifecycle Platform (DALP), bringing custody, issuance, compliance, settlement, and servicing together on one platform.
The partnership expands Ripple’s institutional digital asset footprint while strengthening SettleMint’s ability to offer financial institutions an end-to-end platform for managing tokenized assets.
The tie-up reflects tokenization’s shift from experimentation to implementation, as banks increasingly need integrated infrastructure to move digital asset initiatives into production.
Digital asset lifecycle management company SettleMint has entered a strategic partnership with blockchain solutions company Ripple to help banks custody, issue, and manage tokenized assets.
SettleMint will integrate Ripple Custody, Ripple’s institutional-grade digital asset custody infrastructure, with its own Digital Asset Lifecycle Platform (DALP), a composable digital asset lifecycle platform built for financial institutions, market infrastructure operators, and sovereign entities. DALP brings issuance, compliance, custody, settlement, and servicing onto a single platform, allowing financial institutions to manage the full lifecycle of a digital asset without relying on multiple vendors or separate systems to move from pilot to production. SettleMint’s DALP is currently used by financial institutions across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific.
Ripple launched its digital asset custody infrastructure in 2024 and has since expanded its capabilities via new partnerships with Securosys and Figment, an integration with Chainalysis, and its acquisition of Palisade in November of 2025. Bringing Ripple’s custody solution into SettleMint’s DALP platform will allow institutions to hold and manage digital assets in a regulated, compliant way using a single vendor for custody, issuance, compliance, and servicing.
“Global capital markets are moving fully on-chain, and that shift only works when digital asset custody and lifecycle management operate as one system rather than two,” said SettleMint CEO Adam Popat. “Combining Ripple Custody and DALP gives institutions that single foundation, and this partnership lets us bring it to regulated markets globally.”
The offering is now live in Asia and will be available in other geographies as demand develops.
“Financial institutions across Asia Pacific are putting digital assets to work,” said Ripple Managing Director of Asia Pacific Fiona Murray. “They are asking how to do more without stitching together separate solutions for custody, issuance, and governance. This partnership gives them the foundation to roll out digital assets and future-proof them from there: Ripple Custody to hold and govern the asset, and SettleMint to manage its entire lifecycle.”
Founded under the name OpenCoin in 2012, Ripple debuted at FinovateSpring the following year. The company provides blockchain-based solutions across traditional and digital finance. Its solutions span global payments, custody, liquidity, prime brokerage, and treasury management tools for banks, fintechs, payment service providers, and crypto businesses.
The partnership extends the reach of Ripple’s custody infrastructure by embedding it within a broader digital asset management platform. For SettleMint, adding Ripple Custody strengthens DALP’s ability to serve as a single access point for institutions looking to issue and manage tokenized assets.
Just as we’re seeing with stablecoins, tokenization is moving from experimentation to implementation. As banks move tokenized assets into production, custody alone is not enough. Participating institutions will also need to add infrastructure for issuance, compliance, settlement, and ongoing asset management. Integrating these functions eliminates the need for institutions to stitch together multiple providers, making it easier for banks to move forward with digital asset initiatives.
We officially have 72 demos on stage at this year’s FinovateFall conference, taking place September 9 through 11 at the Marriott Marquis in New York (book now!). This year’s lineup is a nice mix of startups with established players, and with all demos running on a single track, you won’t miss a thing. This concentrated format makes it easy to spot the patterns shaping bank roadmaps for the next 12 to 18 months.
Here’s a look at what trends lie ahead, based on what we’re seeing across this year’s demo companies.
AI gets to work
It will come as no surprise that AI is the most prominent enabling technology on the FinovateFall stage this year. What’s more interesting is that this year’s demo companies are showing that the industry has evolved its use of AI to tackle specific jobs that are expensive, repetitive, time consuming, or difficult to scale.
