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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
With hundreds of unique fintech solutions available to help diversify your offerings, identity protection may not be at the top of the list. However, as identity fraud becomes increasingly common, differentiating your firm with an identity protection solution may be beneficial for both your firm and your customer.
In this video interview, recorded at FinovateFall 2025 in New York, we explore how PrivacyGuard is turning validation into a competitive edge. I spoke with Christopher D’Aprile, Director of PrivacyGuard, who joined us in a conversation where he explored the latest trends in identity protection, its relevance for banks and credit unions, and actionable strategies for implementation.
“You want to find new products and services to bring to your customers,” said D’Aprile, “but let me be honest with you. Your customer does not want to buy a magazine subscription from a bank. They want something relevant. Identity theft protection is exactly that. If you can adopt that solution, we already have the recipe to turn it into a non-interest revenue-generating machine.”
Connecticut-based PrivacyGuard was founded in 1991 and offers a comprehensive suite of credit reporting, credit monitoring, and identity theft protection services. The company offers alerts from all three credit bureaus and scans the dark web for users’ personal details. PrivacyGuard offers three plans: Identity Protection, Credit Protection, and Total Protection.
D’Aprile serves as Director of PrivacyGuard. He is well-seasoned in the importance of digital identity, having previously held an executive position at Allstate Identity Protection. With more than 30 years of experience driving growth across financial services, insurance, and technology sectors, he specializes in building partnerships with banks and credit unions to deliver identity theft protection solutions that both safeguard consumers and open new non-interest revenue streams.
Block’s Cash App rolled out its largest update ever, adding 151 new features spanning banking, bitcoin, payments, and AI-driven automation.
The app will soon let Cash App’s 58 million users send and receive stablecoins, automatically converting between fiat and crypto to bypass legacy payment rails.
A new Moneybot feature delivers personalized financial insights, while Cash App Green expands banking perks like 3.5% APY savings and fee-free overdrafts.
Block-owned Cash App unveiled its Fall Release this week. The move marks the brand’s most significant product expansion since it was founded in 2013. The new release brings 151 new features across banking, bitcoin, commerce, peer-to-peer payments, and AI and automation on the platform.
Among the releases, one of the most relevant is the new stablecoin capability. When it goes live early next year, Cash App’s 58 million customers will receive a blockchain address that will allow them to send and receive stablecoins directly on the platform. When users receive stablecoins, they are automatically converted to fiat currency within the app. Conversely, fiat dollars sent out convert back to stablecoins on-chain. Leveraging the blockchain to transfer funds will help Cash App bypass ACH, card networks, and correspondent banking.
Other notable releases among the 151 announced are:
Cash App Green
Arguably the second most significant piece of the new launch is Cash App Green, a flexible banking program that expands banking tools to more than eight million qualifying customers. Cash App is positioning the banking program as a benefits program, and will pay 3.5% APY on savings, offer free overdraft coverage of up to $200, facilitate no-fee cash withdrawals from in-network ATMs, extend higher borrowing limits, offer free overdraft protection, and lend up to $500 without a credit check. Users can unlock these benefits by spending $500 or more with their card or depositing $300 or more in paychecks each month.
Moneybot
This AI-powered feature offers users real-time insight and personalized suggestions within the app. The feedback, which is based on in-app activity, helps customers budget smarter, identify trends, and build financial confidence.
Expanded access to credit
Cash App’s lending product, Borrow, is now available to eligible customers in 48 states. This expansion targets underserved populations with low credit scores. Cash App disclosed that 70% of Borrow users have credit scores below 580, while repayment rates remain above 97%.
Expanded teen savings and safety features
Cash App’s teen accounts for users 13 to 17 year of age now earn 3.5% APY on their savings balances. Additionally, the company is releasing new parental controls to allow the primary accountholder to set spending caps, limit features, and approve contacts.
Making bitcoin everyday money
In addition to the stablecoin capabilities mentioned above, Cash App customers will be able to spend, send, and hold bitcoin. When users select USD as a currency for Lightning QR Code payments, they can make the payment without spending or holding bitcoin. Additionally, customers can access a new map to find and pay nearby merchants who accept bitcoin.
