FinovateFall 2025 Archives

Where Are They Now? Updates from Six FinovateFall 2025 Best of Show Winners

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on July 16, 2026
Categories: Casap, Eko Investments, FinovateFall 2025, FinovateFall 2026, Krida, LemonadeLXP, LendAPI, Vertice AI

Last year’s FinovateFall conference brought together attendees, fintechs, and bank representatives from across the world.

On the second day of the event, 63 companies took the stage to showcase their newest solutions. Of that group, six fintechs brought home Best of Show honors for the work they showcased on stage.

With FinovateFall coming up September 9 through 11, we wanted to look at how last year’s Best of Show winners have grown and influenced their markets. Here’s a look at what Casap, Eko, Krida, LemonadeLXP, LendAPI, and Vertice AI have been up to since taking home Best of Show.

Casap

What won Best of Show: Casap impressed the audience with its AI-powered platform that helps financial institutions automate disputes, reduce fraud losses, accelerate resolution times, and strengthen customer relationships.

Where they are now: Since winning Best of Show, Casap has continued expanding its dispute automation platform, reporting customer results including 97% chargeback win rates, 51% fewer fraud losses, and 40% lower call volumes. Earlier this year, the company also participated in Filene’s FiLab program, where credit unions evaluated how Casap’s AI can reduce manual workloads and improve member experiences during fraud disputes.

Eko

What won Best of Show: Eko demonstrated how embedded investing can help financial institutions increase digital banking engagement, grow deposits, and improve customer retention.

Where they are now: Since FinovateFall, Eko has continued expanding its embedded investing platform with additional financial institution deployments, including Brooklyn Cooperative Federal Credit Union. The company remains focused on helping banks and credit unions integrate investing directly into digital banking rather than sending customers to third-party brokerage platforms.

Krida

What won Best of Show: Krida showcased technology that shortens lending cycle times, reduces manual work, and minimizes borrower drop-off, helping banks originate loans faster while improving customer relationships.

Where they are now: While Krida has kept a relatively low public profile since its Best of Show win, the company continues developing its lending automation platform aimed at streamlining loan origination and underwriting for community financial institutions.

LemonadeLXP

What won Best of Show: LemonadeLXP earned Best of Show for InsightAI, its platform that helps financial institutions improve employee education, customer knowledge, and operational efficiency through AI-powered learning.

Where they are now: Over the past year, LemonadeLXP has continued investing heavily in AI-powered employee enablement while expanding its leadership team. In November, the company launched AI Conversations, an AI-powered voice conversation training tool that helps make employees more confident. LemonadeLXP was also selected to demo at FinovateFall 2026 in New York.

LendAPI

What won Best of Show: LendAPI demonstrated a collaborative platform that enables technology, risk, and compliance teams to build lending products together on a shared infrastructure.

Where they are now: LendAPI has continued expanding its embedded finance platform, positioning itself for the emerging era of agentic AI in lending. The company started the year by surpassing 100 million credit applications processed on its platform, and has since strengthened its leadership team with new appointments, launched instant commercial DDA onboarding for credit unions, and joined an accelerator program.

Vertice AI

What won Best of Show: Vertice AI showcased its AI-powered customer growth platform, which translates customer data into personalized product recommendations and marketing campaigns for community financial institutions.

Where they are now: Since winning Best of Show, Vertice AI has grown its customer base to more than 80 clients, formed a strategic partnership with Ceto, teamed up with Member Driven Technologies (MDT), and launched a new CUSO called CUltivate. Additionally, the company’s Vertice COMPOSE solution was selected for Filene’s FiLabs 2026 Testing for its acceleration of compliant, personalized CU marketing at scale. Best of all, Vertice AI was selected to demo at FinovateFall in New York this September.

If you’d like to see the next generation of fintech innovators before everyone else does, join us in New York September 9 through 11 for FinovateFall 2026. There’s still time to get exclusive hotel discounts if you book your room before August 17.

Photo by Ivana Rodriguez

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Transforming Business Banking with US Bank’s Shruti Patel

By David Penn Posted on January 8, 2026
Categories: FinovateFall 2025, Speaker series, US Bank, Women in Fintech

In our latest interview from FinovateFall 2025, Beyond the Arc CEO Steven Ramirez talks with Shruti Patel, EVP and Business CPO at US Bank, about the institution’s approach to supporting small- and mid-market businesses. The two discuss the emergence of new digital capabilities, embedded payroll and account payable solutions, as well as the role of customer experience in shaping product design.

