Alumni profile

CSI Acquires Qolo for Undisclosed Amount

CSI Acquires Qolo for Undisclosed Amount
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Alumni profile, Mergers & Acquisitions, Qolo

Fintech solutions provider CSI has acquired payments infrastructure and treasury solutions provider Qolo for an undisclosed amount.

CSI anticipates that the acquisition will strengthen its commercial banking solutions by offering its community financial institution clients more flexible deposit structures and expanded commercial card programs. Adding Qolo’s existing clients to its own roster will also extend CSI’s geographical reach.

More specifically, CSI will use Qolo’s technology to serve as the orchestration layer across payments, accounts, and workflows. The Kentucky-based company will integrate with CSI’s core banking platform, digital banking solution, and broader API capabilities to bring community financial institutions prepackaged, pre-integrated commercial banking solutions, including:

  • A real-time account ledger that gives banks and businesses instant visibility into balances, transactions, and authorizations.
  • Multi-rail payment orchestration that offers a unified payment engine to orchestrate domestic and international money movement across multiple payment rails and business workflows.
  • Enhanced card capabilities that expand integrated issuing and processing across debit, prepaid, virtual, and secured corporate credit card programs.

Qolo, which demoed at FinovateFall 2022, was founded in 2018 with the aim of simplifying payments through a unified infrastructure layer. Its platform combines an embedded ledger, card issuing, money movement, real-time reconciliation, and cross-rail connectivity into a single API. Rather than requiring banks to replace legacy cores, Qolo overlays its technology on top of existing systems, enabling institutions to deploy new payment capabilities in months, not years.

CSI said that the combined company will remain focused on serving community financial institutions with new ways to attract, retain, and grow customer relationships by offering modern commercial banking capabilities typically found at large banks. Keeping up with current, constantly changing technology can help small community banks compete more effectively with banks that have large R&D budgets.

“Community financial institutions are built on trusted relationships, local expertise, and deep knowledge of their markets,” said CSI President and CEO Nancy Langer. “But businesses in their communities also need sophisticated banking capabilities that simplify and fit more naturally into their day-to-day financial operations. With Qolo, CSI is helping community banks bring those capabilities to market in ways that help them grow commercial relationships and become more central to how businesses operate. At the same time, it expands our ability to support fintechs and B2B payments providers as demand grows for financial services embedded directly into everyday business workflows.”

For community banks, the acquisition is less about adding another payments tool and more about simplifying how commercial banking services are delivered. As businesses increasingly expect real-time payments and integrated treasury capabilities, banks are looking for unified platforms that reduce technology complexity while enabling them to embed financial services more naturally into their customers’ day-to-day operations.

“The line between traditional banking and embedded finance is becoming increasingly blurred,” said Qolo Co-founder and CEO Patricia Montesi. “Whether you’re a community bank modernizing your commercial offering or a fintech building embedded finance products, you’re often running into the same challenges: fragmented vendors, disconnected payment rails, and manual workarounds that limit growth. By joining CSI, we can invest more deeply in the infrastructure that powers modern financial experiences and help our customers become a more seamless part of how businesses manage and move money every day.”

In an interview at FinovateFall last year, I sat down with Montesi to discuss how the company helps modernize payments infrastructure. “We set out to build an entire, comprehensive payments stack that includes ledger, card, payments, virtual account management—everything all available through a single API served up to you so that you can then focus on your customers,” said Montesi.

Rather than replacing legacy cores outright, banks are increasingly layering modern payments, ledger, and treasury capabilities on top of existing infrastructure. Qolo built its platform around that philosophy, making it a natural fit for CSI’s strategy of helping community financial institutions modernize without undertaking large-scale core replacements.

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Meniga Launches New Conversational LLM Product

Meniga Launches New Conversational LLM Product
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Alumni profile, Meniga

Personal finance solutions fintech Meniga launched a new product called Fini, an MCP server that enables banks to bring agentic AI into their existing platforms.

Fini, which was built with the input of five large banks, serves as the bridge between a bank’s preferred large language model (LLM) and Meniga’s personal finance, enrichment, and insights capabilities. Rather than building its own AI model, Meniga enables banks to pair Claude, GPT, Gemini, or another LLM with the company’s financial intelligence platform, allowing customers to ask questions about their finances in natural language within the bank’s website or mobile app.

Founded in 2009, Meniga serves over 100 million banking customers across 30 countries. The UK-based company’s clients include UniCredit, Groupe BPCE, UOB, Swedbank, SAB, Tangerine, and Riyad Bank. Meniga’s intelligence and personalization layer helps banks turn financial data into insights and proactively anticipate customer needs, promoting engagement.

