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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
The OCC conditionally approved Upstart to establish a branchless, full-service national bank just four months after the company applied.
The charter would let Upstart originate loans nationwide, accept FDIC-insured deposits, and reduce its reliance on third-party banking partners while preserving its existing loan-purchaser network.
The approval reflects growing fintech interest in bank charters, but the OCC’s rejection of Wise’s application shows that regulatory approval is still far from guaranteed.
Lending marketplace Upstart has been granted conditional approval from the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to establish Upstart Bank. The news comes four months after Upstart submitted its initial application.
Upstart is pursuing a de novo bank charter—a license to establish a newly formed, full-service national bank—and will accept the accompanying bank holding company oversight. The charter will allow Upstart to reduce operational complexity as well as reliance on third party partners.
“Conditional approval from the OCC is an important milestone for Upstart Bank and we will continue to work with the OCC, the FDIC, and the Federal Reserve on the remaining steps,” said Upstart Co-Founder and CEO Paul Gu. “Upstart Bank will allow us to lower the cost of lending and bring our full product offering to all 50 states, advancing our mission to radically reduce the cost and complexity of credit for all Americans.”
While the newly formed bank will be headquartered in Delaware, it will not have any physical branches. The new charter will allow it to originate loans to all US consumers and accept FDIC insured deposits. Upstart emphasized that the new bank is intended to complement its existing funding model instead of replace it. Banks, credit unions, and institutional investors are expected to continue purchasing the vast majority of loans originated on the Upstart platform.
California-based Upstart was founded in 2012 and leverages AI to price credit and automate the borrowing process. The company closed its IPO in 2020 and is currently traded on the NASDAQ under the ticker UPST with a market capitalization of $2.67 billion.
Upstart’s conditional approval comes as bank charter activity is accelerating under a more fintech-friendly regulatory environment. At the same time, regulators are demonstrating that approvals are far from automatic. Just one day after Upstart’s announcement, the OCC rejectedWise’s application for a national trust bank charter, underscoring that applicants must still satisfy supervisory and compliance expectations.
Intuit launched a QuickBooks-native business credit card that combines spending, expense management, and accounting in a single platform.
The move puts Intuit in more direct competition with spend management fintechs like Ramp, Brex, and Expensify by eliminating the need for multiple corporate spend tools.
With native access to QuickBooks data and nearly 100 million customers across its ecosystem, Intuit enters the market with significant underwriting, distribution, and cross-selling advantages.
Intuit has unveiled the Intuit Business Credit Card, a new Mastercard to help small businesses manage spending, access credit, and understand their financial health in one place. With the launch of the new card, QuickBooks is moving upstream in the small business services space from bookkeeping into the moment a business expense is authorized.
The new card syncs natively with QuickBooks to automatically match receipts to transactions, which offers visibility into spending and cash flow. Additionally, cardholders benefit from unlimited 2% cash back on purchases and 5% cash back on Intuit products and services, unlimited employee cards, customizable spend controls, and real-time transaction notifications.
“The Intuit Business Credit Card gives businesses something they have never had before: a single, connected solution for spending, cash flow, and credit that is built around how their business actually performs,” said Intuit EVP and General Manager, Services Group David Hahn. “We know businesses don’t have a one-size-fits-all need for capital, which is why we’re building a range of capital solutions on the Intuit platform. The Intuit Business Credit Card introduces a smarter way to power business growth with critical controls and value on every dollar spent. This is an important part of Intuit’s broader commitment to building the capital solutions small businesses need to grow with confidence.”
For businesses, bringing a familiar accounting tool like QuickBooks and a credit card in one place eliminates the need to manually reconcile line items or fix a broken account connection. Additionally, the WebBank-issued credit card automatically matches receipt photos to the corresponding transaction in QuickBooks, reducing manual entries and potential errors.
From a competitive standpoint, Intuit has been adjacent to Ramp, Brex, and Expensify for years. The launch places the company in more direct competition with the integrated corporate card and spend management model these fintechs helped popularize. Until now, a typical small business might have relied on four separate providers to manage corporate spending: a bank-issued credit card, Ramp or Brex for employee cards and spending controls, Expensify for expense reporting and reimbursements, and QuickBooks as the accounting system of record. Intuit is now collapsing much of that workflow into a single platform, reducing the number of tools businesses need to issue cards, manage spending, and reconcile transactions.
While Intuit is now competing directly with Ramp, Brex, and other spend management providers, it also enters the market with an advantage those companies cannot easily replicate. Because the card is native to QuickBooks, Intuit already has access to customers’ accounting data, giving it a richer understanding of business cash flow and financial health. That could enable faster underwriting, reduce application friction, improve credit decisions, and create opportunities to expand relationships through lending, payments, and other financial services.
Beyond its underwriting advantage, Intuit also brings unmatched distribution. The company serves nearly 100 million customers worldwide across TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, Mailchimp, and Intuit Enterprise Suite, giving it an enormous installed base from which to market new financial products. It also benefits from decades of brand recognition and customer trust. For many small businesses, applying for a business credit card through a platform they already use every day may be a far easier decision than establishing a relationship with another fintech.
