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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
Payments expert ACI Worldwideannounced it now offers intelligent payments routing for Swift ledger transactions. The capabilities are available using ACI Connetic, the company’s cloud-native payments hub.
Swift’s blockchain-based ledger was announced last year to help banks move tokenized deposits across borders beyond traditional operating hours. While the 17 banks involved stand to benefit from the infrastructure, many have not fit tokenized deposit payments into their day-to-day operations.
Using ACI Connetic, banks will be able to process tokenized deposit payments, as well as traditional payment types, into the same payments environment banks already use to route, monitor, control and reconcile payments at scale. Because banks can use the same operational controls, workflows, and infrastructure for tokenized payments as they do with traditional payments, it eliminates the need for separate digital-asset payment operations.
“Digital assets should extend a bank’s payment capabilities, not force it to build a second payment operation,” said ACI Worldwide SVP, Head of Account-to-Account Payments, Craig Ramsey. “Banks need a practical way to operationalize tokenized deposits at scale using the people, controls and processes they already trust. With ACI Connetic, payments orchestrated through Swift’s ledger can be managed alongside other payment flows within a common operational framework.”
Swift’s ledger may provide the infrastructure to move tokenized value across borders, but banks still need a way to incorporate those transactions into their existing payment operations. By routing Swift ledger transactions alongside traditional payments, ACI Connetic could lower one of the barriers to adoption by allowing banks to experiment with and scale tokenized deposits without building a parallel payments stack. As tokenized deposits move from pilots toward production, that ability to integrate new rails into existing infrastructure will become increasingly important.
ACI Worldwide’s ACI Connetic works by unifying payment types, payment rails, and controls in a single platform that uses bank- and customer-defined rules to automatically select the best clearing and settlement path. This automatic routing gives banks flexibility while maintaining consistent controls and visibility and allowing for scale without relying on a separate operation.
Founded in 1975, ACI Worldwide’s solutions power intelligent payments orchestration in real time to allow banks, billers, and merchants to modernize their payment infrastructure. The company combines a global footprint with local expertise to help its clients manage evolving payment methods and infrastructure. ACI Worldwide, which presented at our developer’s conference at FinDEVr Silicon Valley 2016, is publicly traded on the Nasdaq under the ticker ACIW.
FintechOS raised $28 million in combined debt and equity, bringing its total funding since 2017 to $178.9 million.
The capital will support US expansion, deeper European client relationships, and team growth as the company shifts from efficiency mode back toward faster expansion.
FintechOS enters that growth phase from a stronger financial base, having reached profitability while growing recurring revenue 40%, operational EBITDA more than 102%, and its U.S. business 130% in 2026.
Fintech enablement platform FintechOS has closed $28 million in combined debt and equity. The funding, when added to the company’s previous rounds, boosts FintechOS’s total funding to $178.9 million since it was founded in 2017.
Today’s equity funds come from existing investors Bek Ventures, IFC, Cipio Partners, and Molten Ventures. The debt facility comes from Santander CIB. FintechOS will use the investment to fund its US expansion, deepen its European client relationships, and grow its team.
“Santander CIB’s support, alongside other investors that trust us, is a strong vote of confidence in the path we’re on, and it gives us the capital to go after the extraordinary potential we see ahead, particularly in the US, without compromising the discipline that got us to profitability in the first place,” said FintechOS Founder and CEO Teo Blidarus.
FintechOS aims to help banks launch new technologies by offering them low-code solutions that facilitate fast and inexpensive deployment of new products and services. The company’s Unified Origination tool is an AI-first, cross-product origination solution to help retail and commercial banks accelerate time-to-market. It also offers a composable core product for insurers.
2026 has been a strong year for FintechOS. The company became profitable, boosted its recurring revenue by 40% and grew its operational EBITDA by more than 102% year-over-year, and grew its US business by 130%. Also this year, FintechOS expects to set a new record of client acquisistion, adding more than 20 banks to its client list for FintechOS 8.
“Reaching profitability was not an accident, it was the outcome of a deliberate, multi-year effort to get our cost base, our margins and our delivery practice right before we pushed harder on growth again,” said FintechOS CFO Cyril Desouza. “Now that discipline is paying off twice over: the business has reached profitability, and we’ve already made the shift back into high growth, which is exactly the combination that lets us take on a round like this one.”
The funding comes at an interesting inflection point for FintechOS. After spending the past few years prioritizing efficiency and profitability, the company is now using that stronger financial footing to accelerate growth, particularly in the US.
