Swift Goes Live with New Blockchain-Based Ledger

Swift Goes Live with New Blockchain-Based Ledger
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Daily news
  • Swift launched a blockchain-based ledger that lets banks move tokenized deposits across borders 24/7 before completing final settlement through existing banking systems.
  • The ledger is designed to make blockchain interoperable with bank infrastructure, giving financial institutions a shared layer for digital money without requiring them to abandon current rails or compliance processes.
  • Seventeen global banks will participate in the initial pilot, moving Swift’s blockchain work from prototype to live testing with major transaction banks across six continents.

Swift has officially launched its new blockchain-based ledger that will support 24/7 cross-border payments with tokenized deposits, enabling funds to move in any regulated form, anywhere, with a high level of security.

The shared, blockchain-based ledger offers banks an orchestration layer for bank-issued tokenized deposits on their own ledgers. The blockchain ledger enables banks to move funds for customers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, before completing final settlement through the banks’ existing systems. In addition to always-on settlement, banks can offer clients global liquidity while maintaining compliance, credit, risk, and control standards.

“With our new ledger capability, we’re extending the trust and stability of established finance into the frontiers of digital money,” said Swift Chief Business Officer Thierry Chilosi. “It allows tokenized value to move across borders with the velocity and flexibility modern commerce expects, while maintaining the same high levels of resiliency, security, and compliance global finance requires. The strong support from banks shows the practical value of this approach—one that will help scale benefits globally while creating a foundation for future innovation in areas like programmable money and agentic commerce.”

Unlike other new payments technology, Swift’s ledger brings blockchain-based payments into the infrastructure banks already use. While previous digital money efforts were fragmented across pilots, private networks, and bank-specific systems, Swift’s approach gives banks a shared layer for moving tokenized value across borders while preserving the compliance, resiliency, and settlement processes that each region requires. Rather than asking banks to abandon existing rails, Swift is positioning the blockchain as an interoperable layer that can work alongside them.

Today’s announcement comes ten months after Swift teased the launch of its ledger, testing a prototype blockchain with more than 30 financial institutions across the globe. This is the first use case for Swift’s ledger, which the cooperative anticipates will set a new precedent for interoperability on payments infrastructure. Swift has made it clear that it will offer fee transparency and a faster, more consistent customer experience. Today’s upgrades to the ledger move Swift’s blockchain ambitions out of the experimentation phase and into a live pilot with some of the world’s largest transaction banks.

Swift reports that the speed of payments on the new blockchain-based network exceeds current standards. “A full 75 percent of payments on the network reach beneficiary banks within 10 minutes, and often in seconds, and the cooperative is going even further to advance the industry to meet the G20 targets for international transactions,” the company states. The member-owned cooperative plans to expand the network functionality and availability after an initial pilot phase that will include 17 banks from six continents. Among the pilot banks are ANZ, BNP Paribas, BNY, Citi, DBS, First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB), FirstRand Bank Limited, HSBC, Itaú Unibanco, Lloyds Bank, Mashreq, MUFG Bank, OCBC, Standard Chartered, UBS, UOB, and Wells Fargo.

“We see interoperability as the key enabler for scaling tokenized deposits beyond individual institutions,” said UBS Managing Director, Group Head of Digital Assets Mr. Andreas Kubli. “Swift’s ledger is an important industry initiative that can help connect digital money networks, supporting real-time settlement, greater liquidity mobility and the broader adoption of tokenized payments and digital assets across the global financial ecosystem.”

Photo by Sonny Sixteen

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nCino’s Mortgage Point of Sale Solution Gets a New Capability and a New Customer

nCino’s Mortgage Point of Sale Solution Gets a New Capability and a New Customer
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, nCino
  • Agentic AI banking platform nCino announced a new partnership with Cornerstone First Mortgage, a full-service mortgage bank based in San Diego, California; as well as new capabilities for its Mortgage Point of Sale solution.
  • Cornerstone First Mortgage highlighted nCino’s Mortgage Point of Sale solution in its partnership announcement, praising the technology’s flexibility and mobile capabilities.
  • nCino also unveiled LeadGen PreQual, a new capability for its Mortgage Point of Sale solution that gives borrowers key eligibility information before opening an account or filling out a loan application.

This week marks both a new customer and a new capability for nCino’s Mortgage Point of Sale.