More and more credit unions and community banks are weighing the challenges and opportunities of deploying AI-powered solutions for their members and customers. Yet, while there is much attention paid to the technical details of integrating AI-based technologies into banking operations, there is often less focus on the critical issues of AI governance: the rules, policies, and processes that ensure that a given use of AI is safe, non-discriminatory, and transparent.
With this in mind, this week Finovate First-Timers interviews Lisa Pent, Founder and CEO of PentEdge. Founded in 2025 and headquartered in Albany, New York, PentEdge is the company behind AIMS (AI Monitoring & Governance System), a purpose-built SaaS platform that enables credit unions and community banks to govern AI operations confidently.
AIMS provides financial institutions with “AI with Guardrails”, a framework that automates AI inventory, vendor risk assessment, regulatory mapping, and board-ready reporting, transforming complex compliance requirements into a streamlined process. PentEdge made its Finovate debut earlier this year at FinovateSpring 2026 in San Diego, demonstrating this technology.
In this conversation, Pent talks about the predicament that many financial institutions find themselves in when deploying AI solutions without recognizing the myriad risks involved and how to mitigate them. She also discusses the unique challenges that credit unions, community banks, and other smaller firms face when embracing AI compared to their larger rivals. Last, Pent explains how PentEdge’s technology helps these companies manage AI vendor relationships better and more accurately assess risk.
What problem does PentEdge solve and who does it solve it for?
Lisa Pent: Most community banks and credit unions are already using AI. Very few of them know where, how much, or who owns the risk.
That is because AI almost never arrives through a deliberate build decision at an institution this size. It arrives through vendors. The core processor adds an intelligent feature. The fraud platform turns on a model. Marketing signs up for a writing assistant on a corporate card. Nobody stood up an AI program, and yet the institution now carries the risk and the examination exposure.
The consequences are not hypothetical. Earlier this year, a publicly traded community bank disclosed in a securities filing that an employee had uploaded customer information to an AI tool the institution had not authorized. That gap, between what an institution believes it is using and what its people are using, is exactly what we built PentEdge to close.
Our customers are community banks, credit unions, and adjacent regulated firms such as insurers, RIAs, and asset managers. Their supervisory expectations are similar to those on the largest banks. Specific requirements often scale with asset size, but the expectation that you know what AI you are running, and can show how you govern it, does not. AIMS™, our AI Monitoring and Governance platform, gives them a defensible AI inventory, a risk score for every tool, and reporting their board and their examiners can rely on.
How does PentEdge solve this problem better than other companies?
Pent: Two things set us apart: the catalog and the scoring model.
The catalog is the asset. We maintain a research catalog of AI tools and the vendors that supply them, built around the technology community financial institutions genuinely use. When an institution tells us which vendors it works with, we can identify the AI inside those relationships rather than asking a compliance officer to figure it out from vendor marketing pages. And because vendors turn AI features on continuously, we monitor the catalog for change, so the inventory does not go stale.
The scoring model is the second piece, and it is aligned to the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, which is the closest thing this industry has to a common language for AI risk. Our AI Risk Score™ separates what we know from what only the institution knows. PentEdge supplies the inherent risk score, combining a tool’s exposure profile with the nature of the AI itself. The institution scores its own controls and mitigants. The result is a residual score that reflects that specific institution rather than an industry average.
The alternatives fall into two camps: enterprise governance platforms scoped and priced for the largest banks, and consultants who deliver a thoughtful, point-in-time document that is out of date within a quarter. Neither serves the roughly 9,000 institutions that make up most American banks and credit unions.
Who are PentEdge’s primary customers? How do you reach them?
Pent: Our market is every US bank outside the top 25 and every US credit union, roughly 9,000 institutions, plus adjacent regulated firms in insurance and asset management. Within those institutions, our buyers are chief risk officers, chief compliance officers, CIOs, and, in smaller shops, the CEO directly. The common thread is not asset size. It is that nobody in the building has “AI risk” in their job description.
We reach them four ways. First, direct outreach to named institutions, which is still the most productive channel we have. Second, associations, which remain the trusted intermediary in this market in a way they are not in most other industries. Third, in-person events, where community bankers and credit union executives compare notes candidly. We were at FinovateSpring and IBANYS this year, and we will be exhibiting at GoWest MAXX in Denver in October. Fourth, education. I publish a weekly newsletter, At the Helm, along with white papers and practical guidance on AI governance for institutions of this size.
Most engagements start with our 48-Hour AI Risk Assessment, a short, concrete look at what AI an institution is already exposed to. It is a low-friction way to see the problem clearly before committing to the full platform.
Can you tell us about a favorite implementation, deployment, or partnership experience? What made it special?
Pent: My honest answer is that every implementation is my favorite, and that is not a dodge. It is the point.
We decided early that AIMS™ would not require integration with the core. We do not touch endpoints. There is no agent to install, no data pipeline, and no security review of a connection into their environment, because there is no connection. The institution gives us a list of its vendors, an Excel file is perfectly fine, and the platform generates a scored AI inventory automatically.
And the output is not a raw list. From day one, that same inventory produces examiner-ready and board-ready reports at the click of a button, so nobody must rebuild it in a spreadsheet the night before a meeting.