Cash App was founded in 2013. At the time, Cash App most directly competed with Braintree’s Venmo. Twelve years on, Cash App still has its roots in peer-to-peer payments, but has since diversified into a more robust digital banking platform that enables users to hold funds, deposit their paychecks, spend their money, invest, manage their bitcoin, and file their taxes.
Today’s announcement, which comes four months after Cash App launched a group payment feature called Pools, is a clear statement that the company is seeking to compete in the challenger banking arena.
DownloadFintech at the Crossroads: Regulatory Divergence and Technological Convergence in 2026, the latest report from the research team at Finovate.
This free resource highlights the challenges and opportunities banks, fintechs, and financial services providers will face next year as powerful trends in regulatory authority and technological innovation take hold.
“A wave of enabling technologies, new challenges, and shifting attitudes is reshaping the way companies and individuals all over the world are making, investing, spending, and moving their money … Emerging technologies such as agentic AI, stablecoins, and embedded finance are advancing alongside increasingly fragmented global regulation.”
Fintech at the Crossroads examines 10 emerging themes—including embedded finance, open banking, stablecoins, and agentic AI—that are moving to the top of the agenda for fintech innovators and regulatory authorities alike. The white paper looks at where these technologies are today and what directions they are likely to take banking and financial services in 2026.
DownloadFintech at the Crossroads: Regulatory Divergence and Technological Convergence in 2026 today!
B2B payments solutions company LiquidTrust announced the availability of its LiquidTrust platform featuring Protected Pay and Simple Pay.
The offering will help companies secure high-value and first-time transactions and enable fast, verified payments.
Headquartered in Los Angeles, California, and founded in 2019, LiquidTrust made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2024. Saujin Yi is Founder and CEO.
B2B payments solutions provider LiquidTrustannounced the formal availability of its LiquidTrust platform featuring both the company’s Protected Pay and Simple Pay solutions. The offering is designed to facilitate secure high-value transactions and provide for fast, verified payments.
LiquidTrust helps platforms—including document management systems, supply chain companies, and marketplaces—embed configurable payment and escrow flows directly into their environments. This enables a faster, more streamlined launch that avoids the massive effort typically involved in building secure payment infrastructures.
“Most platforms focus on the matchmaking, but solving the complexities of what happens after the sale or match is both a risk and an opportunity,” LiquidTrust Founder and CEO Saujin Yi said. “LiquidTrust helps them close the loop by turning trust into a growth lever, enabling platforms to increase transaction volume, reduce disputes, and strengthen user confidence. By embedding structural trust directly into payments, platforms can transform what was once a compliance burden into a competitive advantage. In a time of tariffs and uncertainty, trust is the foundation that keeps commerce moving.”
LiquidTrust provides two ways for businesses to move money safely and efficiently. Powered by the company’s proprietary Micro Escrow technology, LiquidTrust’s Protected Pay secures high-value and first-time transactions by holding funds until specific, verifiable conditions—such as shipment, delivery, or document upload—are satisfied. LiquidTrust’s Simple Pay offering provides fast, verified payments to 200+ countries. Together, the two solutions give companies control over how their funds move, providing both flexible protection and instant visibility over every transaction.
Platforms deploying the solution will benefit from easy-to-launch payment flows that are customized for their individual use cases; built-in KYC/KYB, AML, transaction monitoring, and subledgering; SOC 2 certification and secure infrastructure powered by JP Morgan’s global treasury and payment rails; and the opportunity to generate new revenues from monetized protection features or payment fees.
Founded in 2019 and headquartered in Los Angeles, California, LiquidTrust made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2024. At the conference, the company showed how its technology enables businesses to hold payments in third-party micro escrow accounts to guard against delays, default, and fraud. In the year since then, the company has raised $4 million in seed funding, and earned recognition from Datos Insights and the PayTech Awards USA.
Gusto is partnering with SymphonyAI to bring enterprise-grade financial crime protection to its 400,000+ small and mid-sized business clients.
SymphonyAI’s risk intelligence platform gives Gusto’s clients faster detection, deeper visibility, and fewer false positives across fraud, AML, and sanctions monitoring.
