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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
After rumors swirled last week about Nuvei’s plans to acquire Payoneer, the deal has been made official this week. Nuvei has agreed to acquire the global payments solutions company for $2.75 billion to bolster its payments infrastructure. There’s plenty of other fintech news to catch up on this week, so we’ll continue to add more announcements as the week progresses.
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Late last week, a handful of the largest US banks revealed a plan to launch their own tokenized deposit network.
JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and other major banks will launch the new network, which is set to launch by mid-2027. The banks are launching this new network in partnership with The Clearing House (TCH), a bank-owned consortium that operates critical US payment infrastructure, including the RTP network, which enables real-time payments between participating financial institutions.
The initiative will connect traditional banking infrastructure with blockchain-based payments while keeping deposits inside the banking system. Here are five things banks and fintechs should know.
TradFi’s answer to stablecoins
With a market value of more than $316 billion, stablecoins are no longer a crypto experiment. Stablecoin issuance is projected to reach between $3 trillion and $4 trillion by 2030. This growth has the attention of some of the largest banks in the world, warranting a coordinated response.
Similar to stablecoins, a tokenized network offers 24/7 infrastructure and programmable payments, allowing banks to deliver many of the benefits associated with stablecoins. Most notably, the tokenized deposits network will not require customers to move funds outside the traditional banking system, meaning banks will be able to retain their deposits.
Because tokenized deposits are still bank deposits, they retain the same regulatory treatment, accounting treatment, and credit-risk profile as traditional deposits. Tokenized deposits are different from traditional deposits in that they are represented on blockchain infrastructure instead of existing bank ledgers.
It’s about controlling infrastructure
For much of the past decade, fintech competition centered on who could best distribute products and services. Fintechs and banks competed to acquire customers, launch new apps, and build better digital experiences. Recently, however, firms have shifted their focus to controlling the infrastructure that powers financial services.
This race toward infrastructure can be seen in Stripe acquiring Bridge to gain stablecoin infrastructure, Visa’s and Mastercard’s recent investment in stablecoin settlement capabilities, and in banks’ efforts to build tokenized deposit networks. Rather than competing for customer relationships, these companies are positioning themselves to own the rails that move money.
The new tokenized deposit network creates a shared infrastructure layer for programmable deposits and real-time settlement, allowing participating banks to ensure they remain at the center of digital money movement.
The initial target is corporate treasury, not consumers
The new tokenized deposits network will initially be aimed at corporate treasury, which means it will likely not reach consumers before 2028.
TCH expects early demand to come from multinational corporations seeking treasury automation, real-time liquidity management, cross-border payments, and programmable payments. These are the same use cases that have helped stablecoins gain traction among businesses.
While some of these workflows and use cases are applicable to retail clients, businesses stand to benefit the most from real-time settlement, programmable payments, and always-on liquidity management. For that reason, the battle between tokenized deposits and stablecoins may take place in corporate treasury long before it reaches the consumer wallet.
A tokenized network offers 24/7 infrastructure
One of the biggest benefits of blockchain-based payments is that they do not operate on traditional banking schedules that have batch processing at the end of each day.
The new proposed network would allow tokenized deposits to settle 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This continuous movement helps banks compete with stablecoin networks that already offer near-instant transfers at any time.
Smaller institutions will eventually need a position
With large financial institutions taking the lead on this new tokenized deposits network, where does that leave smaller community banks and credit unions? These smaller institutions will need to find their role in a world where money increasingly moves on programmable infrastructure.
Fortunately for these smaller institutions, the network is expected to be available to banks across the US, not just the largest institutions. As different digital asset infrastructure matures, financial institutions may need to determine their stance on whether they will issue, connect to, custody, or simply enable access to these new forms of digital money.
Klarna launched a high-yield savings account paying up to 3.38% APY, adding deposits and savings tools to its growing portfolio of consumer financial products.
The move builds on Klarna’s existing banking ambitions. The company already holds $12.3 billion in deposits globally and has offered interest-bearing accounts in Europe since 2021.
As Klarna expands from BNPL into savings, payments, P2P transfers, and stablecoins, it is increasingly positioning itself as a full-service digital bank rather than a standalone payments provider.