Meniga anticipates that this conversational interface will benefit banks by engaging with consumers on a deeper level, increase satisfaction, lower support costs, and offer insights into customers’ individual needs. The new tool also meets consumers where they are, especially as their preferences shift away from features and towards conversational interfaces that offer instant, personalized answers.

“The banks that win agentic banking will be the ones that ground their conversational layer in real financial context. Not a generic chatbot, but an assistant that actually knows a customer’s spending patterns, their goals, and their upcoming bills, and is able to act on them,” said Meniga CEO Raj Soni. “With Fini, banks can enter the AI-agent era on the platform they already trust, without rebuilding what’s underneath, and without their data ever leaving the bank.”

Beyond answering questions, Fini supports agentic AI workflows that allow customers to complete certain banking tasks, like opening new accounts or setting up automatic transfers, directly within the conversation. This eliminates the need to navigate to separate screens.

Because Fini is model-agnostic, banks can build their AI assistants on Claude, GPT, Gemini, or their own proprietary model while relying on Meniga to provide the underlying financial context. Banks also retain control over their own guardrails, identity and access controls, and customer data, which never leaves the bank.

Meniga’s launch is similar to those of other fintechs racing to capture the LLM opportunity for consumer financial management. Rather than developing proprietary large language models, banks are increasingly viewing AI as a layered architecture. Foundation models such as Claude, GPT, or Gemini provide the conversational interface, while companies like Meniga provide the financial intelligence needed to ground those conversations in a customer’s actual spending patterns, cash flow, subscriptions, and financial goals. This approach enables banks to adopt new AI models as they emerge without rebuilding the personal financial management capabilities that differentiate their customer experience.

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Marco Ma of Ventus AI on Transforming Data into Behavioral Intelligence

Marco Ma of Ventus AI on Transforming Data into Behavioral Intelligence
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni profile

For our latest installment of Finovate First-Timers, a new series profiling companies that recently made their debuts on the Finovate stage, we catch up with Marco Ma, Co-Founder and CEO of Ventus AI. Ventus AI helps banks personalize every touchpoint across the customer journey, boosting engagement, lifetime value, and assets under management.

The company’s technology transforms raw transaction data into a cross-categorized behavioral intelligence layer that spans more than 3,000 spending subcategories to surface life events, dynamic personas, and real-time intent signals. Founded in 2025 and headquartered in New York, Ventus AI demoed its technology at FinovateSpring 2026 in San Diego, California.

In this week’s conversation, Ma talks about the challenges banks and credit unions face when it comes to leveraging data to create better, more personalized experiences for customers and members. He explains how Ventus AI plugs into existing stacks to provide a new analytics layer that delivers answers to questions about customer preferences and pain points without building anything new.

What problem does Ventus AI solve and who does it solve it for?

Marco Ma: Banks sit on enormous volumes of transaction data, but most of it stays trapped as raw, messy records their teams can’t actually read. The result is a lose-lose: customers get served demoralizing generic experiences which leads to lost relationships and deteriorated customer economics. We solve this for banks and credit unions that want to understand and serve their customers more deeply.

How does Ventus AI solve this problem better than other companies?

Ma: We built a proprietary customer intelligence and personalization engine. It works across every account and payment rail and detects the full picture: lifestyle patterns, life-event triggers, financial vulnerability signals, and semantic budgeting. Where most tools stop at cleaning up a merchant name, we surface what’s actually happening in a customer’s life, and we deliver it into the tools banks already use rather than asking them to rip anything out.

Who are Ventus AI’s primary customers, and how do you reach them?

Ma: US financial institutions, with our initial focus on banks and credit unions in the $1 billion to $50 billion asset range, alongside an active enterprise pipeline. We reach them through industry programs and conferences like Finovate and the Fintech Sandbox network, direct relationships built by the founding team, and warm introductions through our advisors and ecosystem partners.

Can you tell us about a favorite implementation or partnership experience?

Ma: Our favorite work is on rewards and deals. The insight that makes it special is that the same offer can mean completely different things to different people. People don’t wake up one day and say “I want to shop at Crate & Barrel.” Some people want a new coffee machine, some people want a new side table. Because we understand the behavior behind the spend, the bank can present the same deal in the way that actually resonates with each person, turning a generic coupon book experience into something that feels personal.

What in your background gave you the confidence to respond to this challenge?

Ma: We have a strong founding team with backgrounds spanning Visa, McKinsey, AWS, and Credit Suisse, along with prominent advisors from the banking world. That mix of payments, data, and institutional banking experience meant we understood both the technical problem and the way banks actually buy and adopt technology.

You demoed at FinovateSpring in May. How was the experience?