“We are super focused on our small businesses. They are looking for very simple banking products: an easy-to-use, best-in-class operating, savings, or money market account. They’re looking for a great rewards card. And then, last but not least, small dollar loans. We excel in our small business access loans. We are number four nationally and very close in California, as well. When it comes to their lending needs, when it comes to their banking needs, we’re very much focused on how can we make the life of a small business really, really easy.”

Joining US Bank in 2023, Patel has brought leadership experience from across fintech, banking, and payments. Previously head of global partnerships and monetization at Shopify—and before that head of embedded payments and partnerships at JPMorgan Chase—Patel today oversees services for US Bank’s small business and mid-market customers across money movement and credit card solutions, as well as the bank’s full suite of digital capabilities.

With nearly 1.4 million business customers representing up to $25 million in revenue, US Bank serves its clients at every business life stage—from starting a business to managing a growing company to selling a successful venture. US Bank provides a comprehensive and integrated suite of banking and payments solutions delivered both digitally and via its trusted banking partners.

Photo by Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash

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UPSTACK on Empowering Businesses with Strategic Tech Advisory and Innovation

By David Penn Posted on December 18, 2025
Categories: FinovateFall 2025, Interview, Speaker series

Businesses today are confronted with a dizzying array of options when it comes to digital modernization and embracing technological innovation. Decision-making when it comes to technology investment is often slow, and the costs incurred when those investments do not work out as planned can be painfully high. Poor solution choices have resulted in failure rates of up to 75%, according to some estimates, and even those investments that do succeed often come with hefty price tags that can put a drag on revenues.

To learn what companies in the financial services space can do to make better technology choices, I caught up with Charlie Day, SVP, Sales and Advisory, at UPSTACK, at FinovateFall 2025 earlier this year. UPSTACK is a technology advisory platform that helps businesses reduce costs, accelerate deployment, and simplify IT decision-making. The company offers vendor-agnostic expertise, with recommendations powered by both AI and UPSTACK’s vendor experience, all informed by the firm’s proprietary dataset.

In this conversation, Day explains how UPSTACK combines a focus on long-term relationships, human expertise, and AI-powered insights to drive business success and help companies achieve their goals in an ever-evolving technology landscape.

Technological advisory has really shifted into more of a strategic relationship. It’s not just about a transaction, an event, or a sale, but a true, long-term relationship beyond the technology choice. We mix the technology expertise we have with marketing insights—everything from pricing to integration capabilities to how certain selections will mix into their overall IT landscape—to ensure that our customers are making not only the right decision in a short snapshot in time, but also what’s going to keep them achieving their goals over the long term.

Charlie Day brings more than 20 years of experience in enterprise sales and strategic partnerships. He has held leadership roles at 8×8, RingCentral, Oracle, and AT&T. Day has business degrees from the University of New Hampshire and Southern New Hampshire University.

UPSTACK is a vendor-neutral, full-service technology brokerage. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in New York City, the company provides expert advisory and execution services to help businesses make smarter technology decisions. UPSTACK works with companies across the entire technology landscape, including colocation, cloud, connectivity, networking, cybersecurity, AI, and more. With more than 60 customers in the Fortune 1000, UPSTACK recently acquired Breakwater Cloud Advisors, a CX consultancy specializing in contact center modernization, automation, and AI transformation. Christopher Trapp is UPSTACK’s Founder and CEO.

Photo by Sonja Langford on Unsplash

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Chimney’s Blueprint for Financial Wellness: How Chase Neinken Is Reimagining the Digital Banking Experience

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on December 11, 2025
Categories: Chimney, FinovateFall 2025, Speaker series

Today’s financial landscape is steered by rising consumer expectations, requiring banks to search for ways to deliver more personalized, actionable guidance to their customers. While fintech has always discussed financial wellness, it is not always easy to deliver it in a way that is embedded, intuitive, and with low friction. The banks that will take the lead in the customer journey in 2026 are the ones that will turn complex financial decisions into simple, interactive experiences that help users understand their options in real time.

Today, we’re highlighting a conversation with Chase Neinken, CRO and co-founder of Chimney, which offers banks personalized tools to help them improve the customer experience and ultimately improve their financial wellness. Recorded at FinovateFall 2025, this interview features Neinken’s thoughts on how banks can use interactive tools to deepen engagement, increase transparency, and empower consumers to make smarter financial decisions within their trusted banking channels.

But I think over the next few years, what you’re going to see, especially with AI and automation and some of the intelligence tools that are coming out, is that the winners are going to separate themselves by moving from the application layer to the infrastructure layer. So owning that data and being able and prepared to take advantage and act on it. So [consider] how you take advantage of all of the accountholder data that you have within your existing systems, not relying on third parties to do that, and then analyze that data, act on that data, and give that to the accountholders in a very convenient experience that helps your teams be more efficient and helps you grow the balance sheet in a meaningful way.