The mix of debt and equity indicates that instead of relying solely on another dilutive venture round, FintechOS is adding debt capital as it scales, a financing option that is more accessible as it has moved into profitability. For banks, FintechOS’s expansion adds another well-capitalized competitor to the growing field of providers promising to modernize product origination and core infrastructure without requiring them to rip and replace their existing technology stacks.
It’s the last full week of September, which means that the calendar is ready to flip to the final quarter of 2026. Check out what fintechs are up to in this week’s look at the top fintech news. We’ll continue to update this post with news throughout the week.
DeFi
Aracore and Teizato work on institutional stablecoin settlement model between South Korea and Malaysia.
Spriveraises $10 million for mortgage prepayment tool.
Credit and analytics
Nationwide Building Society partners with EquifaxUK to give customers free access to their credit score.
Agentic commerce
GoCardless announces that it has processed the UK’s first agentic account-to-account transaction in the UK.
Wealth management
UK-based, Sharia-compliant, cross-border digital banking platform Nomoteams up with investment service provider AllFunds to establish a fully digital Sharia-compliant investment product.
Lending
Kastlesecures $24 million in Series A funding to support its AI workforce platform for consumer lending.
Plaid and ID.me are teaming up to help US government agencies verify both benefit recipients’ identities and ownership of the financial accounts receiving payments.
The partnership combines identity and account verification into a single flow, helping agencies reduce manual processes, duplicate payments, and the risk of funds being diverted.
Connecting identity with payment destination could help modernize government benefits, enabling legitimate recipients to receive funds faster while strengthening fraud prevention and auditability.
Plaid has selected digital identity network ID.me to enable US government agencies to verify both the person requesting a benefit and the associated financial account receiving it.
Plaid is leveraging ID.me’s digital identity wallet to solve the identity piece and is using its own financial account verification tools to help state and federal agencies verify that the account receiving a benefit payment belongs to the recipient before funds move.
“Identity verification tells an agency who is asking to be paid, but it does not tell them where the money is going,” said ID.me CEO and Founder Blake Hall. “That gap is where benefits go missing, and it’s costing our government and everyday Americans billions of dollars. Through our partnership with Plaid, agencies would be able to confirm the account belongs to the verified person before a dollar moves, and eligible people get paid faster.”
For beneficiaries, the partnership allows users to verify their identity using ID.me and securely link their bank account, eliminating the need to upload bank statements or wait for manual verification. For agencies, account ownership information is sourced directly from the recipient’s financial institution and matched with their verified identity before funds are released. The solution creates a dated record linking the verified recipient with the account that received the payment, while limiting the financial information shared with the government.
The partnership will help agencies consolidate legacy capabilities, reduce the possibility of duplicating payments in error, and make it easier for beneficiaries to receive funds they are entitled to.
“For too long, getting benefits to the people who qualify for them has meant a slow, manual process that fraudsters have learned to exploit. Agencies have gotten very good at confirming who someone is. What’s been missing is the same confidence about where the money actually lands,” said Plaid COO Eric Sager. “By partnering with ID.me, we’re closing that gap so eligible people get paid in minutes, and every dollar reaches the person it was meant for.”
Fraud prevention in government payments has long relied on multiple, often disconnected layers of verification. Identity verification alone is not enough if agencies cannot also verify the destination of the funds. By connecting those two layers, Plaid and ID.me are helping government agencies modernize benefit delivery in a way that could make payments both faster for legitimate recipients and harder to divert fraudulently.
Coinbase and Stablecore are teaming up to help community and regional banks and credit unions offer digital asset services, including trading, custody, and stablecoin payments.
The partnership reflects the broader rebundling of financial services, bringing capabilities that once required separate crypto platforms back inside customers’ existing banking relationships.
Coinbase is positioning itself to benefit either way; it can either own the customer relationship, or it can provide the infrastructure that allows banks to retain it.
Crypto exchange platform Coinbase is teaming up with crypto and DeFi banking infrastructure company Stablecore to help banks and credit unions offer digital asset services through their existing banking platforms.
Under the agreement, Coinbase will tap Stablecore’s expertise to bring digital asset services such as trading, custody, and stablecoin payments to Stablecore’s 3,000+ bank and credit union partners. The goal of the solution is to help traditional financial institutions offer regulated digital asset products without rebuilding their infrastructure. Crucially, the new launch also allows bank customers and credit union members to participate in the decentralized economy without having to leave their existing banking platform.