In wealth management, AdvisorHelpAI, Covecta, GPTAdvisor, Nextvestment, Mobena, and Valcori Automated Solutions are using technology to augment advisors, improve planning, organize institutional knowledge, or streamline the work that happens around client relationships. CUltivate AI, LemonadeLXP, and ScreenSteps are focused on the employee side of the equation, helping financial institution staff learn, find information, and navigate complex processes more efficiently. Inbenta, Titan AI, Tweezr, Birdie AI, and Hamming AI similarly point toward a future in which AI is embedded into service and operational workflows rather than living in a standalone chatbot.
The same shift is happening with data. Pyramid Solutions, Data City, Preql AI, and Ventus AI are helping organizations extract more useful intelligence from the data they already have, while Go.AI allows financial institutions to use AI while maintaining greater control over their data, models, and outputs.
Banks are slowly realizing that they can outsource a wide range of tasks to AI, and fintechs are making that possible.
Agentic AI moves deeper into financial operations
The next evolution is already visible as fintechs begin building technology capable of taking action.
Saris AI is building agents to automate lending, compliance, and operations tasks, while Rexi applies an agentic layer to transaction matching, reconciliation, and discrepancy resolution. Palomonte Labs is building infrastructure that makes financial APIs understandable and executable by AI agents, and Tacnode is tackling the data layer by giving agents access to shared, real-time context.
Agentic concepts are showing up in more specialized areas, too. Vertice AI is applying autonomous capabilities to marketing campaign planning and execution, while Transvision Solutions uses autonomous AI to conduct AML investigations. Kita Technologies deploys multiple specialized agents across the lending process. Voyager AI similarly brings intelligence to document collection, spreading, underwriting, compliance, and credit memo preparation.
The first generation of agentic banking may be much less visible to consumers than other developments have been. Rather than immediately handing an AI agent control over a customer’s entire financial life, financial institutions appear more interested in deploying specialized agents with narrowly defined jobs, permissions, data, and guardrails.
Fintech targets operating leverage
One of the more interesting themes in this year’s lineup has less to do with a particular technology and more to do with the outcome fintechs are promising. Many are seeking to help financial institutions accomplish more without adding equivalent amounts of headcount, cost, or complexity.
This becomes very clear when we look at the lending subsector. ALoan is automating commercial underwriting and credit memo preparation, while QuickFi digitizes commercial equipment financing from application through final payment. Kato uses automation to lower the cost of servicing and collections, Veritus deploys AI voice and text agents across lending and collections, and Vertyx automates servicing workflows after mortgage close. Donevia adds an intelligence and engagement layer to existing lending infrastructure rather than requiring institutions to replace their LOS.
Other companies are attacking operational friction from different angles. MHC automates documents, payments, and customer communications, while Naehas automates regulated offers, disclosures, and marketing processes. Loquat brings onboarding, lending, cards, and back-office lifecycle management together for community financial institutions. Finerative, Horizon AI, FFERM Technologies, and adapfin Technologies are also addressing specialized areas where better technology can streamline decision-making or financial operations.
Even Delfi Labs, which operates in capital markets rather than traditional bank operations, reflects the same underlying theme by using AI-guided analytics and streamlined execution to help community financial institutions make balance-sheet decisions more efficiently.
This is a notable shift from an earlier era of fintech, when some of the industry’s most visible innovations centered on making banking look and feel better. Smoother onboarding and cleaner interfaces still matter, but much of this year’s technology is focused on making the institution itself operate better.
Customer engagement gets tied to outcomes
Customer engagement and financial wellness remain prominent on the demo stage, but this year’s companies are increasingly connecting them to measurable behaviors and business outcomes.
BankUniverse uses intent signals to identify high-value prospects and improve digital conversion, while Finalytics.ai uses behavioral, transactional, and third-party data to create segment-of-one experiences. Tapix enriches raw payment data to create the clean merchant and transaction information needed to power better analytics and personalization. Omnisient adds another dimension by enabling privacy-preserving collaboration around consumer data, and Radar uses location intelligence not only for fraud prevention, but also to help companies engage users in context.