Digital payments app Klarna is starting to look more like a bank ecosystem. The Sweden-based company has launched a high-yield savings account, adding to its existing suite of banking tools.
The fintech’s new savings account, which currently pays 3.38% APY or higher, does not require a minimum deposit, charge monthly fees, or require a direct deposit. It also offers built-in tools like round-ups, scheduled transfers, and savings goals. While Klarna is partnering with FDIC-insured WebBank, which is holding the funds, users can fund the account in the Klarna app.
Klarna already offers flexible payment tools, debit and credit payment cards, a shopping platform, and mobile telco plans. Savings is a natural next step for Klarna, especially since the company has offered interest-bearing accounts in Europe since 2021. Today, the company holds $12.3 billion in deposits across eleven markets.
“The average American earns less than half a percent on their savings, not because better options don’t exist, but because their bank hasn’t had to compete,” said Klarna CEO and Co-founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski. “Klarna is already where millions of Americans manage their everyday spending. Now it’s where they save too.”
As with many high-yield savings accounts, the percentage yield on Klarna’s new savings account is subject to change. According to the fine print, users can open up to three accounts and can boost their APY by becoming a Klarna member. The higher yield will be paid on balances of up to $50,000.
The new launch follows Klarna’s move into the public markets after its IPO in September of 2025. Today, the company counts over 119 million global active users and 3.4 million transactions per day. While it has not provided updated figures for its Balance accounts, Klarna reported that its Balance accounts held $14 billion in 2025. Given the higher yield that the new savings accounts pay, it is reasonable to assume that much of the funds in the Balance accounts will be moved to the new savings accounts.
Klarna debuted peer-to-peer (P2P) capabilities in 13 European markets earlier this year. And while it has not yet launched similar P2P capabilities in the US, the company will likely do so after it moves its stablecoin (KlarnaUSD) from a testnet to the mainnet. The launch of the savings account places Klarna another step closer to becoming a full-service digital bank. Klarna has built its brand around buy now, pay later, but is increasingly expanding into deposits, payments, and everyday banking.
Stripe-owned stablecoin infrastructure platform Bridge is partnering with Banking Circle to enable clients to move stablecoins into and out of local currencies, with support for EUR, GBP, USD, and soon AUD.
The partnership combines Bridge’s stablecoin capabilities with Banking Circle’s regulated banking infrastructure, correspondent banking network, and local clearing access to facilitate cross-border payments and fiat-to-stablecoin conversions.
The deal reflects the growing convergence of traditional banking and stablecoin infrastructure, as businesses increasingly seek regulated on- and off-ramps that make stablecoins practical for everyday global payments.
Banking Circle, a Luxembourg-based bank, announced today that Stripe-owned stablecoin infrastructure platform Bridge is using it to move money across the globe.
Banking Circle’s money movement infrastructure enables Bridge’s clients to move stablecoins in and out of local currencies. Currently, Banking Circle supports EUR and GBP, and plans to offer support for AUD in the third quarter of this year. Bridge will also use Banking Circle’s SWIFT capabilities to allow its clients to send and receive USD.
By offering stablecoin on- and off-ramps to and from local currencies, Bridge is giving its clients the flexibility to send and receive payments in multiple European currencies without having to worry about holding the currencies themselves.
“As payment businesses continue to expand globally, access to reliable, scalable banking infrastructure is critical,” said Banking Circle Chief Digital Assets Officer Kirit Bhatia. “Banking Circle provides regulated banking rails, local clearing access, multi-currency accounts and cross-border payment capabilities through a single integration, helping companies simplify operations and accelerate growth in new markets.”
As a fully regulated, licensed bank, Banking Circle offers Bridge access to its correspondent banking network for global payments. The company was founded in 2013 to provide payments, banking, and lending infrastructure to financial institutions and regulated payment businesses.
The partnership highlights the growing convergence between stablecoin infrastructure providers and traditional banking institutions. While Bridge offers businesses a way to move value using stablecoins, Banking Circle provides the regulated banking rails, local clearing access, and correspondent banking relationships needed to move funds into and out of local currencies.