“Community banks and credit unions shouldn’t have to choose between staying local and staying current,” said Coinbase Head of Infrastructure Business Alec Lovett. “Together with Stablecore we are helping put them on the cutting edge of payments technology—cheaper, faster money movement, and the tools they need to stay strong for the communities they serve.”
Founded in 2025, Stablecore exclusively serves community and regional banks and credit unions. The Texas-based fintech offers white-labeled solutions that integrate into existing banking technology to bring together all of the necessary components so financial institutions can offer tokenized deposits, stablecoins, and digital asset products.
Among the financial institutions piloting the digital asset offering is Amarillo National Bank. Leveraging the new tool, the Texas-based bank can offer digital asset services under its own brand and on its own terms, while keeping deposit and lending relationships within local institutions.
“Banks and credit unions should not have to move to completely new technology platforms to support digital assets for their clients,” said Stablecore Co-Founder and CEO Alex Treece. “We built Stablecore to bring together all of the pieces so they don’t have to.”
The partnership is another example of how firms are rebundling financial services across the industry. Digital assets initially developed largely outside the traditional banking ecosystem, requiring consumers to establish separate relationships with crypto exchanges and wallets. Infrastructure providers like Stablecore are helping reverse that fragmentation by bringing those capabilities back inside the bank. The rebundling will offer community financial institutions an opportunity to remain the primary financial relationship by incorporating new products, especially as customer expectations evolve.
What’s interesting here is who is offering banks access to crypto. As a third-party fintech, Coinbase competes directly with this product. Consumers could go directly to Coinbase for digital assets, but the fintech is also making its capabilities available through banks so that the bank can retain the interface and relationship. In that sense, Coinbase is positioning itself to benefit from the rebundling trend rather than fight it. If consumers increasingly prefer to access digital assets alongside their other financial products, Coinbase doesn’t necessarily need to own the customer relationship; it can own the infrastructure powering it. For banks, the partnership offers another way to defend their position as the place where customers manage their broader financial lives.
AI-powered insurance decisioning firm Earnix launched its Agent Hub this week.
Integrated within the company’s AI Orchestration System, Earnix AIOS, the Agent Hub enables insurance-specific agents to directly access Earnix pricing, underwriting, and customer decision solutions to automate workflows and enhance business performance.
Headquartered in Boston, Earnix made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2016.
Insurance decisioning firm Earnixunveiled its Agent Hub this week. Located within Earnix AIOS—the company’s AI Orchestration System powering pricing, rating, underwriting, and customer engagement—Agent Hub will enable more intelligent workflows by bringing together more than 25 insurance-specific agents and apps.
Agent Hub builds on Earnix’s multi-modal AI strategy, enabling agents to work across an insurer’s existing technology environment rather than as standalone assistants. Agents can draw on context from policy administration systems, data platforms, underwriting workbenches, and customer portals, while maintaining defined permissions, traceability, and human oversight. These specialized agents can then be used for high-value insurance workflows, accelerating execution, enhancing consistency and auditability, and facilitating faster, better-informed decisions, while keeping humans in the loop to ensure accountability.
Earnix’s new offering arrives at a time when insurers are facing a volatile insurance environment that is challenging their ability to grow, achieve profitability, and improve portfolio performance. AI is enabling insurers to analyze, recommend, and act faster, but this intelligence also brings with it higher standards for governance, explainability, and accountability.
“Agentic AI changes the equation because, for the first time, AI is moving from informing people to acting within insurance workflows,” Earnix CEO Robin Gilthorpe said. “That creates enormous potential to shorten the distance between intelligence and action—but it also raises the standard for trust, governance, and accountability. The winners will not be the insurers with the most agents. They will be the insurers that can turn agentic AI into better business performance while remaining firmly in control.”
Examples of the insurance-specific agents available via Earnix’s Agent Hub include a model feature mapper that connects model features to the right data variables to improve transparency and auditability for pricing and actuarial teams, and a product expert advisor that uses approved product information to provide real-time answers to product queries to facilitate faster customer guidance. Another is a premium explainer that provides easy-to-understand, personalized explanations of policy premiums.
“Agentic AI becomes much more powerful when it can work with the data, models, and business context relevant to the task,” Earnix Chief Product and Technology Officer Be’eri Mart said. “The opportunity is not simply to automate a task, but to keep the information current as risk, customer behavior, and market conditions change. That is how insurers become more agile without losing control.”
Founded in 2001, Earnix made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2016. Today, the Boston, Massachusetts-based fintech processes more than four billion transactions annually and serves customers in the insurance industry in more than 35 countries across six continents.