Agentic AI banking platform nCino announced this week that Cornerstone First Mortgage (Cornerstone) has selected nCino’s Mortgage Point of Sale to enhance the customer experience and to support the firm’s continued expansion across the US. The San Diego, California-based full-service mortgage bank chose nCino’s solution for its ability to support Cornerstone’s branch-based model while still providing a consistent borrower experience nationwide. Cornerstone operates in 49 states through a network of 130 branches that support dozens of local brands.

“Your point-of-sale platform is the first representation of your company after that initial conversation with a borrower,” Cornerstone President of Operations Eric Rotner said. “As we evaluated the next phase of growth for our business, we wanted a solution that could support our branch network, preserve the local brands our loan officers have built and provide a better experience for our borrowers. nCino’s Mortgage Point of Sale stood out because of its flexibility, mobile capabilities, and the team’s commitment to helping us succeed.”

Cornerstone, which has doubled in size twice over the past three years, has leveraged its deployment of nCino’s technology to reduce borrower friction and streamline the lending process. The bank is using nCino-connected verification tools to boost adoption of digital income, employment, and asset verification, and is also speeding up its adoption of solutions such as eNotes and remote online notarization (RON).

“Cornerstone has built an impressive growth story by empowering entrepreneurial branch leaders while maintaining a strong commitment to the borrower experience,” nCino General Manager Casey Williams said. “We’re proud to support their continued expansion and look forward to helping the organization drive even greater efficiency, consistency, and customer satisfaction through nCino’s Mortgage Point of Sale.”

nCino’s partnership announcement accompanies news that the company has added a new capability to its Mortgage Point of Sale solution. LeadGen PreQual enables borrowers to receive a real, credit-backed prequalification letter before opening an account or filling out a loan application. The new capability delivers flexible credit and verification options, lender branding, and seamless profile continuity to meet borrowers where they are and where they go.

Why is this a significant addition? nCino notes that many lenders require potential borrowers to create an account and complete a full application before getting any sense of how much they will be able to finance. This often leads to borrower abandonment. While some lenders have attempted to reduce friction with more minimalist lead capture forms, these alternatives fail because they tend to collect unverified, borrower-provided information that produces soft leads rather than credit-backed assessments of borrower eligibility. This forces lenders to have to make product and qualification decisions based on unconfirmed, potentially inaccurate information.

With LeadGen PreQual, borrowers click a link from their loan officer and complete a short, mobile-optimized form. With borrowers’ consent, an automatic credit check analyzes if a conventional loan may receive an Accept risk class from Freddie Mac’s Loan Product Advisor (LPA). This includes the determination of whether the loan is eligible for an automated collateral evaluation (ACE) appraisal waiver. Based on a review of the assessment results, credit information, and data from the mobile form, borrowers can immediately generate and download a prequalification letter on their mobile device.

“Borrowers today expect the same immediacy from their lender that they get from every other financial service they use,” Williams explained. “LeadGen PreQual meets that expectation at the moment it matters most, giving buyers a real answer about what they can afford from their phone before they ever step into a lender’s office.”

Headquartered in Wilmington, North Carolina, and founded in 2011, nCino made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2017. With more than 2,700 customers worldwide—including community banks, credit unions, independent mortgage banks, and some of the largest international financial institutions—nCino offers an agentic banking platform that enables organizations to reduce inefficiency, enhance decision-making, and deliver better outcomes for their customers.

nCino is a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ under the symbol NCNO. The firm has a market capitalization of $1.9 billion. Sean Desmond is nCino’s President and CEO.

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Making an IMPACT: Finovate’s Funders and Founders Forum Launches This Fall

Making an IMPACT: Finovate’s Funders and Founders Forum Launches This Fall
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: IMPACT, Speaker series

A decade ago, Finovate launched its developer conference series FinDEVr. The goal was simple: to provide a forum for software developers, programmers, and technologists to showcase APIs, open banking solutions, developer tools, and more during a truly revolutionary time in the history of fintech innovation.

Today, one of the biggest challenges to fintech innovation is ensuring that fintech founders get the support and funding they need to grow and succeed in an even more complex and competitive financial services landscape.

Meet IMPACT

The first-ever event bridging capital and innovation in the financial services space, the IMPACT Funders & Founders Forum comes to New York for a full day of curated investor meetings, dynamic discussions, and breakthrough pitches from innovative startups ready to scale. Running concurrently with FinovateFall, the IMPACT Funders & Founders Forum takes place on Friday, September 11, at the New York Marriott Marquis in Times Square.

Heather Stowell, Finovate VP and Informa Senior Director, sat down with Greg Palmer, host of the Finovate Podcast, to discuss the problem that IMPACT is designed to solve, and the opportunities the new event offers to fintech startups and fintech investors alike.

