Spreedly Taps Paysafe to Process Card Payments

Spreedly Taps Paysafe to Process Card Payments
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news, Spreedly
  • Spreedly is partnering with Paysafe to integrate Paysafe’s merchant acquiring capabilities into its global payments orchestration platform.
  • The partnership gives merchants more flexibility by combining Paysafe’s gateway and acquiring tools with Spreedly’s open payments architecture.
  • The move will help modernize payment stacks with a modular approach.

Open payments platform Spreedly is partnering with payments processing fintech Paysafe, integrating Paysafe’s merchant acquirer capabilities into its own global payments orchestration platform.

Paysafe will process credit card and debit card payments for Spreedly’s online merchant clients doing business across Europe, North America, and other geographies. Under the agreement, Paysafe is processing card payments for multiple online trading brokers and financial services companies and plans to onboard additional merchants launching before the end of 2026.

From Paysafe’s perspective, the partnership expands the reach of its gateway technology into Spreedly’s global orchestration layer, particularly among online trading brokers and financial services companies operating across multiple markets. “With the Paysafe Gateway, a trusted solution for card payments among forex and financial trading brokers and a wide range of other industries, we look forward to strengthening Spreedly’s Open Payment Platform and streamlining payments for its merchant users and their customers,” said Paysafe Chief Revenue Officer Rob Gatto.

This integration is meaningful for merchants operating across borders, as payments complexity continues to grow with gateway fragmentation and regulatory changes. Combining Paysafe’s tools into Spreedly’s offering brings a modular, open payments stack that allows merchants to adapt without rebuilding their infrastructure.

Spreedly’s Open Payment Platform is a payment orchestration stack that offers merchants more than 140 gateway connections to more than 40 payment methods. Integrating the Paysafe Gateway allows Spreedly to process online card payments for merchants and their customers.

For Spreedly, adding Paysafe reinforces the company’s broader strategy of giving merchants more choice and flexibility across payment providers and geographies without locking them into a single acquirer or gateway. “At Spreedly, we believe open payments drive better outcomes for merchants. Bringing Paysafe onto our Open Payments Platform expands optionality for our customers and reinforces our mission to provide a flexible, future-ready infrastructure for global commerce,” said Spreedly Partner Strategy Director Michael Rokos.

Founded in 1996, UK-based Paysafe has 30 years of experience providing online payments tools for forex and financial trading brokers, as well as merchants in iGaming, ecommerce, travel, and hospitality. The company connects businesses and consumers across 260 payment types in over 48 currencies around the world. Paysafe processes an annualized volume of $152 billion in transactions and is publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker PSFE with a market capitalization of $350 million.

Spreedly was founded in 2007 to help merchants build their payments stack on a single platform. The company’s payment orchestration stack processes over $60 billion in gross merchandise value on behalf of more than 400 customers across 100+ countries. Spreedly also offers fraud prevention, payment optimization tools, and more. Among the company’s clients are BMW, CLEAR, HBO Max, Hopper, Lemonade, Getty, Warner, The New York Times, and others.

Photo by Leeloo The First

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Jump Raises $80 Million to Leverage AI to Automate Financial Advisory Workflows

Jump Raises $80 Million to Leverage AI to Automate Financial Advisory Workflows
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Funding, Jump
  • AI solutions provider for financial advisors Jump has raised $80 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Insight Partners.
  • The investment will help Jump scale its technology, which automates a range of tasks for financial advisors, from an AI assistant to a comprehensive intelligence and AI orchestration layer for modern financial advisory firms.
  • Founded in 2023 and headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, Jump made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2025 in New York. Parker Ence is Founder and CEO.

In a round led by Insight Partners, AI solutions provider for financial advisors Jump has secured $80 million in Series B funding. The round also included participation from new investors F-Prime, Allianz Life Ventures (the venture capital arm of Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America), TIAA Ventures, and Peterson Partners. Also involved in the round were existing investors Battery Ventures, Sorenson Capital, Pelion Venture Partners, and Citi Ventures, as well as angel investors Hans Tung, Ryan Anderson, and Aaron Skonnard.

