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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
After a thrilling weekend of World Cup matches, fans in the US are readying for this evening’s big contest against Belgium. To help you while away the hours until then, here’s a look at some of the top fintech headlines that are coming across our radar today. Be sure to check back with Finovate’s Fintech Rundown all week long for the latest updates.
Digital banking
Cloud-native core banking and payments platform Thought Machinesurpasses $100 million total revenue milestone.
Digital banking platform for small businesses Bluevineexpands its services to selected foreign-resident owners of US businesses.
Back office
VyStar Credit Union expands partnership with FMSI to advance branch performance strategy.
Agentic AI
BBVAcompletes its first AI agent-initiated transaction on behalf of a cardholder.
The five companies that won Best of Show represent many of the top trends in fintech today, from embedded finance and stablecoin-powered payments to mainframe modernization and AI-enabled personalization. In these interviews, we learn about the inspiration behind the founding of these innovative companies and the problems they are solving for banks, credit unions, other financial institutions, and their customers.
Finovate podcast host Greg Palmer talks with Caitlyn Truong, CEO and Co-Founder of Zengines.
Palmer and Truong discuss how Zengines addresses the challenge of managing legacy core banking applications written in older programming languages like COBOL, RPG, and PL1. Truong explains how her company is modernizing legacy mainframe applications without losing critical logic, satisfying auditors faster, and making legacy systems searchable so transformation and compliance do not stall.
Juan Jurado-Blanco and Armando Quintana, CEO and Chief Revenue Officer of Clockout, respectively, sit down with Greg Palmer in this Finovate podcast conversation.
The trio discuss the benefits of earned wage access as an offering for community banks and credit unions. Clockout’s technology enables users to access their earned wages the same day they work, rather than waiting for traditional biweekly or even monthly pay cycles. The solution embeds seamlessly into existing bank experiences.
Oren Buskila, CEO and Co-Founder of Cobalt, talks with Finovate podcast host Greg Palmer about the challenge of financial institution system dependencies.
Cobalt offers a technology that automatically maps real system dependencies across complex banking environments, enabling agentic AI, real-time visibility, safer changes, reduced risk, and confident operations. Cobalt enables technical teams to anticipate the consequences of modifications before implementation, preventing failures and ensuring safer deployments.
Podcast host Greg Palmer catches up with Craig McLaughlin (CEO) and Baron Conway (Chief Strategy Officer) of Finalytics.AI in the wake of the company’s second consecutive Best of Show win at FinovateSpring (2025 and 2026).
Palmer, McLaughlin, and Conway discuss how Finalytics.AI enables community financial institutions to deliver personalized, high-touch experiences through digital channels while leveraging the wealth of customer data these banks and credit unions possess.
Host Greg Palmer interviews Crebit co-founders Jensen Coonradt (CEO) and Simmi Sen (Chief Product Officer).
In this podcast conversation, Coonradt and Sen explain how their company is modernizing international money transfers by leveraging stablecoin technology to send money across borders as easily as sending a text message. Crebit’s “stablecoin sandwich” approach enables users to on-ramp funds using local payment methods before settling into virtually any currency worldwide in minutes.
How are financial institutions like US Bank helping small businesses take advantage of new, innovative tools and technologies that will enable them to better serve their customers and scale their operations? At FinovateSpring 2026 earlier this year, I spoke with Queanne Smith, Senior Vice President at US Bank, on how integrated digital solutions and strategic partnerships can bring greater efficiency and new revenue opportunities to small and medium-sized enterprises.
In our conversation, Smith talks about the challenges that small businesses face when confronted with fragmented banking services, and explains how embedded banking and platform integration can build trust and efficiency. Smith also discusses the importance of delivering end-to-end solutions like billpay and payroll and shares her thoughts on the best practices for bank-fintech partnerships.
“We did a survey in 2025 with about a thousand of our small business owners and identified that 63% of those small business owners were really struggling and overwhelmed by the number of platforms they were utilizing for their cash management services … The integration that we’re looking to build enables our small business owners and midsize businesses to have a one-stop shop experience. The opportunity for us to think about how clients interface with us and experience us is a real thing. The objective is to minimize the points of friction and improve the client experience overall.”