So, the moment I look forward to is the same every time, and it comes within days or hours rather than months. We put an institution’s own scored inventory in front of the people responsible for it, and the conversation stops being abstract. They are looking at their own list, sorted by risk, deciding what to handle first.
What in your background gave you the confidence to respond to this challenge?
Pent: Thirty years of standing on both sides of this problem.
I started in community banking and spent the first half of my career in credit risk on Wall Street, including building a credit risk business from scratch at Helaba that grew past $12 billion in assets, and running a group at Fuji Bank. That work taught me what regulators are looking for, and more usefully, what they are looking for when they ask a question that sounds like it is about something else.
The second half was technology. I spent a decade at Thomson Reuters building SaaS products for financial institutions, then moved into senior leadership at Cognizant. That is where I learned how software gets adopted inside a bank, which is a different discipline entirely from knowing what the software should do.
Alongside that, I have served on boards, and I founded WomenExecs on Boards (WEoB), which put me in the room for a lot of oversight conversations. Board members are being asked about AI right now and most of them have no instrument to answer with.
So when community institutions started telling me they had no idea what AI they were running, I recognized all three problems at once: the risk problem, the product problem, and the governance problem. That combination is uncommon, and it is what gave me the confidence to build PentEdge.
Does AI governance bring unique challenges for smaller, community financial institutions, above and beyond the challenges of deploying AI in general?
Pent: Yes, and the difference is structural rather than a matter of degree. It starts with vendor management.
Community institutions run on vendors, and the volume is enormous relative to headcount. It is not unusual to find one vendor relationship for every one or two employees. Every one carries a contract, a due diligence file, a risk rating, and an annual review. That workload already outstrips the people assigned to it, before AI enters the conversation.
Then AI arrives, and the instinct is to treat it as one more vendor category. It cannot be managed that way. Traditional vendor management is periodic by design: you onboard, you diligence, you review once a year. AI does not hold still for a year. A vendor can turn on an AI feature in a routine release with no contract amendment and no meaningful notice, so the tool you assessed in January can carry a different risk profile by June. An annual questionnaire will never catch that.
The nature of the risk is different too. A traditional vendor review asks about uptime, financial condition, and business continuity. AI raises questions about what data leaves the institution, how decisions affecting members and customers are made, and whether anyone can explain them afterward.
What we hope to do is broader than AI alone. If an institution can see its full vendor stack clearly, with the AI inside it identified and scored, it gains something it has never had: efficiency in that stack (cost efficiency included) and transparency into where the risk truly sits.
You demoed at FinovateSpring in May of this year. How was the experience?
Pent: It has been our highlight of 2026 so far.
The format does something for a founder that no internal exercise can replicate. A few minutes, live, on stage, with nothing to hide behind. You either show what the product does, or you do not, and preparing for that clarified our own thinking about AIMS™ more than any planning session had.
What I did not fully anticipate was the momentum. The interest was tremendous on the day itself, and it did not stop when we left the stage. The conversations continued through the rest of the event and then kept going in the weeks afterward, and a meaningful part of what we are working on now traces back to that room.
What struck me most was the consistency of the reaction. Nobody argued the premise. Not one person suggested that AI governance is a large-institution problem or a future problem. The questions were all operational: where do we start, what does the inventory look like, how do I explain this to my board. For a founder, that is the best possible signal. You would far rather spend your time answering how than defending why.
I would recommend it to any founder selling into this market, both for the discipline the stage imposes and for the honest, unfiltered feedback you get in the hallway afterward.
What are your goals for PentEdge over the balance of 2026 and into next year?
Pent: Three priorities.
First, make the entry point easier. We recently introduced AIMS™ Manifest, a self-serve tier that gives an institution full access to our AI tool catalog with its own holdings flagged inside it, along with continuous change monitoring. No institution should have to buy the whole platform to answer the first question: what is our AI risk profile?
Second, deepen the catalog. It is the core of what we sell and the reason a subscription earns its renewal. Through the rest of this year, we are expanding coverage and keeping the mapping between tools and governance expectations current as both sides move.
Third, and this is where we are heading next, we want to be the go-to firm helping community financial institutions optimize their vendor stack, creating both cost efficiency and operational efficiency. That is above and beyond what most consulting firms do in this space, which is renegotiate contracts. Renegotiation is worth doing, but it treats the stack as fixed. Once an institution can see every vendor, every tool inside those vendors, and the risk attached to each, it can ask sharper questions: what is redundant, what is unused, and what is carrying risk out of proportion to the value it delivers.
Into 2027, the goal is straightforward. When an examiner asks a credit union what AI it uses, or a board asks its CEO, the answer should be a one-click report rather than a research project. And when that same CEO asks whether the institution is getting full value from everything it buys, and what risk it is carrying to get it, that should come from the same place.
ANNA Money has acquired Business Data Group (BDG) and UK Business Forums (UKBF) as part of its goal of building an AI-powered operating system for small business founders and owners.
BDG is a leading, UK-based independent company formation platform. UKBF is a 160,000-member, online community of small business owners, freelancers, and other professionals.
Founded in 2017 and headquartered in London, ANNA made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2020 in Berlin.
