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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
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.
TransUnion UK announced the availability of its Modelled Income Assessment solution this week.
The new offering sits inside the company’s Affordability Report and helps lenders make income estimates to guide affordability decisions.
TransUnion’s new solution comes at a time of greater volatility in consumer incomes, making it more challenging for lenders who require accurate income data.
A new solution from TransUnion UK will help lenders make affordability decisions with greater confidence. Sitting inside the company’s Affordability Report, TransUnion’s Modelled Income Assessment solution estimates monthly income at configurable confidence thresholds. This enables proportional affordability checks and an income estimate consistent with client-agreed custom thresholds, allowing lenders to tailor outputs to their own risk appetites.
“The way people earn and manage money has fundamentally shifted,” TransUnion UK Chief Product Officer Kelli Fielding said. “Incomes are more volatile, data gaps are more common, and lenders are under growing pressure to evidence affordability decisions. Modelled Income provides lenders with a dependable, data-driven proxy that fills critical gaps in affordability strategies, without adding friction for consumers or compliance risk for lenders.”
TransUnion’s new offering comes as research indicates that more than a third of adults in the UK saw income changes over the previous three months. TransUnion’s Consumer Pulse Q1 2026Survey reflects consumer income patterns and household finances that are increasingly volatile and under pressure. This has created challenges for lenders who require reliable income data and insights, especially when access to traditional salary information is inconsistent or difficult to access.
With Modelled Income Assessment, lenders no longer have to try to generate a precise pound-value prediction. The new offering from TransUnion UK provides an estimate of an individual’s net monthly income and leverages advanced machine learning technology to deliver proportional affordability assessments in real time. The solution also addresses client demand for frictionless alternatives to manual verification such as open banking.
“Expectations around affordability assessments continue to rise as regulation, such as Consumer Duty, demands richer affordability data, clear evidence of fair outcomes, earlier identification of vulnerability, and support for customers showing signs of financial stress,” TransUnion UK Director of Credit Clare Hollis said. “Modelled Income is designed to sit within strong model risk management frameworks and address regulatory pressure for fairness and appropriate consumer outcomes, while helping lenders streamline onboarding and reduce unnecessary friction in the customer journey.”
An international information and insights company with more than 12,000 associates operating in 30+ countries, TransUnion most recently demonstrated its technology at FinovateSpring 2024 in San Diego. At the conference, the company demonstrated its Enhanced BreachIQ solution, which replaces one-size-fits-all resources with modern, gamified consumer identity protection. The offering generates an Identity Safety Score based on a user’s individual data breach history, Breach Risk Scores that measure the severity of an incident in which their data was exposed, and a Personalized Action Plan to provide practical, effective mitigation steps to reduce risk.
TransUnion UK’s launch announcement comes at the same time that the company inked a multi-year partnership agreement involving Marshmallow Insurance and data specialist Percayso Inform. The partnership is an extension of Marshmallow’s and Percayso’s relationship, but marks the first time Percayso will deliver TransUnion data across the insurance and auto finance sectors for Marshmallow via Percayso’s platform.
Entrust has unveiled its Entrust Biometric Authentication solution to help organizations defend, high-risk, “moments of truth” in the customer lifecycle, such as account onboarding and device transfer, from fraud and financial crime.
These high-risk moments are increasingly the targets of choice by AI-powered fraud threats including presentation, injection, and deepfake attacks.
Headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Entrust is an alum of Finovate’s developer conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley. Tony Ball is CEO.
As high-risk security moments like account recovery, device changes, and large transactions are increasingly targeted by fraudsters, developing strategies to defend consumers against these threats has grown in demand. This makes the latest announcement from Entrust, the launch of the company’s Entrust Biometric Authentication solution, all the more noteworthy.
“Too many organizations are treating authentication as a login problem, but attackers have already moved beyond access,” Entrust Chief Technology & Product Officer Mike Baxter said. “Preventing account takeover in the age of AI requires confirming the person behind every interaction. Entrust helps organizations apply the right level of assurance at the right moments while delivering secure, low-friction experiences.”
The Entrust Biometric Authentication solution introduces identity-centric assurance to high-risk processes by combining biometric identity verification with adaptive risk-based authentication. This approach helps defend against presentation, injection, and deepfake attacks by requiring identity assurance checks during key, high-risk moments. Entrust’s new offering leverages the verified identity that was established at enrollment and extends it across every access point and interaction. This anchors a biometric check to that trusted identity, making it easier for companies to consistently make authentication decisions with a high degree of confidence.