The core of this forum, this new event, is to connect startups and scaleups with investors. Many of these startups and scaleups will be raising funding, but we also want to foster an exchange of information.

So, in addition to raising funding, a lot of these conversations will also revolve around investors’ insights that they can share with startups and fostering connections with investors early on that will be useful down the road. It’s all about combining these two communities and creating a real synergy between them.

Heather Stowell is the VP of Demos for Finovate and Senior Director of Fintech and Startup Ecosystems for Informa. Over the last 10 years, Stowell has curated innovative demo lineups for dozens of events, launched a developer conference series in the US and abroad, coached startups to help them deliver impactful demos and presentations, and coordinated VC connections for startups raising early-stage funding.

Check out Palmer’s interview with IMPACT’s Heather Stowell. Learn more about IMPACT in our full-length explainer—Introducing IMPACT: A New Event for Fintech Founders and Investors.

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3 Ways Fiserv’s Payments Network Sale Could Reshape Payments

3 Ways Fiserv’s Payments Network Sale Could Reshape Payments
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: List series

According to the Wall Street Journal, JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and PNC are in conversation with Fiserv about acquiring its two debit payment networks, STAR and Accel. While there is not an official deal on the table, the initial discussions surrounding the sale raise important questions about the future of the payments infrastructure in the US. If a sale of the payment networks does take place, the impact would extend far beyond Fiserv. Here are three ways it could reshape payments.

Large banks could gain more control over payment economics

Right now, banks, card networks, and merchants each play a unique role. Banks issue cards, card networks route the transactions, and merchants pay the interchange fees. Much of the value of STAR and Accel is that they route debit transactions. If all of a sudden, banks own the network, the dynamics change. The large banks that end up owning the payment networks could capture more economics from transactions made on the networks. Some analysts have suggested that owning the networks could provide strategic advantages related to debit routing and interchange economics.

Community banks and fintechs could lose a neutral network partner

Fiserv currently serves a range of smaller financial institutions, including community banks, regional banks, fintechs, and credit unions. If Fiserv offloads STAR and Accel to some of the nation’s largest financial institutions, smaller institutions would have to rely on infrastructure owned by their competitors. This is of concern to smaller players, especially since banks like JPMorgan and Bank of America stand to profit more if competitors lose market share. Because of these conflicts of interest, payments infrastructure is most valuable when participants view it as neutral.

The race to own the infrastructure accelerates

Fintechs and banks alike have shown growing interest in moving down the stack to own more of the underlying financial infrastructure. Capital One’s acquisition of Discover would give the bank ownership of a major card network, reducing its reliance on Visa and Mastercard. At the same time, the rise of stablecoin payment rails is creating new infrastructure that bypasses traditional card networks altogether, while FedNow is giving banks direct access to real-time payment capabilities. Together, these developments show that banks and fintechs are no longer content to compete solely through customer-facing products. Increasingly, they are seeking greater ownership of the infrastructure that powers payments. Bringing more of the stack in-house can reduce dependence on third parties, provide greater control over the customer experience, and create new revenue opportunities.

Whether or not the deal ultimately happens, it shows that banks are no longer content to compete only on products and customer experience. Instead, banks are seeking ownership of the infrastructure that powers payments. If a deal goes through, it could reshape competition across banks, fintechs, merchants, and payment networks.

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

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Thought Machine Secures $41 Million in Funding; Tops $100 Million Revenue Milestone

Thought Machine Secures $41 Million in Funding; Tops $100 Million Revenue Milestone
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Funding, Thought Machine
  • Core banking technology firm Thought Machine has raised £30 million ($41 million) in funding from an unnamed Tier 1 bank. The bank, which is both a client and an investor, made its investment in May of this year.
  • The funding will help support Thought Machine’s R&D expansion, including a pledge to hire more than 100 new engineers in 2026.
  • The funding announcement comes as the company reported surpassing the $100 million revenue milestone for the year ending December 2025.

According to multiple reports, core banking technology firm Thought Machine has secured £30 million ($41 million) in funding from an unnamed Tier 1 bank that is also a Thought Machine client. The reports indicate that the investment was made in May of this year; Fintech Futures noted that the funding consisted of £9 million in primary funding and a £21 million secondary market transaction.

The investment will help power the company’s R&D expansion, including support for the firm’s new engineering office in Lisbon, Portugal, and the hiring of more than 100 new engineers. The capital will also help Thought Machine pursue its expansion in the US, having opened a new office in Miami to complement its regional headquarters in the US.