AI-powered, all-in-one business account ANNA Money has acquired Business Data Group (BDG) and UK Business Forums (UKBF). The move represents the latest effort by ANNA to build an AI-powered operating system to help founders start, manage, and scale their businesses. By acquiring BDG, ANNA will be able to leverage the firm’s formation agents to support startups from formation to the day-to-day tasks of successfully running a business. The acquisition of UKBF will allow ANNA to continue to invest in the UKBF community and bring its business management tools to more small business owners to help them run their businesses more efficiently.
“ANNA isn’t going to compete with formation agents,” the company noted on its LinkedIn page. “We’re here to help them win. ANNA’s success is tied to the success of the businesses we help get started. So instead of competing with the independent agents who rely on BDG’s eFiling platform, we’re investing in the technology, automation, and tools that strengthen their positions.”
BDG is an independent company formation platform based in the UK. The firm offers eFiling and the Partner Program used by thousands of formation agents and their clients every year. Formation agents are professional service providers that help founders and businesses register and incorporate new companies with the appropriate government entities. UKBF is a 160,000-member, online business community and discussion forum where small business owners, founders, freelancers, and other professionals share insights and concerns about running their businesses.
ANNA’s goal is to help small businesses take advantage of current agentic AI capabilities to raise invoices, follow up on overdue payments, calculate and file taxes, and more now, with the aim of expanding capabilities to help small business owners communicate better with their customers, manage suppliers, and conduct a growing volume of the day-to-day tasks involved in running a business “over time” in what the company called “ANNA 3.0.”
“Bringing BDG and UKBF into ANNA is an important step towards that future,” ANNA Money Co-founder and Co-CEO Eduard Panteleev said. “Company formation is where every business journey begins, and BDG’s network means we can now support many more entrepreneurs from day one, with technology that grows alongside them.”
ANNA made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2020 in Berlin. At the conference, the UK-based company showed how its tax and VAT accounting solution manages self-assessment and VAT returns by automatically categorizing and reconciling expenses, and calculating VAT and tax in real time at a fraction of the cost of a dedicated accountant. ANNA completes and submits both tax and VAT returns to HMRC with the support of a certified accountant.
ANNA began 2026 with a fresh capital infusion of £10 million in growth debt from Flashpoint Ventures. The funding helped the firm accelerate the scaling of its Auto Accountant solution designed to help small businesses in the UK meet the new regulatory requirements of the country’s Making Tax Digital mandate. “This funding gives us the firepower to scale at exactly the right moment,” Panteleev said. “As Making Tax Digital for self-assessment comes into force for around 850,000 self-employed people and landlords next year, demand for smart, automated accounting is accelerating fast.”
It is clear that the payments industry is entering its next phase. With stablecoins, AI advancements, and real-time payments, the payments scene of 2026 is a vastly different landscape from what it was in 2012. In this new era, success depends on scale, specialization, and settlement infrastructure.
This summer, three major announcements in the payments space have both supported evidence of this new era and hinted at where we can expect it to go next. Here are the top three headlines that will have impact on the space in the months to come.
Ant International raises $1.2 billion to expand cross-border payments and agentic commerce
What happened: Singapore-based Ant International raised $1.2 billion in Series A funding. The company said it will use the investment to accelerate global expansion, strengthen cross-border payments infrastructure, and invest in AI-powered merchant services and agentic commerce solutions. Ant International already connects more than 150 million merchants with over 2 billion user accounts through businesses including Alipay+, Antom, and WorldFirst.
Why it matters: The move to expand internationally and bolster its cross-border payments indicate two things. First, it shows that infrastructure for cross-border, agentic payments is becoming increasingly valuable, even if consumers are not ready for an agentic-led future. Second, Ant International’s plan for growth suggests that the company is readying for a potential future IPO. It is rumored that Ant International plans to IPO in Hong Kong as early as this year, which has the potential to create a new global payments heavyweight.
Stripe and Advent’s Failed $53 billion bid for PayPal
What happened: Stripe and private equity firm Advent International have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal Holdings. The move would have taken PayPal private and offered Stripe scale in addition to access to PayPal’s progress in the DeFi space, including its own stablecoin PYUSD. PayPal’s board rejected the bid, saying that it undervalues the company.
Why it matters: Whether or not a deal materializes, the reported bid signals that large payments platforms remain highly valuable strategic assets. It also suggests that established payments companies are increasingly being evaluated not only for their merchant and consumer networks, but also for emerging capabilities such as stablecoins, digital wallets, and AI-driven commerce, as well as their long-standing reputation and trusted consumer relationships.
Open USD Consortium launch
What happened: Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase, and more than 140 other companies joined forces to launchOpen USD, a consortium-backed stablecoin designed to create an open, interoperable digital dollar for business payments. Open USD will be operated by Open Standard to ensure decisions are made for the collective interest, not a single entity.
Why it matters: The new consortium offers a standardized, interoperable way for businesses to mint and redeem Open USD without relying on a single issuer or payments provider. By bringing together competitors such as Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and Coinbase, the initiative could accelerate enterprise adoption of stablecoins for cross-border payments, treasury management, and settlement while reducing concerns about vendor lock-in.