“Banking Circle’s API-led infrastructure and multi-currency capabilities support our continued global expansion,” said Bridge Head of Product Mai Leduc Blount. “By making it seamless for businesses to convert between fiat and stablecoins, we ensure that any business can use stablecoins for everyday expenses, all around the world.”
Bridge was founded in 2022 to serve as an alternative payment method to compete with SWIFT and credit cards and was acquired by Stripe in 2024 for $1.1 billion. Bridge’s technology allows businesses to move, store, and accept stablecoins using just a few lines of code. The company’s Issuance APIs help clients issue their own stablecoin and accept USD, EUR, USDC, USDT or any other stablecoin.
Reset raised $6 million in seed funding from credit union customers and partners to expand its embedded earned wage access platform for credit unions and community banks.
The company positions earned wage access as a tool to deepen relationships and grow deposits, reporting that cardholders increase deposits by 27%, maintain 36% higher balances, and generate 20% more interchange revenue.
Credit unions increasingly view earned wage access as competitive infrastructure to defend primary financial relationships against digital banks and neobanks.
Embedded earned wage access platform Resetunveiled today that it has raised $6 million in seed funding. The investment, which comes from credit union customers and strategic partners in the credit union and community banking space, boosts Reset’s total funding to more than $8 million.
Reset will use the funds to expand its sales and implementation capacity, deepen product development, and accelerate existing deployments.
California-based Reset, which aims to serve credit unions and community banks, embeds its technology directly into financial institutions’ existing technology stacks to enable members to access their earned wages on a daily basis, fee-free, via a card issued by the credit union or community bank.
“When your customers lead your funding round, there is no clearer market signal,” said Reset CEO and Co-founder Matt Dicou. “These credit unions aren’t just writing a check. They’re making a decision about where they want to take their members, their institutions, and the credit union industry. They see that Chime and other neobanks are successfully recruiting people away from credit unions today. Our credit union partners already have trusted member relationships. We give them what they need to remain the primary financial home.”
Reset anticipates that the earned wage card will help financial institutions grow direct deposits, since the more a member deposits, the more real-time funds they can access. The company said that cardholders increase deposits held at their credit union by 27% and maintain checking account balances 36% higher than before switching cards.
In addition to the earned wage feature, Reset also helps credit unions generate credit interchange revenue on cardholder’s everyday spend. The company said that its cardholders generate 20% more in credit interchange revenue for their institution.
“When a credit union invests in a fintech, it sends a message: we believe in this enough to put our name on it. Reset is solving a real problem for working members, and it’s doing it in a way that makes the credit union stronger in the process,” said Stephanie Curtis, Chief Member Experience Officer at VyStar Credit Union.
Rather than viewing earned wage access as simply another product offering, many credit unions increasingly see these tools as infrastructure to defend primary financial relationships, capture direct deposits, and compete against digital banks. As neobanks continue using faster access to money as a customer acquisition tool, features like earned wage access may become table stakes rather than differentiators.
Georgia’s Own Credit Union’s investment in Reset highlights this shift from product experimentation toward competitive infrastructure. “Our members are already looking for this, and until now, they’ve had to turn to other options,” said Georgia’s Own Credit Union CTO Kevan Williamson. “Reset levels the playing field for our members. We invested because we’ve seen what it does for members’ financial stability, and because we believe credit unions should be the ones offering it.”
While many banks are still trying to create their stablecoin strategy (or decide to pursue a stablecoin strategy), some of the largest players in payments, acquiring, exchanges, and financial infrastructure are exploring a stablecoin collaboration.
CoinDesk reported that payments giants Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard are backing a stablecoin platform, while Coinbase is considering involvement. The move could challenge the dominance that Circle and Tether have on the stablecoin industry by helping standardize digital currency routing across legacy systems
What impact will this disruption have on players in the traditional space? Here are a few implications.
Stablecoin interoperability improves
As with many new enabling technologies in banking and fintech, stablecoins are quite fragmented. Even though Circle and Tether dominate issuance, moving stablecoins across wallets, exchanges, payment providers, and legacy financial infrastructure remains complex. Additionally, there is no universally accepted framework for how digital currency moves across financial infrastructure.
While both of these factors limit mainstream adoption, a consortium backed by companies such as Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and Coinbase could help create a common framework that makes digital currency movement feel more like existing payment infrastructure.