Other companies are connecting financial wellness more directly to action. Doshi combines gamified financial education with product-readiness signals, while GenAspire uses teen banking and financial literacy as an acquisition strategy for community financial institutions. Young Early Starters combines education with real, parent-approved investing, and On Time Harvest pairs cash-flow forecasting and behavioral insights with financial education and planning.
Perqia uses incentives timed to borrower cash flow to encourage loan repayment. Clockout connects financial wellness and liquidity tools to direct-deposit growth and engagement. And Goodbuy turns community commerce into a channel designed to drive account activation, deposits, card usage, and interchange.
Even lending and payments are becoming more contextual. equipifi brings personalized BNPL and flexible payments into the digital banking relationship, while OptimaFI uses household-level intelligence and peer benchmarking to identify growth and risk opportunities.
The common thread is that engagement is now focused on influencing what happens next instead of generating clicks.
Infrastructure takes center stage
Much of the technology on the FinovateFall stage will be the infrastructure that consumers never see.
Payments provide a good example. 3 Degrees enables community banks and credit unions to embed cross-border payments, while Finzly provides infrastructure for banks to process payments across rails including ACH, Fedwire, RTP, SWIFT, and FedNow. Neural Payments connects financial institutions to multiple payment rails and wallets through a single branded integration. Paywhere and Tyfone also illustrate the continued evolution of the technology connecting financial institutions, payments, and digital banking experiences.
Glide combines digital account opening, lending, onboarding, identity verification, fraud detection, and funding, demonstrating another important infrastructure trend: financial institutions increasingly want capabilities that can slot into their existing environments rather than require wholesale replacement.
Security and trust are becoming part of that infrastructure, as well. Darwinium continuously evaluates digital behavior to identify fraud across customer journeys, while Illuma applies voice authentication to contact-center security. SLC Digital focuses on secure digital authentication and account-takeover prevention, and Quavo Fraud & Disputes tackles the operational infrastructure surrounding fraud and disputes.
McCarthy Hatch applies AI to regulatory risk by analyzing customer complaints, while RangersAI moves fraud prevention closer to the customer with real-time scam education and intervention. Warrant and Root represent other approaches to establishing trust and managing risk as financial services become increasingly digital.
And some infrastructure is aimed at expanding what financial institutions can offer in the first place. Blytz, Cosmos, and FinZee AI illustrate just how broadly the definition of financial technology continues to stretch, from new forms of financial interaction to technologies that connect financial behavior with other sources of context.
In a broad sense, many of this year’s fintechs aren’t trying to replace the bank or even become the customer’s primary financial interface. This new breed is building the intelligence, automation, security, payments, data, and workflow layers that allow existing financial institutions to modernize.
What’s missing?
For a demo lineup this large, almost every corner of fintech has some representation. Still, one of today’s loudest industry conversations is surprisingly quiet.
Stablecoins have moved squarely into mainstream conversations about payments, settlement, and banking infrastructure, but there isn’t a corresponding wave of stablecoin issuers, tokenized-deposit platforms, crypto custody providers, or blockchain companies on the demo stage. This is a reflection of the fact that regulatory frameworks like those established by the GENIUS Act and proposed under the CLARITY Act are still taking shape, and many traditional banks are hesitant to jump into decentralized finance without established regulatory guidelines.
Overall, this year’s demos point toward a fintech industry that is becoming less focused on novelty and more focused on execution. AI is being tasked with real work, agents are beginning to execute defined processes, infrastructure is drawing attention, and customer engagement is increasingly being tied to measurable outcomes.
The flashy front-end experience hasn’t disappeared, but much of the innovation at FinovateFall 2026 will be happening behind it. And for banks planning their next 12 to 18 months of technology investment, that may be the trend that matters most.
FinovateFall returns to New York September 9 through 11, bringing more than 100 industry experts to the Marriott Marquis Times Square to discuss the forces reshaping banking and fintech.