Queanne Smith is a Senior Vice President at US Bank, where she leads business strategy and partnerships designed to expand access to capital and growth tools for small business owners. Smith works at the intersection of banking, technology, and community impact, leveraging partnerships, data, and emerging tools to deliver scalable, measurable outcomes. In 2025, Smith was recognized as part of American Banker’s Most Powerful Women in Banking Top Teams.
The fifth-largest commercial bank in the United States, US Bank serves millions of clients via a diversified range of business lines. These operations include commercial and institutional banking, business banking, payments, wealth management, and consumer banking. Headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and a member of the Fortune 500, US Bank was named one of the World’s Most Ethical Companies by the Ethisphere Institute.
MX launched a white-labeled conversational AI assistant that banks can embed into their digital banking platforms.
Unlike many consumer AI tools, MX’s assistant can both answer questions about a customer’s finances and initiate banking actions, such as opening new accounts.
The launch reflects a broader industry shift toward keeping AI-powered financial guidance inside banks’ own digital channels, helping institutions strengthen customer relationships.
Financial data platform MX is bringing conversational AI directly into digital banking. The company unveiled a white-labeled financial AI assistant that banks can deploy within their existing banking platforms, enabling customers to ask questions about their finances and take action without leaving the bank’s app.
The new assistant allows bank customers to engage with their finances by asking natural language questions in a conversational environment. The assistant maintains an active relationship with the customer by surfacing meaningful opportunities for financial wellness. Unlike many consumer AI assistants, MX’s tool leverages the financial institution’s existing transactional infrastructure to help customers complete tasks such as opening new accounts.
MX financial institution clients also stand to benefit from the new conversational AI tool. It leverages consumer-permissioned data to contextually recommend immediate financial opportunities and relevant products and services at the exact moment they are needed. Additionally, the increased engagement can help improve consumer trust and reduce strain on traditional customer service channels. Most importantly, it ensures that the bank maintains control over the customer relationship.
“Financial institutions are sitting on incredibly powerful data. They just haven’t had the right tools to act on it at the moment that matters,” said MX CEO and Founder Ryan Caldwell. “This assistant will change that. It’s designed to take complex back-end data and turn it into a clear signal: this customer needs something right now. Instead of a third party stepping in to capture that moment, the relationship stays with the financial institution that earned it, and the customer gets help from someone they already trust.”
From a compliance standpoint, MX’s AI assistant routes user interactions through a secure architecture that helps mitigate risk by validating conversations against the bank’s pre-configured policy rules. These guardrails ensure that consumers receive insights that are derived from their actual data while ensuring administrative visibility for internal risk and compliance teams. And because data stays within the financial institution’s and MX’s platform, it is not made available for third parties to train or retain the data used by the AI assistant.
Interestingly, MX’s launch comes the same week that ChatGPT made its financial aggregation tool more broadly available to its subscribers. The Plaid integration now works for both ChatGPT Pro users as well as ChatGPT Plus users. However, MX’s AI assistant differentiates itself from the LLM’s capabilities in that it is not limited to read-only. The company’s new tool leverages the financial institution’s existing transactional processes to allow users to take actions on their accounts.
MX is currently recruiting early launch partners and expects to roll the assistant out to a broader group of financial institutions following the initial pilot phase.
LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Promon announced a strategic alliance to enhance fraud prevention in mobile apps around the world.
The partnership will combine access to LexisNexis’ ThreatMetrix digital identity, device, and behavioral intelligence with Promon’s in -app protection and trusted telemetry technology.
Headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia, LexisNexis Risk Solutions made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2025 in New York.
LexisNexis Risk Solutions has forged a strategic alliance with mobile application security firm Promon to bolster fraud prevention in mobile apps. The partnership will combine LexisNexis’ ThreatMetrix digital identity, device, and behavioral intelligence with in-app protection and telemetry from Promon’s Promon Shield and Promon Insight, respectively.