Reading Between the Headlines
Taken individually, these stories may seem unrelated. Together, however, they reveal that the payments industry is undergoing a transformation. While the industry used to favor those who could process a transaction the fastest or cheapest, in 2026 however, the winners will be those that build the most intelligent, connected, and globally interoperable payments ecosystem will be the winners.
For banks, fintechs, and payments providers, success in the years ahead will rely on more than just the ability to keep pace with new technologies. It will require rethinking how money moves in an era of AI-native commerce, global payment networks, and digital-dollar infrastructure. Organizations that embrace agentic capabilities, integrate stablecoin-based settlement where it adds value, and build for interoperability will be better positioned to meet evolving customer expectations in 2027 and beyond.
Expensify has expanded its partnership with Marqeta to launch the Expensify Card in Spain, Ireland, Poland, and the Netherlands.
The European rollout gives multinational businesses access to spend controls, virtual and physical cards, receipt matching, and no foreign transaction fees.
The launch reflects growing competition among US spend management providers to expand internationally, while highlighting Marqeta’s role in enabling cross-border card programs.
Business expense management company Expensify has expanded its partnership with card-issuing platform Marqeta to bring its corporate card offering into select European markets, including Spain, Ireland, Poland, and the Netherlands.
The Expensify Card, which the company originally launched in the US in 2019, offers multiple features that cater to businesses’ needs. In addition to automatic transaction coding and receipt matching, the card also offers real time visibility into spending, spending limits and category rules, virtual card creation, and integrations with major accounting platforms. Crucial to the international launch, the Expensify Card does not charge foreign transaction fees and can be connected to any GBP, EUR, or US business bank account with no minimums, deposits, or credit checks required.
“The Expensify Card works quietly in the background to keep your business spend controlled, compliant, and ready for accounting,” said Expensify Founder and CEO David Barrett. “It’s a preaccounting assistant that eliminates hours of reconciling transactions, chasing receipts, and reimbursing employees. One of our US customers, Pivot Bio, cut down on their expense report audit times by 90%. We can’t wait to share that same time savings with millions of businesses in the UK and EU.”
The launch represents the Expensify Card’s first broad commercial expansion beyond the US, following a UK and EU beta introduced in 2025. The European launch extends the company’s ability to serve multinational businesses with its unified spend management platform. It also serves as another example of how US spend management providers such as Brex and Navan are investing more resources into international expansion to support multinational businesses. While the demand for global corporate spend management tools and card providers expands, global reach has become an important competitive differentiator.
Fueling this launch is Marqeta’s multinational card-issuing capabilities. Leveraging Marqeta’s platform, Expensify is offering physical, virtual, and tokenized cards. Businesses can use the cards for a variety of use cases, including travel, one-time vendor purchases, and departmental expenses. Additionally, Marqeta’s card capabilities enable Expensify clients to set spend controls by cardholder, authorize transactions in real-time, and provide insights into spending patterns that can help improve cashflow visibility and budgeting.
“With multinational card issuing capabilities built into our platform, we are uniquely positioned to support this type of international scale, enabling customers to enter new markets and grow their card programs while simplifying the complexities that come with global expansion,” said Marqeta Chief Revenue Officer Todd Pollak.
For Marqeta, the partnership is another example of how embedded card issuing providers are key enablers of global fintech growth. Rather than building payments infrastructure market by market, fintechs are increasingly relying on third parties with established regulatory, issuer, and network relationships to accelerate international expansion.
Founded in 2009, Marqeta provides infrastructure and tools to help companies build and manage their own payment programs. The company, which just expanded its partnership with Klarna, processed nearly $383 billion in annual payment volume in 2025 and has increasingly focused on helping customers scale internationally through its multinational issuing capabilities.
Card issuing platform Marqeta has announced a partnership with digital asset infrastructure provider zerohash.
The collaboration will integrate zerohash’s stablecoin infrastructure into Marqeta’s card issuing capabilities to enable companies to offer stablecoin payments to their customers without having to rebuild their core systems.
A Finovate alum since 2016, Marqeta is headquartered in Oakland, California.
Card issuing platform Marqeta and digital asset infrastructure provider zerohash have teamed up to enable Marqeta customers to embed stablecoin payments directly into both new and existing financial products. The integration of zerohash’s stablecoin infrastructure into Marqeta’s card issuing capabilities means organizations will benefit from the ability to offer stablecoin payments to customers without having to rebuild core systems or accept additional regulatory burdens.
“Our customers are building the next generation of financial products, and that requires new ways to manage and move money,” Marqeta Interim Chief Product Officer Anthony Peculic said. “By integrating with zerohash, we will be able to give our customers a full solution to deliver multinational and stablecoin-backed card programs that meet the needs of their users, while also being compliant and ready for global scale.”
Courtesy of the collaboration, Marqeta customers will be able to spend their digital dollars at tens of millions of merchants around the world using a standard payment card, with merchants paid in fiat currency. Marqeta will manage card issuance, acceptance, and bank and network relationships. zerohash will provide the underlying infrastructure that supports custody, compliance, and liquidity for on-chain money custody and movement.