Ma: It was a great moment for us. Banking is deeply personal. It touches the most important moments in people’s lives, and our hero demo follows an expecting-parent spending pattern across rails to show we can extract major life event signals and orchestrate the existing tech stack—rewards, product, relationship—to be personalized to help this customer through this journey. Demoing that live on the main stage reminded us why this matters: done right, this technology lets a bank show up for someone at exactly the moment it counts. We’re returning for the Fall show.

You were accepted into the Fintech Sandbox Data Access Residency. What is it, and why does it matter?

Ma: Fintech Sandbox gives early-stage fintech companies access to high-quality financial data and infrastructure to build and refine their products. For us, it’s meaningful because behavioral intelligence is only as good as the data it learns from. The residency accelerates our ability to develop and validate our engine against real, rich datasets, which directly strengthens what we deliver to banks.

What are your goals for the rest of 2026 and into next year?

Ma: Grow our pipeline through business development, move active conversations into live deployments, return to the Finovate main stage in the Fall, and close our current funding round. Beyond that, we’re heads-down building, deepening the behavioral signal we deliver and expanding what banks can do with it.

Photo by Floriane Vita on Unsplash

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3forge Unveils Application Fabric for Finance, 3forge Enterprise

3forge Unveils Application Fabric for Finance, 3forge Enterprise
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: 3forge, Alumni profile

For companies involved in the business of empowering developers to build business-critical fintech applications, the world has changed a great deal over the past decade. From the rise of AI to a sea-change in regulatory priorities that has increased scrutiny on third-party relationships, fraud and risk management, consumer data protections, and more, the task of providing fintech developers with the tools they need to innovate has only become more challenging.

This makes the recent news from 3forge, a New York-based fintech that has been empowering fintech designers and developers for 15 years, all the more interesting.

“We started 3forge in New York, in 2011, to build a transformative platform enabling your designers and developers to build applications in a fraction of the time and cost, with a focus on business-critical scale, performance, and interoperability,” 3forge Founder and Chief Technology Officer Robert Cooke said from the Finovate stage at the beginning of the company’s Finovate debut in 2022.

Today, the New York-based fintech announced the launch of its application fabric for finance. 3forge Enterprise unifies real-time data, business logic, AI, and application development in a single operational environment. This gives financial institutions a production-ready continuum from data to deployed application. 3forge Enterprise provides a data gateway that unifies current-state access to real-time and historical tables, streams, and procedures across data nodes in the 3forge fabric. The technology enables developers and applications to publish, subscribe, query, and insert data via native connectivity in Java, Python, and C++, and provides failover support and integrations across JDBC, Pandas, and SQLAlchemy libraries. 3forge Enterprise also provides MCP server and AI agent access, live prompting and agentic development, and an operations hub that centralizes the management of 3forge deployments.

“For years, financial institutions treated data platforms, business logic, and applications as separate architectural domains,” Cooke said. “That separation made sense operationally, but it is increasingly inefficient for high-value capital markets workflows. As AI raises the stakes, models and agents need more than disconnected data estates and fragmented application logic.”

3forge Enterprise uses three layers to transform platforms into an enterprise-wide fabric for financial systems: a governed real-time intake and exhaust layer for financial data, an application engine and AI-assisted development layer for building and running financial workflows that helps users move from data to production, and an operational control layer to facilitate managing deployments at scale. Combined, these layers enable vendor platforms, internal systems, and AI-powered applications to access real-time and historical data via unified queries, streams, APIs, and agents. At the same time, 3forge Enterprise preserves the entitlements, auditability, and production controls needed for capital markets.

“An application fabric brings data, decisions, execution, AI, and applications onto the same controlled, auditable foundation,” Cooke explained. “For tier-one financial institutions, 3forge Enterprise provides a way to extend and modernize complex existing infrastructure. For mid-market banks, broker-dealers, hedge funds, and asset managers, it provides access to a production-ready application fabric without having to build one from scratch.”

Founded in 2011 and headquartered in New York, 3forge made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2022. At the conference, the company showed how its Full Stack Enterprise platform enables developers to quickly build customized business-critical solutions with an emphasis on workflow transparency, real-time visualization, and data discovery without limitation.

Photo by Vincenzo Marotta on Unsplash

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WALLETTO Taps AMLYZE to Advance AML Compliance

WALLETTO Taps AMLYZE to Advance AML Compliance
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Alumni profile, AMLYZE, Daily news

Financial crime innovator AMLYZE announced this week that fellow Lithuanian company WALLETTO has selected it to strengthen its anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-financial terrorism (CFT) capabilities.

AMLYZE was founded in 2019 to help fight financial crime with a range of SaaS-based products that cover real-time and retrospective transaction monitoring, customer risk assessment, AML/CFT investigations, sanctions, PEP, and adverse media screening.

