Alumni News

Plumery Offers DBP Rescue Plan to Help Banks Transition to New Platforms

Plumery Offers DBP Rescue Plan to Help Banks Transition to New Platforms
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Plumery
  • Digital banking development platform Plumery launched its DBP Rescue Plan this week to help banks and other financial institutions migrate away from banking platforms that no longer serve their needs.
  • The offering includes a specialist migration team, migration tooling and playbooks, as well as a Proof of Migration framework that allows institutions to test the migration before committing to it.
  • Headquartered in Amsterdam, Plumery made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2025 in London.

Digital banking development platform Plumery unveiled its DBP Rescue Plan this week. The new offering is an international program designed to help banks and other financial institutions transition away from digital banking platforms that no longer serve their needs.

Plumery’s DBP Rescue Plan removes the primary barriers to migration, providing financial institutions with a defined path away from their current platform that doesn’t require them to take on the full risk and expense of switching platforms. Plumery is making the offering available to 10 financial institutions on a first-come, first-served basis. Participating banks will receive a specialist migration team, migration tooling and playbooks, as well as a Proof of Migration framework that enables them to test the migration against their own systems and environment before committing to the program.

Plumery notes that after the transition, banks and other financial institutions will be able to move beyond vendor dependency and create new products and services with greater flexibility and speed. This will ultimately give development teams more control over the kind of digital banking experiences they can provide to customers. Plumery aims to complete all ten migrations within 12 months.

The DBP Rescue Plan arrives at a time when a growing share of bank IT budgets are being dedicated toward maintaining technical debt. Banking trends research from Accenture noted that in 2026, 70% of bank IT budgets were devoted to these costs. At the same time, software costs have outpaced banking revenue growth, growing by 8% annually since 2017. In this context, in some cases, upgrading an existing platform can be more expensive than building a new platform from scratch. This problem is all the more acute when the bank believes that their current platform is no longer meeting their needs.

“Too many financial institutions stay with digital banking platforms that are no longer working for them because leaving feels riskier than staying,” Plumery CEO Ben Gold said. “The DBP Rescue Plan is designed to remove some of that risk. By combining migration expertise, proven tooling, and a commercial model that removes software licensing costs for up to two years during the transition, we’re giving (financial) institutions a practical way to move forward and take back control over their digital future. Now the real risk is staying.”

Founded in 2016, Plumery made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2025 in London. The company helps banks and other financial institutions modernize their tech stacks and assemble new digital and AI-native banking experiences for their customers.

Photo by Javier M. on Unsplash

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Mifundo Teams Up with Yapily to Enhance Cross-Border Credit

Mifundo Teams Up with Yapily to Enhance Cross-Border Credit
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Mifundo
  • Credit data platform Mifundo has partnered with open banking infrastructure provider Yapily.
  • The combination of Mifundo’s cross-border credit assessment platform with enriched bank account data from Yapily will make it easier for lenders to serve borrowers who live and work in multiple countries, and provide more accurate credit assessments overall.
  • Estonia-based Mifundo most recently demonstrated its technology at FinovateEurope 2026 in London.

Pan-European credit data platform Mifundo has teamed up with Yapily, an open banking infrastructure provider based in London. The partnership will combine Yapily’s enriched bank account data with Mifundo’s cross-border credit assessment platform via Yapily’s Data Plus product. Combined with verified credit bureau information from European markets, this data will enable the creation of a single, standardized, cross-border credit report. This will allow lenders to benefit from having multiple sources and types of financial information consolidated into a single report.

“Cross-border credit assessment requires more than one type of financial data,” Mifundo Founder and CEO Kaido Saar said. “Credit bureau data shows how a customer has managed credit over time, while open banking data provides additional insight into their current financial situation. Mifundo brings these different data sources together across countries and standardizes them into one report that banks can use in their credit assessment. Yapily is an important partner in providing open banking connectivity within that wider ecosystem.”