The partnership marks Gusto’s evolution beyond payroll, strengthening its risk management capabilities and expanding its role as a full-scale financial operations platform.
Payroll, benefits, and HR management solutions company Gusto is bringing new benefits to its small business customers today. The California-based company is teaming up with SymphonyAI to offer its small business clients another tool to fight financial crime.
SymphonyAI’s financial crime and risk intelligence platform offers financial crime detection, investigation, and reporting capabilities to more than 2,000 enterprise customers across the globe, including 200 of the top financial institutions. The tools give compliance teams a synchronized view of risk across fraud, AML, and sanctions. As a result, organizations benefit from faster investigations, fewer false positives, and greater transparency.
“Small businesses deserve enterprise-grade protection, and SymphonyAI helps us deliver exactly that,” said Gusto’s Head of Financial Crime Compliance and AML/BSA Officer John Wiethorn. “Their platform gives our team deeper visibility and faster insight so we can stay ahead of risk and keep our customers’ operations safe and seamless.”
SymphonyAI’s financial crime platform enables Gusto’s compliance team to analyze massive transaction volumes, identify risks faster, and minimize false positives on its 400,000+ small- and mid-sized business clients.
“Gusto’s implementation shows how vertical AI delivers tangible, immediate impact,” said SymphonyAI President of the Financial Services Division John Edison. “Our platform automates the entire financial crime lifecycle—from detection and investigation to compliance and reporting—unifying processes that have historically been fragmented. This end-to-end automation is transforming how institutions fight financial crime, improving speed, accuracy, and operational efficiency.”
Gusto, originally known as ZenPayroll, was founded in 2011 to provide a cloud-based payroll, benefits, and HR management solution. The company’s tools help businesses track time and attendance, onboard new employees, manage existing talent, and more. Earlier this fall, Gusto acquired retirement specialist Guideline.
Adding SymphonyAI’s capabilities to its lineup will strengthen Gusto’s risk management framework and mark another step in its evolution from payroll processor to full-scale financial operations platform.
The International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) is out with a new report that highlights both the promise and the potential hazards of the tokenization of financial assets.
In a world in which stablecoins have increasingly defined innovation in the cryptocurrency/blockchain space, tokenization of financial assets is seen by some as the Next Big Thing in decentralized finance. Tokenization of financial assets refers to the process of representing ownership of a traditional financial asset, such as a share of stock or a bond, as a digital token on a distributed ledger or blockchain. Importantly, although tokenized assets can be transferred, traded, or exchanged between parties electronically, these assets are not cryptocurrencies—they are digital representations of regulated financial assets.
Valued for their ability to bring greater efficiency to the payments process—as well as their transparency, programmability, and potential to support financial inclusion via fractionalization—tokenized financial assets remain a new feature on the financial services scene. As such, there are myriad questions about how they can and should be used, as well as how they should be regulated. In their recent report, IOSCO, via its Fintech Task Force (FTF) and Financial Asset Tokenization Working Group (TWG) raised a number of these questions.
“The analysis shows that the majority of risks arising from the current commercial application of tokenization fall into existing risk taxonomies,” the report reads in its Executive Summary. “Market participants are not unfamiliar with managing such risk types. However, the manifestation of vulnerabilities and risks that are unique to the technology itself may require the introduction of new or additional controls to manage them.”
Here are three top takeaways from the IOSCO report on the tokenization of financial assets.
Legal Uncertainty and Ownership Rights
The biggest concern expressed in the report is the idea that there remains significant legal ambiguity about the tokenization of financial assets. This includes questions about the rights of ownership, transferability, and enforceability of claims.
“While there are currently well-established legal frameworks and structures for the treatment of financial assets created in paper certificate or book-entry form,” the report observes. “It can be unclear whether the existing legal treatment … applies to those created or represented in the form of tokens.”
In the absence of greater clarity on these legal framework issues, investors may find themselves unable to price or trade tokenized financial assets with confidence. This, at a minimum, can create asymmetry between investor expectations and outcomes and, at a maximum, contribute to more systemic uncertainty and challenges.