Word of Thought Machine’s spring investment comes as the firm announces that it has surpassed $100 million in total revenue for the financial year ending December 2025. This accomplishment reflects a 57% year-on-year increase in total revenue. Thought Machine also announced that, thanks to a multi-year commitment for several tier 1 bank migrations, the company’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) surpassed the $100 million threshold as of Q2 2026.

“Crossing the $100 million revenue threshold proves that the world’s largest banks are no longer thinking of cloud-native core technology as being solely for greenfield business, they are deploying it at scale for full bank migrations,” Thought Machine CEO and Founder Paul Taylor said. “We have established clear leadership in the tier 1 market because our platform properly fulfills the needs of banks at scale. With a strong balance sheet backed directly by our customer-investors, we have the financial maturity and the technology to power any bank, of any size, anywhere in the world.”

The investment also shines a light on Thought Machine’s other funding plans, namely a London IPO. While a consideration since the company’s Series D funding round in 2022, an initial public offering in the current financial climate is “difficult” in the words of the Thought Machine CEO. As such, he has pushed back the likelihood of a London IPO until 2028 “at the earliest,” and even criticized the merit of valuation as a performance metric relative to revenue.

“We are trying to put less emphasis on valuation and more emphasis on commercial success,” Taylor said. “Funding rounds are just not where we want the attention to be. We want the attention to be on commercial growth. Hitting revenue targets is a far better indicator of success than saying ‘look how valuable we are’.”

Thought Machine introduced itself to Finovate audiences at FinovateEurope 2018 in London. The company offers modern, cloud-based core banking and payments solutions—Vault Core and Vault Payments, respectively—that give financial institutions greater flexibility in creating new banking products and the ability to offer payment options for every method, scheme, and region around the globe. Founded in 2014, Thought Machine has 68 banks around the world using its technology, including 18 of the world’s largest institutions, representing more than 10% of the international market.

Photo by Alicja Ziaj on Unsplash

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Narmi Unveils AI Decision Assist to Facilitate Account Opening Review Process

Narmi Unveils AI Decision Assist to Facilitate Account Opening Review Process
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Daily news
  • Narmi has unveiled AI Decision Assist, an agentic AI tool that automates account opening reviews by analyzing identity, risk, and compliance data and generating explainable recommendations for bank employees.
  • The configurable platform helps banks tailor AI-driven decisioning to their own risk policies, reducing manual review times from hours to minutes and increasing approval rates by up to 6%.
  • The launch is an example of how banks are increasingly deploying AI to support operational decision-making in areas like account opening, fraud detection, underwriting, and compliance rather than limiting AI to customer-facing assistants.

Digital banking platform Narmi announced the planned launch of AI Decision Assist today. The new agentic AI tool aims to help banks automate the account opening review process.

AI Decision Assist takes on the heavy lifting when it comes to reviewing customer applications. In addition to analyzing identity, risk, and compliance information, the tool also generates recommendations that help employees make faster, informed, and explainable decisions based on each bank’s own history of approved, flagged, and declined applications. Each decision is traceable and offers transparency into the decision-making process.

Narmi built AI Decision Assist to be configurable, allowing each bank to tailor the tool to its own risk appetite and operational processes. By automating much of the review process, the platform reduces manual review times from hours to minutes, enabling banks to make faster decisions at scale. It also helps institutions identify applicants they might have otherwise overlooked, increasing approval rates by up to 6%, according to Narmi.

“Account opening remains one of the most time-intensive workflows for financial institutions, often relying on fragmented systems and manual review processes that require employees to gather information from multiple sources before making a decision,” said Narmi Co-founder Chris Griffin. “AI Decision Assist is designed to dramatically fix that problem by fitting in seamlessly into existing workflows, helping teams make better decisions faster while eliminating one of the most time-consuming and cumbersome parts of account opening.”

Narmi’s announcement shows how banks are starting to think differently about AI. Over the past two years, most banks have focused on customer-facing AI assistants that answer questions or summarize information. Now, AI is increasingly moving into the back office to support operational decision-making. From account opening and fraud detection to underwriting and compliance, banks are increasingly using AI to analyze and recommend actions.

New York-based Narmi was founded in 2016 to offer banks the digital banking tools they need to increase profitability, deposits, and accounts. The company offers a FedNow service, commercial and retail digital banking tools, digital account opening capabilities, analytics, and an administrative portal.