Currently, even as cross-border consumer lending is growing, credit data is typically siloed behind national borders. A consumer may have a strong credit history in one country, but have virtually no credit history in another country where they may be seeking to obtain a loan due to the absence of portable data or cross-border data access. The combination of Mifundo’s credit bureau and registry network and Yapily’s open banking connectivity will enable banks and other lenders to see a more complete picture of a borrower’s finances, their long-term credit management, and their current financial situation.

The partnership also comes at a key moment as the revised Consumer Credit Directive (CCD2) will apply throughout the European Union from November 20, 2026. Article 6 of this directive includes a non-discrimination provision when it comes to accessing consumer credit, which includes discrimination based on a borrower’s place of residence.

“Open banking has an important role to play in making financial data more accessible across borders, and to do that, it needs data that is ready to act on the moment it lands, not a raw feed that still has to be interpreted,” Yapily Director of Sales EMEA, Irene Brime, said. “Our Data Plus product delivers bank account information already categorized and enriched, complementing credit bureau information and helping lenders build a more complete view of customers with financial histories across different countries. We are excited to be partnered with Mifundo and to contribute to a solution addressing a real challenge for European lenders.”

Open banking API infrastructure platform Yapily securely connects its customers to thousands of banks across Europe, enabling them to access financial data, initiate payments and conduct other operations from credit assessment to onboarding. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in London, the company recently reported 2025 revenues that were up 2.5x over 2024, and has achieved and sustained profitability since Q1 2025.

Headquartered in Tallinn, Estonia, and founded in 2022, Mifundo most recently demoed its technology at FinovateEurope 2026. At the conference, the company demonstrated how its cross-border credit data solution enables banks to access the verified credit history of borrowers from other countries. This helps them make lending decisions that are not just more accurate, but also avoid discriminating against worthy borrowers who live, work, or move across international borders. Mifundo makes foreign credit data accessible, standardized, and operational within existing bank processes, facilitating compliant, scalable cross-border lending across the European Union.

Photo by Hongbin on Unsplash

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LoanPro Launches New Payments, Disbursement, and AI Servicing Tools

LoanPro Launches New Payments, Disbursement, and AI Servicing Tools
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news, LoanPro
  • LoanPro launched three new products spanning payments, card-based loan disbursement, and AI-assisted servicing: LoanPro DirectPay, Beyond Credit, and LoanPro MCP.
  • The launches bring more of the lending lifecycle onto LoanPro’s platform, helping lenders reduce reliance on separate vendors and integrations for payments, disbursements, and servicing.
  • LoanPro MCP allows lenders to connect AI agents to servicing workflows while applying the same permissions, compliance guardrails, and audit trails used for human employees.

Lending and credit platform LoanPro revealed its three newest launches this week. The Utah-based company unveiled multiple new products covering payments, card-based loan disbursement and AI-assisted servicing.

Among today’s launches are LoanPro DirectPay, Beyond Credit, and the LoanPro MCP (Model Context Protocol). The company also announced RiskRadar delinquency prediction, ongoing compliance monitoring, LoanPro Connect, full support for secured cards, and added two new payment partners, Moov and CheckAlt.

“Lenders have asked us for years to handle more of this for them, with one contract and one team to call,” said LoanPro CEO and co-founder, Rhett Roberts. “Payment processing, real-time card disbursement and AI guardrails are now built into LoanPro’s core, and all of it is live today. A lender can now get funds to a borrower on a Friday night or have an AI agent help service an account, and all of it stays inside LoanPro.”

LoanPro is rebranding its payments suite to LoanPro Payments, which centers around LoanPro DirectPay, the company’s payment processing service that moves about $4 billion per month in loan repayments and disbursements. Because LoanPro holds the loan and processing data in-house, loan officers can view the entire lifecycle of a payment, see why a payment failed, and process a dispute all on the same platform.

Beyond Credit is a virtual Mastercard through which lenders can disburse installment loan funds that borrowers can access via Apple Pay or Google Pay wallet. Lenders have control over where funds from the fee-free card are spent, and can limit card usage by merchant name, merchant ID, location, or merchant category code.