As a co-founder of Chimney, Chase Neinken brings a commercial mindset shaped by years of working with banks and fintechs to solve real consumer pain points. Neinken’s focus is on transforming static, outdated digital banking experiences into dynamic tools that guide users toward financial wellness.

Founded in 2021, Chimney is helping banks change the role they play in consumers’ financial lives by providing interactive financial tools that power more personalized, data-driven experiences within the banks’ existing channels. Chimney’s tools help users explore scenarios such as mortgage affordability and home-equity planning. For financial institutions, the New York-based company offers a plug-and-play way to increase engagement, build trust, and drive conversions without overhauling their core.

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Fighting First-Party Fraud: How AI is Revolutionizing Dispute Resolution in Fintech

By David Penn Posted on December 4, 2025
Categories: CEO Interview, FinovateFall 2025, Speaker series

First-party fraud is a growing problem for financial institutions and retail businesses. But relative to other fraud threats—from deepfakes to account takeover—first-party fraud is often overlooked when it comes to major fraud challenges faced by businesses. Nevertheless, this type of fraud, which takes place when an individual claims to have not made a purchase they have actually made, is a problem that has only increased as ecommerce has expanded.

In this interview, conducted at FinovateFall earlier this year, I spoke with Shanti Shanmugam, Co-Founder and CEO of Casap, about the challenge of first-party fraud and dispute resolution. Shanmugam explains how AI enables Casap to instantly distinguish legitimate disputes from fraudulent claims, reducing dispute resolution costs by 90% and reducing fraud losses for clients by 51%. Shanmugam discusses why trust is at the center of both banking relationships and the dispute resolution, and how a poor dispute resolution experience can impact how much business a customer decides to do with their primary financial institution in the future.

The true cost of disputes is in trust. You are saying ‘Hey, I really did not buy this TV at Best Buy, and I really need you to have my back.’ Right now, most financial institutions, especially if they’re not working with us, take on average 90 days to resolve your case. And you’re kind of waiting in the dark the whole time. Maybe they give you a credit up front, but at the end, if they don’t get that money back from the merchant, they’re going to be clawing that money back from you 90 days later. And that’s a very trust-breaking experience. It’s the number-one reason why people are leaving their institution as a primary financial relationship: because of a negative dispute experience. So that’s the hidden cost of a dispute.

Founded in 2022 and headquartered in New York City, Casap won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2025. The company’s dispute automation and first-party fraud prevention platform automatically resolves disputes, enabling financial institutions to intelligently manage first-party fraud. The technology also transforms the dispute resolution process into an opportunity to build lasting loyalty and trust. Casap’s solution increases recovery rates, identifies and prevents fraud patterns, and delivers fast, frictionless, low-cost dispute and chargeback resolution.

Photo by Kavoos Hosseinpour on Unsplash

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Modernizing Financial Systems: A Strategic Approach to Legacy Transformation and Fraud Prevention

By David Penn Posted on November 6, 2025
Categories: FinovateFall 2025, Interview

For financial institutions deciding on their modernization strategy, what are the options? Does legacy technology need to be abandoned immediately or entirely? Or are there ways that financial institutions can leverage the infrastructure they have while embracing areas where digital and other modern solutions can bring real efficiency gains?

In this interview, I talk with Casey Ferguson, VP of Marketing at Zoot Enterprises, about the company’s phased approach to modernizing financial systems, integrating legacy technology, and enhancing fraud prevention strategies. Ferguson explains why incremental progress, cross-functional collaboration, and layered fraud defenses are key to effective digital transformation.

“At Zoot we look at modernization this way: It’s not about tearing everything down. When you look at this kind of rip and replace mentality you’ve got to remember that it can be pretty risky, it can be very expensive, and it can be kind of slow, as well. When you think about the pace of change, architecting the perfect environment, the world may have changed by the time you have a perfect picture of all this. So working on things incrementally and in phases can really make a difference.”

Headquartered in Bozeman, Montana, and founded in 1990, Zoot Enterprises provides acquisition, origination, and decision management solutions that help financial institutions streamline processes, increase flexibility, and accelerate growth. Zoot offers comprehensive and flexible platforms for numerous specific business operations—from loan origination and data acquisition to fraud detection and prevention.

Photo by Charles Moll on Unsplash

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Breaking Through the Verification Barrier: How Middesk Simplifies Risk & Identity

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on October 30, 2025
Categories: FinovateFall 2025, Middesk, Speaker series

Digital businesses in the modern era span geography, product types, and regulatory regimes, making the process of verifying identities and assessing risk difficult. Today, we’re highlighting a conversation that digs into how platforms can assess risk at scale by embedding identity and risk intelligence into a single workflow.