“Fraud prevention is increasingly dependent on understanding the full context of a digital interaction,” LexisNexis Risk Solutions Chief Commercial Officer Grayson Clarke explained. “Promon’s app protection capabilities complement the insights delivered through our LexisNexis Risk Intelligence Network, helping customers strengthen the signals they rely on to better detect fraud across the mobile environment.”
Defending mobile apps from fraud comes with a range of challenges. Using techniques such as malware, overlay manipulation, device tampering, reverse engineering, and automated abuse to bypass controls, fraud attacks are increasingly targeting the mobile app itself. This means that fighting fraud requires not just knowing who a user is, but also whether the environment the user is operating in can be trusted.
In response, combining access to in-app protection and telemetry provided by Promon Shield and Promon Insight with identity, device, and transactional risk intelligence from LexisNexis enhances the integrity of the app and strengthens fraud detection quality. These capabilities are orchestrated by the LexisNexis Dynamic Decision Platform, which enables companies to combine app-level protection and identity intelligence to provide better, real-time decisions throughout the mobile customer’s journey.
“Promon has always believed that strong mobile security is a critical foundation for digital trust,” Promon Chief Executive Officer Daniel Kollberg said. “As fraud increasingly targets the mobile app and device environment, organizations need clearer insight into whether each session can be trusted. We are bringing Promon Shield, mobile risk detection, behavioral insights, and tamper-resistant telemetry into one of the world’s leading fraud intelligence platforms, helping organizations protect customers, reduce fraud losses, and deliver safer mobile experiences.”
Together, Promon and LexisNexis Risk Solutions assess risk and protect applications across billions of installations and digital identities around the world. By providing a more comprehensive view of mobile fraud risk, bolstering both the application layer and the signals used for fraud detection, Promon and LexisNexis Risk Solutions are enabling organizations to reduce the number of blind spots in app environments.
Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Oslo, Norway, Promon provides runtime intelligence for apps, embedding protection into compiled apps in seconds with no source code changes and no SDK. Promon’s technology sits inside running apps, detecting threats, transforming trusted telemetry into informed decisions, and executing responses before attacks reach users. Promon has 500+ enterprise clients around the world and protects more than 13 billion transactions a month.
Headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia, and founded in 2000, LexisNexis Risk Solutions made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2025. At the conference, the company demonstrated its AI-powered identity verification and fraud detection solution, IDVerse. The technology authenticates documents and provides biometric verification to defend customers against deepfakes and forged documents. LexisNexis Risk Solutions acquired IDVerse in February 2025.
At FinovateFall this year, we’re selecting 68 innovations that will reshape how financial services operate, and we’re ready to name names. We know many of you prefer to see the demo lineup before securing your delegate pass, so without further ado, here’s 80% of the lineup featuring breakthrough technologies you haven’t seen before and innovation trends you need to know.
The initial wave of selected companies represents many dynamic areas of fintech development—here are just four to give you a sneak peek:
Payments and Cross-Border Solutions: Payments, cross-border solutions, and payment infrastructure modernization feature prominently, with companies developing unified payment hubs that integrate multiple payment rails, blockchain-based remittance systems, and embedded international payment capabilities. These innovative solutions target the growing demand for seamless cross-border transactions and represent exciting new revenue diversification opportunities.
Digital Experience and Security: Privacy-focused customer analytics platforms, streamlined onboarding processes, and voice-based security authentication represent the industry’s cutting-edge response to evolving customer expectations and regulatory requirements around data protection.
Risk and Compliance: Real-time fraud prevention systems, automated reconciliation tools, and AI-powered dispute resolution platforms address the persistent challenge of managing operational risk while maintaining processing speed—and we’re eager to see these solutions in action.
AI-Powered Operations: The largest category, AI-Powered Operations, focuses on autonomous compliance processes, including AML investigations that require minimal human intervention, AI-driven lending workflows that accelerate decision-making, and intelligent back-office automation systems. These groundbreaking solutions address the industry’s ongoing challenge of balancing regulatory compliance with operational efficiency in ways we haven’t seen before.