This year’s keynote lineup reflects just how much is changing at once. Banks and fintechs are navigating an uncertain economic and geopolitical environment while determining where AI can create real value, how to defend against increasingly sophisticated financial crime, what stablecoins mean for payments, and who will control customer relationships as financial data moves into AI-powered interfaces.
With that in mind, here are some of the keynote sessions worth adding to your FinovateFall agenda.
Manas Chawla, Founder and Chief Executive, London Politica
The Global Economic and Geopolitical Outlook and The Direction Of Travel For The US Economy Wednesday, September 9
Fintech doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Interest rates, geopolitical tensions, trade policy, economic growth, and shifting global alliances ultimately influence everything from lending and investment to payments and consumer behavior.
London Politica Founder and Chief Executive Manas Chawla will open the conversation by zooming out from individual technologies and examining the broader economic and geopolitical forces shaping the US economy. For banking and fintech leaders making investment decisions amid continued uncertainty, Chawla’s keynote offers context for understanding the environment in which those decisions will play out.
Jennifer White, Senior Director, Global Banking and Payments Intelligence, J.D. Power
Fraud in The Age Of AI: How To Respond When The Attacker Has Better Tools Than You Thursday, September 10
AI is giving financial institutions new tools to detect fraud, but it is also lowering the cost and increasing the sophistication of attacks. Deepfakes, synthetic identities, automated social engineering, and increasingly scalable fraud operations are changing the threat landscape.
Jennifer White, Senior Director of Global Banking and Payments Intelligence at J.D. Power, will address what happens when financial criminals have access to many of the same (or potentially better) AI tools as the institutions trying to stop them. Her quick-fire keynote will consider how fraud defenses must evolve as financial crime becomes increasingly industrialized.
Jon Lakefish, Founder, Lakefish Group
AI-Enhanced CX to Create Trust and Loyalty Friday, September 11
The question surrounding AI is quickly moving beyond whether financial institutions should use it. Instead, the questions now pertain to how AI can deliver measurable value.
Jon Lakefish, Founder of Lakefish Group, will take a practical approach to that question by focusing on customer experience. His keynote will explore the AI tools available today and how organizations can put them to work to improve customer interactions, build trust, and strengthen loyalty.
Lakefish brings more than 20 years of branding and marketing experience to the discussion and focuses his work on helping businesses translate AI from an emerging technology into practical tools that can save time, reduce costs, and improve decision-making.
Arthur J. O’Connor, Academic Director of Data Science and Generative AI, CUNY School of Professional Studies
From Copilots To Colleagues: As AI Shifts From Assistive Tools To Semi-Autonomous Actors, What Does It Mean For Control, Risk, And Value? Friday, September 11
The next phase of financial services AI may look very different from the chatbots and copilots that characterized its first wave.
As AI systems gain the ability to take actions rather than simply provide information, financial institutions will have to rethink questions of control, accountability, governance, and risk. Arthur J. O’Connor, Academic Director of Data Science & Generative AI at CUNY School of Professional Studies, will explore what happens as AI makes the transition from tool to semi-autonomous actor and where financial institutions can capture value without surrendering appropriate oversight.
Luther Liang, SVP, Head of Product, Grasshopper Bank
Stablecoin 101: What Are They and Why Do They Matter? How Can Banks Monetize Them? How Will They Affect Payments? Friday, September 11
Stablecoins have moved rapidly from a crypto industry topic to a strategic question for banks. The conversation is increasingly about practical applications: payments, settlement, cross-border money movement, deposits, and how financial institutions should participate.
Grasshopper Bank SVP and Head of Product Luther Liang will provide a practical introduction to the technology and, more importantly, examine the business case. His keynote will consider where banks can monetize stablecoins, how they could reshape payments, and what financial institutions need to understand as stablecoin infrastructure moves closer to mainstream financial services.