At FinovateFall earlier this year, I spoke with Kate Young, Marketing Manager at Middesk, a company specializing in identity verification and onboarding automation. During our conversation, Kate discussed identity and onboarding challenges, how platforms distinguish legitimate enterprises from fraudulent ones, and the importance of embedding risk intelligence and KYB tools into the onboarding and lending processes. The interview touches on real-world use cases, ROI metrics, and what it takes to move from spreadsheets to APIs.

“There’s still this… trust gap between all of the businesses and the changes that they make both legitimately and illegitimately and the understanding of those financial institutions of those businesses. So there’s a wide gap between that business identity data and financial institutions being able to trust it…. We can actually bring that [gap] much closer and financial institutions can get much closer to trusting those businesses and saying yes to them more confidently and honestly growing their portfolio with those businesses once they truly trust who they are.”

Founded in 2018, Middesk’s identity and business verification platform provides APIs for verifying B2B customers, reducing fraud risk, and automating underwriting. With features such as entity resolution, beneficial-owner monitoring, and embedded data flows, Middesk enables platforms to streamline onboarding, reduce fraud, and scale reliably by offering up-to-date, verified data about their business users and clients.

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Revolutionizing B2B Payments: Unified API and AI-Powered Supplier Enablement with Rutter

By David Penn Posted on October 23, 2025
Categories: CEO Interview, FinovateFall 2025, Speaker series

What is supplier enablement and why does it offer businesses a way to optimize vendor payments to maximize cash flow or another business outcome? How does the revolution in data management help businesses deal with the challenge of important data that is sequestered in accounting systems? And, finally, what role do automation and AI have in opening up access to that data?

Last month at FinovateFall, I interviewed Peter Zhou, Co-Founder and CEO of Rutter. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in New York City, the company offers a unified API to help companies add accounting, commerce, and payment integrations into their B2B product workflows. A trusted integration partner for companies such as Airwallex, Mercury, and Ramp, Rutter empowers businesses to build and launch products in lending, expense management, AP/AR automation, and more.

“In the same way that companies like Plaid offer a unified API for banking data, Rutter aims to be the unified API for small business financial data. Our core systems of record that we are unifying for companies are commerce, payments, accounting, and ads data … We basically help them provide customer-facing integrations into those systems of record that their customers use.”

Rutter introduced its Supplier Enablement solution earlier this year. The new offering leverages unified ERP and payment intelligence to help businesses unlock card revenue. Supplier Enablement allows Rutter to provide support for fetching vendor data from 30+ additional mid-market and enterprise ERPs, a new intelligent file import workflow, advanced OCR enrichment that uses bill attachments to improve vendor match, and integration of Visa card acceptance data to enhance vendor scoring.

Peter Zhou is a graduate of Yale University, with both Bachelor’s and Master of Science degrees in Computer Science. Before co-founding Rutter, Zhou was a software engineer with San Francisco, California-based professional services company Atrium.

Photo by Vardan Papikyan on Unsplash

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Breaking Past Fragmentation: How Qolo Simplifies Payments for Banks and Businesses

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on October 16, 2025
Categories: FinovateFall 2025, Qolo, Speaker series, Streamly

Many businesses approach fintech in a fragmented way. They are forced to stitch together multiple payment systems, APIs, banking partners, and integrations just to achieve basic functionality.

Patricia Montesi, Founder and CEO of Qolo, explains in a FinovateFall video interview how her platform is solving that complexity for banks, fintechs, and enterprises. Qolo offers a unified payments stack through a single API that enables institutions to modernize their payments infrastructure without expensive and risky rip-and-replace of legacy systems.

In the video, Montesi delves into embedded ledgers, real-time rails, and how Qolo can overlay existing cores in under nine months while positioning clients for the next generation of payments, such as stablecoins and novel rails.

“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.”

Patricia Montesi is a seasoned payments veteran with over 20 years of experience across banking and fintech. Prior to Qolo, she held leadership roles driving innovation in payments and scaling complex platforms. Her deep domain expertise across card processing, FX, bank partnerships, and regulatory environments gives her insight into the pain points that banking partners face when retrofitting modern payments capabilities.

Qolo was founded in 2018 with the aim to simplify payments by offering a comprehensive payment stack, including an embedded ledger, card issuing, money movement, real-time reconciliation, and cross-rail connectivity on a single API. Rather than forcing banks to rip out their core, Qolo overlays its platform directly atop existing systems, enabling deployment in under nine months. This sidecar-oriented architecture lets institutions adopt new payment rails without disrupting core banking operations.