WALLETTO will integrate AMLYZE’s AML/CFT platform to help reinforce its compliance framework. WALLETTO will leverage the full AMLYZE product suite, including Transaction Monitoring, Customer Risk Assessment, AML Investigations, Customer Screening, and Payment Screening.

“At WALLETTO, maintaining the highest standards of compliance, security, and operational resilience is a fundamental part of our long-term growth strategy,” said WALLETTO Member of the Management Board Migle Soltysiak.

WALLETTO was founded in 2017 to offer solutions for card issuance, acquiring, and electronic payments such as SEPA and SWIFT services. The company is an e-money institution (EMI) regulated by the Bank of Lithuania and holds partnerships with Visa and Mastercard to help businesses scale their payments services without having to worry about compliance.

For AMLYZE, which demoed at FinovateEurope 2024, partnering with WALLETTO will help it expand into the Baltic region. “Welcoming WALLETTO to our client portfolio is a particularly meaningful milestone for us,” said AMLYZE CEO and Co-Founder Gabrielius Erikas Bilkštys. “WALLETTO is one of the largest fintechs in Lithuania, and this partnership reflects our commitment to the Baltic market, which we consider our home. We are proud to be the compliance partner of choice for leading institutions in this region and to continue growing our portfolio of clients served here.”

The partnership comes as compliance infrastructure is becoming not only a regulatory requirement but also a competitive differentiator. As fintechs expand internationally, launch additional payment capabilities, and face more regulatory scrutiny, demand is growing for specialized platforms capable of managing complex financial crime workflows. For AMLYZE, landing one of Lithuania’s largest fintechs shows that newer compliance providers can increasingly compete for traditional financial institutions rather than only smaller customers.

Photo by Pixabay

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Regtech Eisen Raises $18.5 Million to Streamline Escheatment

Regtech Eisen Raises $18.5 Million to Streamline Escheatment
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni profile, Eisen, Funding

Eisen, a fintech that specializes in end-to-end escheatment and unclaimed property compliance automation, has secured $18.5 million in funding. The capital comes in the form of a $10 million Series A led by MissionOG and a previously unannounced $8.5 seed round led by Index Ventures. Cowboy Ventures, First Round Capital, Homebrew, and Restive Ventures also participated in the investment.

Eisen innovates in an often-overlooked area of financial services: escheatment and the recovery of unclaimed property. State law requires that abandoned funds eventually be turned over to the government in a legal process called escheatment. While each state has its own rules regarding dormancy periods, notice requirements, and remittance deadlines, the concept of escheatment is designed to help protect consumers when financial institutions lose track of them. Nevertheless, the process of retrieving those assets can be both complex and cumbersome. As such, it is little surprise that more than 30 million Americans have unclaimed property in state custody, with states holding a combined $70 billion in consumer assets: from retirement accounts and life insurance proceeds to forgotten savings accounts and emergency funds. Out of all of this, only $4.5 billion was returned to owners in 2024.

In response, Eisen’s technology streamlines the compliance lifecycle from dormancy tracking and due diligence through to state reporting, remittance, and audit defense. The company offers a Tax Compliance Suite to support 1099 filing, TIN matching, and B-notice handling, as well as disbursement services. This reflects the firm’s evolution beyond improving the escheatment process and a recognition that many of the same issues that plague escheatment also impact other compliance operations.

“We started with escheatment because the gap there is the widest, but the same operational pattern shows up across the compliance stack,” Eisen Co-founder and CEO Allen Osgood wrote in a blog post announcing the investment. “Eisen’s platform now covers escheatment, disbursement, and 1099 reporting. Operational teams use Eisen to replace manual work and prevent dormant-account risk. Executives use it to reduce regulatory exposure, retain customer assets, and protect customer trust.”

Last year, Eisen prevented more than 31% of at-risk assets from being lost to state custody. The company monitors nearly $16 billion in balances across tens of millions of accounts at firms including Adyen, Binance.US, BitGo, and PeoplesBank. Eisen’s platform integrates state-by-state requirements directly into account operations, enabling financial institutions to identify dormancy risk earlier, reduce manual compliance work, and keep more customer assets in customer accounts.

“Every dollar in state custody represents a real person who never expected their money to disappear,” Osgood added. “The rules governing dormant assets weren’t built for crypto wallets, fintech platforms, or digital-first banking. Most institutions are sitting on 5x to 10x more liability than they realize. Eisen prevents that loss before it happens.”

Founded in 2021, Eisen made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2024 and returned to the Finovate stage earlier this year at FinovateSpring 2026 in San Diego. At the conference, the company demonstrated its Eisen Dashboard, a real-time compliance command center that features account-level detail views with state-specific rules, eligibility and due diligence tracking by reporting year, a disbursement hub with daily reconciliation and fraud protection, and an outreach hub to manage owner communications. Eisen is headquartered in New York.