In an era when banks are letting go of competent employees in favor of AI, like Starling’s recent layoff of 130 employees, Narmi made it clear that AI Decision Assist is meant to work alongside employees instead of replacing them. The company said that it is instead designed to free employees from repetitive research and administrative work. Instead of replacing humans, the tool aims to preserve oversight, auditability, and accountability.

Photo by Mikhail Nilov

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Meniga Launches New Conversational LLM Product

Meniga Launches New Conversational LLM Product
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Alumni profile, Meniga

Personal finance solutions fintech Meniga launched a new product called Fini, an MCP server that enables banks to bring agentic AI into their existing platforms.

Fini, which was built with the input of five large banks, serves as the bridge between a bank’s preferred large language model (LLM) and Meniga’s personal finance, enrichment, and insights capabilities. Rather than building its own AI model, Meniga enables banks to pair Claude, GPT, Gemini, or another LLM with the company’s financial intelligence platform, allowing customers to ask questions about their finances in natural language within the bank’s website or mobile app.

Founded in 2009, Meniga serves over 100 million banking customers across 30 countries. The UK-based company’s clients include UniCredit, Groupe BPCE, UOB, Swedbank, SAB, Tangerine, and Riyad Bank. Meniga’s intelligence and personalization layer helps banks turn financial data into insights and proactively anticipate customer needs, promoting engagement.

Meniga anticipates that this conversational interface will benefit banks by engaging with consumers on a deeper level, increase satisfaction, lower support costs, and offer insights into customers’ individual needs. The new tool also meets consumers where they are, especially as their preferences shift away from features and towards conversational interfaces that offer instant, personalized answers.

“The banks that win agentic banking will be the ones that ground their conversational layer in real financial context. Not a generic chatbot, but an assistant that actually knows a customer’s spending patterns, their goals, and their upcoming bills, and is able to act on them,” said Meniga CEO Raj Soni. “With Fini, banks can enter the AI-agent era on the platform they already trust, without rebuilding what’s underneath, and without their data ever leaving the bank.”

Beyond answering questions, Fini supports agentic AI workflows that allow customers to complete certain banking tasks, like opening new accounts or setting up automatic transfers, directly within the conversation. This eliminates the need to navigate to separate screens.

Because Fini is model-agnostic, banks can build their AI assistants on Claude, GPT, Gemini, or their own proprietary model while relying on Meniga to provide the underlying financial context. Banks also retain control over their own guardrails, identity and access controls, and customer data, which never leaves the bank.

Meniga’s launch is similar to those of other fintechs racing to capture the LLM opportunity for consumer financial management. Rather than developing proprietary large language models, banks are increasingly viewing AI as a layered architecture. Foundation models such as Claude, GPT, or Gemini provide the conversational interface, while companies like Meniga provide the financial intelligence needed to ground those conversations in a customer’s actual spending patterns, cash flow, subscriptions, and financial goals. This approach enables banks to adopt new AI models as they emerge without rebuilding the personal financial management capabilities that differentiate their customer experience.

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Decisionly Partners with Episode Six on AI-Powered Dispute Automation

Decisionly Partners with Episode Six on AI-Powered Dispute Automation
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Decisionly
  • Card issuer Episode Six has forged a strategic partnership with dispute automation platform Decisionly.
  • The partnership will give card issuers an end-to-end dispute management solution that will enable them to boost efficiency via AI-powered automation.
  • Founded in 2024 by the team that launched Chargehound, Decisionly made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2025.

Enterprise-grade card issuer Episode Six has teamed up with AI-powered dispute automation platform Decisionly in a strategic partnership designed to give card issuers an end-to-end dispute management solution. The alliance will help issuers burdened with traditional dispute and chargeback tools deal with the complexity of modern card program management.

Decisionly’s technology automates the entire dispute lifecycle, including regulatory requirements, network rules, and custom program configuration. The platform delivers automation rates of greater than 95% from day one and reduces manual dispute resolution work by more than 80%. Both Decisionly’s and Episode Six’s platforms are based on an API-first architecture and serve overlapping markets. This will allow customers to access best-in-class capabilities across card infrastructure and dispute operations, and help transform disputes from a cost to be dreaded into an opportunity for creating superior experiences for cardholders.

“We built Episode Six to give issuers the infrastructure they need to run modern card programs, and that means addressing every layer of the stack,” Episode Six CEO and Co-Founder John Mitchell said. “The shift towards purpose-built solutions is accelerating across payments, and disputes is one of the clearest examples of an operational function ready for transformation. By partnering with Decisionly, we can now offer those clients the solutions they need.”