Personalization That Pays: Turning Data into Revenue, Not Just Engagement
Friday, September 11
Banks have spent years investing in personalization, but personalized experiences do not automatically translate into better economics.
This Customer Experience & Trust keynote will tackle the next step: turning customer data and personalization into measurable business value. The discussion will consider how financial institutions can move beyond using data simply to drive engagement and instead connect personalization with revenue.
Speaker to be announced.
Stefany Bello, Senior Vice President, Digital Partnerships, Fintech and Enablers in North America, Mastercard
Payment Innovation: Customer Choice Friday, September 11
Consumers increasingly expect payments to fit around how they want to transact rather than the other way around.
Mastercard Senior Vice President of Digital Partnerships, Fintech and Enablers in North America Stefany Bello will participate in a fireside chat examining payment innovation, including the launch of Cleo’s program and what new payment options mean for consumer choice and flexibility.
The conversation comes as payments become increasingly embedded within broader financial experiences and consumers gain more ways to determine how, when, and through which provider they pay.
Beyond 1033: Who Controls Customer Data In An AI-Driven Financial System?
Friday, September 11
The debate over open banking is no longer limited to whether consumers can share their financial data with third-party apps.
As open banking evolves toward open finance and consumers increasingly interact with their financial lives through LLMs and AI-powered interfaces, the bigger question may become who controls that data once it starts moving between banks, fintechs, aggregators, and AI platforms.
This quick-fire keynote will look beyond Section 1033 to consider what this new layer of intermediation could mean for banks and their relationships with customers.
Speaker to be announced.
A CIA Whistle-Blower’s Perspective On Speaking Truth To Power: Secret Wars & CIA Lies
Friday, September 11
FinovateFall’s final out-of-the-box keynote will take the conversation well beyond financial technology.
Drawing on the experience of a CIA whistle-blower, the session will examine what it means to challenge powerful institutions, operate in environments where information and incentives collide, and speak truth to power. It’s a different lens from the banking and technology discussions taking place throughout the week—and an opportunity to close the conference by thinking more broadly about transparency, accountability, and institutional decision-making.
Speaker to be announced.
One lineup, several big questions
Taken together, these keynotes highlight a common challenge facing financial services leaders: how do you make decisions when technology and the environment around it are changing faster than traditional planning cycles?
AI is simultaneously becoming a customer experience tool, an autonomous actor, and a weapon for fraudsters. Stablecoins are challenging assumptions about how money moves. Open finance is raising new questions about who controls customer data. All of these developments, which our speakers will cover in depth at FinovateFall, are unfolding against a changing economic and geopolitical backdrop.
FinovateFall takes place September 9 through 11, 2026, at the Marriott Marquis Times Square in New York. In addition to the keynote sessions, this year’s agenda includes more than 70 seven-minute fintech demos and dedicated content across AI and innovation, customer experience and trust, and the future of money. Check out the full agenda and register today to save your seat.
Stripe has acquired startup legal infrastructure provider Clerky, expanding beyond payments into startup formation and ongoing corporate operations.
The deal could help Stripe bring companies into its ecosystem earlier, establishing relationships during incorporation, fundraising, and hiring before startups ever need payment processing.
Clerky complements Stripe Atlas with deeper legal workflows and attorney relationships, strengthening Stripe’s push to become a broader operating infrastructure layer for startups.
Payment infrastructure fintech Stripe is getting into a new infrastructure layer this week. The California-based company has acquiredClerky, a company that offers legal infrastructure that startups need during and after formation. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Clerky was founded in 2011 to help startups with legal paperwork surrounding incorporation and post-incorporation documentation, board actions, SAFEs and convertible notes, hiring documentation, stock and option issuances, and ongoing corporate maintenance. It also offers startup attorneys a private workspace that makes it easy to work with a startup’s clients and colleagues.
“As startup attorneys in Silicon Valley, we saw how our clients would try to get paperwork done faster and cheaper, but ended up paying us more in the end to fix everything,” Clerky said in its blog post. “We started Clerky to provide the experience our clients were looking for, but with our legal expertise built into the products.”