Photo by Kanhaiya Sharma on Unsplash

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KeyBank Deepens Ties with Qolo to Launch New Virtual Card Program

KeyBank Deepens Ties with Qolo to Launch New Virtual Card Program
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Alumni profile, Qolo

KeyBank is launching a new commercial card program this week. The Ohio-based bank is deepening its partnership with card issuing company Qolo to launch its Key Virtual Card (KeyVC), a virtual commercial card program that helps businesses manage and track payments. 

“KeyVC is designed to reduce that complexity by allowing clients to use virtual cards alongside other treasury tools, with consistent reporting and simplified reconciliation across payment types. Businesses want payment tools that fit naturally into how they already operate,” said Qolo Chief Operating Officer Rouzbeh Rotabi. “Working with KeyBank, we’ve built a virtual card solution that feels like a seamless part of the treasury environment–giving finance teams more flexibility, stronger controls, and clearer insight into their spending.”

KeyVC will enable KeyBank’s commercial clients to create and manage virtual cards within the bank’s Virtual Account Management platform (KeyVAM). Adding virtual cards to their existing treasury management tools will offer KeyBank’s commercial clients a way to pay suppliers while maintaining oversight of spending and facilitating reconciliation.

“Commercial clients are increasingly looking for simpler and more controlled ways to manage payments,” said KeyBank Head of Commercial Cards John Withrow. “By expanding our partnership with Qolo, we’re making virtual cards easier to use within our existing treasury platforms, helping clients streamline accounts payable, improve visibility, and maintain better control over how and when money is spent.”

Qolo, which demoed at FinovateFall 2022, was founded in 2018 with the aim of simplifying payments through a unified infrastructure layer. Its platform combines an embedded ledger, card issuing, money movement, real-time reconciliation, and cross-rail connectivity into a single API. Rather than requiring banks to replace legacy cores, Qolo overlays its technology on top of existing systems, enabling institutions to deploy new payment capabilities in months, not years.

In an interview at FinovateFall last year, I sat down with Patricia Montesi, Qolo Founder and CEO, to discuss how the company helps modernize payments infrastructure. “We set out to build an entire, comprehensive payments stack that includes ledger, card, payments, virtual account management—everything all available through a single API served up to you so that you can then focus on your customers,” said Montesi.

Qolo and KeyBank have worked together since 2024, when the two launched KeyVAM. Expanding this partnership will enable KeyBank to prioritize embedded payment experiences inside treasury workflows, rather than offering standalone payment tools. Qolo’s API-based approach will allow KeyBank to avoid a core overhaul while still providing modern card-based capabilities.

Embedding virtual cards within treasury environments shifts competition from facilitating payments to providing a more holistic workflow solution. The integrated approach brings payment tools directly into how finance teams manage liquidity, reconcile transactions, and control spend.

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Alkami Unveils GenAI Capabilities with Alkami Code Studio

Alkami Unveils GenAI Capabilities with Alkami Code Studio
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alkami Technology, Alumni profile

Alkami Technology, a digital sales and service platform provider for financial institutions, has unveiled its Alkami Code Studio. The new offering is an AI-powered development capability—currently in beta—that will empower banks and credit unions to deliver more personalized and scalable digital experiences.

“Financial institutions are looking for partners who are not only talking about AI, but actively embedding it into their platforms in meaningful ways,” Alkami Chief Technology Officer Deep Varma said. “Alkami Code Studio reflects our commitment to investing in innovation that is both forward-looking and grounded in the needs of our customers—helping them move faster while maintaining the governance, security, and control they require.”

Alkami Code Studio is an AI-powered assistant that supports the creation, validation, and deployment of SDK components on the Alkami platform. Designed for developers, Alkami Code Studio provides standards-aligned, design-compliant components within a secure, governed environment. The solution is powered by closed-loop large language models (LLMs) operating inside Alkami’s secure infrastructure to ensure that customer code remains safely within Alkami’s ecosystem.

Embedded within the Alkami Software Development Kit (SDK) Wizard, Alkami Code Studio sits alongside Alkami’s One-Click SDK Manager, which enables users to self-manage deployments across both staging and production environments. Alkami Code Studio has been developed in collaboration with Alkami’s financial institution clients, including Patelco Credit Union, which played a major role in early testing of the technology.

“Delivering the best digital experiences that are efficient, secure, and tailored to our members’ needs is at the heart of what Patelco does,” Patelco Credit Union Director of Application Engineering Deepan Chandrasekaran said. “The early insight Alkami’s Code Studio gives us into how AI can support development workflows without compromising control brings immense and innovative benefits to our members.”