The first half of 2026 has made it clear that fintech and banking are entering a new phase. AI is changing how consumers interact with financial institutions, infrastructure is becoming a competitive advantage, and embedded finance continues to blur the lines between banks, fintechs, and technology companies.
What do these shifts mean for the rest of the year?
Jody Bhagat, President of North America, Engine by Starling
Tiffani Montez, Principal Analyst, EMARKETER
Jeremy Almond, CEO, Paystand
During this interactive discussion, we’ll explore questions such as:
Will AI assistants become the primary interface for banking?
Is owning financial infrastructure becoming more valuable than owning the customer relationship?
How are customer expectations around banking relationships changing?
What does the rise of invisible payments and embedded experiences mean for banks and fintechs?
Which trends are likely to define the second half of 2026?
Whether you work at a bank, credit union, fintech, or technology provider, you’ll leave with practical insights into where the industry is headed and what strategies are likely to matter most over the coming months.
Date: Wednesday, July 1, 2026 Time: 12:00 p.m. PDT
Reserve your spot today and join the conversation as we examine the forces shaping the future of financial services.
Due to the changing nature of both fintech funding and Finovate alums—a growing number of which are younger, smaller firms—we are presenting our latest alum funding report based on the entirety of the first half of 2026, rather than a single quarter. This year, we are proud to announce that a baker’s dozen of Finovate alums have raised more than $208 million in funding for H1 2026.
We should note that there were companies that secured funding shortly before becoming alums. For example, AAZZUR raised more than $2millionless than a month before making its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2026 in London. Zocks raised $45 million ahead of its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2026 in San Diego. And while these sums cannot be considered as part of the total presented here, they still reflect the level of interest that investors have when it comes to the kind of companies that demo their innovations on the Finovate stage.
Top equity investments from the first half
Jump: $80 million
Saris AI: $28.8 million
Paysend: $25 million
Eisen: $18.5 million
Lyzr AI: $14.5 million
While there were three investments of undisclosed amounts in the first half of 2026, the $80 million raised by Jump, the AI-powered meeting assistant for financial advisors that made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2025, represents the top equity investment from any Finovate alum so far this year. Used by more than 16,000 advisors and leading enterprise IBDs, RIAs, and FIs, Jump saves advisors up to 15 hours per week by putting meeting administration and other tasks on “AI autopilot.”
After Jump, the next largest investments were secured by Saris AI ($28.8 million) and Paysend ($25 million). Saris AI, which made its Finovate debut this year at FinovateSpring 2026, offers an agentic AI solution with AI agents that automate back-office workflows. The San Francisco-based fintech was founded in 2023. Paysend, by contrast, has been a Finovate alum since its debut at FinovateEurope 2016. Supporting more than 25 billion digital endpoints across 170+ countries, Paysend operates a payment infrastructure that features a full stack of proprietary systems, from processing and FX to orchestration and settlement. London-based Paysend was founded in 2015.
Here is our detailed alum funding report for the first half of 2026.
If you are a Finovate alum that raised funding in the first half of 2026 and do not see your company listed, please drop us a note at [email protected]. We would love to share the good news! Funding received prior to becoming an alum is not included.
Fiserv has embedded Personetics’ AI platform into Experience Digital (XD).
The integration will help banks deliver real-time, personalized financial guidance to consumers and small businesses.
The move reflects the shift of AI from a standalone fintech tool to core digital banking infrastructure.
Banking and commerce technology provider Fiserv and cognitive banking platform Personetics are joining forces today. Fiserv has embedded Personetics’ platform within its Experience Digital (XD), a tool that gives banks and credit unions a new way to offer more personalized experiences to end users.