Photo by Tim Samuel

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From Rate Wars to Real Value: How Wysh is Redefining Deposit Strategy through Protection

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on October 9, 2025
Categories: FinovateFall 2025, Speaker series, Streamly, Wysh

With more banking options available than ever before, winning customers and their deposits has become increasingly difficult. Differentiation is not only harder to achieve, it’s also more essential for banks and credit unions seeking growth. Yet for many institutions, finding a truly distinct value proposition can feel elusive.

This is where Wysh’s embedded life insurance product comes in. I spoke with Wysh CEO and Founder Alex Matjanec at FinovateFall last month about how his company helps banks differentiate their offerings by adding life insurance protection. The unique benefits help firms build loyalty, retention, and deeper customer relationships while also helping grow deposits.

“The main problem that we’re solving is that in America, there’s a massive underinsured gap where many Americans don’t have enough insurance. And the way they get it is actually going away, so they’re looking for new avenues to do so. On the other side, banks are looking to differentiate themselves by capturing new deposits to beat digital institutions… and we think layering in protection is the way to do so and we make it very easy to do that.”

Alex Matjanec is a serial entrepreneur with deep roots in fintech and digital product leadership. Before founding Wysh, he co-founded MyBankTracker.com, which has been called “the Expedia of banks,” and was involved in other startup ventures focused on financial tools and mobile apps. Under his leadership, Wysh has scaled from a small team to over 50 employees, expanding into dozens of US states, and forging partnerships with banks and fintechs to embed protection into deposit accounts.

Wysh was founded in 2021 to help banks increase deposits while adding value and improving customer retention. The company’s flagship solution, Life Benefit, allows banks, credit unions, and fintechs to embed micro life insurance directly into deposit accounts without requiring underwriting, opt-in steps, or extra bureaucracy.

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Watch the 63 Live Demos from FinovateFall 2025

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on September 30, 2025
Categories: Best of Show, FinovateFall 2025, Marketing

Two weeks ago, 63 companies took the stage at FinovateFall 2025 to demonstrate their newest offerings live in front of our audience. Whether or not you were in attendance, you can now watch all of the seven-minute demo videos for free online. That’s more than seven and a half hours of fintech content, available for free.

Don’t know where to start? We’ve highlighted the six Best of Show-winning demos below to get you started.

Casap

eko

Krida

LemonadeLXP

LendAPI

Vertice AI

You can find all of the videos on the Finovate website and on Finovate’s YouTube channel.

If you don’t want to miss out on the live action next time around, be sure to register for FinovateEurope, taking place February 10 through 11 at the O2 Intercontinental in London.

Photo by Gloire Bingana on Unsplash

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Revolutionizing Community Banking—How to Modernize Your Operations

By David Penn Posted on September 25, 2025
Categories: FinovateFall 2025, NYMBUS, Speaker series, Streamly

The challenge of modernization remains a daunting one for many community banks and credit unions. Faced with the expense and risk of a “rip and replace” strategy on the one hand and a seemingly endless series of quick fixes, workarounds, and complex third-party relationships on the other, some financial institutions remain in a limbo of inaction.

To this end, the latest innovations from banking technology platform company Nymbus are a welcome development. In our interview with Nymbus CEO Jeffery Kendall, shared here, we talk about the current state of core banking systems, the innovative “sidecar” approach to core modernization that Nymbus offers, and the transition toward vertical banking which helps community financial institutions deliver differentiated solutions to a wider range of customers and members.

“We are a United States-focused banking technology platform. We work with community banks and credit unions (that) tend to be in the one to ten billion asset size; those are the customers we are able to help the most. We provide a full banking stack that allows them to run their core processing, their digital banking experiences, onboarding experiences … from one unified platform.”

Chairman and CEO of Nymbus since 2020, Jeffery Kendall has more than 20 years of experience in technology and financial services. He succeeded Scott Killoh, who founded the company in 2015. With Kendall as CEO, Nymbus has secured more than $123 million in funding courtesy of Series C and D rounds in 2021 and 2023, respectively. The company launched a Credit Union Service Organization (CUSO) in 2021, and has forged partnerships with financial institutions like PeoplesBank, VyStar Credit Union, and MSU Federal Credit Union.

A leading provider of banking technology solutions for financial institutions, Nymbus offers a full-stack banking platform for US banks and credit unions that helps them accelerate their growth and enhance their market positioning. The company modernizes legacy core systems for both brick-and-mortar and digital-first institutions. Nymbus also supports vertical banking strategies and the launch of subsidiary brands with a sidecar core alternative. The company is headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida.

Photo by Kelly

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