For financial services providers in the traditional finance (TradFi) space, this common framework could help decrease integration costs, making stablecoin connectivity easier to implement. The shared framework could lower integration costs by reducing the number of connections banks and fintechs must build and maintain. A standardized ecosystem could potentially offer more consistent routing, settlement, and compliance processes. Importantly, the standardization would mean that banks would be able to act now instead of waiting for the winning standard to emerge.
Stablecoins become infrastructure instead of products
Right now, much of the conversation around stablecoins focuses on which company issues the token used for a transaction. Consumers, however, rarely care which payment rail, settlement network, or digital asset powers their transaction. Instead, they simply expect money movement to be fast, seamless, and secure.
For banks and fintechs, this may mean that owning the token itself becomes less important than controlling the infrastructure surrounding money movement. When consumers are rails agnostic, we may start to see that the companies that facilitate routing, settlement, custody, compliance, and customer experiences gain a competitive advantage over those that issue the underlying asset.
Economics of traditional payments face new pressure
Stablecoins are likely here to stay, but they will not replace cards, wires, or ACH payments. However, if major payment players like Visa and Mastercard help introduce new stablecoin infrastructure, it could create pressure on existing payment economics. For example, cross-border payments and merchant settlement could become faster and potentially less expensive.
This increased competition, even if only viable in certain use cases, could reduce margins and force traditional financial institutions to reconsider where they create value. Because both Visa and Mastercard have a stake in traditional payments, however, they are unlikely to introduce a structure that will eliminate traditional payment revenues altogether. Instead, there will likely be gradual pressure on pricing and a shift toward monetizing new infrastructure layers rather than existing friction.
Stablecoin strategy becomes harder to postpone
It is clear that stablecoins are no longer fringe, and at this point, sitting on the sidelines becomes a strategic decision. While it used to be acceptable to treat stablecoins like an optional experiment, the involvement of established financial infrastructure companies makes it mandatory to understand stablecoins. Traditional financial institutions of all sizes need to consider if they will issue stablecoins, custody them, connect to them, or simply enable customer access.
While the “wait and see” approach is still a valid strategy, at this stage it is more of an active strategic decision instead of a passive delay. Financial institutions that choose not to participate should do so intentionally, taking into consideration which revenue opportunities, customer segments, and payment flows they may be willing to forgo if adoption accelerates.
Cash App launched Cash App Tags, NFC-enabled, payment “accessories” that let customers pay without their phone or card.
The first of these new tags comes in the form of a wand, but the company said that other form factors will be available in the future.
While payments companies have tried and failed to move the payments form factor from cards and phones, the wands may succeed because they are visible, social, and impossible to ignore.
Cash Appannounced a new payment form factor yesterday that is so outrageous it would have dropped the jaws of payments executives in 2014 to the floor. The payments company unveiled the first release of Cash App Tags, NFC-enabled, payment “accessories” that let customers pay without their phone or card.
The pilot Cash App Tag comes in the form of a pearlescent wand, aptly called Cash App Wand. Eligible users ages 13 and up with an active Cash App Card can activate their wand by linking their wand to their Cash App Card using the Cash App on their phone. Once the wand is activated, customers can tap to pay without holding a phone or card.
The new form factors will work where Visa tap-to-pay is accepted and there are no minimum balance or activity requirements. Just like Cash App’s payment cards, Tags offer real-time transaction alerts, 24/7 fraud monitoring, and the ability to instantly lock, unlock, and deactivate them within the app.
Odds are that if you’re reading this, Cash App’s Tags aren’t marketed to your demographic. The company explicitly designed them for Gen Z customers as a new form of expression and for use in situations where phones aren’t allowed or are too cumbersome to pull out of a bag. Cash App is anticipating that users will want to collect them like Labubu dolls. In a recent survey of Gen Z consumers, the company found that 38% of this generation purchases collectibles, accessories, or limited edition items at least monthly.