Acquiring Clerky will help Stripe bring startups into its ecosystem even earlier. Instead of waiting until a business needs payments, Stripe will use Clerky to help establish the relationship during incorporation, fundraising, and hiring. Ideally, Stripe will retain that company as it scales.
Additionally, Clerky will help Stripe expand Atlas from formation into startup operations. Atlas, which Stripe launched in 2016, lets founders incorporate a Delaware company, obtain an EIN, issue founder equity, file an 83(b) election, generate SAFEs, and then move directly into banking and Stripe’s payments ecosystem. While Atlas and Clerky overlap when it comes to startup formation, Clerky brings deeper legal workflows and relationships with startup attorneys.
Given these two elements, Stripe could possibly offer a more holistic startup ecosystem that helps startups incorporate, establish equity, fundraise, hire employees, accept payments, and manage money. While Stripe hasn’t announced this exact integration, it may help increase ecosystem stickiness.
Today, Clerky’s startup clients account for 23% of all Silicon Valley seed and pre-seed financings and together have raised over $140 billion in venture capital. Additionally, Clerky counts hundreds of attorney and paralegal clients that use its platform to work with their customers. Under Stripe’s ownership, Clerky plans to continue to build its client base and provide the same high level of service to startups and attorneys that it has in the past.
Stripe’s move is another example of fintechs moving upstream. By helping startups with formation and legal infrastructure before they ever need payment processing, Stripe can establish relationships earlier in a company’s lifecycle and potentially grow alongside those businesses. The acquisition also reflects Stripe’s broader evolution from a payments provider into an operating infrastructure layer for startups, giving founders more reasons to remain within its ecosystem as their companies scale.
Basware has agreed to acquire payment fraud prevention company Trustpair, with the transaction expected to close later in 2026.
The acquisition will extend Basware’s invoice lifecycle assurance through payment, combining its AP automation capabilities with Trustpair’s AI-driven account validation and payment fraud prevention.
The deal reflects the convergence of AP automation, payments, and fraud prevention as AI-driven fraud increases demand for end-to-end transaction security.
Enterprise payment solutions company Basware announced it has agreed to acquire payment fraud prevention company Trustpair this week for an undisclosed amount. The transaction is expected to be completed later in 2026.
Basware, provider of AP automation, e-invoicing, and compliance tools, anticipates that Trustpair’s fraud prevention tools will enhance its invoice lifecycle management tools by delivering invoice lifecycle assurance that covers the entire transaction. Basware will use its tools to confirm that an invoice is legitimate and approved, while Trustpair will confirm that the payment reaches the intended supplier.
Trustpair was founded in 2017 to secure enterprise payments using its AI-driven risk intelligence. Today, the South Carolina-based company serves more than 600 organizations by automating manual account validation to serve as a centralized, strategic layer of payment security.
“Trustpair was built around a simple belief: approving the right invoice is not enough if the money ultimately reaches the wrong account,” said Trustpair Co-Founder and CEO Baptiste Collot. “By bringing our capabilities together, we see the opportunity to give finance teams stronger protection across the full journey, from supplier onboarding and invoice approval through payment. Trustpair will continue to operate with the same team, platform, and commitment to our customers and partners across the finance environments they already use. Basware’s reach and resources will help us accelerate beyond what we could have achieved alone.”
Once the acquisition is finalized, Trustpair will leverage Basware’s intelligence spanning 2.5 billion invoices and 20 million suppliers to strengthen its validation models and gain a faster route to a wider customer base.
Founded in 1985, Basware’s invoice lifecycle management platform offers governed autonomy, continuous compliance, financial integrity, and enterprise control. By governing the entire AP process end-to-end across every country, and every ERP, Basware helps enterprises automate accounts payable while maintaining the controls needed to ensure invoices are legitimate, compliant, and accurately processed. Basware counts more than 6,500 customers worldwide, including DHL, Heineken, and NBC Universal Media.