The company’s new MCP powers its Intelligence Suite, which gives loan servicing agents a summary of health indicators, recent activity, and suggested next steps for each account. Lenders can use the MCP to connect AI agents and models of their choice to LoanPro. Each action is also recorded in the audit trail under the name of the employee using the agent, giving lenders a way to introduce agentic AI into servicing while maintaining oversight and accountability.

Taken together, LoanPro’s new product launches show a push to consolidate more of the lending lifecycle onto a single platform. Bringing payment processing, real-time loan disbursement, servicing, and AI capabilities into the same environment will help LoanPro reduce the number of vendors and integrations lenders need to manage while giving them a more complete view of the borrower and loan lifecycle.

The MCP launch adds another dimension to LoanPro’s strategy to minimize third party partners because it allows AI agents to operate within the same permissions, compliance guardrails, and audit trails already used for human employees. As lenders move from using AI to summarize information toward allowing agents to actually take actions on accounts, that governance layer could become just as important as the AI models themselves.

“You will only ever drive as fast as you trust your brakes to stop you,” said LoanPro Chief Product Officer Colin Terry. “Lenders have spent years building controls around their human agents, and the LoanPro MCP runs through those same role-based access controls and compliance guardrails. We bring the context, the action and the trust. You bring the thinking, and you have an AI strategy in a box.”

Founded in 2015, LoanPro helps banks, auto lenders, and credit providers automate workflows, process payments, underwrite applications and manage collections. The company has participated in our developers conference, FinDEVr 2021, and demoed its loan management system at FinovateSpring 2021.

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Numeral Raises $100 Million for Sales Tax Solution

Numeral Raises $100 Million for Sales Tax Solution
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news, Funding
  • Numeral raised $100 million in Series C funding, bringing the tax compliance platform’s total funding to $157.5 million since its 2023 founding.
  • The company will use the capital to accelerate product development, expand into additional industries, and grow its team, while launching a new accounting partner program.
  • Numeral is using agentic AI to automate more of the tax compliance workload while keeping humans in the loop, as businesses face growing complexity across markets and jurisdictions.

Sales tax compliance platform Numeral has raised $100 million in Series C funding, boosting its total raised to $157.5 million since it was founded in 2023.

Insight Partners led the round, which saw participation from Salesforce Ventures, Geodesic, Benchmark, Mayfield, FCVC, Y Combinator, and Uncork.

San Francisco-based Numeral aims to simplify sales tax compliance details such as nexus tracking, registrations, filing, rate calculation, remittance, exemption certificate management, and virtual mailbox services. In addition to sales tax, the company works with VAT and GST compliance in more than 90 countries. Numeral has recently recorded a 327% year-over-year increase in total transaction volume and expects to process more than 80 million transactions via its tax engine.

“Sales tax has become a much bigger operational challenge as companies grow across markets, systems and business models,” said Numeral Co-Founder and CEO, Sam Ross. “Businesses need infrastructure that can keep pace as rules and requirements change across jurisdictions, without adding more manual work for their teams. We’re building Numeral to provide that foundation, backed by tax expertise and service that customers can rely on.”

Numeral will use today’s funding to accelerate product development, expand its offering for industries, and grow its team. The company is also launching its accounting partner program that will allow partnering firms to refer clients, resell the platform, use it to deliver their own services, or advise clients through implementation to stay closely involved in their clients’ tax decisions. Overall, Numeral’s technology leverages agentic AI while keeping humans in the loop.

“Our customers want to know that their tax obligations are being handled accurately while still having access to a person when a complex issue comes up,” said Ross. “That expectation shapes how we build the platform and how we support each customer. As Numeral moves into additional industries and serves larger businesses, we’ll continue investing in both the technology and the tax expertise behind it.”

As tax compliance is becoming more complex for businesses operating across multiple markets, Numeral is using AI to automate more of the work traditionally handled by internal tax teams and accounting firms. Rather than simply using AI to help employees complete compliance tasks, Numeral’s technology aims to take on more of the operational burden itself, while keeping tax professionals available for complex cases.