Entrust’s new solution uses three different authentication strategies, based on varying risk levels. These include a biometric passkey that provides biometric authentication at high-risk moments by linking authentication to a verified human identity; face authentication that accelerates everyday verification and step-up authentication, and motion authentication that leverages advanced liveness detection to combat deepfake, replay, and injection attacks in high-assurance use cases.
The new technology from Entrust comes at a time when AI-powered fraud attacks are resulting in significant increases in fraud and financial crime. According to research from TransUnion in its H2 2025 Update to the Top Fraud Trends Report, global businesses lost an average of 7.7% of annual revenue to fraud, with account takeover representing nearly one-third of those losses. Entrust’s own 2026 Identity Fraud Report noted that one in five biometric fraud attacks use AI-generated deepfakes.
The statistics on fraud attacks during what Entrust called “moments of truth” in the customer lifecycle—the high-risk moments mentioned above—are stark. According to Entrust, 55% of fraud in digital banks is related to account takeover (ATO), 67% of fraud in cryptocurrency operations occurs during the onboarding process, and 81% of fraud targeting payments takes place at authentication.
In response, Entrust Biometric Authentication enables companies to deploy identity assurance to fight account takeover, reduce unnecessary account lockouts from password and passcode failures, minimize manual review and support calls, and improve the user experience with intuitive biometric experiences that save time and avoid friction.
Headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Entrust was formed when Datacard Corporation acquired digital security company Entrust in 2013. The combined entity operated as Entrust Datacard when it made its Finovate debut at our developers conferences FinDEVrSiliconValley 2015 and 2016, and rebranded to Entrust in 2020. The company’s new product announcement follows the appointment of Adam Dimopoulos as Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). Dimopoulos previously led enterprise-wide identity security and Zero Trust transformations as VP of Information Security at Synchrony. Earlier this year, Entrust announced that it was collaborating with IBM Consulting, combining the firm’s quantum-safe transformation experience with Entrust’s expertise in cryptographic security and PKI.
For our latest installment of Finovate First-Timers, a new series profiling companies that recently made their debuts on the Finovate stage, we catch up with Marco Ma, Co-Founder and CEO of Ventus AI. Ventus AI helps banks personalize every touchpoint across the customer journey, boosting engagement, lifetime value, and assets under management.
The company’s technology transforms raw transaction data into a cross-categorized behavioral intelligence layer that spans more than 3,000 spending subcategories to surface life events, dynamic personas, and real-time intent signals. Founded in 2025 and headquartered in New York, Ventus AI demoed its technology at FinovateSpring 2026 in San Diego, California.
In this week’s conversation, Ma talks about the challenges banks and credit unions face when it comes to leveraging data to create better, more personalized experiences for customers and members. He explains how Ventus AI plugs into existing stacks to provide a new analytics layer that delivers answers to questions about customer preferences and pain points without building anything new.
What problem does Ventus AI solve and who does it solve it for?
Marco Ma: Banks sit on enormous volumes of transaction data, but most of it stays trapped as raw, messy records their teams can’t actually read. The result is a lose-lose: customers get served demoralizing generic experiences which leads to lost relationships and deteriorated customer economics. We solve this for banks and credit unions that want to understand and serve their customers more deeply.
How does Ventus AI solve this problem better than other companies?
Ma: We built a proprietary customer intelligence and personalization engine. It works across every account and payment rail and detects the full picture: lifestyle patterns, life-event triggers, financial vulnerability signals, and semantic budgeting. Where most tools stop at cleaning up a merchant name, we surface what’s actually happening in a customer’s life, and we deliver it into the tools banks already use rather than asking them to rip anything out.
Who are Ventus AI’s primary customers, and how do you reach them?
Ma: US financial institutions, with our initial focus on banks and credit unions in the $1 billion to $50 billion asset range, alongside an active enterprise pipeline. We reach them through industry programs and conferences like Finovate and the Fintech Sandbox network, direct relationships built by the founding team, and warm introductions through our advisors and ecosystem partners.
Can you tell us about a favorite implementation or partnership experience?
Ma: Our favorite work is on rewards and deals. The insight that makes it special is that the same offer can mean completely different things to different people. People don’t wake up one day and say “I want to shop at Crate & Barrel.” Some people want a new coffee machine, some people want a new side table. Because we understand the behavior behind the spend, the bank can present the same deal in the way that actually resonates with each person, turning a generic coupon book experience into something that feels personal.
What in your background gave you the confidence to respond to this challenge?