Embedding Personetics’ AI platform directly into Fiserv’s digital banking experience will allow Fiserv’s bank clients to act on data in real time, offering them the ability to deliver timely prompts, contextual guidance, and relevant offers within XD. The new capabilities will help end consumers manage their cash flow, build their savings, and make more informed financial decisions. It will offer small business users the ability to better manage working capital, anticipate needs, and respond more quickly to changes in their business.
“Financial institutions have no shortage of data, but many still struggle to translate that information into timely, relevant action,” said Personetics CEO Udi Ziv. “By embedding Personetics within Experience Digital, Fiserv is helping banks and credit unions deliver more human, personalized digital experiences that can improve money management for consumers and help small businesses operate with greater confidence.”
Personetics was founded in 2010 to bring cognitive banking tools to banks. The company sets itself apart with its AI-driven insights that help banks become a trusted advisor to their customers by bringing them personalized financial guidance. Personetics, a long-standing pioneer in AI-powered financial wellness, serves 150 million bank customers across 24 global markets each month.
Fiserv launched its XD platform in 2023 as the evolution of its digital banking offerings, bringing together account opening, money management, payments, small business banking, and fintech integrations in a unified digital experience. Natively embedding Personetics’ tools into XD will enable banks to create a more intuitive and relevant digital banking experience.
The move comes at a time when consumers are increasingly turning to AI-powered tools for financial guidance. Increasingly, fintechs and banks are adding AI-powered financial guidance as a built-in capability rather than an optional add-on. Embedding Personetics directly into XD will allow Fiserv to lower implementation barriers for clients, enabling banks to bring AI-driven money management tools to market more quickly.
“Consumers and small businesses increasingly expect digital banking experiences that are intuitive and responsive,” said Fiserv Chief Product Officer Vishal Dalal. “With this collaboration, our clients can use the data they already have to deliver timely guidance and personalized engagement that creates meaningful value for the consumers and businesses they serve.”
The announcement illustrates how AI is shifting from a standalone feature to core digital banking infrastructure. Rather than asking banks to select and integrate their own AI tools, platform providers like Fiserv are increasingly embedding those capabilities directly into their products, making advanced financial guidance accessible to a broader range of institutions.
It’s a holiday shortened week in the US, with Independence Day (also known as the Fourth of July) just days away. With that in mind, we’ll keep you posted with all the fireworks in the fintech headlines this week here on the Fintech Rundown!
Maldives Premier Bank (MPB) partners with Finastra for its Financial Messaging API, enabling resilient, secure, always-on payment connectivity.
Paysafejoins Primer platform to streamline card payments for online merchants.
Investing
Education Community Alliance partners with InvestiFi for in-platform investing.
Financial wellness
Family technology company Greenlightlaunches its smart home display—Family Hub—to help families manage finances, chores, and more.
Lending
Baker Hill and Lumos, a specialist in predictive credit intelligence for small business lending, announce a partnership to help community banks and credit unions expand lending opportunities.
Financial services app Tabbysecures a consumer finance license and a SME finance license from the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA.)
Identity and authentication
AI-native risk intelligence solution provider for financial crime and national security operations Quantifindsecures $200 million in funding in a round led by Summit Partners.
Post-quantum authentication and digital identity solutions provider Wultraraises $7.75 million in Series A funding.
Agentic AI
Communication risk management platform for financial services Shieldadded new AI agents to AmplifAI, its agentic suite for digital communications surveillance and investigations.
This week’s edition of Finovate Global looks at recent fintech headlines from India.
CRED raises $900 million in round led by Meta
CRED, a membership-based, credit rewards platform that offers solutions across payments, lending, insurance, wealth, and lifestyle, has secured $900 million in Series H funding. The round was led by Meta, and will be structured through a combination of primary and secondary share purchases. Meta will join the CRED cap table as a minority investor; CRED will earn a post-money valuation of $4.5 billion.
With 1.7 million members engaging with its platform every month, CRED processes more than 40% of credit card bill payments in India, and has seen its lending business grow to more than $2.5 billion in managed assets. The investment will enable the company to accelerate growth, build “institutional muscle,” and extend its leadership across verticals. The company announced that its founder, Kunal Shah, will transition from his operating role as CEO to head WhatsApp internationally. India is WhatsApp’s largest market, with more than 500 million users. Miten Sampat, who has led strategy and finance for CRED since 2020, will take the helm as interim CEO.