“While digital wallets are invisible and physical cards are often buried in wallets, Cash App Tags are just the opposite,” said Block Hardware Lead Thomas Templeton. “We see a unique opportunity here to make payments visible and social for the first time. Early testers have told us that they’ve loved carrying the Wand and showing it off at checkout, so we believe there’s a real appetite for this among our customers”
The Cash App Wand is now available for $25 in the app, and the company plans to release limited runs of new designs in the coming weeks. “We see this as an early starting point for Cash App Tags. The number of form factors we can create is nearly limitless,” added Templeton. “From clothing to jewelry, almost any item can become a way to pay with this technology. We’re looking forward to hearing what our customers want to see next.”
I can’t decide whether I love this or hate this. Payment companies have tried for over a decade to move the payment form factor from the phone to a ring, fitness band, and even a Timex watch, but each effort has failed to gain traction. At the same time, the industry has been hyper-focused on making payments invisible, and this is the exact opposite. Perhaps moving the form factor to something as outrageous as a wand will succeed because it is visible, social, and impossible to ignore.
As financial institutions increasingly deploy AI across customer service channels, many are wondering where they should start.
At FinovateSpring in San Diego earlier this year, I spoke withCresta Director of Customer Success Stacy Osorio about how banks, credit unions, and fintechs should think about customer experience, contact center transformation, and AI-driven automation.
One of the biggest opportunities, Osorio explained, is not simply using AI to reduce costs, but leveraging it to improve customer experiences while helping organizations better understand what is happening across customer interactions.
“Looking at customer experience through that lens, they should be thinking about the role of AI in customer experience transforming your contact center to think about ways to use AI to drive additional revenue, helping to drive that customer experience—whether that’s driving satisfaction or helping coach and innovate different ways or more automation through your AI agent,” Osorio said when discussing how financial institutions should think about AI-powered customer experience.
Osorio also noted that financial institutions should think beyond conversational AI and consider how AI can automate workflows, surface insights from customer interactions, and help human agents have better conversations.
Stacy Osorio serves as Director of Customer Success at Cresta, where she works directly with enterprise customers to help them optimize customer experiences and maximize value from AI-powered customer engagement tools.
Founded in 2017, Cresta offers an AI-powered contact center platform designed to help enterprises improve customer conversations, automate workflows, coach human agents, and better understand customer interactions. The company works with enterprise organizations across industries, including customers such as United Airlines, Cox, Acorns, and others. Cresta’s platform combines conversational intelligence, workflow automation, and AI agents to help organizations improve customer experiences while increasing operational efficiency.
Ramp raised $750 million at a $44 billion valuation as it expands beyond corporate cards and expense management.
The company is betting AI token spend will become a major business cost category requiring new financial infrastructure.
Ramp launched Stack, an AI-native accounting platform, as it pushes deeper into automation, accounting, and enterprise finance.
Corporate card and expense management platform Ramp is on a roll this week. In addition to launchingStack, an AI-native platform for accountants, the New York-based company also raised $750 million at a $44 billion valuation.
The $750 million boosts the company’s total funds to $3.75 billion, following its most recent raise of $300 million in November of last year. Investors in this week’s round include new contributors Goldman Sachs Alternatives, D.E. Shaw & Co., Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Generation Investment Management, Insight Partners, and BroadLight Capital, as well as previous investors Founders Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners, D1 Capital Partners, T. Rowe Price, General Catalyst, Alpha Wave Global, 137 Ventures, Thrive Capital, Coatue, Sands Capital, Khosla Ventures, 1789 Capital, Avenir Growth, BoxGroup, 8VC, Pinegrove Venture Partners, Definition Capital, and Stripes.
The investment comes as Ramp positions itself as financial infrastructure for AI spending by expanding into managing one of the fastest-growing costs in business: tokens.
“For 500 years, business ran on two pillars of spend: people and vendors. In the last 24 months, a third arrived—intelligence, paid by the token and invisible to every system we’ve built to manage cost. Ramp is the infrastructure for the third pillar,” said Ramp Co-Founder and CEO Eric Glyman.
As businesses embed AI into workflows, employees and agents are generating growing volumes of token-based costs across models, copilots, and automated workflows. Ramp is betting companies will increasingly need tools to monitor, control, and optimize those costs just as they do traditional employee and vendor spending.