Operating in more than 50 countries, Episode Six is an international, API-first, cloud-native card infrastructure provider. The company’s technology can be run as a sidecar to existing systems or as the foundation for a new stack. Episode Six enables creation of a wide range of products including credit, prepaid, and commercial cards; virtual accounts; embedded wallets; BNPL and lending features; and more. Founded in 2015, Episode Six is based in Austin, Texas.

“Partnering with Episode Six was a natural fit,” Decisionly CEO and Co-Founder Pallavi Kuppa-Apte said. “We share the same fundamental belief that modern card programs deserve modern technology at every layer, including disputes. Episode Six gives us a direct path to a strong and growing base of banks and fintechs already running on modern infrastructure, exactly the kind of issuers who are ready to unlock the full value of purpose-built dispute automation.”

Founded in 2024 by the team that launched Chargehound (which was acquired by PayPal in 2021), Decisionly made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2025. At the conference, the company demonstrated its AI-powered dispute resolution and first-party fraud detection technology for card issuers. Decisionly automates disputes from intelligent intake to custom investigation,to rapid resolution, combining deep domain expertise with advanced technology to allow card issuers to make faster, smarter decisions while lowering operational risk.

Photo by Mike Kononov on Unsplash

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Signicat and TrustTech Bring Reusable Identity to Digital Wallets

Signicat and TrustTech Bring Reusable Identity to Digital Wallets
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Signicat
  • Digital identity innovator Signicat has teamed up with identity verification specialist TrustTech to bring reusable compliance checks to regulated businesses through private digital wallet ecosystems.
  • The partnership combines Signicat’s digital identity platform capabilities with TrustTech’s trust infrastructure to enable verified identity data to be established once and then reused across systems, entities, and borders.
  • Based in Norway, Signicat made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2017 in London.

Digital identity and trust services provider Signicat has partnered with digital trust infrastructure company and identity verification specialist TrustTech to bring reusable compliance checks and trusted signatures to regulated businesses via private wallet ecosystems.

The partnership combines Signicat’s digital identity platform capabilities with TrustTech’s trust infrastructure to help businesses transition away from fragmented identity checks, password-based authentication, and repetitive signing processes in favor of a single, private wallet-driven flow. This enables verified identity and trusted information to be established once and reused across multiple systems, organizations, and borders. The partnership will initially focus on financial services, government, and healthcare, industries where EU-compliant private wallets are already being deployed for employees and customers. These private wallets are front-running eIDAS 2.0, a digital identity framework in the EU that mandates that member states provide citizens with a secure European Digital Identity (EUDI) wallet, and that these wallets be accepted for standardized, cross-border authentication.

“Customers, employees, and partners should not have to prove who they are again and again, and institutions cannot afford to rebuild trust from scratch every time,” TrustTech Chief Commercial Officer Rens Pennings said. “By combining TrustTech’s proven reusable trust infrastructure with Signicat’s European scale, we can help regulated enterprises move from one-off verification to reusable identity. The result is faster onboarding, less manual work, and trusted digital journeys that work across private wallet, sector wallets, and the wider European identity ecosystem.”

TrustTech helps organizations and businesses navigate increasingly complex regulatory regimes, security risks, and fragmented identity systems. The Netherlands-based company’s digital identity solutions and supporting infrastructure enable organizations to securely identify users and customers, protecting sensitive data and conforming with regulations such as eIDAS 2.0, GDPR, and NIS2. Founded in 2025, TrustTech allows organizations to replace repeated checks and paperwork with reusable KYC and compliance checks that feature secure information sharing and cross-organization interoperability.

“Regulated organizations are dealing with identity across more touchpoints than ever, from customer onboarding to employee access, partner checks, and digital signing,” Signicat Chief of Enterprise for Central & Southern Europe Thijs Vink said. “Private wallets give them a practical way to bring those journeys together today, rather than waiting for the wider public wallet ecosystem to mature. By partnering with TrustTech, we can help enterprises create trusted identity experiences that are easier to manage, safer to use, and ready to scale across Europe.”

Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Trondheim, Norway, Signicat made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2017. Today, more than 21,000 organizations around the world use its digital identity solutions for identity proofing, authentication, electronic signatures, trust orchestration, and more. Signicat’s digital identity platform features more than 35 electronic identity methods, as well as access to 500+ digital identity experts across Europe. Asger Hattel is CEO.

Photo by Simon Williams on Unsplash

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What’s Really Behind Robinhood’s 7% Yield?