The partnership between the two companies comes at a time when stablecoin adoption is accelerating throughout financial services. In February of this year, for example, stablecoin monthly transaction volumes reached $7.2 trillion, topping the ACH network’s $6.8 trillion for the first time. zerohash saw its own transaction volume grow 6.9x year-over-year in 2025, with transaction frequency up more than 2x. Having partnered with crypto companies to power debit card offerings in the US and Europe that enable spending in fiat currency based on crypto holdings, Marqeta will now be able to expand its capabilities to enable crypto and non-crypto companies to make stablecoin-based payments a part of their offering.
“Compatibility between stablecoins and traditional payment networks is a critical unlock for users’ onchain money, while also opening new opportunities for traditional businesses through stablecoin-backed cards,” zerohash CEO and Founder Edward Woodford said. “zerohash’s role is to abstract the complexity behind the scenes so stablecoins can be leveraged as a seamless part of everyday payments and money movement.”
A cryptocurrency, stablecoin, and tokenized asset infrastructure provider, zerohash offers an API and an embeddable dev kit that enables innovators to launch solutions for cross-border payments, commerce, trading, payroll, remittance, tokenization, and on/off-ramps. Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, and founded in 2017, zerohash serves fintechs, marketplaces, banks, brokerages, trading platforms, and more with regulated crypto trading and staking, real-time stablecoin payments, and tokenized financial products. The company supports more than 100 different assets, has more than seven million end customers, and a global regulatory footprint across the European Union, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, Bermuda, and the US. The firm also operates regulated entities in 51 US jurisdictions.
A Finovate alum since 2016, Marqeta debuted at our developer conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley. The Oakland, California-based fintech offers card issuing, including virtual cards and tokenization, as well as processing and settlement services with Just-in-Time (JIT) funding and dynamic spend controls. Marqeta’s solutions enable businesses to transform real-time data into personalized, optimized solutions to enhance consumer loyalty, capital efficiency, and more. Processing nearly $400 billion in annual payment volume in 2025, Marqeta operates in more than 40 countries around the world.
Marqeta’s partnership announcement with zerohash comes as the firm reports that it has expanded its collaboration with fellow Finovate alum Expensify. The spend management software platform is leveraging Marqeta’s card issuing platform to bring its solution to customers in the UK and EU.
“Businesses across Europe are seeking expense management tools that are simple, automated, and designed to save them time and money,” Expensify Chief Strategy Officer Daniel Vidal said. “Through our expanded partnership with Marqeta, we’re able to bring our proven corporate card capabilities to Europe, delivering the same high-quality spend management solutions our US customers rely on to businesses of any size across the region.”
Transaction monitoring and fraud prevention company INETCO unveiled its fraud investigation tool, BullzAI Investigate.
A module within INETCO’s BullzAI fraud prevention platform, BullzAI Investigate uses agentic AI to scale fraud prevention operations, reduce false positives, and help prioritize high-risk cases.
INETCO made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2015. The Vancouver, Canada-based company was founded in 1984.
Real-time transaction monitoring and payment fraud prevention solutions provider INETCOhas launched its new fraud investigation tool, BullzAIInvestigate. The new, AI-assisted solution leverages specialized agents to compile transaction data, analyze behavioral patterns, and triage incoming alerts. BullzAI Investigate then steers analysts toward the highest-risk cases and produces explainable, auditable risk scores for each recommendation.
Running on a proprietary small language model that is deployed inside the client’s own system, BullzAI Investigate keeps sensitive data on premises. The solution also uses analyst feedback to refine and improve system performance via a supervised machine-learning cycle. The company noted that the new module is designed to reduce false positives and the amount of manual effort required to analyze large volumes of fragmented transaction data. This enables fraud teams to focus on higher-priority threats.
“INETCO BullzAI Investigate gives banks and payment service providers an intelligent way to scale the productivity of their fraud operations, reduce false positives, and prioritize high-risk cases,” INETCO Chief Technology Officer Ugan Naidoo said. “Agentic AI automates the heavy lifting by collating transactions, triaging alerts, and delivering explainable risk scores that support faster, more transparent decisions. Rather than replacing analysts, INETCO BullzAI Investigate serves as an intelligent partner that works continuously behind the scenes, allowing fraud teams to investigate more effectively while human oversight remains firmly in control.”
INETCO BullzAI Investigate has shortened fraud investigation times from as much as 30 minutes to as little as 20 seconds in early deployments. The company also reported a 97% to 99% reduction in investigation time, reviews that were up to 90 times faster, and recommendation precision of approximately 95%.
The new offering adds to INETCO BullzAI, the company’s cyber fraud prevention platform launched in September 2021. When initially unveiled, the platform was notable for its ability to detect and block fraudulent payment transactions in milliseconds before they complete and without interrupting legitimate payments. The platform was most recently deployed by Saudi Arabian fintech solutions provider Alhamrani Universal in December via INETCO’s global partner, Stanchion Payments.
“INETCO BullzAI gives us real-time visibility across thousands of self-service and digital payment transactions—revealing which financial institutions and merchants are active, how transactions are performing and where suspicious behaviors or anomalies occur,” Alhamrani Universal Chief Operations Officer Mario Rouhana said. “By understanding the behavioral patterns of every user, terminal, and device, we can scale our business with confidence, respond instantly to emerging threats and reinforce the trust our customers, partners, and regulators place in Alhamrani Universal as a leader in secure digital transformation.”
Headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and founded in 1984, INETCO made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2015. Today, the firm monitors more than 100 billion transactions a year, serving financial institutions and payment service providers around the world with end-to-end, secure payment visibility, adaptive modeling, and real-time fraud prevention.
After days (weeks!) of deliberation, the finalists for the 2026 Finovate Awards have been chosen. The shortlist is now on its way to our panel of esteemed industry judges who are tasked with picking this year’s winners in more than 30 categories ranging from alternative investing and lending to financial inclusion and payments!
“This year’s field of nominees was excellent, making for an incredibly competitive process,” Finovate VP and Director of Fintech Strategy Greg Palmer said. “It made for some difficult decisions for our judges as we had to decide who to advance, but it says great things about the current state of our industry. It’s exciting to see so much strong work being done across so many different areas within fintech, and congratulations to our finalists for rising to the top of the pile!”
The Finovate Awards showcase the financial institutions, fintechs, and founders who are driving fintech innovation today. Now in its eighth year, the Finovate Awards celebrate the diversity of stakeholders in the fintech ecosystem and provide a forum for these companies and individuals to make the case for the positive impact their innovations are bringing to our industry.
Coming up!
Now that the finalists have been selected, our team of judges will spend the next few weeks reviewing and choosing the winners in each of our 30+ award categories. The winners will be announced on September 10 at FinovateFall in New York City.
Questions about the Finovate Awards? Reach out at [email protected].
Chime has launched Chime Invest, allowing users to trade stocks and ETFs commission-free or choose an Atomic Invest-managed portfolio.
The new feature aims to lower investing barriers with no account minimums and management fees ranging from 0% to 0.25%, depending on membership tier.
Chime Invest strengthens Chime’s push to become a broader financial platform and reflects fintech’s wider shift toward rebundling banking, investing, lending, and other services in one app.
Digital bank Chime is giving its users one more reason to spend more time in its app with the launch of Chime Invest, a new investment capability. With the new investing tool, users can buy stocks and ETFs commission-free or use an expert-managed portfolio option.
The managed accounts are managed by Atomic Invest, an SEC-registered investment adviser that offers users a diversified portfolio personalized to their goals and risk profile with up to $500,000 of protection by SIPC. For Chime Prime members, the managed accounts do not require balance minimums or charge management fees. Chime Plus members face a 0.10% annual management fee, while all other Chime members are charged 0.25% for the managed portfolio option.
According to a Gallup Economy and Personal Finance survey, around 40% of Americans report that they do not own any stock. Chime anticipates that its new investing feature will lower barriers to entry in investing by not requiring an account minimum and by offering a managed portfolio option for those who may be intimidated to make trades on their own.
“The hardest part of investing is often getting started and sticking with it,” said Chime CEO and Co-founder Chris Britt. “Millions of people already trust Chime with their money every day. By bringing investing into the app they already know and love, we’re making it easier to turn saving into investing and investing into long-term wealth.”
The average Chime member opens the app five times a day and makes approximately 50 transactions each month. Adding investing tools within its app will not only make it easy for users to begin investing, but it also gives existing investors another reason to keep their financial activity within the Chime ecosystem instead of turning to a third-party brokerage.
Chime was founded in 2012 and is well known in fintech for offering tools and services that cater to lower-to-middle income consumers. The challenger bank offers an earned wage access tool that allows users to receive their paycheck up to two days earlier when they set up direct deposit, a credit-building tool, and a feature that will spot users up to $200 to avoid account overdrafts. The fintech has three membership tiers with varying benefits based on the direct deposit amount.
The addition of Chime Invest is another example of how fintechs are rebundling multiple services into singular apps to become more comprehensive financial platforms. Instead of competing solely on checking accounts or payments, companies are increasingly layering on adjacent services such as investing, lending, insurance, financial planning, and even mobile telco plans to deepen customer relationships and increase lifetime value.
For traditional banks, the rebundling trend increases competition by demonstrating that consumers increasingly expect everyday banking and long-term wealth-building tools to coexist within a single digital experience. For fintechs, it underscores that customer engagement is becoming more valuable than customer acquisition as a competitive advantage.
Chime Invest will be generally available to members in the coming weeks.
Walmart-backed OnePay has partnered with Upgrade to launch personal loans ranging from $1,000 to $50,000 directly within the OnePay app.
OnePay will use existing customer data to streamline applications and underwriting, potentially extending same-day offers to eligible users.
The partnership advances OnePay’s super app ambitions while giving Upgrade access to a larger customer base and highlighting fintech’s broader rebundling trend.
Walmart-backed digital banking platform OnePay is getting an upgrade this week. The New York-based company has teamed up with alternative lender and fellow digital banking platform Upgrade to launch Personal Loans, bringing a new element into its banking app.
With the new Personal Loans product, OnePay will allow eligible borrowers to apply for a loan ranging from $1,000 to $50,000, receive and accept an offer with APRs ranging from 7.74% to 35.99%, and pay back their loan within the OnePay app. The company sees the new product as a significant step forward in its mission to make everyday financial services simpler, more accessible, and more useful.