Infrastructure Risks and Operational Vulnerabilities
The second major risk discussed in the IOSCO report has to do with infrastructure risk, and the concerns range from the operational to the malicious. In either case, however, a major event that exposes these technical vulnerabilities could result in assets becoming permanently lost or cause an even wider market disruption.
Much of this concern is related to the relative newness of distributed ledger technology, as well as to some unique aspects of the technology compared to what is found in traditional financial markets. One example is the potential loss of a private key in a token structure, a phenomenon that does not exist in the world of traditional finance. The loss of a private key, which represents a sort of digital signature or ownership credential, would effectively result in the loss of access to the asset. To that end, a stolen private key would enable a criminal to steal the victim’s tokens.
“These assets face operational vulnerabilities and risks unique to this infrastructure, including cyber-attacks on blockchain nodes, congestion in transaction processing, data leakage, market fragmentation, smart contract bugs, and loss of private keys,” the report explains. “As tokenization scales up, regulators should also be cognizant of possible changes in market activities and market structure.”
Market Interconnectedness and Systemic Risk
A third concern is the creation of new dependencies and greater interconnectedness between market participants that is likely to happen as tokenization of financial assets scales. There are two versions of this. As an example of the first version, the report notes that a critical failure of a shared infrastructure, with multiple financial institutions tokenizing assets on the same blockchain network, could impact all tokenized assets on the network, rendering them temporarily or even permanently inaccessible.
Another example of the potential interconnectedness challenge arises as tokenized financial assets are increasingly used as collateral in cryptocurrency markets or as part of a stablecoin reserve. Here, the concern is that a crisis in the cryptocurrency markets such as a major or sustained stablecoin depeg could affect tokenized money market funds or government bonds being used as backing assets. The impact could readily spread to institutional investors with tokenized holdings, who would become involuntarily exposed to the heightened volatility of the crypto market.
Innovating for Known Unknowns
The quote from the report’s executive summary helps keep these and other concerns raised in the report in the proper context. While some challenges are more daunting, others more likely represent the kind of technological gauntlet that any product, service, or network must overcome as it scales. “Such risks and controls have been acknowledged by issuers and operators,” the report itself notes. That said, clear legal frameworks will be essential for addressing the broader challenges facing tokenized financial assets and unlocking their potential benefits.
Business verification specialist Dotfile has teamed up with fraud prevention firm Trustfull.
The partnership will integrate Trustfull’s risk-scoring API within Dotfile’s business verification platform to help businesses fight synthetic identity fraud.
Headquartered in Paris, France, Dotfile demoed its technology at FinovateEurope 2024 in London.
End-to-end business verification company Dotfile has partnered with fraud prevention firm Trustfull to help fight a synthetic fraud problem that analysts believe will cost businesses $23 billion by 2030.
“As the lines between AML compliance and fraud prevention continue to blur, financial institutions are increasingly looking for integrated solutions to help them stay ahead of risk without compromising user experience,” Dotfile CEO Vasco Alexandre said. “In Trustfull, we’ve found the ideal partner to meet that need. Our teams share a clear vision for secure, seamless onboarding and a deep commitment to customer-centricity, making our collaboration a success from day one.”
Synthetic identity fraud takes place when fraudsters combine authentic and counterfeit personal information to create fake user profiles and bypass standard identity verification checks. The partnership will integrate Trustfull’s risk-scoring API within Dotfile’s business verification platform. This will enable clients to identify synthetic identities and other suspicious behavior discreetly and in real time. Trustfull’s AI agents leverage the analysis of hundreds of open source intelligence datapoints from users’ phone numbers, emails, IP addresses, and web domains to flag high-risk signups and bolster KYC, KYB, and AML workflows.
For businesses onboarding customers at scale—such as traditional and challenger banks, BNPL providers, crypto platforms, and payment providers—the new integrated solution from Dotfile and Trustfull will help them find a balance between effective fraud fighting and a seamless customer experience. Trustfull’s risk scoring functionality is currently available to both new and existing Dotfile customers, providing a unified solution that combines risk scoring, fraud prevention, ID verification, UBO mapping, AML screening, and onboarding workflows in a single streamlined offering.