What’s Really Behind Robinhood’s 7% Yield?
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Julie's Column, Thought Leadership

Robinhood announced a handful of features last week, including the rollout of Robinhood Earn, a decentralized lending product that allows people to lend their dollar-backed USDG through a self-custody wallet at an estimated 7% APY. This estimated 7% APY on USDG stablecoin deposits is high enough to raise eyebrows, especially at a time when banks are paying closer to 3% to 4% on their highest-yield savings accounts. So how can Robinhood sustainably offer 7%?

Robinhood Earn

First, let’s take a look at the details of the launch. Robinhood Earn applies to USDG, a stablecoin issued by Paxos Digital Singapore and Paxos Issuance Europe. Robinhood is not paying 7% APY on bank deposits. Instead, the yield is generated by lending activity for Robinhood users who lend stablecoins using Morpho, a decentralized lending protocol that powers onchain lending. Just as with fiat lending, there is risk in lending stablecoins. Users still assume the risk on the deposits. However, Robinhood has partnered with Lloyd’s of London and RELM to protect covered losses in the event of cyber or smart contract exploits. Essentially, the company is bringing decentralized finance (DeFi) into a familiar customer experience.

The 7% interest strategy appears no different from a fintech offering a new high-yield savings account that pays an above-average yield of over 4% APY in order to incentivize consumers to open new accounts. It is a marketing tool. Robinhood’s new DeFi lending product is already integrated into its mainstream brokerage experience, so the 7% is the additional incentive for users to convert cash to USDG, begin using Robinhood Chain, and eventually use tokenized assets and on-chain services.

Should banks offer 7% yield?

It is important for firms to recognize that yield has become a feature, not the product. If stablecoins become everyday money, what role does the deposit account play? If consumers can earn yield without a traditional bank account, how should banks compete? And what happens when customers don’t even realize they’re using decentralized finance?

The answer isn’t necessarily to match Robinhood’s 7% yield, which is good, because banks already know that offering a 7% yield is off the table. Instead, banks should focus on the advantages DeFi can’t easily replicate:

  • Trust
    FDIC insurance, consumer protections, fraud resolution, and regulatory oversight still matter—especially during periods of market volatility.
  • Financial relationships
    Consumers don’t just need a place to store money. They need mortgages, auto loans, credit cards, financial advice, and payment services. Banks have an opportunity to integrate yield-generating products into a broader relationship.
  • Simplicity
    Robinhood’s announcement demonstrates that consumers don’t want to navigate wallets, bridges, or smart contracts. Banks that can abstract blockchain complexity while maintaining a familiar customer experience will be well positioned.
  • Hybrid models
    Rather than viewing DeFi as competition, banks may eventually incorporate tokenized deposits, stablecoins, or on-chain lending into their own offerings, allowing customers to benefit from blockchain infrastructure without leaving the regulated banking system.

In the new era of finance, the winners will be those that make DeFi invisible. Just as most consumers don’t think about ACH, RTP, or card networks when they use a credit card, in the future they may not care whether their yield comes from a bank balance sheet or an on-chain lending protocol. Instead, they’ll choose the institution that offers the best combination of return, trust, and convenience.

Photo by Andrew Neel

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AI-Driven Investment Platform MDOTM Raises $27 Million

AI-Driven Investment Platform MDOTM Raises $27 Million
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Funding, MDOTM Ltd
  • AI-powered investment solutions provider for asset and wealth managers MDOTM has raised $27 million in funding.
  • The round was led by Expedition Growth Capital and takes MDOTM’s total funding to $36.5 million.
  • MDOTM made its Finovate debut earlier this year at FinovateEurope 2026, introducing its proprietary AI investment platform Sphere.

In a round led by Expedition Growth Capital, AI-driven investment solutions provider MDOTM has secured $27 million in growth equity funding. The investment takes the company’s total funding to $36.5 million, and will be used to accelerate international expansion and hiring across AI research, engineering, product, sales, and client solutions.

With clients including Morgan Stanley, Amundi, and Zurich Bank, MDOTM serves more than 60 financial institutions throughout Europe, the UK, and the US, enabling a growing number of firms to use AI-powered solutions to manage complex investment portfolios at scale. The company’s flagship offering, Sphere, analyzes market and macroeconomic data to identify market regimes and provide forward-looking insights across asset classes. Investment teams can leverage this analysis to construct their own market views, which are then translated into portfolio construction and rebalancing tools. This empowers users to create, customize, and manage investment portfolios at scale, leveraging Sphere’s generative AI capabilities to automatically create personalized portfolio commentary and client reporting.