“Getting access to credit in America today is harder than it should be,” said OnePay CEO Omer Ismail. “It’s never been more important to give consumers access to financing that’s simple, transparent, and meets them where they already are—and we’re excited to partner with Upgrade to introduce another financing option for our customers with OnePay Personal Loans.”
Because it can leverage information customers have already shared, OnePay can reduce repetitive entry during the application process, minimizing friction. Additionally, because OnePay is able to leverage customer information such as their average daily balance, overdraft occurrences, and spending habits for underwriting purposes, it is able to extend financing offers as soon as the same day to some of its active customers.
OnePay has tapped San Francisco-based Upgrade for the lending infrastructure and expertise, offering it the ability to offer larger-dollar lending directly within its app. Founded in 2017, Upgrade offers checking and savings accounts, personal loans, credit cards, and rewards programs that focus on low fees and responsible credit usage to help consumers improve their financial lives. With more than 7.5 million customers, Upgrade has facilitated over $42 billion in credit with tools such as its Upgrade Card, which encourages customers to pay off balances quickly and avoid revolving debt and build credit responsibly.
“Our personal loans offer consumers the breathing room they need to get on the best financial path,” said Upgrade CEO and Co-founder Renaud Laplanche. “We’re proud that this partnership makes that resource more accessible to millions of OnePay customers.”
The addition of a personal lending product is a major step for OnePay, which has been building out its banking super app since it was founded in 2021. By embedding unsecured lending directly into its app, OnePay is evolving beyond a digital wallet and deposit platform into a more comprehensive financial services hub. The partnership is another example of recent rebundling efforts in fintech. Rather than building every product in-house, digital banking providers are increasingly partnering with specialized fintechs to quickly expand their offerings.
For Upgrade, the deal opens the door to OnePay’s growing customer base, while OnePay gains proven lending infrastructure and underwriting expertise without taking on the complexity of developing it internally. As competition among digital banking platforms intensifies, strategic partnerships like this one are becoming an increasingly common way to deepen customer relationships and increase engagement.
Cross-border payments and embedded finance platform Buckzy Payments announced a strategic partnership with European payment infrastructure provider FinXP.
The partnership will enable Buckzy clients to access direct SEPA payment capabilities from FinXP. FinXP customers will benefit from Buckzy’s global banking network and stablecoin infrastructure.
Headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Buckzy Payments made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2019 in New York.
Real-time cross-border payment network Buckzy Payments has forged a strategic partnership with European payments and banking service provider FinXP. The partnership is designed to enable businesses operating internationally to access European and international payment capabilities by combining FinXP’s regulated European infrastructure—including euro accounts and SEPA payment capabilities—with Buckzy’s real-time international payment network and stablecoin infrastructure.
The partnership will enable eligible Buckzy clients to access FinXP’s direct SEPA payment capabilities, while FinXP’s clients will benefit from Buckzy’s international banking network and stablecoin infrastructure. This bolsters FinXP’s existing cross-border payment capabilities and extends its reach across additional markets and currencies.
“Europe is a critical market for our clients and an important part of any global payments proposition,” Buckzy Payments CEO Abdul Naushad said. “FinXP brings direct SEPA access, regulatory expertise, and a strong understanding of complex payment requirements. This partnership enhances Buckzy’s ability to provide clients with an integrated route into European accounts and SEPA Instant Payments, while extending the international reach available to FinXP clients.”
The partnership will help customers of both companies manage European accounts, collections, and payouts; extend their reach to new international markets and currencies; reduce reliance on disconnected providers; and enhance payment visibility, reconciliation, and operational efficiency. The two fintechs will initially connect European account and SEPA capabilities with Buckzy’s international cross-border payments infrastructure. Buckzy and FinXP also announced plans to explore potential opportunities in automated account provisioning, embedded payment services, multi-currency payment flows, and API-led financial infrastructure.
“Buckzy and FinXP share a common objective: to make international payments simpler, faster, and more accessible for businesses,” FinXP Co-founder and CEO Jens Podewski said. “Buckzy brings strong global payment connectivity and modern API infrastructure, while FinXP contributes regulated European account and payment capabilities. By combining these strengths, we can offer clients a more complete solution across Europe and international markets.”
FinXP offers IBAN accounts, card issuing, SEPA Direct Debit, clearing services, payout solutions, and an omnichannel payment gateway to enable its customers to make and receive payments in whatever form they prefer. A licensed Electronic Money Institution authorized by the Malta Financial Services Authority and a specialist in the B2B payments space, the company began 2026 with news of its partnership with B2B financial services platform ONE.io. FinXP helped the London-based firm build a new Euro account solution as well as launch its USD payment platform. Founded in 2014, FinXP processes €4 billion annually.
Headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Buckzy Payments made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2019. At the conference, the company demonstrated its money transfer ecosystem that enables users to send and receive money in real time. The solution supports bank-to-bank transfers, international bill payments, digital wallet transfers, top-ups, and more. Serving financial institutions, fintechs, e-commerce marketplaces, and multinational companies, Buckzy is a registered money services business with FINTRAC (Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada). The company was founded in 2018.