The round also comes days after Ramp launched Stack, a tool that allows customers to use agents to do reconciliations, update schedules, post journal entries, and create flux analyses. This creates value for accountants, as it has pre-built integrations that connect to every system their clients use, offers a full audit trail on every action, and provides an underlying model that handles a wide range of accounting tasks.
Some analysts claim that Ramp is overvalued at $44 billion, as it well exceeds competitor Brex’s valuation of $5.15 billion when it was acquired by Capital One earlier this year. It also exceeds PayPal’s valuation of nearly $38 billion.
However, Ramp is defending its value based on its past platform growth and current trajectory. In the past few months alone, Ramp has launched more than 70 products and major features. In addition to token spend management and Stack, the company released budget tools, procurement agents, accounting agents, and customized tools for startups. Also, Ramp closed two acquisitions and announced geographical expansions into the UK and Europe.
“We’re growing as fast as we were three years ago, at roughly twenty times the size,” said Glyman. “And that’s because finance is going through the biggest structural change since the spreadsheet. Every company needs infrastructure to navigate an AI economy, from a CFO in London to an accounting firm in Wichita. While we’re growing fast, we still only serve a fraction of the market. There’s a lot more work to do.”
Whether Ramp’s valuation proves justified remains to be seen. But the company’s recent product launches and messaging suggest it is attempting something larger than expense management. Rather than positioning itself as a corporate card company, Ramp is betting that businesses entering an AI economy will need new financial infrastructure to manage not only employees and vendors, but also increasingly autonomous systems and the costs they generate.
Financial crime innovator AMLYZE announced this week that fellow Lithuanian company WALLETTO has selected it to strengthen its anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-financial terrorism (CFT) capabilities.
AMLYZE was founded in 2019 to help fight financial crime with a range of SaaS-based products that cover real-time and retrospective transaction monitoring, customer risk assessment, AML/CFT investigations, sanctions, PEP, and adverse media screening.
WALLETTO will integrate AMLYZE’s AML/CFT platform to help reinforce its compliance framework. WALLETTO will leverage the full AMLYZE product suite, including Transaction Monitoring, Customer Risk Assessment, AML Investigations, Customer Screening, and Payment Screening.
“At WALLETTO, maintaining the highest standards of compliance, security, and operational resilience is a fundamental part of our long-term growth strategy,” said WALLETTO Member of the Management Board Migle Soltysiak.
WALLETTO was founded in 2017 to offer solutions for card issuance, acquiring, and electronic payments such as SEPA and SWIFT services. The company is an e-money institution (EMI) regulated by the Bank of Lithuania and holds partnerships with Visa and Mastercard to help businesses scale their payments services without having to worry about compliance.
For AMLYZE, which demoed at FinovateEurope 2024, partnering with WALLETTO will help it expand into the Baltic region. “Welcoming WALLETTO to our client portfolio is a particularly meaningful milestone for us,” said AMLYZE CEO and Co-Founder Gabrielius Erikas Bilkštys. “WALLETTO is one of the largest fintechs in Lithuania, and this partnership reflects our commitment to the Baltic market, which we consider our home. We are proud to be the compliance partner of choice for leading institutions in this region and to continue growing our portfolio of clients served here.”
The partnership comes as compliance infrastructure is becoming not only a regulatory requirement but also a competitive differentiator. As fintechs expand internationally, launch additional payment capabilities, and face more regulatory scrutiny, demand is growing for specialized platforms capable of managing complex financial crime workflows. For AMLYZE, landing one of Lithuania’s largest fintechs shows that newer compliance providers can increasingly compete for traditional financial institutions rather than only smaller customers.
Gradient Labs raised $26 million in Series A funding to expand its vertical AI platform, bringing its total funding to $42.6 million.
The company will use the funds to build autonomous banking tools designed to help financial institutions automate customer operations.
The funding shows that banks are shifting from using AI as a bolt-on solution toward using AI agents to autonomously execute operational tasks directly within financial systems.
Conversational AI platform Gradient Labs is on a mission to build AI agents that will help banks run on autopilot. The UK-based company has added $26 million to its Series A round, boosting its total funding to $42.6 million.
The investment was led by new investors Octopus Ventures and CommerzVentures, with additional backing from Redpoint Ventures and Exceptional Capital. Gradient Labs noted that the diverse group of investors is a strong validation for the company, which will use the funds to build autonomous banking tools that help banks deploy AI agents that reduce the time and resources they spend dealing with operational complexity.