Alkami Technology’s Alkami Code Studio announcement arrives at the same time that the company previewed the launch of Alkami Engage, its digital adoption and analytics platform built to help banks and credit unions accelerate digital banking adoption. Alkami Engage offers in-app guidance and behavioral analytics to enable financial institutions learn about how their retail and business customers prefer to engage with digital banking across online and mobile experiences. The technology is integrated directly into the Alkami Digital Banking Platform, capturing near real-time user interactions such as page views, clicks, feature usage, and journey progression.

“Financial institutions invest heavily in digital transformation but often lack visibility into user behavior,” Alkami Chief Product Officer Benjamin Conant said. “Alkami Engage delivers real-time behavioral insights and in-app guidance to reduce friction, improve onboarding and self-service, and enable personalized digital experiences that drive growth and efficiency.”

A long-time Finovate alum, Alkami Technology made its Finovate debut as iThryv in 2009. Today, the Plano, Texas-based fintech is a digital sales and service platform provider for banks and credit unions throughout the US, helping them onboard, engage, and grow relationships with their customers and members. Alkami Technology is a pioneer in Anticipatory Banking, which combines onboarding and account opening, digital banking, and personalized marketing to deliver proactive, data-driven experiences that predict account holder needs and surface next best actions. Alex Shootman is Alkami Technology’s CEO.

Photo by Bryan Dickerson on Unsplash

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Personetics and Atomic Partner to Help Banks Measure Deposit Growth

Personetics and Atomic Partner to Help Banks Measure Deposit Growth
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni profile, Atomic FI, Personetics

Cognitive Banking Platform Personetics and embedded financial connectivity specialist Atomic recently announced a new partnership. The two companies will deliver a native, end-to-end solution for contextual direct deposit and billpay switching that sits within the digital banking experience. The new capability will enable banks to use transaction intelligence to identify the right customers and financial moments and then design, trigger, execute, and measure switching journeys within a single platform. Translating intelligence into action and action into meaningful outcomes, the integration of Atomic will expand the capabilities of the Personetics platform to include embedded, context-driven switching journeys that boost both deposit growth and share of wallet.

“By partnering with Personetics, we’re enabling banks to bring highly relevant, real-time insights into everyday banking experiences, and seamlessly turn those insights into financial action,” Atomic Co-founder and CEO Jordan Wright said. “Together, we help banks deepen relationships while delivering measurable business outcomes.”

The goal of the Personetics/Atomic partnership is to empower banks to avoid the kind of gaps that can occur with existing deposit switching solutions. In a statement, the companies noted that many current options lack the context required in order to engage the right customers at the right moment, instead delivering generic, fragmented campaigns. These solutions also often suffer from reliance on disconnected tools that add friction and make conversions more challenging. Furthermore, this makes it harder for banks to understand the connection between switching initiatives and measurable business outcomes. In contrast, the collaboration between Personetics and Atomic closes these gaps by combining transaction intelligence with seamless execution and closed-loop measurement in a single platform.

“Atomic’s capabilities are a natural fit with our Cognitive Banking vision and our open platform roadmap, enabling banks to move beyond insights to deliver contextual financial actions that drive measurable business outcomes,” Personetics CEO Udi Ziv said.

Atomic made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2021 and most recently demoed its technology at FinovateSpring 2024. At FinovateSpring, the Salt Lake City, Utah-based fintech demonstrated how its PayLink solution simplifies subscription management by enabling users to manage their recurring payments and subscriptions from within their preferred bank or financial institution. Founded in 2019, Atomic enables financial institutions to offer a range of next-generation banking products including subscription management, direct deposit switching, payment switching, and bill optimization.

Founded in 2010 and headquartered in New York, Personetics most recently demoed its technology at FinovateFall 2016. The company’s Cognitive Banking Platform empowers banks to leverage data to respond swiftly and dynamically to customer needs. The platform provides relevant and timely insights that help consumers make smarter decisions to achieve financial wellness and reach their goals. Designed to help financial institutions boost customer engagement and sales, grow and retain deposits, support small businesses, and convert transaction data into insights and action, Personetics’ technology is used by banks and financial institutions in 35 markets around the world, supporting 150 million active monthly users.

Photo by Joslyn Pickens

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Insurtech Qover Secures $12 Million in Growth Funding

Insurtech Qover Secures $12 Million in Growth Funding
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni profile, Qover

Qover, a Belgian fintech that specializes in “Insurance-as-a-Service,” has raised $12 million in a capital extension from CIBC Innovation Banking. The company, which made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2018, reported that its total funding now tops $100 million.

The investment comes as the embedded insurance orchestration firm marks its 10th anniversary of serving customers throughout Europe. At a time when the international embedded insurance market is expected to grow from $176 billion in 2026 to more than $1.46 trillion by 2034, Qover currently protects 15 million customers via its insurtech platform and expects to reach 55 million users by the end of this year.