“Getting onboarding right is non-negotiable for today’s digital companies,” Trustfull CEO Marko Maras said. “By integrating Trustfull’s risk scoring solution within Dotfile’s market-leading platform, we’re giving fintechs a single, integrated way to detect and stop synthetic identities and high-risk users at the first touchpoint with the customer, preventing fraud while protecting signup conversion in one single step.”
Trustfull analyzes digital footprint data from customer interactions to help businesses reduce risk and accelerate growth. The company’s technology leverages combined and silent phone, email, IP, device, browser, and domain checks to identify fraud and financial crime across the customer journey. Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Milan, Italy, Trustfull receives more than one million API requests a day, and leverages 500+ open data sources to provide a 95% fraud detection rate. With more than $13 million in capital raised, Trustfull counts ING Bank, Scalapay, and Elavon among its enterprise clients.
Headquartered in Paris, France, and founded in 2021, Dotfile demonstrated its end-to-end business verification platform at FinovateEurope 2024. Dotfile’s technology enables businesses to streamline the verification and onboarding process, automatically evaluating risk profiles and addressing and managing risk in real time. Companies using Dotfile’s platform can automate KYB and AML processes, reduce fraud, access quality data, and secure compliance all from a single platform.
Dotfile serves more than 80 financial institutions across 15 countries. With 3x year-over-year revenue growth, the French fintech has raised €8.5 million ($9.8 million) in funding from investors including Serena Capital and Seaya Ventures.
FintechOS and Finastra have forged a strategic partnership designed to modernize the account origination process for small businesses and consumers.
The partnership will integrate the Finastra Phoenix core system and MalauzAI Digital Banking into the FintechOS platform.
Finastra was formed via a merger between D+H Corporation and Finovate alum Misys in 2017. FintechOS has been a Finovate alum since FinovateFall 2021.
A newly announced strategic partnership between FintechOS and Finastra will help modernize the account origination process for small businesses and consumers. The pact will integrate both the Finastra Phoenix core system and MalauzAI Digital Banking into the FintechOS platform to make the account opening process faster, easier, and more secure for both in-person and online applicants.
“Our collaboration with Finastra is a direct response to the market’s demand for faster innovation,” FintechOS SVP of Growth Ash Govindia said. “By integrating our low-code digital onboarding and origination platform with Finastra’s core system, we are empowering financial institutions to launch sophisticated, customer-centric products in weeks, not months.”
The combination of a reliable core and digital banking system with a low-code origination platform and AI-powered product engine will help institutions avoid issues common to both traditional and online account opening processes. The integration will enable Finastra customers to configure pricing, tiers, bundles, and eligibility rules, and publish them to mobile, web, and banker-assisted journeys. This will reduce time to market and make operations less complex. The combined capabilities will be available to joint customers of both companies.
“Our goal is to help community and regional financial institutions deliver compelling experiences wherever customers engage,” Finastra General Manager, US Core and Digital Banking, Joe Gomez, said. “FintechOS complements Phoenix and MalauzAI by adding a flexible product and pricing layer that simplifies account opening while supporting personalized offers across channels. Together we make it easier to innovate while maximizing existing investments.”
Headquartered in London, Finastra leverages its expertise in lending, payments, universal banking, treasury, and capital markets to provide software solutions to more than 8,000 customers in more than 130 countries. This includes 45 of the world’s top 50 banks. Formed in a merger between Misys and D+H Corporation in 2017, the company recently announced a partnership with Belize Bank Group, which has deployed the company’s cloud-native core banking solution, Essence.
FintechOS made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2021 and returned to the stage earlier this year for FinovateFall 2025. Based in London and founded in 2017, the company offers an AI-driven product engine that integrates seamlessly into banks’ existing systems. The technology features low-code capabilities and composable architecture that facilitate rapid digital transformation and innovation without replacing current core infrastructure. Last month, the company announced that it has forged a strategic partnership with HCLTech to accelerate digital transformation and core modernization for banks and insurers.
CB Insights is out with its State of Insurtech Q3’25 report. The top takeaway? With the total number of deals down and merger and acquisition activity at record highs, the insurtech industry appears to be reorganizing to maximize the opportunities of scale, digital modernization, and market reach.