Founded in 2023, Gradient Labs enables banks to embed AI agents directly into their systems to automate customer operations and complex workflows. By moving beyond rule-based automation, the company helps financial institutions reduce operational burden, improve customer experience, and prepare for an AI-first future. The company boosted its revenue by 900% last year, and currently counts 32 million end users after adding Current, Stash, and Rho to its existing client base that includes Wise, Zego, Monzo, Pockit, and others.
Gradient Labs is building on the concept of vertical AI, which is AI built specifically for one industry rather than for general-purpose. The company offers a Lending Agent that automates the borrower lifecycle, from a missed payment to outbound collections calls, to an agreed repayment plan; a Disputes Agent that handles everything from intake to chargeback; and a KYB Agent that runs identity and document checks.
The company argues that this domain specialization is what differentiates vertical AI from general-purpose AI tools. “Each agent includes the guardrails, compliance checks, and test scenarios for its domain, from FCA Consumer Duty to the EU AI Act,” said Gradient Labs CEO Dimitri Masin. “This is why so many organizations trust us to automate their long-running processes, and why we’re doubling down even further on domain-specific AI agents for financial services.”
Gradient Labs’ funding shows that banks are increasing their interest in deploying AI-powered solutions that are more integrated into their systems instead of just bolted on. Banks initially deployed AI to assist employees with customer service and internal workflows, but they are now increasingly exploring how AI can execute operational tasks autonomously.
Fiserv has partnered with AI agent lab Cognition to use Devin, an autonomous AI software engineer, to accelerate banks’ core modernization efforts and shorten development cycles.
Devin can autonomously plan, write, test, and deploy code across complex codebases, helping Fiserv deliver new features, security updates, and integrations to bank clients faster.
Banks increasingly expect quicker deployment cycles and more flexibility, and providing faster infrastructure changes will offer Fiserv a competitive advantage.
Fiserv has tapped AI agent lab Cognition to help its bank clients modernize their core banking technology faster. The Wisconsin-based company anticipates the partnership will help it accelerate the process of bringing new capabilities to its bank clients.
Specifically, Fiserv will leverage Devin, Cognition’s AI-powered, autonomous software engineer, to shorten release cycles. Released in 2024, Devin plans, writes, tests, iterates, and ships production code on its own, working inside banks’ codebases and using existing tools. Firms like Goldman Sachs, Ramp, Zillow, and Lowe’s use Devin to help extend engineering capacity to free up their teams to focus on delivering improvements such as enhancements, strengthened quality checks, and improved platform resilience.
Because Devin is able to work at scale across complex codebases, it can help modernize a firm’s infrastructure quickly. Fiserv will use Devin to help modernize its core platform and for other complex engineering initiatives.
“Speed matters more than ever in banking, and our clients are counting on us to deliver. With Devin, we can accelerate modernization of the platforms our clients run their business on, ship new capabilities faster, and free our teams to focus on the work that matters most,” said Fiserv Co-President Dhivya Suryadevara.
Core modernization has historically been expensive, resource-intensive, and slow, often taking years to complete. If AI-powered software engineers can materially accelerate development cycles, banks may be able to upgrade infrastructure, launch products, and respond to market shifts faster than previously possible.
Fiserv notes that while this move will help ship new capabilities to its clients faster, it is doing so with controls in mind. The company is also strengthening its governance and security controls specifically for AI-assisted development.
“Fiserv is exactly the kind of organization where Devin creates compounding value—massive scale and an engineering organization that has ambitious goals for what it needs to build and maintain,” said Cognition Co-Founder and President Russell Kaplan. “We are proud to partner with Fiserv to help teams deliver measurable improvements, so clients see faster access to new capabilities, more consistent releases, and continued focus on quality and security.”
Because Fiserv provides infrastructure powering thousands of financial institutions, accelerating modernization efforts could allow the company to roll out new features, security improvements, integrations, and core platform upgrades to banks faster. Banks increasingly expect quicker deployment cycles and more flexible technology stacks, and providing faster infrastructure changes will offer Fiserv a competitive advantage.