Did FinovateFall 2026 reflect a “coming of age” moment for AI?
It is probably too much and too soon to say that the current discourse around AI represents a milestone in–or, much less, a reckoning with–all the challenges and opportunities that AI technology presents. But the split-screen of last week’s conference was difficult to ignore: four days (including our Leaders+ pre-conference event) of sober, sophisticated discussion on what needs to be done to take our use of AI to the next level at the conference, while outside in the broader media landscape, the conversation is essentially a bet on how quickly AI will kill us all.
I don’t want to dismiss the concerns of those who are calling for a “slowdown” in AI development. And I certainly don’t want to suggest that those who are (and have been) working in AI for years have everything figured out. That said, we are clearly experiencing some sort of “coming of age” moment in our evolving relationship with AI. From the demoers to the keynote speakers, FinovateFall 2026 articulated several different versions of what that moment looks like and what it means.
The Other AI Reckoning
The existential debate aside, a different reckoning is clearly underway in the AI industry, and that reckoning involves reconciling the millions of dollars already invested in AI projects with the mixed return on investment many of these projects have produced. As the “gold rush” stage of the AI era subsides, it is no longer good enough for an AI pilot to work; financial institutions need to see results that are in line with goals and expectations, creating efficiencies, generating revenue, and boosting profitability.
This is how Inbenta CEO Melissa Solis and Chief Technology Officer Merlin Bise framed it for me during a Finovate studio interview at the conference week. The transition from AI pilots to AI production means that AI investments will come under increased scrutiny. While this will inevitably be painful in many instances, the shift in focus from promise to proof represents important evidence of maturation in this space.
Another reckoning that has received relatively short shrift in the conversation about data centers and AI-driven extinction is the old fear that AI will be a job-killer, especially for middle-class, white-collar jobs in customer service and call centers, for example. This was an issue that Solis was particularly concerned about, noting that the “human side” of AI is not just about putting humans in the loop of AI decision-making, but also about ensuring that humans are net beneficiaries of the technology rather than casualties of it. This is true whether their labor is enhanced by AI or, ultimately, replaced by it. For those industries where the latter is likely, businesses need to be prepared to help those workers transition to new roles.
Scenes from the Stages
Was there a single AI presentation that did not at some point underscore the importance of governance?
If so, I must have missed it. From the mainstage to the industry stages, I was struck by the number of times keynote speakers and panelists referenced not just what AI can do—a common theme in presentations in recent years—but what companies and innovators need to do to ensure that AI is delivering on those capabilities. From the special address that referenced the origins of American football to explain the importance of creating playbooks for AI agents to panels that highlighted the role of AI orchestration and the importance of governance and auditability, if there was one word that summed up the attitude toward AI coming from the FinovateFall stage last week, it might be “controls.”
This is not to say that there still isn’t a sense of near-giddy excitement over the opportunities that AI presents. Jon Lakefish of the Lakefish Group delivered another standout keynote on the current state of AI tools and solutions, followed by a standing-room-only workshop on practical applications of these resources. Statements like “I’m blown away!” “Please can you send me the materials?” and “You’ve just saved me $40,000!” were a small sample of the kinds of responses Lakefish’s AI workshop received.
Learning from the Demos
I’ve always found reviewing the companies that won Best of Show to be a good way of understanding which fintech innovations are making an impression. This year’s FinovateFall gave us a lot to think about, particularly in relation to the spread of AI in general and agentic AI in particular throughout the industry.
AI-powered solutions were present, but they did not dominate the innovations of the Best of Show-winning companies. Clockout, which secured its second Best of Show win in as many appearances, leverages embedded finance to help financial institutions better serve customers and increase deposits. Young Early Starters, picking up a Best of Show award in its Finovate debut last week, offers an investing and education app and platform that is engaging without relying on gamification, or on AI for that matter. That said, a number of firms did leverage AI for key functions such as executing marketing campaigns (Vertice AI), or providing co-pilot assistance to developers operating in legacy environments (Tweezr).
When AI was on display, it was often in the form of agentic AI, which featured prominently among the deployments demoed. Interestingly, many of these deployments are about augmenting human action rather than replacing it—from supporting developers in legacy environments, optimizing marketing campaigns, and guiding customer service and call center workers through complex processes and procedures. In many ways, AI is simultaneously a bridge from the current way of working to a new one and a new technological environment in its own right.
Business identity and risk intelligence firm Baselayer has partnered with agentic payments infrastructure company Nevermined.