“We started with a simple conviction: insurance could be simpler and truly accessible across borders,” Qover CEO and Co-Founder Quentin Colmant said. “Ten years and 15 million users later, that conviction has become a platform, and with AI now accelerating what’s possible, we are more ambitious than ever. Our goal is to protect 100 million people by 2030, building the infrastructure that makes a global safety net real.”

Qover said that the funding from CIBC will support the company’s continued investment in its orchestration platform, AI capabilities, and operational infrastructure.

Qover’s API-first platform orchestrates embedded insurance for businesses and insurers across Europe. Adaptable to any product, partner, country, or risk carrier, Qover’s platform gives institutions greater control with less complexity, covering the full insurance lifecycle, from design to claims. Organizations using the platform benefit from a configurable setup that enables them to tailor the solution to their needs, as well as a modular approach that allows users to select from different platform modules and how they are implemented.

“The next decade of insurance will be defined by the companies that can operate at scale without sacrificing precision,” Qover General Counsel Caroline Hanotiau said. “AI gives us the opportunity to make compliance by design the standard, not the exception, allowing us to expand into more products and more regions with the confidence that we are always operating at the highest level. That’s how Qover will grow responsibly and at the scale our vision demands.”

Founded in 2016, Qover made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2018. Today, the company protects 15 million people in more than 32 countries and boasts revenue growth of 3x and more than $173 million in gross written premiums over the past four years. Qover has orchestrated embedded insurance programs for a number of major international brands including fellow Finovate alums Revolut and Mastercard; as well as Monzo, bunq, and BMW.

Qover’s fundraising news comes just a few days after the company announced that it had forged a strategic partnership with Willis, a WTW business. Together, the two companies will offer a product-agnostic solution that helps companies launch tailored insurance programs quickly and at scale.

Photo by Viktoria Alipatova

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Embedded Finance Platform Array Acquires Penny Finance, Chimney, EarnUp

Embedded Finance Platform Array Acquires Penny Finance, Chimney, EarnUp
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni profile, Array, Chimney, Penny Finance

Embedded finance platform Array has been on a truly remarkable acquisition pace in recent weeks. The company, which won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2021 and again in its return to the Finovate stage for FinovateSpring 2022, acquired fellow Finovate alum—and fellow Best of Show winner—Penny Finance in late February. This move came just a few days after Array announced its acquisition of another Finovate alum and Best of Show winner, Chimney.

And just to show that Array’s appetites are not limited to Best of Show-winning Finovate alums, the company also announced its acquisition of paytech EarnUp less than a month ago.

What do these acquisitions mean for Array? Overall, these deals represent the company’s strategy to provide its financial institution partners with modular, embeddable tools and data that enable them to boost engagement, improve retention, and secure measurable value. Designed to complement the solutions currently offered by fintechs, financial institutions, and digital brands, Array’s embedded, invisible-by-design approach allows consumers to enjoy a wider range of financial solutions and services while still relying on the brands they know and trust.

Consider Penny Finance. Penny Finance is an online financial planning engine that enables credit unions and community banks to provide personalized education, resources, and services to their members and customers. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, and founded in 2020 by CEO Crissi Cole, Penny Finance helps individuals and families pay off debt, begin investing, and build wealth—all within a unified, integrated solution. Array Founder and CEO Martin Toha said that acquiring Penny Finance will enable Array to serve consumers the same way that they experience financial challenges and responsibilities: “as part of a single, ongoing journey.”

“Penny Finance strengthens our ability to support that full picture,” Toha said, “enabling our partners to deliver more holistic, consumer-first financial experiences directly within the products people already use.”

The acquisition will empower Array to help its clients address a broader range of consumer needs and complements the company’s current credit, identity, and privacy offerings with solutions to help consumers enhance their financial wellness through better savings behavior and financial planning.

“Penny was built to give people confidence in how they spend, save, and plan—without judgment or complexity,” Penny Finance’s Cole said. “By joining Array, we can scale that mission and integrate financial education and planning tools into trusted experiences that already play a meaningful role in people’s financial lives.”

Array’s acquisition of Chimney will add the fintech’s modern financial calculators and home value tracking tools to its platform offerings. Founded in 2020 and based in Brooklyn, New York, Chimney helps more than 160 financial institutions in the US leverage real-time property data and predictive analytics to engage homeowners and grow loans. Chimney’s technology identifies high-propensity opportunities for home equity, refinancing, new mortgages, and more, enabling financial institutions to target the right customers and members at the right time with personalized offers delivered inside their banking apps and platforms. In his statement, Chimney CEO and Co-Founder Matthew Covi underscored this last point, highlighting the value of embedded finance in helping consumers get the resources they need while remaining engaged with the brands they trust.

