Baselayer Partners with Nevermined to Bring Identity Verification to Agentic Payments

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Baselayer

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…

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Torus Teams Up with SRM to Help Acquirers Recover Profits

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, SRM Technologies, Torus

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…

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American Express Now Offers High-Yield Business Savings Account

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, American Express, Daily news

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…

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PayNearMe Acquires Marr Labs, Envestnet Acquires Vestmark

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni profile, Envestnet, Mergers & Acquisitions, PayNearMe

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.…

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What to Build vs Buy: Lessons from AI Agents in Production at a Major Insurer

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Sponsored

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…

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Arva AI Unveils Research Lab to Help Banks Automate High-Risk Decision-Making

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Arva AI

Agentic AI company Arva AI has launched its Research Lab, a new division dedicated to building models and infrastructure to enable financial institutions to automate high-risk decisions.

The Lab has produced proprietary models for data enrichment, transaction analysis, and evidence-based reasoning, and infrastructure—AgentCore—that turns analyst insights into backtested, versioned system improvements.

Founded in 2024, Arva AI made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2026 in London.

Arva AI, a fintech startup that leverages agentic AI to enhance business verification, announced the launch of its Research Lab. The lab is a new research division within the firm dedicated to building the models and infrastructure that enable banks to automate high-risk decisions. After more than 5,000 hours of research, training, and evaluation, the Lab has produced proprietary models for data enrichment, transaction analysis, and evidence-based reasoning. The Lab has also built infrastructure—AgentCore—that transforms analyst corrections, insights, and case outcomes into…

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Fintech Rundown: A Rapid Review of Weekly News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Bluefin, Coinbase, Finastra, Fintech Rundown, Worldline

FinovateFall 2026 is in the books! A huge thanks to all who attended our annual autumn conference. If you missed it, check out the companies that won Best of Show, and stay tuned for our wrap-ups and top takeaways in the weeks to come.

For now, we're catching up on the latest in fintech news and announcements, including a major fundraising in the Buy Now, Pay Later space and continued innovation in agentic commerce. Be sure to check back with the Fintech Rundown all week long for updates!

Payments

Bluefin announces expanded Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) support across its payment security infrastructure.

Payments and banking hub xpate launches new API-based capability xpate Pro to enhance money management for digital businesses.

Wealth management

AI-powered portfolio management platform for financial advisors Pave Finance raises $15 million in Series A funding.

Trade finance

Finastra teams up with digital trade finance platform provider…

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FinovateFall 2026 Best of Show Winners Announced!

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Best of Show, Clockout, equipifi, FinovateFall 2026, Goodbuy, Neural Payments, ScreenSteps, Tweezr, Vertice AI, Young Early Starters

The demos are done and the votes have been counted: congratulations to the winners of Best of Show at FinovateFall 2026!

It is true that AI continues to be the most enabling technology in fintech, bringing new capabilities to payments, fraud prevention, lending, wealth management, and more. As one demoing company representative noted from the FinovateFall stage this week, there may not have been a single demo that did not in some way acknowledge the role that AI—and increasingly agentic AI—is playing in helping banks and other financial institutions become more efficient and more effective in serving individuals, families, businesses, and communities.

That said, if there is one commonality among the companies that won Best of Show at this year's FinovateFall, then that commonality might be a laser-focus on what matters most to financial institutions large and small: growing deposits, boosting customer and membership growth, creating new revenue opportunities, and…

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Finovate Global: Meet the International Alums of FinovateFall 2026

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Finovate Global, FinovateFall 2026

This week's edition of Finovate Global is a hat tip to the companies from outside the US that are traveling to New York to demo their latest fintech innovations live on stage at FinovateFall 2026.

It is true that our European conference tends to feature the highest proportion of non-US companies. That said, FinovateFall is a popular destination for emerging and established fintechs looking to showcase their solutions to an audience of banking and financial services professionals and decision-makers.

Get to know our dozen international fintechs below—and be sure to catch them on stage next week at FinovateFall!

FinovateFall 2026 comes to the Marriott Marquis Times Square in New York, September 9 through 11. Tickets are still available, so visit our registration page and save your spot, book your room, and join us next week in New York!

3 Degrees—United Kingdom

3 Degrees enables community banks…

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FinovateFall 2026: The Need to Knows Before You Go

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: FinovateFall 2026

With FinovateFall 2026 less than a week away, there's not much time left to make your last-minute preparations before the conference begins on September 9 (September 8 for those lucky delegates attending one of our exclusive Leaders+ or Credit Union Spotlight pre-events!).

We're looking forward to hosting more than 2,000 senior-level decision-makers, including more than 1,000 from banks and financial institutions, and more than 300 from credit unions and community banks. Add to that our full, 72-demo roster and a slate of insightful keynote speakers and panelists, and we're on track to deliver one of the best FinovateFall conferences to date.

To help you make the most of your experience, here's a handy guide of need-to-knows before and during your time at FinovateFall next week. We'll see you at the Marriott Marquis Times Square in New York!

Connect Yourself

The first step is to download the ConnectMe app from…

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EMVCo Releases Framework for Card-Based Agentic Payments

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Daily news

EMVCo released a draft framework for card-based agentic payments designed to promote secure, interoperable, and scalable transactions involving AI agents.

The framework introduces Intent Services, a shared layer that would help payment participants register, retrieve, reference, and update consumer-authorized intent as it changes over time.

EMVCo is exploring additional agentic payment capabilities, including Know Your Agent (KYA) and Agentic Transaction Indicators, while seeking industry feedback on the draft through September 30.

Global technical organization EMVCo released the draft of a new framework to help promote secure, interoperable and scalable agentic payments. 

Much of the conversation around agentic commerce has centered around the liability that occurs when an AI agent makes a purchase on the consumer's behalf. EMVCo has discovered that, in agentic payment scenarios where intent needs to be managed over time, such as recurring purchases, cumulative budgets, and post-transaction activities, users may need to offer access to a…

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Finzly Unveils AI Assurance Layer Assure

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Finzly

Banking transformation company Finzly has launched its AI-powered security and assurance layer Assure.

Assure provides banks and other financial institutions using Finzly's BankOS with AI-powered security, compliance monitoring, and operational resilience that is native to the infrastructure they rely on.

Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, Finzly is a two-time Best of Show winner. The company most recently demonstrated its technology at FinovateSpring 2022.

The latest product launch from banking transformation company Finzly weaves security and continuous assurance natively into the infrastructure its banking customers rely on. Assure, Finzly's newly released security and assurance layer, is part of the company's Agentic Galaxy suite of AI capabilities, which powers BankOS, its modern operating system for banks. Financial institutions using BankOS will benefit from Assure's AI-powered security, compliance monitoring, and operational resilience that is native to the infrastructure they are currently using.

"Banking is entering a new era where attacks happen…

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