“I started CRED in 2018 with a belief that creditworthiness deserves to be rewarded,” Shah said. “In under eight years, that belief has turned into a new category: millions of members, $325 million in revenue, profitability, a full stack of licenses, and a strong brand. On this foundation, with additional capital and an extraordinarily talented team, CRED is poised to become an enduring institution for decades to come.”
CRED is headquartered in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India. The company’s investment announcement comes as the firm launches a new AI-powered credit coaching solution for CRED members. The AI credit coach provides personalized, real-time guidance based on the user’s credit profile to help them better understand their credit status and improve their credit health.
Navi UPI enhances fraud protection capabilities
Navi UPI, a popular UPI app, has unveiledNavi Secure, a new unified framework that combines the platform’s existing fraud prevention, risk monitoring, and user protection capabilities. The offering is designed to help merchants and users deal with the proliferation of increasingly sophisticated fraud attacks that leverage social engineering, compromised devices, false merchants, and more.
With intelligent risk signals, contextual alerts, and preventive safeguards embedded in the customer journey, Navi Secure helps firms reduce risk across a range of fraud scenarios, including scam-driven payments and manipulation-based fraud; compromised devices and apps; unsafe networks and environments; and high-risk entities and transaction behavior.
“Given digital payments have become central to everyday life, fraud prevention needs to be real time and contextual. Navi Secure reflects our commitment to building trust-first financial infrastructure, where safety is embedded into every transaction, not added as an afterthought,” Navi Limited MD and CEO Rajiv Naresh said. “By combining advanced risk intelligence with user-friendly safeguards, we are ensuring that customers can use UPI with confidence, knowing that Navi is actively working in the background to protect their money.”
Navi UPI is among the fastest growing financial services companies in India. The company’s UPI transaction volumes grew from more than 709 million to more than 824 million between January and May 2026. The company currently has 3.6% of India’s UPI market share; a market dominated by PhonePe (46.2%) and Google Pay (32.7%).
Bengaluru-based Navi is a financial services company that provides personal and home loans, insurance, mutual funds, and gold investing, as well as UPI, India’s flagship instant real-time payments system (Unified Payments Interface). Navi UPI is the company’s money transfer solution, which leverages UPI to deliver money transfers anytime, anywhere. Navi was founded in 2018.
Indian paytech Skydo expands to Canada
Payments platform Skydo has won its first regulatory approval outside of its native India. The Bengaluru-based company has secured an international payment license in Canada that will enable the company to offer two-way payment flows, including local collections and payouts, between India and Canada.
“Securing our first international license marks Skydo’s evolution from an India-focused cross-border payments platform to a multi-country payments operator,” Skydo CEO and Co-Founder Srivatsan Sridhar said. “With Canada, we are expanding beyond collections to enable seamless two-way payment flows and support growing India-Canada commerce.”
Founded in 2022, Skydo is a cross-border B2B payments specialist, reducing foreign exchange charges for businesses by more than 50%. The company partners with leading banks around the world, providing businesses with their own foreign virtual accounts to enable them to receive payments without tax or compliance complications. Supporting more than 150 countries, Skydo’s platform processes more than 200,000 payments a year and is used by 40,000+ Indian exporters.
Skydo has referred to Canada as a strategic market, given the scale of trade activity between India and Canada. In 2025, India and Canada reached $10.9 billion in bilateral merchandise trade. Both countries have indicated that they would like to more than double two-way trade, currently at just over $30 billion annually, to $70 billion by 2030.
“Our ambition is to build for the world, from India,” Skydo Co-Founder Movin Jain said. “Canada strengthens our global footprint, enables local collections and payouts, and creates a strong foundation for future expansion across North America.”
Skydo’s regulatory win in Canada comes just a month after the company received in-principle approval to operate as a Payment Service Provider (PSP) in the International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) at Gujarat International Finance Tec-City.