“AI may be the most powerful productivity tool of our generation,” said Basware CEO Jason Kurtz. “Unfortunately, it is also becoming one of the most powerful tools ever placed in the hands of criminals. A finance team can do everything right on the invoice and still send the money to the wrong bank account. Basware has spent more than 40 years protecting the invoice. Bringing Basware and Trustpair together extends that protection through the payment itself. Together, we will offer the first end-to-end invoice-to-payment assurance in the market, strengthening financial integrity and continuous compliance across the invoice lifecycle.”
As AI tools proliferate, AP automation tools are expanding to better manage financial risk across the transaction lifecycle. AI is making payment fraud increasingly sophisticated, which means that validating and approving an invoice is no longer sufficient to ensure a legitimate transaction. Embedding payment validation into AP workflows gives platforms like Basware an opportunity to move beyond automating financial processes to protecting the movement of money itself. For fintechs, the shift could further blur the lines between AP automation, payments, and fraud prevention as businesses look for platforms that can manage and secure a transaction from invoice through payment.
Nayax plans to acquire smart parking technology provider IPS Group to expand its presence in parking and curb management.
The acquisition will combine IPS’ parking technology and 250,000-space footprint with Nayax’s payments infrastructure and global reach, creating new expansion and cross-sell opportunities.
The deal reflects Nayax’s “land and expand” M&A strategy and the broader convergence of payments and vertical software as payment providers move beyond transaction processing.
Global commerce, payments, and loyalty platform Nayaxannounced plans today to acquire smart parking technology provider IPS Group from Windjammer Capital Investors for an undisclosed amount.
Founded in 2000, IPS offers payment-enabled smart parking technology that processes millions of consumer payment transactions each year. The platform operates using physical infrastructure such as meters, combined with mobile and text-based payments, enforcement and permitting software, vehicle detection tools, and curb data analytics.
Nayax will tap IPS, which has two decades of experience building parking technology with an established base of more than 250,000 parking spaces. Nayax anticipates that its established reach across more than 120 countries will help IPS expand into new markets while giving its own customers access to a parking and curb management solution, adding cross-sell opportunities to Nayax’s existing offering. Nayax estimates that IPS will boost its addressable cashless opportunity to approximately $342 billion by 2029.
“Cities run some of the most demanding unattended commerce anywhere, with strict compliance requirements and infrastructure that must last a decade,” said Nayax CEO Yair Nechmad. “Together with IPS we can give cities a unified platform for the curb and run parking alongside EV charging.”
Nayax was founded in 2005 and offers cashless payment, IoT service, and management solutions for unattended retail stores. The Maryland-based company’s tools work best for high-frequency, low-value transactions for which Nayax provides end-to-end hardware, software, payments, and loyalty.
Acquisitions play a major role in Nayax’s growth strategy. In addition to today’s deal, the company has made 10 acquisitions over the past 21 years, following a “land and expand” playbook of acquiring established solution providers in specific verticals and integrating them with Nayax’s payments infrastructure. The strategy allows Nayax to leverage the acquired companies’ industry expertise and customer relationships while using its payments stack and global reach to scale their businesses into new markets.
“IPS fits perfectly into our M&A playbook,” said Nayax Chief Strategy Officer Aaron Greenberg. “We seek companies in verticals where payments and software work together, using our payment stack and infrastructure to take these businesses global. From hardware quality to payments strength, it is exactly the platform a combined Nayax-IPS represents.”
The deal shows how unique payments infrastructure can help organizations expand into specialized verticals. Rather than building industry-specific software and distribution from scratch, payments companies can acquire established vertical platforms and layer their existing payments capabilities onto them. The acquisition also reflects the continued convergence of payments and vertical software. As payments become increasingly embedded within industry-specific platforms, payment providers have an opportunity to move beyond transaction processing and own more of the technology their customers use to operate.