Photo by Tara Winstead

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Go.AI Secures $85 Million in Series A Funding

Go.AI Secures $85 Million in Series A Funding
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Funding, Go.AI
  • AI infrastructure provider for regulated industries, Go.AI, has secured $85 million in Series A funding in a round led by Updata Partners. The investment takes the company’s total funding to $90 million.
  • The capital will enable Go.AI to grow its engineering team, accelerate development of its key solutions, and scale go-to-market efforts beyond regulated industries.
  • Go.AI made its Finovate debut earlier this year at FinovateSpring 2026 as Go Abacus. The Chicago-based company returned to the Finovate stage for FinovateFall 2026 in September.

Go.AI, an AI infrastructure provider for regulated industries, has raised $85 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Updata Partners with participation from existing investors GFT Ventures and LAUNCH. The investment takes Go.AI’s total funding to $90 million. In a statement, the company said it will use the funding to grow its engineering team and accelerate development of both its operating system, Go.OS, and its hardware line. The company will also scale its go-to-market efforts, expanding beyond regulated industries such as financial services and defense into a broader range of compliance-oriented organizations.

“When Lisa Gillespie and I co-founded the company, we were two people with a big idea,” Moscatelli said. “Today, we have over 50 team members, and the company we’ve built is doing exactly what we said it would do for the institutions that trust us most. This funding lets us keep building at that pace, but the thing I’m most proud of isn’t the growth number, it’s the education. AI doesn’t have to be something people fear or don’t understand. Done right, it works alongside the people who use it. That’s what this round lets us prove, at scale.”

Go.AI offers an on-premises AI appliance that puts enterprise-grade AI inference directly into a bank’s or financial institution’s own environment. Featuring zero cloud dependency and zero data egress, Go.AI’s Go1 is SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and HIPAA compliant, making it purpose-built for regulated industries. This allows institutions to run AI on sensitive data while remaining compliant and auditable. Go1 is paired with Go.AI’s operating system, Go.OS, which automates model management, GPU allocation, and serving without any cloud connection. Go1 provides full model lifecycle governance, including versioning, rollback, and real-time monitoring. Go.AI’s customers are currently running on-premises AI deployments that are processing more than 12.5 million queries a day.

Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, Go.AI made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2026. The company returned to the Finovate stage earlier this month for FinovateFall. Go.AI’s funding news comes just a few weeks after the company announced its rebrand from Go Abacus to Go.AI. In a statement, Moscatelli said the company’s work in on-prem AI, security, and safety “has matured into a category-defining position” and that the company has succeeded in making “that complexity feel simple, without ever compromising trust or control. Go.AI is the name that finally matches that ambition.”

Photo by Diego Alberto Martínez Mendoza

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ACI Worldwide to Support Payments Orchestrated Through Swift

ACI Worldwide to Support Payments Orchestrated Through Swift
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: ACI Worldwide, Alumni News, Alumni profile

Payments expert ACI Worldwide announced 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.

Photo by Athena Sandrini

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Plaid Taps ID.me to Help Government Agencies Verify Financial Beneficiaries and their Accounts

Plaid Taps ID.me to Help Government Agencies Verify Financial Beneficiaries and their Accounts
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, ID.me, Plaid
  • 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.

Photo by Melisa Uygun

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Coinbase Partners with Stablecore to Help Banks Offer Digital Asset Services

Coinbase Partners with Stablecore to Help Banks Offer Digital Asset Services
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Coinbase, Daily news
  • 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.

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Earnix Launches Agent Hub for Insurance-Specific Agents

Earnix Launches Agent Hub for Insurance-Specific Agents
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Earnix
  • 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 Earnix unveiled 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.

Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash

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Baselayer Partners with Nevermined to Bring Identity Verification to Agentic Payments

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 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.

Photo by Trev W. Adams

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Torus Teams Up with SRM to Help Acquirers Recover Profits

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 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.

Photo by Mr Alex Photography

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American Express Now Offers High-Yield Business Savings Account

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 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.

Photo by Foodguide App on Unsplash

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