The partnership will bring identity verification to agentic payments, enabling agents to obtain the authority they need to make transactions on behalf of users.
Baselayer was founded in 2023 and made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2026 in San Diego.
A new partnership between Baselayer and Nevermined is helping give AI agents the authority they need to act on behalf of human users.
In order for AI agents to transition from conducting research and making recommendations to taking action, they need three things: access to data, permission to access the solutions and services required to complete the task, and the ability to prove to the businesses they interact with that they are legitimate actors.
Business identity and risk intelligence innovator Baselayer has teamed up with agentic payments infrastructure company Nevermined, combining agentic payments and identity verification to enable agents to obtain the bounded authority they need to operate and the verified business context necessary for confident transactions.
“Agentic commerce requires more than giving an agent the ability to pay,” Nicole Dunn, Baselayer GM, Agentic Economy, said. “Agents need bounded authority to transact, and the ecosystem needs confidence in who is on either side of the transaction. Nevermined is building the delegation and payments layer while Baselayer establishes identity and trust. Together, we’re moving toward commerce where agents can act autonomously without sacrificing accountability.”
Typically, AI agent builders face a dilemma. They can create a process in which every tool call and purchase by an AI agent must be approved, which blunts agent autonomy and limits the efficiency gains made possible by agentic AI. The other option is to give AI agents access to all the credentials they could possibly need, potentially creating an unnecessarily broad scope of access and opening the door to out-of-control spending.
In contrast, Nevermined uses a budget and spending-boundary approach, in which users set spending and transaction duration limits in advance. The AI agent can then purchase access to Baselayer APIs as needed. This avoids both unrestricted access and the requirement that a human manually top up the account. Because the underlying payment instrument is a card, the transaction remains within familiar enterprise payment and reporting infrastructure. Baselayer will bring Nevermined’s card delegation experience into its Trusted Registry, linking agent identity with the authority to conduct transactions. Nevermined will leverage Baselayer to verify sellers in its marketplace to ensure that agents and their operators know who they are transacting with.
By delegating authority to AI agents in much the same way businesses delegate authority to human employees, the Baselayer/Nevermined partnership provides a better operating model for autonomous work and opens up new workflows for other operations. These could include onboarding and compliance agents, procurement and research agents, fraud and underwriting agents, and commerce agents.
“The most capable agents won’t just use the tools they were given, they’ll discover and purchase the capabilities they need to get a job done,” Nevermined Chief Revenue Officer Josh Wadinski said. “Nevermined gives agent builders a way to enable that autonomy with clear spending boundaries. By partnering with Baselayer, we’re pairing that delegated authority with trusted identity, so agents can transact more autonomously without giving up the controls enterprises require.”
Founded in 2022 by Don Gossen and Aitor Argomaniz and headquartered in Zug, Switzerland, Nevermined offers a commerce platform that enables AI agents to conduct transactions autonomously. Nevermined allows users to enroll a card and set a mandate, after which the agent can begin spending with any agent-enabled merchant. For their part, merchants connect their PSP and set their pricing. Agents then pay as prescribed, with payments settled before the service is delivered through the merchant’s existing rails.
This announcement represents the first phase of the partnership between the two companies. Baselayer and Nevermined plan to integrate identity more closely with agentic payments by verifying the sellers that AI agents can transact with, connecting spending authority with registered agents, and eventually establishing the identity of the people or businesses behind the agents.
Baselayer is a business identity network and fraud intelligence platform that provides KYB verification, fraud prevention, risk intelligence, and ongoing portfolio monitoring. The company’s flagship KYB solution is used by more than 2,200 financial institutions to instantly verify business identity. The technology matches applicant input data against authoritative Secretary of State (SoS) filings in all 50 states in the US, validates taxpayer identification numbers (TINs) with the IRS in real time, screens against Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and other sanctions lists, and provides risk assessments with confidence scores. The company made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2026, demonstrating its Portfolio Monitoring solution.
Payments profitability intelligence platform Torus and international advisory company SRM have partnered to help acquirers recover billions of dollars by improving fee transparency.
The partnership comes as a white paper from Torus highlights the challenges faced by acquirers due to growing fee scheme complexity and increased regulatory scrutiny.
Torus most recently demoed its technology at FinovateEurope 2025 in London. SRM made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2023 in New York.
Payments profitability intelligence platform Torus and international advisory company SRM have teamed up to help acquirers recover billions of dollars through greater fee transparency. The companies’ new joint offering, the SRM/Torus Acquirer Profitability Solution, gives acquirers transaction-level scheme fee assurance, automated reconciliation, and merchant profitability analytics. The solution will help acquirers address growing pressures from rising operating costs, complex and ever-changing card scheme fee structures, margin compression, and greater regulatory scrutiny.