Ma: We have a strong founding team with backgrounds spanning Visa, McKinsey, AWS, and Credit Suisse, along with prominent advisors from the banking world. That mix of payments, data, and institutional banking experience meant we understood both the technical problem and the way banks actually buy and adopt technology.
You demoed at FinovateSpring in May. How was the experience?
Ma: It was a great moment for us. Banking is deeply personal. It touches the most important moments in people’s lives, and our hero demo follows an expecting-parent spending pattern across rails to show we can extract major life event signals and orchestrate the existing tech stack—rewards, product, relationship—to be personalized to help this customer through this journey. Demoing that live on the main stage reminded us why this matters: done right, this technology lets a bank show up for someone at exactly the moment it counts. We’re returning for the Fall show.
You were accepted into the Fintech Sandbox Data Access Residency. What is it, and why does it matter?
Ma: Fintech Sandbox gives early-stage fintech companies access to high-quality financial data and infrastructure to build and refine their products. For us, it’s meaningful because behavioral intelligence is only as good as the data it learns from. The residency accelerates our ability to develop and validate our engine against real, rich datasets, which directly strengthens what we deliver to banks.
What are your goals for the rest of 2026 and into next year?
Ma: Grow our pipeline through business development, move active conversations into live deployments, return to the Finovate main stage in the Fall, and close our current funding round. Beyond that, we’re heads-down building, deepening the behavioral signal we deliver and expanding what banks can do with it.
Accounting software provider FreeAgent launched a new AI-powered tool to enable landlords to capture and categorize rental statements.
The new offering helps bookkeepers and accounting firms better serve their customers in property management as the Making Tax Digital initiative comes into effect throughout the UK.
Headquartered in Scotland and founded in 2007, FreeAgent made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2013 in London.
Scotland-based fintech FreeAgentunveiled a new feature for its FreeAgent for Landlords accountholders. The new AI-powered tool enables rental statement capture and categorization, transforming letting agent statements into entries that are structured, categorized, and reconciled automatically.
“If you work with landlord clients, you’ll know exactly what we mean,” FreeAgent noted in a blog post announcing the new offering. “Every month, letting agents send out rental statements. On paper, they look straightforward enough. But a single statement can be a jumble of rental income, management fees, repair costs, contingency balances, and a net payout.” The challenge for accountants is recording all of this information accurately, especially for tax purposes. With data as diverse as this, separate categories for rent invoices, bills for fees and repairs, and more will have to be created and eventually reconciled against a final bank payment. For accountants managing a large number of landlord clients, this work can become overwhelming.
“Our new feature captures and categorizes rental statements using AI to lighten the load,” FreeAgent explained. “All you need to do is upload the letting agents’ statement. Then FreeAgent will extract rental income and fee data, match line items to the correct property, assign the right accounting categories, and reconcile the final net bank payment in seconds.”
Platforms like FreeAgent have become valuable resources for companies looking to comply with the Making Tax Digital (MTD) initiative launched by the UK’s HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) office. MTD is designed to modernize the country’s tax system by fully digitizing all aspects of tax administration. The goal is a more effective, efficient, and transparent process for taxpayers by reducing errors, delivering real-time information about tax liabilities, and simplifying tax compliance via digital record-keeping and reporting.
“We know that the real challenge of MTD isn’t just about hitting submission deadlines,” FreeAgent Director of Product Craig Clarke noted. “Overcoming the manual, disjointed bookkeeping that makes managing property finances a headache is going to be just as tall a hurdle. That’s exactly why we built FreeAgent for Landlords—a product specifically designed to make accounting for rental income as simple as possible.”
A Finovate alum since 2013, FreeAgent offers accounting software and support for small businesses and their accountants and bookkeepers. The company has more than 200,000 users who rely on FreeAgent’s software to manage finances from daily administration to big-picture, financial planning.
Kentucky’s UK Credit Union is deploying IllumaSHIELD to strengthen fraud prevention and member authentication across its contact center and self-service channels.
IllumaSHIELD shifts away from security questions and passwords as banks and credit unions adopt voice biometrics to combat AI-powered fraud, including voice cloning and social engineering attacks.
Illuma’s technology continuously authenticates members as they speak, helping financial institutions reduce friction, shorten call times, and improve security without disrupting the customer experience.
Voice authentication solutions provider Illuma announced its latest partnership this month. The Texas-based company is teaming up with Kentucky-based UK Credit Union to help the credit union reduce fraud.