“Asset and wealth managers are no longer asking whether to use AI in investment decisions, but how to deploy it at scale across thousands of portfolios while maintaining control,” MDOTM CEO Tommaso Migliore said. “That is exactly what Sphere was built to enable, which is why leading financial institutions are already running the platform in production. This investment will help us expand our team and meet the accelerating demand in the US and European market.”

MDOTM’s funding comes as asset and wealth managers are dealing with the twin challenges of fee compression and a demand for personalization. Further, the rising number of investment opportunities is making portfolio orchestration increasingly complex. This requires asset and wealth managers to manage a greater number of inputs, constraints, and decisions across thousands of portfolios. In response, MDOTM’s Sphere delivers an end-to-end AI workflow for investment teams, providing them with AI-driven insights, automated portfolio construction, customization, and rebalancing, personalized portfolio commentary, and more. With over $100 billion in assets under management, MDOTM’s Sphere is backed by a team of 60+ data scientists, engineers, and finance experts, as well as the MDOTM LAB, an academic network of 20+ professors and PhDs engaged in research on machine learning, portfolio management, behavioral finance, and AI ethics.

“Financial institutions have spent the last decade buying back-office and front-end software, but the work in the middle still happens in spreadsheets: rebalancing, keeping portfolios aligned with house views, and generating client commentary,” Expedition Growth Capital Partner Steve Twomey said. “MDOTM has built the AI infrastructure that finally scales that work, with the explainability and governance institutional buyers demand.”

Founded in 2015 in London, MDOTM made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2026. At the conference, the company demonstrated its proprietary AI platform, Sphere, which enhances investment processes and decision-making for banks, insurers, asset managers, and wealth management firms.

Photo by Lucas Davies on Unsplash

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Klarna Applies for US Banking License

Klarna Applies for US Banking License
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news, Klarna
  • Klarna has applied to establish Klarna Bank USA, a Utah-chartered industrial bank, marking its latest step toward becoming a full-service bank in the US.
  • Owning a bank charter would allow Klarna to bring banking operations in-house, reducing its reliance on partner banks while expanding its payments, savings, credit, and merchant offerings.
  • Klarna joins a growing wave of fintechs pursuing US bank charters in 2026, reflecting an industry shift toward owning banking infrastructure instead of relying on sponsor banks.

Digital bank and BNPL provider Klarna is the latest fintech to apply for a US banking license. The company announced today that it has submitted applications to the Utah Department of Financial Institutions and the FDIC to establish Klarna Bank USA. The newly proposed bank will be a Utah-chartered industrial bank.

Klarna’s role as a bank is not new. The Sweden-based fintech has had a bank license in Europe since 2017, and while it has been providing bank services in the US since 2019, it does so through partner banks. Originally founded in 2005 as a buy now, pay later technology provider, Klarna now counts 30 million users in the US and over 119 million active global users.

Klarna said that obtaining its own bank charter will enable it to offer a broader suite of financial services directly to consumers while reducing its reliance on partner banks. The company also framed the move as a way to foster greater competition in the US banking market. “Banking is built on trust,” said Klarna Co-founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski. “We’ve seen firsthand the appetite for a fairer, more transparent approach in the US, and our own banking license is the natural next step, giving customers tools to borrow responsibly and build financial confidence, while bringing greater competition, innovation, and choice to consumers and merchants alike.”

Klarna Bank USA will operate as a subsidiary of Klarna and will have its own independent board, governance, and internal controls. Klarna has appointed Gary Harding, who served as CEO of both Milestone Bank and Prime Alliance Bank, to serve as President and CEO of Klarna Bank USA.

Having its own bank charter would allow Klarna Bank to bring its existing banking operations in-house. Klarna anticipates that removing its reliance on WebBank, its partner bank, will increase reliability across payments, savings, credit, and merchant services. Obtaining its own bank license will offer consumers more transparency and safety by bringing digital tools and traditional banking products in one place.

Klarna’s move to apply for a bank charter follows a flurry of applications in the first half of 2026. According to American Banker, two dozen neobanks, digital asset companies, lenders, investment firms, and payments providers have applied for or conditionally received bank charters so far this year.

Klarna’s application is another sign that fintechs are increasingly viewing bank charters as a strategic advantage instead of a regulatory burden. After years of relying on sponsor banks to offer deposit accounts and lending products, many fintechs have realized that owning the charter can provide greater control over product development, funding, compliance, and the customer experience. Even though the process to obtain a charter is costly and brings heightened regulatory oversight, it also gives companies like Klarna more flexibility to build long-term banking relationships with customers instead of depending on third-party partners.

Photo by Julio Lopez

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