“By combining SRM’s deep advisory expertise with the Torus transaction-level analytics platform, we’ve created a solution that addresses one of the industry’s largest hidden profit leakage challenges,” Torus CEO Kirill Lisitsyn said. “Our customers are already demonstrating that significant improvements in profitability can be achieved through better fee assurance, stronger pricing governance, and automated analytics.”
The SRM/Torus Acquirer Profitability Solution delivers interchange and scheme fee assurance through automated, merchant-level calculation and recovery, helping minimize revenue leakage and boost billing accuracy. The offering provides daily transaction-level reconciliation between schemes and merchant settlement files, giving acquirers complete visibility into discrepancies and enhancing financial controls. The new solution also features comprehensive daily profitability analysis across merchants, portfolios, and segments. This facilitates better pricing decisions, more effective commercial performance, and stronger management reporting.
The new offering comes as SRM’s new white paper, “Transforming Acquirer Profitability,” reviews the current commercial pressures facing acquirers and highlights the flaws in traditional approaches to scheme fee management. The report explains why many acquirers continue to rely on manual processes and aggregated reporting, even as these methods provide limited visibility into profitability, require significant operational effort, and can still lead to revenue leakage.
By contrast, the SRM/Torus Acquirer Profitability Solution enables financial institutions to accurately allocate scheme fees, reconcile settlements, identify under- and over-recovery, and enhance pricing governance. Torus and SRM indicated that one mid-sized European acquirer using the technology has improved annual scheme fee recovery by €4 million, representing approximately 10% of total scheme fee costs. SRM’s report includes an economic analysis that suggests that acquirers could recover $1 billion in operational costs over the next five years. An additional $3 billion to $5.5 billion in fee revenue could also be realized as a result of more accurate and transparent oversight of the data.
“The economics of acquiring have fundamentally changed,” SRM Europe Managing Partner John Berns said. “Growing scheme fee complexity means that traditional reconciliation processes are no longer sufficient. Financial institutions need transaction-level visibility to understand where revenue is being lost, ensure fees are accurately recovered, and make better commercial decisions. Our collaboration with Torus enables these improvements.”
Headquartered in Vilnius, Lithuania, Torus most recently demoed its technology at FinovateEurope 2025 in London. Founded in 2021, the company offers a SaaS intelligence platform for banks and fintechs that enables them to boost profits on card transactions by up to 50%. Torus’ technology helps financial institutions analyze scheme fees, reconcile transaction flows, control unit-level profitability, and optimize pricing.
Making its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2023, SRM is an international advisory and execution firm that enables financial institutions to add value in areas such as payments, digital transformation, core processing, digital assets, and overall operating efficiency. The company helps its clients modernize payments, shape enterprise strategy, and deploy transformative technologies to lower costs, create revenue opportunities, and increase productivity.
American Express launched a 2.95% APY Business Savings account with no minimum balance or monthly maintenance fee.
Amex is deepening its business banking offering with card-rewards deposits and a forthcoming Gusto-powered payroll solution with AI-driven insights.
Amex is positioning itself to compete with fintechs like Mercury, Brex, and Bluevine as a more complete financial operating system for businesses.
American Express is bolstering its offerings today with the launch of the high-yield American Express Business Savings account.
The high-yield savings account comes with an APY of 2.95% and does not require a minimum balance or charge a monthly maintenance fee. Users will be able to make and receive transfers online or through the Amex app and can make instant transfers to and from an American Express Business Checking account with no transfer fee.
Additionally, later this year, Amex’s Graphite Business Cash Unlimited card members, who earn 2% rewards on each transaction, will be able to redeem those reward dollars for deposits into their Business Checking accounts. Plus Amex is adding a new Gusto-powered payroll solution later this year.
The new payroll solution, which will be available to Business Checking account customers for a monthly fee early next year, will help customers enroll, manage, and run payroll within American Express Business Checking, keeping everything in a single place. Leveraging Gusto, Amex will offer AI-powered insights on payroll.
These developments are part of American Express’ efforts to expand its Amex Business Membership by offering business customers more value with integrated solutions. The new tools integrate with accounting software and link the Amex accounts with existing bank accounts to make it easier to move money and keep financials up to date.