“In less than two years since launch, we’ve grown from zero to more than 27,000 advisors—making Jump the fastest-growing wealthtech software application in industry history,” the company noted in a statement. “We are now adding more than 2,000 new advisors each month across RIAs, independent broker-dealers, and global financial institutions.”

This week’s investment takes Jump’s total capital raised to $105 million, following the company’s $20 million Series A round led by Battery Ventures in 2025. The company will use the funds to power its next phase of growth, specifically expanding the platform from an AI meeting assistant for financial advisors to a comprehensive intelligence and AI orchestration layer tailored for modern financial advisory firms.

Jump exists at the nexus of a structural shift in the wealth management industry as advisory firms explore integrating AI into the way their advisors prepare, engage, document, analyze, and scale. Starting with using AI to reduce the amount of manual work that advisors do, Jump is evolving into a platform that integrates intelligent, agentic workflows and enterprise controls to comprehensively support modern financial advisory firms. With a focus on reducing operational friction, deep workflow integration, and configurable compliance, Jump’s new funding will enable the company to help advisors proactively identify risks, discover new growth opportunities, and advise on next best actions based on analysis of client conversations and investment flows.

“An enterprise RIA recently shared that Jump ranked number one among more than 40 AI pilots they ran last year in terms of delivering real advisor impact and measurable ROI for the firm,” Jump CEO and Co-Founder Parker Ence said. “They saw not only Jump’s usual one to two hours saved per advisor per day, but also a meaningful increase in their overall organic growth rate.” Ence added that the funding will help the company “invest aggressively in product research and development” as the firm accelerates its vision “for an AI-native operating system.”

Headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, Jump made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2025. At the conference, the company showed how its AI-powered meeting assistant for financial advisors automates meeting prep, note-taking, follow-up, and other client management tasks. Reportedly saving advisors up to 20 hours per week, Jump’s technology puts meeting administration on AI autopilot and provides AI-powered actionable growth insights, while exceeding enterprise scalability and compliance requirements.

Photo by Kirill Lazarev

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Fintech Rundown: A Rapid Review of Weekly News

Fintech Rundown: A Rapid Review of Weekly News
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Fintech Rundown

It’s the last week of February, which means we have one more month to wrap up any Q1 goals. Below, we’ve aggregated the top news in fintech for the week. We’ll continue to add more announcements as the week progresses.

Payments

Flywire appoints Patrick Blanc as Chief Technology Officer.

MoneyHash partners with Wayl to support expansion into Iraq.

Payabli and Huntington Bank partner to bring seamless payments to the digital banking experience.

Worldline unveils One Commerce, powering the next generation of omnichannel retail.

Jaris expands Paysafe partnership to bring instant payouts to US small businesses.

Wealth mangement

Vestwell raises $385 million, doubling its valuation from 2023.

Small business financial mangement

Forest Lawn Memorial Parks achieves complete spend management through Vroozi platform integration.

Wellspring launches treasury management platform for small and mid-sized businesses.

Photo by Vincent Jialei

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Finovate Global East Africa: Investing in Digital Banks, Delivering on Instant Payments, and More!

Finovate Global East Africa: Investing in Digital Banks, Delivering on Instant Payments, and More!
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Finovate Global, Salt Edge, Temenos, VISA

This week’s edition of Finovate Global focuses on fintech developments in countries located in and around East Africa.

Digital banking secures investment in Zambia

Zambian digital banking platform Lupiya has raised $11.25 million in Series A funding. The round—nearly two years in the making—was led by IDF Capital’s Alitheia IDF Fund, and featured participation from INOKS Capital and KfW DEG, a German development finance institution. Lupiya will use the capital to bolster the digital bank’s technology infrastructure, grow its product range, and enter southern and east African markets beyond Zambia’s borders.