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
Asia-Pacific
Japanese financial giant SBI Holdings agreed to acquire crypto exchange Bitbank for $298 million.
Singapore-based fintech platform Airwallex earned a valuation of $11 billion after securing $320 million in Series H funding.
Mynt, the parent company Philippine mobile payments and finance superapp GCash, has filed for an $1.5 billion IPO on the Philippine Stock Exchange.
Sub-Saharan Africa
Nigerian fintech Daya secured $2.4 million in pre-seed funding to expand its stablecoin payments technology for African businesses.
Kenya-based fintech WapiPay received a Money Services Business license from Canada’s Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Center (FINTRAC).
Pan-African fintech DigiPay and French fintech Belmoney launchedDigiTransfer, a mobile app that enables money transfers between France, Belgium, the Republic of the Congo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Central and Eastern Europe
Albania launched its first fully digital bank, Jet Bank.
Mastercard and PrivatBank announced completion of Ukraine’s first payment executed by AI agent.
Austrian-Swiss global payout infrastructure startup Talentir raised €4 million in seed funding in a round led by Redstone.
Middle East and Northern Africa
Egyptian fintech MNT-Halan announced plans for an IPO that could give the company a valuation of $1 billion.
Lean Technologies and Ziina teamed up to launch the UAE’s first One-Tap Pay by Bank experience.
Israeli fintech Payoneeragreed to be sold to Canadian firm Nuvei for $2.7 billion.
Central and Southern Asia
Indian fintech Cred secured $900 million in Series H funding in a round led by Meta.
Karachi-based easypaisa digital bank inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Binance to “explore innovative opportunities” in fintech, digital savings, and investment solutions.
Indian UPI app Navi UPI, unveiled a new unified safety framework, Navi Secure.
Iupana looked at how new governments in Colombia and Peru are seeking to bolster the fintech sectors of their respective countries.
Payward, financial infrastructure platform and parent company of Kraken, secured a Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) registrations from the British Virgin Islands Financial Services Commission (BVI FSC).
How is innovation in blockchain technology, specifically the growing interest in stablecoins and tokenized deposits, creating ways for banks and financial services companies to offer new services, engage current customers better, and introduce new potential revenue sources?
Steven Ramirez, CEO of Beyond the Arc, caught up with Chris Nichols, President of Institutional Banking at SouthState Bank, earlier this year at FinovateSpring 2026 in San Diego. At the conference, Nichols gave a keynote address on the emergence of agentic AI as a new frontier in financial services and discussed ways that agentic commerce will reshape the retail landscape. More specifically, Nichols explained how the combination of tokenization and agentic AI could create major opportunities for banks and financial institutions, enabling 24/7 settlement, smart contracts, programmable money, and more.
In this conversation, Ramirez and Nichols discuss SouthState Bank’s dual token strategy that embraces both deposit tokens and stablecoins, payment orchestration and the future of treasury management, as well as how AI and tokenization are shortening development times from months to days.
What’s really interesting to us, and our number one use case, is the store of value internationally. The customers—specifically the non-US customers of our customers—have subsidiaries in places like Australia or Mexico. These subsidiaries have expenses in dollars that must be converted into local currency, such as Mexican pesos. They then generate revenue and have to convert it back to dollars to repatriate that money. It’s much more efficient to hold some of that capital in a US dollar stablecoin.
As President of Institutional Banking for SouthState Bank, Nichols supports innovation, artificial intelligence, digital assets, loan pricing, asset-liability management, open banking, payments, and fintech investing for the bank, in addition to capital market activities. He produces the Banker-to-Banker blog and is a frequent host of The Community Bank Podcast.
Headquartered in Winter Haven, Florida, SouthState Bank is a $67 billion, publicly traded regional bank with a network of more than 379 branches throughout the southeastern and south-central US. The institution has grown significantly via merger and acquisition in the past few years, most recently acquiring Texas-based Independent Bank Group in 2025.