“Businesses are looking for more value from their banking services, including competitive returns and simple tools that help them automate processes and fit seamlessly into how they operate,” said American Express Executive Vice President of Global Commercial Services Eva Reda. “With Amex Business Banking, businesses now have banking tools that make it easy and rewarding to manage their finances, all in one place.”
For American Express, these launches signify more than just adding another high-yield deposit product. The business banking space has become increasingly crowded, with fintechs and traditional banks racing to become the financial operating system for a company, rather than simply holding their checking account.
Fintechs such as Mercury, Brex, and Bluevine have raised expectations by combining deposits with tools such as payments, cards, expense management, cash management, accounting integrations, and financial automation. Amex is using its existing strength in business cards as the starting point for a broader banking relationship. Connecting card rewards directly to Business Checking, adding savings, and embedding Gusto-powered payroll gives customers more reasons to keep both their money and their day-to-day financial activity inside the Amex ecosystem.
That makes the real competitive advantage less about the 2.95% APY itself and more about integration. Business banking providers are continuing to rebundle financial and back-office functions. Players that can reduce the number of external systems a business owner has to manage stand a better chance of becoming that customer’s primary financial relationship.
With PayNearMe’s acquisition of Marr Labs and Envestnet’s acquisition of Vestmark, we continue to see evidence that fintechs are conducting M&A at a faster pace than banks in 2026.
Payment experience management company PayNearMe has acquired Marr Labs’ technology and hired its ‘key employees.’ Founded in 2023 and headquartered in San Francisco, Marr Labs builds AI agents that provide compliant voice automation, document intelligence, intelligent workflow orchestration, and real-time compliance enforcement. The acquisition will enhance PayNearMe’s ability to deliver agentic AI automation to its clients, leveraging Marr Labs’ expertise in building and operating sophisticated AI systems at scale.
“PayNearMe has always focused on understanding and continuously improving the entire payment journey,” PayNearMe CEO and Founder Danny Shader said. “AI provides powerful opportunities to further improve the experience delivered by our PayXM platform. The Marr Labs team has proven its ability to build and deploy sophisticated AI systems at massive scale. Combining that expertise with PayNearMe’s deep understanding of our clients’ needs and challenges makes this combination so exciting.”
PayNearMe’s PayXM platform is designed to manage the payment experience from payment request through reconciliation. The company’s end-to-end approach accelerates the payment process and lowers the total cost of payment acceptance. By embedding agentic AI into the payment experience, and providing these agents with access to the right data, business rules, and workflows, PayNearMe is able to enhance every touchpoint in the payment journey. This enables the company to deliver highly configurable and specialized payment capabilities to credit unions, lenders, mortgage servicing firms, and more.
“We’ve spent years building AI that can work reliably at scale, and wanted to put that experience to work where it could have the greatest impact,” Marr Labs Co-Founder and CEO Dave Grannan said. “PayNearMe has built a trusted platform serving thousands of businesses and has a deep understanding of the payment problems they need to solve. Joining PayNearMe gives our team the opportunity to bring what we’ve learned to a much broader market and help shape the future of payments.”
PayNearMe offers a payments platform that facilitates self-service, reduces manual intervention, and lowers the cost of acceptance. The company’s Payment Experience Management platform powers payments for thousands of businesses around the world, and supports all major payment types and channels, including PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, Apple Pay, Google Pay, cards, and ACH to cash at 62,000+ US retail locations. Named to CNBC’s “World’s Top Fintech Companies for 2026” list and a three-time Finovate Best of Show winner, PayNearMe processes more than $50 billion a year.
Meanwhile, in the wealth management space, wealthtech firm Envestnet has agreed to acquire portfolio management technology provider Vestmark. AI may not be the headline here, but executives from both companies highlighted its role in the combined offering.
“For 25 years, Vestmark has focused on helping wealth management firms navigate increasingly complex portfolios with greater scale, personalization, and efficiency,” Roessner said. “Envestnet and Vestmark bring complementary capabilities and expertise to the market, and together we can create something neither company could deliver on its own.”
Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Wakefield, Massachusetts, Vestmark provides portfolio management solutions and outsourced services for financial institutions and their advisors. The company helps wealth management firms efficiently manage customized client portfolios via an enterprise-grade platform. With more than $2 trillion in assets and more than five million investor accounts, its clients include BlackRock, Invesco, and Vanguard.