Founded by Evelyn Chilomo Kaingu (CEO) and Muchu Kaingu (CTO) in 2016, Lupiya serves unbanked and underbanked communities in Zambia with credit products and digital payment services via its Lupiya Pay offering. The company has partnered with Mastercard to access payment rails to enable digital transactions and is part of the card network’s financial inclusion strategy. Previous investors in the firm include Enygma Ventures, which contributed $1 million to the company’s coffers. Lupiya has opened an additional funding round this year—alongside its Series A—dedicated to scaling its lending business, enhancing its embedded finance offerings, and bringing Lupiya Pay to new markets.

Lupiya was one of the first companies to earn approval from the Security Exchange Commission in Zambia to offer investments through peer-to-peer lending. Launching this service in-country in 2022, Lupiya expanded operations to Tanzania the following year. Lupiya offers personal loans including collateral-backed loans and salary advances, as well as business financing, invoice discounting, and agriloans. Customers can use Lupiya to send and receive funds via mobile money, P2P, or bank accounts.

According to the World Bank, Zambia’s financial inclusion rate has improved significantly in recent years, climbing from 59.3% in 2015 to 69.4% in 2020. Regional disparities are significant, however, with Lusaka Province, home to the capital city, Lusaka, having a financial inclusion rate of more than 87%, with more rural areas having inclusion rates of approximately 40%. The landlocked country shares borders with the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, and Tanzania.

Ethiopia goes live with instant payments

Instant payments are sweeping the globe—and now businesses, communities, and banks throughout Ethiopia will be able to leverage the technology to provide centralized automated reconciliation, new card and e-wallet services, and more.

In partnership with the National Bank of Ethiopia, the country’s national switch EthSwitch has launched Ethiopia’s National Instant Payment System. Powered by BPC’s SmartVista platform, the system was officially introduced in December 2025, and now connects 32 banks, 12 MFIs, three PSOs, and three PIIs. The unveiling of EthioPay-IPS will enable EthSwitch to offer banks and other financial institutions modern payment rails capable of delivering faster and more economical payment transactions. These include account-to-account and wallet-to-wallet transfers, payments with interoperable QR codes, as well as requests-to-pay and alias-based payments that allow users to transfer funds using a simple identifier.

BPC’s SmartVista suite is a modular payment processing solution for banks, financial institutions, payment service providers, and fintechs. The technology combines banking, commerce, and mobility platforms to facilitate digital banking, payment processing, ATM and switching, fraud management, financial inclusion, and more. Founded in 1996 and headquartered in Switzerland, BPC has more than 500 customers across 140 countries.

Established in 2011, EthSwitch is a share company owned by Ethiopia’s private and public banks, as well as the National Bank of Ethiopia, MFIs, PIIs, and PSOs. The organization has a mandate to support the modernization of Ethiopia’s payment system and to enhance financial inclusion throughout the country. This includes EthSwitch’s 2016 initiative to enable the interoperability of ATMs and POS terminals operated by the nation’s banks.

“Our goal is to provide simple, affordable, secure, and efficient digital payment infrastructure to every retail payment provider and through them, to every Ethiopian,” EthSwitch Chief Portfolio Officer Abeneazer Wondwossen said. “With SmartVista, we have built an interoperable nationwide ecosystem for instant payments that is locally governed, future-ready, and open to innovation. This launch is a point of pride for Ethiopia and a milestone for our financial sector.”

Kayko Raises $1.2 million to help SMEs in Rwanda

Kayko, which offers a small business financial management platform for companies in Rwanda, has secured $1.2 million in seed funding. Participating in the investment were Burrow Capital, the Luxembourg Development Agency, and Hanga Ignite by BRD and develoPPP Ventures. The company, founded in 2021 by brothers Crepin and Kevin Kayisire, will use the capital to fortify its infrastructure, expand its data capabilities, and build credit scoring and lending tools based on real transaction data.

Kayko serves more than 8,500 Rwandan SMEs with bookkeeping, inventory, and tax support. The fintech helps boost SME access to credit in a country in which many businesses have incomplete or informal financial records that make it difficult to secure financing or to scale operations. For these and other small businesses, Kayko provides a point-of-sale and business management system that helps them process sales, track expenses, and accept payments, while turning everyday business activity into structured financial data for analysis and insights.