“Traditional financial institutions are where the majority of Americans manage their finances,” Covi said. “By empowering these institutions with personalized, data-driven solutions that modernize the banking experience, we’ve realized our mission of helping millions of Americans live healthier financial lives.”

Lastly, EarnUp is a payments technology firm that helps consumers better manage debt and bills by aligning mortgage, loan, and bill payments with pay cycles. By enabling them to disaggregate large, inflexible monthly payments into smaller contributions aligned with their paychecks, EarnUp helps lower the amount of missed payments to creditors and financial stress for debtors. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, and founded in 2015, EarnUp has completed 50 million transactions with a cumulative value of $43 billion since inception. Brad Woodcox is CEO.

“EarnUp is a long-standing proven product in the home loan space, having supported millions of US mortgage borrowers through deep integrations with leading mortgage servicing platforms,” Toha said. “We hope to use this distribution and product to extend Array’s reach into the home loan payments space. This acquisition strengthens our ability to help financial services providers deliver more practical, consumer-centric experiences—especially for households managing tight margins and multiple debt obligations.”

Founded in 2020 and headquartered in New York City, Array most recently demoed its technology at FinovateSpring 2023. At the conference, the company demonstrated two of its latest financial solutions—HelloPrivacy (now Privacy Protect) and Subscription Manager—to help banks and other financial institutions generate noninterest income and boost engagement while providing customers with resources to help them stay safe online and save money. Privacy Protect helps defend users from identity theft and privacy risks by monitoring and removing personal information from the web. Subscription Manager helps users manage their subscriptions better, canceling unused subscriptions and negotiating lower rates on select subscriptions.

FinovateSpring 2026 will take place at The Sheraton San Diego on May 5-7. Register today using this link and save 20%.

Photo by Toomas Tartes on Unsplash

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Mastercard Launches Virtual C-Suite to Offer Small Businesses Executive-Level Insight

Mastercard Launches Virtual C-Suite to Offer Small Businesses Executive-Level Insight
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Alumni profile, Daily news, MasterCard

Mastercard is launching a Virtual C-Suite for small business customers this week, introducing agentic AI agents that act as digital executives to provide strategic insights and decision-making support.

The new Virtual C‑Suite is a set of agentic AI-powered tools that are specifically focused on small and medium-sized businesses, which represent roughly 90% of enterprises across the globe and more than half of global employment. By introducing AI agents that mimic executive roles such as CFO, Mastercard is aiming to close the gap between the resources available to large enterprises and those accessible to small businesses.

Mastercard is using its vast experience in payments, data, and security to bring a deeper understanding of how a customer’s money moves. Virtual C-Suite brings intelligence into small businesses’ accounting systems, business software, and banking applications to analyze business performance, identify risks and opportunities, predict likely outcomes, and recommend actions. The tool relies on insights from the billions of transactions processed on Mastercard’s network annually, combined with a business’ financial activity to provide relevant, trusted recommendations on how businesses pay, get paid, and manage working capital.

“Small businesses are the cornerstones of communities, but it’s easy for owners to lose sight of the passions that inspired them when they’re buried in spreadsheets and stretched across multiple roles,” said Mastercard Global Head of Small and Medium Enterprises Mark Barnett. “We hear these pressures from entrepreneurs every day. With Virtual C-Suite, we are bringing the innovative technology, quality data at scale, and strategic expertise usually available to large enterprises to small business owners. Our goal is to turn operational complexity into clarity—helping entrepreneurs regain time, make smarter decisions, and translate their ambition into measurable growth.”

After integrating the new tool, business users and their teams will have access to dashboards and natural language conversational platforms through which they can ask agents direct questions about their accounts, trends, or recommended actions.

Virtual C-Suite will initially launch with a Virtual CFO capability. Mastercard will make additional executive-function roles over time, delivered through financial institutions, accounting platforms, and software providers.

The launch is part of Mastercard’s broader push into agentic AI. The company’s Virtual C-Suite is an advancement beyond basic analytical capabilities, recommending and executing actions across the commerce lifecycle. The new offering highlights how payments networks are adding value by bringing AI intelligence layers to small businesses, combining transaction data with agentic AI to deliver financial insights that traditionally required dedicated finance teams.

Virtual C-Suite’s small business focus is among a series of Mastercard’s recent initiatives aimed at SMEs. In 2024, the company introduced Biz360, a platform designed to help entrepreneurs consolidate and manage the digital tools they rely on to run their operations. Mastercard also rolled out Small Business Navigator to connect business owners with productivity services and remote talent resources, and introduced an SME credit card with built-in cybersecurity protections to help small businesses defend against growing digital threats.

Photo by Pavel Danilyuk

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