Deals Down
According to CB Insights’ research, the number of insurtech deals dropped to its lowest level since the second quarter of 2016. Q3’25 featured 76 insurtech deals, 65% less than the industry’s peak of 219 deals in the first quarter of 2021.
In addition to the number of deals being down, the median insurtech deal size has also decreased on a year-to-date basis from $3.8 million in 2024 to $2.9 million in 2025. The report indicates that a diminished early-stage pipeline is to blame. Year-to-date, 60% of all deals have gone to early-stage startups, the lowest deal-share percentage since 2011.
Lastly, the number of active investors in insurtech in Q3’25 shrank to the fewest since the first quarter of 2017. Especially notable was the quarter-over-quarter decline in investors making multiple investments, from 13 in Q2’25 to 4 in Q3’25.
Mergers and Acquisitions Up
At the same time, M&A activity in insurtech was on a tear, reaching its highest levels in three years. There were 21 insurtech M&A deals in Q3’25—the most since Q3’22 when there were 23 deals. This compares favorably to 16 deals in Q2’25. The report notes that the gains in the third quarter of this year helped reverse a trend of decreasing M&A activity between 2022 and 2024.
The reasons for the uptick in M&A activity are varied and interesting. Some analysts have suggested that business leaders are becoming increasingly confident in dealing with uncertainty and have embraced a “move through uncertainty” mentality, in the words of WTW analyst Jana Mercereau. Other factors include high stock market valuations, which can facilitate acquisitions; relatively stable interest rates; and the relatively weak M&A period from 2022 to 2024. The drive for digital modernization also plays a role. For its part, CB Insights offers an intriguing idea that the relative lack of attention from investors gave established insurance companies the opportunity to “engage more closely with emerging insurtechs.”
Insurtech in Q4 and Beyond
Heading into the final quarter of the year, there are a number of questions for insurtechs and many of them mirror concerns and issues in fintech more broadly. Which companies are actually putting AI to work in interesting use cases, and which are still in a pilot phase purgatory? How well are investors and establishment insurance companies recognizing where the value lies? How will evolving regulatory requirements incentivize regtechs to develop innovative compliance solutions for insurers? These are some of the questions that come to mind when reading CB Insights latest insurtech report. It will be interesting to see how the events of the fourth quarter and beyond help us answer them.
We have two more weeks until the holiday season slowdown, but the fintech news pulse is already beginning to slacken. So far this week, we’re seeing a lot of news in the fraud and compliance spaces, as well as the payments subsector, with Visa and Mastercard reaching a revised $38 billion settlement with merchants. Here is some of the biggest news from this week so far. We’ll continue adding news to this post throughout the week, so stay tuned!
Fraud and security
Agent IQenhances fraud prevention capabilities with integrated risk-based authentication platform from IDScan.net.
Paystand has acquired Bitwage to create a Global Autonomous Finance Network that combines accounts receivable, accounts payable, FX, and treasury management into one decentralized system.
The deal strengthens Paystand’s stablecoin capabilities, enabling instant global payments, on-chain treasury management, and lower transaction costs for businesses operating across borders.
As stablecoin adoption surges, today’s deal validates that stablecoins are not speculative assets, but rather reliable, programmable payment instruments.
Cloud-based billing and payment platform Paystand is acquiring blockchain payments company Bitwage this week. The California-based company will leverage Bitwage to build a Global Autonomous Finance Network to offer a decentralized, programmable foreign exchange and treasury engine.
Bitwage was founded in 2014 and has since helped more than 90,000 workers and 4,500 businesses send and receive payments across almost 200 countries. The company facilitates stablecoins, bitcoin, and fiat currencies, linking both sides of the ledger in one programmable platform.
Founded in 2013, Paystand was created to eliminate fees, digitize the cash cycle, and create a self-driving money experience for businesses. The company offers B2B payments and billing capabilities, helping businesses leverage the blockchain to securely record their payment history by certifying and notarizing payments on the blockchain. Over the past few years, Paystand has connected 1+ million businesses and processed billions in volume.