Specifically, UK Credit Union will implement IllumaSHIELD to bring authentication and fraud prevention capabilities to its contact center and self-service channels. IllumaSHIELD, which was unveiled at FinovateFall 2020, is the company’s voice security platform that leverages real-time voice authentication technology that passively verifies members as they speak, which reduces reliance on security questions and ultimately minimizes call handle time. Because the platform continuously evaluates risk throughout the interaction, it allows the credit union to step up authentication only when needed.
“AI-driven fraud is forcing financial institutions to rethink how they secure the voice channel,” said Illuma Founder and CEO Milind Borkar. “UK Credit Union is taking a forward-looking approach by adopting voice security that continuously verifies identity, blocks threats in real time, and improves both the member and agent experience—while eliminating friction from every interaction.”
As advances in generative AI have made it easier for fraudsters to clone voices, automate social engineering attacks, and bypass traditional knowledge-based authentication methods, financial institutions are having to secure voice interactions beyond asking for security questions and passwords. By providing continuous, biometric forms of identity verification, Illuma is authenticating users based on how they speak rather than what they know. Crucially, platforms like IllumaSHIELD aim to help banks and credit unions deliver this authentication without friction.
UK Credit Union anticipates that IllumaSHIELD will help it move beyond traditional knowledge-based authentication. “At UK Credit Union, protecting our members while delivering a seamless experience remains a top priority,” said UK Credit Union President and CEO Ryan Ross. “Partnering with Illuma allows us to modernize how we approach authentication and fraud prevention while creating a faster, more natural experience across our service channels.”
Headquartered in Plano, Texas, and founded in 2016, Illuma specializes in voice authentication solutions for credit unions and community banks. In addition to IllumaSHIELD, the company also offers advanced fraud prevention, adaptive multi-factor authentication (MFA), deepfake detection, and human-AI collaborative intelligence. The company most recently demoed at FinovateSpring 2025, where it won Best of Show for its deep fake detection technology.
For years, Finovate has helped fintechs connect with banks and other customers. This September, we’re launching a new event designed to help fintechs connect with the people who fund them.
Taking place on September 11 alongside FinovateFall in New York, IMPACT: Funders & Founders brings together fintech startups, scaleups, and investors for a full day of networking, content, meetings, and startup pitches. While FinovateFall is built around helping fintech companies meet potential customers, IMPACT is designed to help fintech founders build relationships with investors.
Who Should Attend?
IMPACT is for fintech founders and their teams and investors.
On the startup side, the event is geared toward fintech startups and scaleups, particularly companies that have raised up to a Series A round. On the investor side, we’re bringing together venture capital firms, angel investors, private equity investors, family offices, and limited partners.
Whether a company is actively fundraising or simply looking to build relationships for the future, IMPACT offers an opportunity to connect with investors who understand the fintech landscape.
Why Are We Creating IMPACT?
While investors have long attended Finovate events, we’ve seen growing demand for a dedicated event focused specifically on fundraising, investing, and startup growth.
IMPACT creates structured opportunities for founders and their teams and investors to connect through pre-arranged, one-on-one meetings, networking sessions, roundtable discussions, and live startup pitches featuring investor feedback and Q&A. The goal is to create an event where meaningful conversations and connections can happen more efficiently than through traditional networking alone.
What Can Attendees Expect?
The event features two dedicated content tracks.
The Investor Stage will explore topics such as AI in investment operations, emerging fund structures, venture capital trends, and the future of fintech investing.
The Founder & Startup Stage will focus on fundraising strategy, go-to-market planning, scaling a fintech company, building industry connections, and leveraging AI for growth.
In addition to attending content sessions, eligible startups can participate in the IMPACT Zone, a dedicated showcase area in Finovate’s Exhibit Hall where companies can meet investors and fellow founders throughout the day. Startups raising pre-seed through Series A funding can also apply to deliver a four-minute pitch in front of investors.
How Is IMPACT Different from FinovateFall?
While IMPACT takes place alongside FinovateFall, the two events serve different purposes.
FinovateFall helps fintechs connect with buyers and partners through live demos and networking. IMPACT helps fintechs connect with investors and advisors who can help fuel their next stage of growth.
Together, the events support fintech companies throughout their journey in everything from raising capital to winning customers. Whether you’re a founder seeking your next investor, a startup executive looking to expand your network, or an investor searching for the next breakout fintech company, IMPACT offers a new way to connect with the people shaping the future of financial services.
If you’d like to register or learn more, check out our website to learn about opportunities that best fit your needs.