Kayko’s funding news coincides with the Kigali-based fintech securing an Electronic Money Issuer (EMI) license from the National Bank of Rwanda (NBR). “With this license, we move from planning to execution,” Crepin Kayisire said in a statement on the company’s LinkedIn page. “We can now operate regulated payments, merchant wallets, and data-driven financial services that improve access to financing for small businesses.”

Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.

Sub-Saharan Africa

  • South African crypto platform Luno introduced crypto and tokenized stock bundle.
  • Blockchain infrastructure provider Binance and African mobile network operator Africell announced a collaboration to boost blockchain education and digital asset literacy across Africa.
  • Ethiopia’s national switch, EthSwitch, launched the country’s National Instant Payment System, in partnership with the National Bank of Ethiopia and powered by BPC’s SmartVista platform.

Central and Eastern Europe

  • The Bank of Lithuania supplemented the electronic money institution (EMI) license for TransferGo Lithuania, enabling the fintech to expand beyond money transfers and payment account services.
  • Open banking solutions provider Salt Edge and financial management platform NoCFO teamed up to bring Pay by Bank to SMEs in Germany and Finland.
  • UK-based fintech Unlimit opened a new global research and development center in Belgrade, Serbia.

Middle East and Northern Africa

Central and Southern Asia

Latin America and the Caribbean

  • Uruguayan fintech dLocal partnered with online English-language platform Open English to introduce a new payment method, Bre-B, for students in Colombia
  • Visa inked a deal to acquire Argentinian payment companies Prisma Medios de Pago and Newpay from private equity firm Advent International.
  • Peru’s Banco de la Microempresa selected Temenos SaaS to modernize its core banking infrastructure.

Asia-Pacific

Photo by Aron Marinelli on Unsplash

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Metropolitan Commercial Bank Forges Partnership with Finzly

Metropolitan Commercial Bank Forges Partnership with Finzly
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Finzly
  • Metropolitan Commercial Bank has partnered with Finzly for its cloud-native, API-first payment platform.
  • The deployment will consolidate all payment rails—ACH, wires, and real-time payments—on a single system via a modular approach that will enable the bank to phase out legacy operations over time.
  • Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, Finzly is a two-time Finovate Best of Show winner.

New York City-based Metropolitan Commercial Bank has called it quits. The full-service commercial bank has retired its legacy ACH mainframe in favor of a new cloud-native, API-first payment platform courtesy of two-time Finovate Best of Show winner Finzly.

“ACH is the most complex of all payment rails, having evolved over more than 50 years,” Finzly Founder and CEO Booshan Rengachari said. “With this, MCB has completed one of the most comprehensive cloud-native payment modernizations in the US today—spanning ACH, wires, instant payments, and international payments on a single platform. It’s a testament to the team at MCB and their achievement in accomplishing what is a bellwether moment for ACH and the industry.”

Digital modernization continues to be a challenge for many institutions still relying on legacy infrastructure. In an effort to avoid the complexity of full ACH cloud modernization, many banks have elected to run a modern ACH platform alongside their legacy systems. The partnership between MCB and Finzly is unique because the bank is the first financial institution to adopt Finzly’s platform as its primary system, completely decommissioning its legacy ACH infrastructure.

Leveraging Finzly’s unified platform will consolidate all payment rails for MCB onto a single system, including ACH, wires, and real-time payments. The platform uses a modular approach that will allow the bank to phase out all legacy operations over time, simplifying operations, boosting resilience, and enabling MCB to provide efficient payment experiences for its corporate commercial clients.

MCB’s partnership with Finzly is part of the institution’s “Modern Banking in Motion” initiative, an infrastructure modernization project that reflects an industry-wide effort to find alternatives to aging payment infrastructures. Regulatory pressures such as new fraud monitoring requirements from Nacha coming into effect this spring—to say nothing of growing public demand for faster payments and real-time visibility—are bringing new urgency to the conversation on digital transformation in banking and payments. In their partnership statement, Finzly and MCB noted an American Banker webinar poll that indicated that 84% of financial institutions believe that the resilience of their current Fedwire and ACH infrastructure should be re-evaluated.