Bringing on Bitwage’s technology will enable Paystand to help businesses scale their stablecoins operations. Specifically, clients will be able to make global payments instantly within Paystand’s accounts receivable (AR)/accounts payable (AP) network, handle treasury management with on-chain settlement, maintain compliance, and lower costs. Notably, the integration will also offer a more connected finance stack that merges AR, AP, payouts, foreign exchange, and treasury in a single, borderless system.
“This is how modern business should move money, from manufacturers in China, to suppliers in Argentina, to developers in Kenya, and everywhere in between,” said Paystand CEO and co-founder Jeremy Almond. “From invoices to payroll, from spending to earning, we’re building a financial system that works like software: 24/7, decentralized, and borderless.”
Paystand selected Bitwage because it has been using the company for years to pay international vendors and contractors in stablecoins. Some employees, including Almond, even received portions of their paycheck and bonuses in Bitcoin.
Logistically, Bitwage employees will join the Paystand team.
The acquisition comes at a time when stablecoin usage and regulation are rising. According to Paystand, the value of stablecoins in circulation has grown by more than 50% since early 2023, while over $7 trillion in stablecoin transactions were processed last year, surpassing even PayPal’s volume. At the same time, new legislation such as the GENIUS Act in the US and MiCA in the EU are offering regulatory clarity.
When mainstream adoption and policy momentum are converging, digital dollars are becoming a core part of global commerce. Paystand’s purchase of Bitwage validates that stablecoins are not speculative assets, but rather reliable, programmable payment instruments that can lower costs, reduce settlement times, and connect businesses and workers across borders in real time.
Digital experience analytics company Glassbox has acquired anomaly detection and business monitoring firm Anodot. Terms of the deal were not available.
Glassbox will integrate Anodot’s engine into its platform to help businesses monitor and better understand customer behavior.
Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Virginia, Anodot made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2022 in London.
Digital experience analytics provider Glassbox announced its acquisition of Anodot, a provider of real-time anomaly detection and business monitoring. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
The integration of Anodot’s engine will enable Glassbox to detect more granular shifts in user behavior in order to spot patterns across digital experiences. This will help the firm identify a range of behaviors that could impact the business, providing early warning of potential customer friction, system underperformance, or conversion declines. These insights will help product, UX, DevOps, and analytics teams make informed decisions and provide them with the built-in workflow integrations they need to accelerate response times.
“As enterprises increasingly rely on digital channels to engage customers, Glassbox has become essential for understanding and shaping customer behavior,” Glassbox CEO Guy Perry said. “By integrating Anodot’s advanced anomaly detection into our platform, we’re enabling customers to automatically uncover and proactively react to even the smallest shifts in user behavior. This acquisition reinforces our commitment to helping our customers deliver exceptional, frictionless digital experiences at scale.”
Glassbox’s acquisition is the first big move for Perry, who joined the company as CEO last month. Perry was previously CEO and president of trade finance software company Surecomp and, before that, held senior leadership roles at NCR Global and Motorola Solutions. In his appointment announcement, Perry underscored Glassbox’s “world-class technology, deep expertise, and truly customer-centric culture” and the firm’s ability to “redefine how organizations turn digital insights into meaningful outcomes.”
Headquartered in London and founded in 2010, Glassbox offers an AI-driven platform that captures, analyzes, and optimizes user interactions across digital channels. The company’s technology helps organizations enhance digital experiences for customers, boost brand loyalty, and improve revenue growth. Glassbox provides 100% user session capture, real-time alerts, and AI-powered insights to help companies detect and resolve customer pain points, ensure accessibility, and fight fraud.
Anodot made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2022 in London. At the conference, the Ashburn, Virginia-based company demonstrated its business monitoring platform that uses AI to continuously monitor and correlate payments activity and business performance. Helping identify revenue-critical issues—from processes that are creating an unacceptable level of customer friction to anomalous behavior that is potentially fraudulent—the platform provides real-time actionable alerts and forecasts to reduce detection time by as much as 80%.
Earlier this year, Anodot announced that it had formed a new business unit, Umbrella, dedicated to the company’s cloud cost management platform. Designed to meet the needs of managed service providers (MSPs) and multi-divisional enterprises, the Umbrella Cloud Cost Management Platform leverages AI and business analytics to give companies visibility into their cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) spend.