The acquisition will enable Envestnet to support its clients across a broader range of products and services, from financial advice and planning through portfolio construction, personalization, trading, tax management, and ongoing portfolio management. The addition will give Envestnet enhanced capabilities and the modularity to serve sophisticated wealth management workflows in a single adaptive ecosystem with no forced migration. Post-acquisition, both companies will continue to invest in and develop their existing product lines. This includes VestmarkOne, VAST, Envestnet Enterprise, Tamarac, and MoneyGuide, as well as incremental investments in AI-powered workflows and automation.
“Wealth management offerings have been siloed for too long, with advisors, traders, and portfolio managers each locked into their own piece of the puzzle,” Envestnet CEO Chris Todd said. “Bringing Vestmark into the Envestnet ecosystem changes that. Wherever a firm sits today, and wherever they’re headed next, they’ll have a platform that can grow with them. We’re not slowing down to make this happen—we’re speeding up, protecting what makes each company great and putting even more behind the roadmap our clients are counting on. Our AI strategy unifies, orchestrates, and personalizes the advisor experience at Envestnet, and will extend across Vestmark’s workflows too. That’s a real reimagining of how advisors do their jobs.”
Envestnet serves more than a third of all advisors across its platforms and has $8 trillion in platform assets. Founded in 1999, the company most recently demoed its technology on the Finovate stage at FinovateFall 2021. Envestnet’s acquisition news arrives amid a flurry of announcements from the Pennsylvania-based fintech, including enhancements to its wealth management, portfolio reporting, and financial planning platforms.
Envestnet’s acquisition of Vestmark is expected to close in Q4 2026. Financial terms of the transaction were not immediately available.
This is a sponsored blog post by AI software company ElevenLabs.
The first generation of automation in financial services was a cost decision, and customers could tell.
Decision tree chatbots and IVR menus reduced volume by deflecting it, and the experience taught a generation of policyholders and account holders to say “agent” and wait for the queue.
Institutions are adopting AI agents for a different reason:a better category of customer experience: every contact resolved on the spot, at any hour, in any channel, or handed to a person who already knows the customer and the situation – with the savings reinvested in the human service that matters most.
Admiral, one of Europe’s largest insurance groups, frames its own ambition as building the most trusted customer experience in insurance, and is explicit that this is a customer experience transformation.
That framing matters for the question every institution asks – build in-house or buy a platform – because the two goals set very different bars.
Automation built to cut cost only has to be cheaper than the queue. An agent built to carry the customer relationship has to be as good as the business’ best people, or better.
Once that is the bar, the useful question is no longer build versus buy. It is which parts of the experience only the institution can supply, and which parts are already solved.
What makes a good customer experience
What makes an agent feel trustworthy is largely invisible: turn-taking that holds up when a caller interrupts, latency low enough that pauses feel natural, background noise handling so that what a customer says is captured accurately without repeating themselves.
This orchestration layer is what delivers a natural conversation, meaningfully impacting whether customers engage with the AI agent and allow it to resolve their question or ask to be routed to a human.
Admiral did not build this layer. By starting from a platform with audio orchestration built in, the team went straight to production work on the use case itself rather than the infrastructure underneath it. The results followed: a loan settlement request that took around five minutes in the old journey now completes in roughly half the time, with customers rating the calls 4/5 or 5/5.
What Admiral built instead
Admiral concentrated its engineering on ensuring agents had the right knowledge, were programmed to follow the right deterministic workflows, and stayed compliant with insurance industry policies. That is where the work belongs – the knowledge, workflows and guardrails are Admiral’s expertise, and encoding them well is what turns a natural conversation into a resolved request.
It set the production bar at matching or beating its best human agents. It routes vulnerable callers and customers in arrears straight to a person while the team learns the edge cases.
The team describes the principle as raising the validation bar without lowering the compliance bar.
Most financial regulation is outcome-based, so this is also where the compliance case is won: what risk teams need are the right outcomes, evidenced and controlled, and the institution’s own standards are what define them.
Reaching customers, then improving in front of them
Experience is only transformed once agents are live, and in a regulated institution the constraint is rarely writing code – it is getting through review and earning customer trust.
Admiral pairs an engineer who knows the architecture with a business owner who knows the local market, and treats that pair as the deployment unit, so the agent reflects how customers in each market actually speak and the people who own the risk shaped the build.
From there, changes ship through staged rollouts measured in hours: a gap customers hit on Monday is fixed by Tuesday.
The pattern across institutions reaching production is consistent. They set the bar as a great customer experience, owned the standards and knowledge that make the experience theirs, and bought the layers where being different is impossible and being excellent is table stakes.
Admiral’s team recently walked through its production agents, testing approach, and rollout process in a live session. Watch the full session here.