“Finzly has been a strong technology partner for Metropolitan Commercial Bank,” MCB Founder, President, and CEO Mark R. DeFazio said. “Their unified payment platform and modular transformation approach allowed us to retire legacy ACH and wire systems safely, launch real-time payments, and deliver a seamless experience to our clients. This migration has strengthened our operational resilience, improved straight-through processing, and positioned MCB to scale efficiently while continuing to innovate. This new platform will enable MCB to expand its payment business which will meaningfully add to NII and lower cost of deposits.”

Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, Finzly won Best of Show at FinovateWest 2020 and again at FinovateFall later that year. The company offers a digital, real-time, cloud-native operating system that features a payment hub that allows banks to centrally process ACH, FedWire, RTP, SWIFT, and FedNow payments. Last fall, Finzly unveiled its Agentic Galaxy offering, an intelligent fabric of deployable AI agents that helps banks and credit unions innovate faster and create more engaging customer experiences.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

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

Sustainability, Quantum, and Cloud: Three Dogs That Did Not Bark at FinovateEurope 2026
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: FinovateEurope 2026, List series

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

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

Sustaining Sustainability in the Age of AI

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

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

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

Quantum Computing: Waiting for the Great Leap Forward?

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

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

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

“Nobody Here But Us Cloud Companies …”

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

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

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

Photo by Anoir Chafik on Unsplash

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

TreviPay Leverages AI to Help Businesses Anticipate Buyer Behavior

TreviPay Leverages AI to Help Businesses Anticipate Buyer Behavior
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, TreviPay
  • B2B payments platform TreviPay is introducing a new solution to help suppliers keep customers engaged and spot dormant buyers.
  • The new offering, TreviPay Growth Center, leverages transactional data, behavioral insights, and predictive insights to help businesses identify early signs of buyer dormancy, enabling teams to intervene with targeted outreach and new incentives.
  • Based in Kansas, TreviPay made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2022 in New York.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Alla Kemelmakher on Unsplash

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

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

Successfully Implementing AI in Banking: Insights from Allica Bank CEO Richard Davies
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: FinovateEurope 2026, Interview, Sponsored

This article is brought to you in collaboration with Gregory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Davies: I would group it into three main areas:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Google DeepMind

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

FinovateEurope 2026 in 1,046 Photos

FinovateEurope 2026 in 1,046 Photos
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: FinovateEurope 2026

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

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

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

The FinovateEurope experience

FinovateEurope 2026 - Experience

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

The sessions

FinovateEurope 2026 Session

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

The demos

FinovateEurope 2026 Demo

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

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

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

FinovateEurope 2026: From AI Hype to Operational Reality

FinovateEurope 2026: From AI Hype to Operational Reality
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: FinovateEurope 2026

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

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

AI moves from experimentation to operationalization

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

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

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

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

Customer experience: from product-centric to embedded

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

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

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

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

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

Payments, tokenization, and agentic commerce

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

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

Capital is maturing

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

Beyond the stage

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

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

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

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

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

Bluefin and Basis Theory Offer Unified Token Strategy Across Digital and In-Person Payments
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Basis Theory, Bluefin
  • Payment and data security infrastructure company Bluefin and tokenization and vaulting platform Basis Theory have announced a strategic partnership.
  • The partnership will enable businesses to implement a unified token strategy to help them manage payment fragmentation between cloud-native tokenized platforms and in-person environments.
  • Bluefin made its Finovate debut at our developers conference FinDEVr SiliconValley. Basis Theory debuted at FinovateSpring 2022.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Francesco Ungaro

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Fintech Rundown: A Rapid Review of Weekly News

Fintech Rundown: A Rapid Review of Weekly News
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Backbase, Feedzai, Fintech Rundown, Jack Henry, Payoneer, Plaid, Temenos, VISA

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

Digital banking

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

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

Fraud prevention

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

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

Mortgagetech and proptech

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

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

Open finance

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

Insurtech

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

DeFi

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

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

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook