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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
As financial institutions race to adopt artificial intelligence, many are discovering that implementing AI is easier than generating meaningful results from it. In 2026, AI is no longer just a playground; organizations are facing growing pressure to demonstrate ROI, maintain regulatory compliance, and manage rising technology costs. How can firms separate successful AI deployments from those that fall short?
At FinovateFall 2026 in New York, Finovate Research Analyst David Penn sat down with Melissa Solis, CEO of Inbenta, and Merlin Bise, the company’s CTO, to discuss the challenges financial institutions face when implementing AI. In their conversation, Solis and Bise explain why some organizations are abandoning their AI initiatives, how companies can avoid common deployment mistakes, and why involving employees across IT, compliance, and other departments is essential to success. They also discuss the importance of balancing automation with human expertise and introduce Inbenta’s Encore platform.
“It’s amazing how the pressure from AI caused so many people to basically get away of all the disciplines that they normally use, right, to buy products and services or look at vendors, and they threw it out the window because of that pressure,” said Solis. “We all thought that AI was a magic wand. You just waved, and we’re finding out it’s not,” she added.
Melissa Solis is CEO of Inbenta, bringing more than 30 years of leadership experience in insurance and technology. She previously co-founded GIACT Systems, a provider of fraud prevention and risk management technology, and served as its CEO until the company’s acquisition by Refinitiv, part of the London Stock Exchange Group, in 2020. Under her leadership, GIACT grew to serve more than 1,000 companies, including Fortune 500 firms.
Merlin Bise is CTO of Inbenta, where he oversees IT infrastructure and new product development, including the expansion of the company’s conversational AI capabilities. Bise brings more than 20 years of technology leadership experience, with expertise in fraud prevention, artificial intelligence, and optical character recognition. He also co-founded GIACT Systems, where he led technology development and implementations for major enterprise customers.
Founded in 2005, Inbenta is an enterprise AI company that helps organizations automate customer interactions, improve customer experiences, and streamline business operations. Its Encore platform combines AI orchestration, customer experience tools, and live agent assistance to help businesses deploy and manage AI solutions with an emphasis on governance, accuracy, and measurable results. Headquartered in Allen, Texas, Inbenta serves more than 1,000 companies worldwide, supporting interactions in more than 90 languages.
At a time when more and more banks and financial institutions are integrating AI-powered solutions into their systems and processes, what separates successful deployments of AI technology from failed, expensive, or incomplete ones?
At FinovateFall 2026, I sat down with Mark Susser, GTM Lead for Financial Services at ElevenLabs. In our conversation, Susser explained what separates successful AI deployments from those that stall, how companies can identify the right use cases for a given AI solution, and why modularity and meeting customers where they are are key.
“The ones that stall out typically make one of two main mistakes: One is that they have too much of a broad platform initiative. Nothing specific to prove, no use case that has been picked out, and they’re more focused on what the technology could do versus what the actual business needs. Another area that we see some faltering in is that they don’t bring in their compliance partners from day one. What we find is that when compliance partners are brought in on day one, they’re actually architecting the foundational elements that will make sure that it’s successful and it’ll get approved once it goes into production.”
Mark Susser is GTM Lead for Financial Services at ElevenLabs. ElevenLabs is an AI company that enables businesses to deliver seamless and intelligent customer experiences, with the integrations, testing, monitoring, and reliability necessary to deploy voice and chat agents at scale. The company builds voice and audio models and delivers them in a platform that can power every interaction across a company: from AI agents for sales, support, and business operations, to creative tools for marketing and media. Founded in 2022, ElevenLabs is headquartered in London.
For years the discourse on technological innovation in banking and financial services favored the fintechs. But is it possible that the ones best positioned to take advantage of the biggest technological revolution in decades—artificial intelligence—aren’t bold, new fintech startups, but are instead banks and credit unions?
In this fascinating conversation with Rob Rooney, Co-Founder and CEO of Hyperlayer, we discuss what banks and credit unions can do to overcome the disadvantages of legacy technology, and how these financial institutions can leverage trust and community relationships to “win the future” of agentic finance and the agentic economy.
“Incumbents are very well positioned. They have the customers. They have the regulatory approvals. They have the breadth of products and, critically, they have the trust. They have to leverage those advantages and lean into the agentic economy. It’s coming, but with the trust factor they can really be winners here.”
Rooney is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Hyperlayer. He is also CEO of Hyperjar, an intuitive digital account with a prepaid debit card that bills itself as the “spending super-app.” Previously, Rooney spent more than 30 years as an executive at Morgan Stanley, serving in multiple roles including CEO of Morgan Stanley International, Global Head of Technology, Operations, and Firm Resilience, and Senior Advisor for Technology and Innovation. He is a graduate of Columbia University.
Hyperlayer is a programmable banking platform that enables financial institutions to innovate at pace without replacing the core systems that provide stability. The platform’s configurable design allows banks, credit unions, wealth managers, and merchants to launch innovative financial products—including agentic solutions—quickly and cost-effectively while maintaining control and remaining compliant.
In the run-up to FinovateFall, which takes place on September 9 through 11 in New York, we asked several speakers for their perspectives on technologies shaping financial services, the biggest challenges facing banks, and why they keep coming back to Finovate.
Below is a preview of what nine speakers had to say ahead of this year’s event.
Michael Reynolds, Business Technology Executive at KeyBank
Michael Reynolds leads intelligent automation at KeyBank, where he oversees robotic process automation, intelligent document processing, low-code development, and generative AI initiatives. Under his leadership, KeyBank’s digital workforce now performs the equivalent of more than 500 employees’ worth of work.
Why Finovate?
“Finovate is one of the few conferences where you can see real, working technology, not concept slides. The live demo format lets banks quickly assess what is production-ready, identify emerging fintech partners, and compare innovation across multiple categories in just a few days. Finovate highlights hundreds of fintech demos and attracts a large audience of banking decision-makers, making it a highly practical venue for both learning and networking.”
What will banks need to prioritize over the next 18 months?
“Banks will need to prioritize AI-powered productivity and agentic automation. The winners will be institutions that combine AI with strong governance, security, and operational integration, not those simply deploying chatbots.”
Where is AI making the biggest impact today?
“Inside our organization, the most immediate impact is in operations and employee productivity: automating manual processes, accelerating knowledge retrieval, improving service delivery, and helping teams focus more time on higher value work while maintaining appropriate controls and oversight.”
Sam Kilmer, Managing Director at Cornerstone Advisors
Sam Kilmer leads Cornerstone Advisors’ work with fintechs, financial institutions, and private equity firms. A longtime banking executive and host of the Fintech Hustle podcast, he spends much of his time helping organizations navigate innovation and partnerships.
Why Finovate?
“Finovate is fast-paced, so likes hit fast and dislikes are over quickly. It exposes me to a lot of earlier stage companies.”
What should the industry focus on next?
“Banks will need to improve showing outcomes and storytelling authentically to stand out from increasingly AI-generated content and claims.”
Andrew Endicott, CoFounder at Gilgamesh Ventures
Andrew Endicott is Co-Founder of Gilgamesh Ventures, an early-stage fintech venture capital firm investing globally in companies from pre-seed through Series A. Before becoming an investor, he co-founded credit card fintech Petal and recently authored the book Is Finance Technology?
Why Finovate?
“Great mix of financial institutions and fintechs all in one place. Really excited to be part of it.”
What financial services problem still needs solving?
“There are many problems in finance that are unsolved, but I feel that wire transfers are a big one.”
Katherine Avery, Founder at Chimayo Consulting
Katherine Avery is founder of Chimayo Consulting and a veteran enterprise risk executive with more than two decades of experience spanning banking, capital markets, commodities, digital assets, and AI governance. She helps financial institutions build governance frameworks that keep pace with rapidly evolving technology.
Why Finovate?
“Finovate earns its place because it’s practitioner driven rather than vendor theater. The demos are live and unscripted, judged by people who actually implement this technology, which forces a level of rigor other conferences don’t demand.”
What should banks prioritize over the next 18 months?
“Banks need to operationalize AI governance now, not after deployment. The institutions that treat model risk management, explainability, and third party AI oversight as foundational, rather than bolted on post-launch, will be the ones still standing when regulators catch up to the pace of adoption, which they will within this window.”
What is one change you believe will fundamentally reshape fintech in the next five years?
“The change I believe will fundamentally reshape fintech in the next five years is the shift from AI as a discrete tool to AI as an embedded decision maker across underwriting, monitoring, and customer interaction. That shift collapses the old boundary between innovation and risk functions. Governance can no longer sit downstream of deployment.”
What is one fintech trend you believe will accelerate in the final quarter of 2026?
“One trend I expect to accelerate in Q4 2026 is the move toward agentic AI in back office and compliance functions. Institutions are getting more comfortable letting AI take bounded, delegated actions in monitoring and control testing, and that comfort will keep building through year end.”
What is one problem in financial services that fintech still hasn’t solved well enough yet?
“The problem fintech still hasn’t solved well enough is third party risk visibility. Banks are stitching together more vendors and platforms than ever, and most risk frameworks still can’t see deep enough into that supply chain to catch concentration or contagion risk before it becomes a real event, not just a checkbox on an assessment.”
Vivek Valecha, SVP of Intelligent Automation at Xebia
Vivek is Senior Vice President of Intelligent Automation at digital engineering company Xebia, where he leads the charge on Agentic AI to help enterprises move beyond automation into autonomous, intelligent decision-making that reimagines customer experience and unlock new levels of employee productivity.
Why Finovate?
“Finovate stands apart because it’s built for demos, not just discussions. It’s one of the few conferences where banks and fintechs see technology in action rather than in slide decks — that hands-on, no-fluff format is exactly where real partnerships and practical ideas take shape.”
What should banks prioritize over the next 18 months?
“Banks should prioritize agentic AI. Banks have spent the last few years automating discrete tasks — the next wave is about deploying AI agents that can reason, make decisions, and orchestrate multi-step processes with minimal human intervention. Institutions that move from “AI-assisted” to “AI-agentic” will have a real competitive edge in speed, cost, and customer experience.”
What is one change you believe will fundamentally reshape fintech in the next five years?
“In five years, autonomous AI agents will handle entire workflows—from underwriting to fraud investigation to customer servicing—with humans stepping in only for exceptions. That shift won’t just improve efficiency; it will fundamentally redefine what “operations” even means inside a bank.”
Jalak Jobanputra, Founder and Managing Partner at Future Perfect Ventures
Why Finovate?
Finovate offers founders an unmatched feedback loop by putting live product demos in front of banks, investors, and potential distribution partners. With only minutes to present, founders quickly discover whether their product solves a real problem.
What is one fintech trend you believe will accelerate in the final quarter of 2026?
One of the biggest fintech trends through late 2026 will be the rise of agent-initiated payments, as AI agents begin making transactions on users’ behalf. This will require merchants, payment processors, and banks to develop secure authorization frameworks. At the same time, stablecoin settlement is moving from pilot programs into real treasury and B2B use, making machine-speed transactions practical.
What is one problem in financial services that fintech still hasn’t solved well?
The industry’s biggest unresolved challenge remains digital identity. Customers still repeatedly verify themselves, share excessive personal data, and rely on fragmented systems that are increasingly vulnerable to AI-powered fraud. Secure, portable, user-controlled identity has existed technically for years, and the growth of AI agents may finally create the commercial incentive needed for widespread adoption.
Courtney Rowan, Chief Digital & Transformation Officer at Citadel Credit Union
Why Finovate?
Finovate is unique because you don’t watch presentations, you watch products. There are no slide decks, no marketing pitches, and nowhere to hide. Every company has seven minutes to demonstrate a real product solving a real problem.
What is one technology or capability that banks should prioritize in the next 18 months?
The biggest opportunity for banks over the next 18 months is embedding AI into everyday work and member experiences. At Citadel, we’re already seeing meaningful impact through employee productivity and operational efficiency, and that’s creating the foundation for even bigger gains in personalization and growth. Longer term, the greatest opportunity is combining those operational gains with personalized member experiences and growth.
What is one change you believe will fundamentally reshape fintech in the next five years?
The biggest change will be the move from AI as a feature to AI as an operating model. Every financial institution will have access to the technology, but the winners will be those that fundamentally redesign how they work. That’s the challenge we’re tackling at Citadel because we believe AI should make banking more personal, more efficient, and more accessible, not less human.
What is one fintech trend you believe will accelerate in the final quarter of 2026?
The biggest trend heading into Q4 is the move from AI pilots to AI at scale. The institutions that can prove measurable business value will pull ahead quickly. At the same time, fintech still hasn’t fully solved proactive financial guidance. We’ve digitized banking, but we haven’t yet personalized financial wellness and advice at scale.
Patricia Montesi, EVP Qolo
Why Finovate?
Finovate rewards the working product over the best narrative. B2B payments infrastructure also gets little stage time elsewhere, and the treasury leaders and platform CTOs who care about it are hard to find in one room.
What is one fintech trend you believe will accelerate in the final quarter of 2026?
In Q4, faster payments stop being a capability and become a product line. The rails are live. The commercial layer is not: pricing, liquidity management, exception handling. Banks that spent two years connecting to instant rails are now being asked what revenue those rails produce.
What is one problem in financial services that fintech still hasn’t solved well enough yet?
This points to what fintech still has not solved: exceptions. We are excellent at the happy path. A payment that is returned, disputed, partially funded, or stuck between two systems is still handled with spreadsheets and email threads. That is where cost hides and where examiners look first. It requires one source of truth across issuing, money movement, and accounts, and most stacks were assembled rather than designed.
Katherine Avery, Founder of Chimayo Consulting
Why Finovate?
Finovate earns its place because it’s built around live demonstrations, not theoretical panels. In a space full of overpromised roadmaps, seeing what a tool actually does gives me a much sharper read on whether a vendor understands the governance burden they’re creating for bank clients.
What is one technology or capability that banks will need to prioritize in the next 18 months to stay competitive?
For the next 18 months, the priority isn’t a new capability, it’s governance infrastructure catching up to adoption. Banks have moved fast deploying AI across operations and risk, but many still lack a proper model inventory, defined testing cadences, and clear escalation paths when a model drifts or fails. That gap is where examiner scrutiny is heading.
Where are you seeing the most practical impact from AI inside your organization?
The most practical impact I’m seeing today is in operational risk and compliance, particularly transaction monitoring and third-party due diligence, where AI is triaging volume that used to require manual review. Unglamorous compared to customer-facing AI, but it’s where governance frameworks are being tested in real time.
What is one change you believe will fundamentally reshape fintech in the next five years?
The change I believe will fundamentally reshape fintech over the next five years is the shift from AI as a standalone product feature to AI as embedded infrastructure across risk, compliance, and operations. Once model decisions are woven into core processes rather than bolted on, governance stops being optional and becomes the determining factor in which institutions can scale these tools safely and which get sidelined by regulatory exposure.
What is one fintech trend you believe will accelerate in the final quarter of 2026?
The trend I expect to accelerate in Q4 2026 is embedded AI governance tooling, fintechs building compliance and model risk controls directly into their platforms rather than treating them as an afterthought their bank partners have to solve. Firms are getting more disciplined about vendor due diligence, and fintechs that can demonstrate governance maturity out of the gate will close deals faster.
What is one problem in financial services that fintech still hasn’t solved well enough yet?
The problem fintech still hasn’t solved well enough is third-party risk transparency at scale. Organizations are expected to maintain oversight of increasingly complex vendor and subcontractor chains, but most fintechs still can’t give their bank partners real-time visibility into where data actually flows or which fourth parties are involved. That gap creates real regulatory exposure on both sides.
Matan Gavish, Founder of Factify
What will banks need to prioritize in the next 18 months to stay competitive?
Over the next 18 months, banks will need to prioritize the infrastructure that allows AI to move from experimentation into production safely. The challenge is no longer whether AI can perform a task. It is whether a bank can ensure that an AI system is operating on the right information, following the right rules, and escalating when it should.
Where are you seeing the most practical impact from AI inside your organization today?
Today, I see the most practical impact in operations, particularly workflows that are repetitive but still require judgment, policy interpretation, and human review. That is where AI can create significant efficiency, provided banks can make its decisions reliable, governed, and provable.
What is one fintech trend you believe will accelerate in the final quarter of 2026?
The trend I expect to accelerate through the end of 2026 is the move from copilots to agents. Financial institutions will increasingly expect AI not just to answer questions, but to complete workflows and make decisions.
What is one problem in financial services that fintech still hasn’t solved well enough yet?
The problem fintech still has not solved well enough is reliability at that level of autonomy. We have become very good at giving AI access to more data and more tools. We are much less effective at guaranteeing that it uses the correct information, follows the organization’s actual rules, and can prove why it took a particular action.
See them on stage at FinovateFall
These are just a few of the perspectives you’ll hear at FinovateFall this September. From AI governance and intelligent automation to venture investing and emerging fintech trends, our speakers bring firsthand experience from the institutions building—and funding—the future of financial services.
Browse the full agenda and register today to hear these experts, watch live fintech demos, and connect with leaders from across the banking and fintech ecosystem.
More and more credit unions and community banks are weighing the challenges and opportunities of deploying AI-powered solutions for their members and customers. Yet, while there is much attention paid to the technical details of integrating AI-based technologies into banking operations, there is often less focus on the critical issues of AI governance: the rules, policies, and processes that ensure that a given use of AI is safe, non-discriminatory, and transparent.
With this in mind, this week Finovate First-Timers interviews Lisa Pent, Founder and CEO of PentEdge. Founded in 2025 and headquartered in Albany, New York, PentEdge is the company behind AIMS (AI Monitoring & Governance System), a purpose-built SaaS platform that enables credit unions and community banks to govern AI operations confidently.
AIMS provides financial institutions with “AI with Guardrails”, a framework that automates AI inventory, vendor risk assessment, regulatory mapping, and board-ready reporting, transforming complex compliance requirements into a streamlined process. PentEdge made its Finovate debut earlier this year at FinovateSpring 2026 in San Diego, demonstrating this technology.
In this conversation, Pent talks about the predicament that many financial institutions find themselves in when deploying AI solutions without recognizing the myriad risks involved and how to mitigate them. She also discusses the unique challenges that credit unions, community banks, and other smaller firms face when embracing AI compared to their larger rivals. Last, Pent explains how PentEdge’s technology helps these companies manage AI vendor relationships better and more accurately assess risk.
What problem does PentEdge solve and who does it solve it for?
Lisa Pent: Most community banks and credit unions are already using AI. Very few of them know where, how much, or who owns the risk.
That is because AI almost never arrives through a deliberate build decision at an institution this size. It arrives through vendors. The core processor adds an intelligent feature. The fraud platform turns on a model. Marketing signs up for a writing assistant on a corporate card. Nobody stood up an AI program, and yet the institution now carries the risk and the examination exposure.
The consequences are not hypothetical. Earlier this year, a publicly traded community bank disclosed in a securities filing that an employee had uploaded customer information to an AI tool the institution had not authorized. That gap, between what an institution believes it is using and what its people are using, is exactly what we built PentEdge to close.
Our customers are community banks, credit unions, and adjacent regulated firms such as insurers, RIAs, and asset managers. Their supervisory expectations are similar to those on the largest banks. Specific requirements often scale with asset size, but the expectation that you know what AI you are running, and can show how you govern it, does not. AIMS™, our AI Monitoring and Governance platform, gives them a defensible AI inventory, a risk score for every tool, and reporting their board and their examiners can rely on.
How does PentEdge solve this problem better than other companies?
Pent: Two things set us apart: the catalog and the scoring model.
The catalog is the asset. We maintain a research catalog of AI tools and the vendors that supply them, built around the technology community financial institutions genuinely use. When an institution tells us which vendors it works with, we can identify the AI inside those relationships rather than asking a compliance officer to figure it out from vendor marketing pages. And because vendors turn AI features on continuously, we monitor the catalog for change, so the inventory does not go stale.
The scoring model is the second piece, and it is aligned to the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, which is the closest thing this industry has to a common language for AI risk. Our AI Risk Score™ separates what we know from what only the institution knows. PentEdge supplies the inherent risk score, combining a tool’s exposure profile with the nature of the AI itself. The institution scores its own controls and mitigants. The result is a residual score that reflects that specific institution rather than an industry average.
The alternatives fall into two camps: enterprise governance platforms scoped and priced for the largest banks, and consultants who deliver a thoughtful, point-in-time document that is out of date within a quarter. Neither serves the roughly 9,000 institutions that make up most American banks and credit unions.
Who are PentEdge’s primary customers? How do you reach them?
Pent: Our market is every US bank outside the top 25 and every US credit union, roughly 9,000 institutions, plus adjacent regulated firms in insurance and asset management. Within those institutions, our buyers are chief risk officers, chief compliance officers, CIOs, and, in smaller shops, the CEO directly. The common thread is not asset size. It is that nobody in the building has “AI risk” in their job description.
We reach them four ways. First, direct outreach to named institutions, which is still the most productive channel we have. Second, associations, which remain the trusted intermediary in this market in a way they are not in most other industries. Third, in-person events, where community bankers and credit union executives compare notes candidly. We were at FinovateSpring and IBANYS this year, and we will be exhibiting at GoWest MAXX in Denver in October. Fourth, education. I publish a weekly newsletter, At the Helm, along with white papers and practical guidance on AI governance for institutions of this size.
Most engagements start with our 48-Hour AI Risk Assessment, a short, concrete look at what AI an institution is already exposed to. It is a low-friction way to see the problem clearly before committing to the full platform.
Can you tell us about a favorite implementation, deployment, or partnership experience? What made it special?
Pent: My honest answer is that every implementation is my favorite, and that is not a dodge. It is the point.
We decided early that AIMS™ would not require integration with the core. We do not touch endpoints. There is no agent to install, no data pipeline, and no security review of a connection into their environment, because there is no connection. The institution gives us a list of its vendors, an Excel file is perfectly fine, and the platform generates a scored AI inventory automatically.
And the output is not a raw list. From day one, that same inventory produces examiner-ready and board-ready reports at the click of a button, so nobody must rebuild it in a spreadsheet the night before a meeting.
So, the moment I look forward to is the same every time, and it comes within days or hours rather than months. We put an institution’s own scored inventory in front of the people responsible for it, and the conversation stops being abstract. They are looking at their own list, sorted by risk, deciding what to handle first.
What in your background gave you the confidence to respond to this challenge?
Pent: Thirty years of standing on both sides of this problem.
I started in community banking and spent the first half of my career in credit risk on Wall Street, including building a credit risk business from scratch at Helaba that grew past $12 billion in assets, and running a group at Fuji Bank. That work taught me what regulators are looking for, and more usefully, what they are looking for when they ask a question that sounds like it is about something else.
The second half was technology. I spent a decade at Thomson Reuters building SaaS products for financial institutions, then moved into senior leadership at Cognizant. That is where I learned how software gets adopted inside a bank, which is a different discipline entirely from knowing what the software should do.
Alongside that, I have served on boards, and I founded WomenExecs on Boards (WEoB), which put me in the room for a lot of oversight conversations. Board members are being asked about AI right now and most of them have no instrument to answer with.
So when community institutions started telling me they had no idea what AI they were running, I recognized all three problems at once: the risk problem, the product problem, and the governance problem. That combination is uncommon, and it is what gave me the confidence to build PentEdge.
Does AI governance bring unique challenges for smaller, community financial institutions, above and beyond the challenges of deploying AI in general?
Pent: Yes, and the difference is structural rather than a matter of degree. It starts with vendor management.
Community institutions run on vendors, and the volume is enormous relative to headcount. It is not unusual to find one vendor relationship for every one or two employees. Every one carries a contract, a due diligence file, a risk rating, and an annual review. That workload already outstrips the people assigned to it, before AI enters the conversation.
Then AI arrives, and the instinct is to treat it as one more vendor category. It cannot be managed that way. Traditional vendor management is periodic by design: you onboard, you diligence, you review once a year. AI does not hold still for a year. A vendor can turn on an AI feature in a routine release with no contract amendment and no meaningful notice, so the tool you assessed in January can carry a different risk profile by June. An annual questionnaire will never catch that.
The nature of the risk is different too. A traditional vendor review asks about uptime, financial condition, and business continuity. AI raises questions about what data leaves the institution, how decisions affecting members and customers are made, and whether anyone can explain them afterward.
What we hope to do is broader than AI alone. If an institution can see its full vendor stack clearly, with the AI inside it identified and scored, it gains something it has never had: efficiency in that stack (cost efficiency included) and transparency into where the risk truly sits.
You demoed at FinovateSpring in May of this year. How was the experience?
Pent: It has been our highlight of 2026 so far.
The format does something for a founder that no internal exercise can replicate. A few minutes, live, on stage, with nothing to hide behind. You either show what the product does, or you do not, and preparing for that clarified our own thinking about AIMS™ more than any planning session had.
What I did not fully anticipate was the momentum. The interest was tremendous on the day itself, and it did not stop when we left the stage. The conversations continued through the rest of the event and then kept going in the weeks afterward, and a meaningful part of what we are working on now traces back to that room.
What struck me most was the consistency of the reaction. Nobody argued the premise. Not one person suggested that AI governance is a large-institution problem or a future problem. The questions were all operational: where do we start, what does the inventory look like, how do I explain this to my board. For a founder, that is the best possible signal. You would far rather spend your time answering how than defending why.
I would recommend it to any founder selling into this market, both for the discipline the stage imposes and for the honest, unfiltered feedback you get in the hallway afterward.
What are your goals for PentEdge over the balance of 2026 and into next year?
Pent: Three priorities.
First, make the entry point easier. We recently introduced AIMS™ Manifest, a self-serve tier that gives an institution full access to our AI tool catalog with its own holdings flagged inside it, along with continuous change monitoring. No institution should have to buy the whole platform to answer the first question: what is our AI risk profile?
Second, deepen the catalog. It is the core of what we sell and the reason a subscription earns its renewal. Through the rest of this year, we are expanding coverage and keeping the mapping between tools and governance expectations current as both sides move.
Third, and this is where we are heading next, we want to be the go-to firm helping community financial institutions optimize their vendor stack, creating both cost efficiency and operational efficiency. That is above and beyond what most consulting firms do in this space, which is renegotiate contracts. Renegotiation is worth doing, but it treats the stack as fixed. Once an institution can see every vendor, every tool inside those vendors, and the risk attached to each, it can ask sharper questions: what is redundant, what is unused, and what is carrying risk out of proportion to the value it delivers.
Into 2027, the goal is straightforward. When an examiner asks a credit union what AI it uses, or a board asks its CEO, the answer should be a one-click report rather than a research project. And when that same CEO asks whether the institution is getting full value from everything it buys, and what risk it is carrying to get it, that should come from the same place.
A decade ago, Finovate launched its developer conference series FinDEVr. The goal was simple: to provide a place for software developers, programmers, and technologists to showcase APIs, open banking solutions, developer tools, and more during a truly revolutionary time in the history of fintech innovation.
Today, one of the biggest challenges to fintech innovation is ensuring that fintech founders get the support and funding they need to grow and succeed in an even more complex and competitive financial services landscape.
Meet IMPACT
The first-ever event bridging capital and innovation in the financial services space, IMPACT Funders & Founders comes to New York for a full day of curated investor meetings, dynamic discussions, and breakthrough pitches from innovative startups ready to scale. Running concurrently with FinovateFall, IMPACT Funders & Founders takes place on Friday, September 11, at the New York Marriott Marquis in Times Square.
Heather Stowell, Finovate VP and Informa Senior Director, shared her thoughts on the upcoming event, and why it is an important opportunity for fintech founders and investors alike.
The core of this new event is to connect startups and scaleups with investors. Many of these startups and scaleups will be raising funding, but we also want to foster an exchange of information.
So, in addition to raising funding, a lot of these conversations will also revolve around investors’ insights that they can share with startups and fostering connections with investors early on that will be useful down the road. It’s all about combining these two communities and creating a real synergy between them.
Heather Stowell is the VP of Demos for Finovate and Senior Director of Fintech and Startup Ecosystems for Informa. Over the last 10 years, Stowell has curated innovative demo lineups for dozens of events, launched a developer conference series in the US and abroad, coached startups to help them deliver impactful demos and presentations, and coordinated VC connections for startups raising early-stage funding.
How are financial institutions like US Bank helping small businesses take advantage of new, innovative tools and technologies that will enable them to better serve their customers and scale their operations? At FinovateSpring 2026 earlier this year, I spoke with Queanne Smith, Senior Vice President at US Bank, on how integrated digital solutions and strategic partnerships can bring greater efficiency and new revenue opportunities to small and medium-sized enterprises.
In our conversation, Smith talks about the challenges that small businesses face when confronted with fragmented banking services, and explains how embedded banking and platform integration can build trust and efficiency. Smith also discusses the importance of delivering end-to-end solutions like billpay and payroll and shares her thoughts on the best practices for bank-fintech partnerships.
“We did a survey in 2025 with about a thousand of our small business owners and identified that 63% of those small business owners were really struggling and overwhelmed by the number of platforms they were utilizing for their cash management services … The integration that we’re looking to build enables our small business owners and midsize businesses to have a one-stop shop experience. The opportunity for us to think about how clients interface with us and experience us is a real thing. The objective is to minimize the points of friction and improve the client experience overall.”
Queanne Smith is a Senior Vice President at US Bank, where she leads business strategy and partnerships designed to expand access to capital and growth tools for small business owners. Smith works at the intersection of banking, technology, and community impact, leveraging partnerships, data, and emerging tools to deliver scalable, measurable outcomes. In 2025, Smith was recognized as part of American Banker’s Most Powerful Women in Banking Top Teams.
The fifth-largest commercial bank in the United States, US Bank serves millions of clients via a diversified range of business lines. These operations include commercial and institutional banking, business banking, payments, wealth management, and consumer banking. Headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and a member of the Fortune 500, US Bank was named one of the World’s Most Ethical Companies by the Ethisphere Institute.
How is innovation in blockchain technology, specifically the growing interest in stablecoins and tokenized deposits, creating ways for banks and financial services companies to offer new services, engage current customers better, and introduce new potential revenue sources?
Steven Ramirez, CEO of Beyond the Arc, caught up with Chris Nichols, President of Institutional Banking at SouthState Bank, earlier this year at FinovateSpring 2026 in San Diego. At the conference, Nichols gave a keynote address on the emergence of agentic AI as a new frontier in financial services and discussed ways that agentic commerce will reshape the retail landscape. More specifically, Nichols explained how the combination of tokenization and agentic AI could create major opportunities for banks and financial institutions, enabling 24/7 settlement, smart contracts, programmable money, and more.
In this conversation, Ramirez and Nichols discuss SouthState Bank’s dual token strategy that embraces both deposit tokens and stablecoins, payment orchestration and the future of treasury management, as well as how AI and tokenization are shortening development times from months to days.
What’s really interesting to us, and our number one use case, is the store of value internationally. The customers—specifically the non-US customers of our customers—have subsidiaries in places like Australia or Mexico. These subsidiaries have expenses in dollars that must be converted into local currency, such as Mexican pesos. They then generate revenue and have to convert it back to dollars to repatriate that money. It’s much more efficient to hold some of that capital in a US dollar stablecoin.
As President of Institutional Banking for SouthState Bank, Nichols supports innovation, artificial intelligence, digital assets, loan pricing, asset-liability management, open banking, payments, and fintech investing for the bank, in addition to capital market activities. He produces the Banker-to-Banker blog and is a frequent host of The Community Bank Podcast.
Headquartered in Winter Haven, Florida, SouthState Bank is a $67 billion, publicly traded regional bank with a network of more than 379 branches throughout the southeastern and south-central US. The institution has grown significantly via merger and acquisition in the past few years, most recently acquiring Texas-based Independent Bank Group in 2025.
For years, bank-fintech relationships often followed a predictable path. Banks identified promising startups, tested their technology, and viewed acquisition as the ultimate endgame. Today, that dynamic is changing.
At FinovateSpring 2026, I sat down with Deepa Chatterjee, SVP of Business Development and Go-to-Market for Small Business Banking at U.S. Bank, to discuss how bank-fintech partnerships are evolving, where banks are competing with digital-first challengers, and what the future of small business banking looks like.
One of the most interesting takeaways from our conversation was how dramatically the relationship between banks and fintechs has changed. While banks once viewed fintech partnerships as potential acquisition opportunities, many are now embracing deeper, longer-term collaborations. “The way that we worked with fintechs was primarily thinking of potentially acquiring them,” said Deepa. “Now that tha markets have changed we are far more likely to work and partner with fintechs in a much deeper way, and so ownership is not necessarily on the table.”
Deepa Chatterjee is SVP of Business Development and Go-to-Market for Small Business Banking at U.S. Bank. She leads business development, partnerships, sales enablement, product marketing, data insights, and automation initiatives for the bank’s small business segment. Before joining U.S. Bank, Chatterjee held leadership roles at Dayforce and Oportun and spent more than a decade at American Express in strategy, marketing, and business development positions. She holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Barnard College at Columbia University and an MBA from the Yale School of Management.
U.S. Bancorp, the parent company of U.S. Bank, is one of the largest banking institutions in the United States, serving millions of consumer, business, commercial, and institutional clients. The bank offers a broad range of financial services, including business banking, payments, treasury management, merchant acquiring through Elavon, lending, and wealth management solutions. U.S. Bank has increasingly expanded its digital capabilities through fintech partnerships and embedded financial services designed to help small businesses streamline their financial operations.
More and more banks and financial services companies are leveraging AI-powered communications to enhance the customer experience with faster response times and reduce operational costs. However, there is a wealth of key issues that institutions need to address in order to deploy technologies like AI voice agents safely and effectively while remaining compliant with an ever-shifting range of regulations.
In this interview, recorded at FinovateSpring 2026 in San Diego, California, earlier this year, William Mills, CEO of William Mills Agency, talks with Joshua March, Founder and CEO of Veritus, about how these challenges and how AI voice and text agents are transforming banking and financial services.
“The operational benefits from AI are so immense that no financial institution can really make the decision to be left behind. Everyone has to make this leap. So the question is not ‘are we going to do it?’ It’s ‘just how do we do it in a compliant and safe way.’ Our philosophy is that by being 100% focused on the needs of these regulated financial entities and building in all of the compliance capabilities—not just in how the AI agents are speaking and the guardrails around that to prevent hallucinations and ensure compliance, but also in, for example, a TCPA compliant outbound dialer, TCPA compliant on the channel orchestration—we’ve built multiple layers of compliance at every single step.”
Veritus enables lenders to deploy AI-powered compliant voice, SMS, andemail agents across the entire loan lifecycle, from origination to recovery. Founded in 2025 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Veritus helps lenders frustrated with stalled applications, limited service hours, rising delinquency costs, and other pain points. Veritus’ Negotiation Engine is a rules-based solution that dynamically offers payment plans, settlements, and hardship options based on individual company policies. Veritus helps providers increase the number of funded loans, improve recovery rates, scale instantly while maintaining brand consistency, all while remaining compliant with FDCPA, TCPA, FCRA, GLBA, and state-specific regulations.
Joshua March founded Veritus in 2025. He previously was Co-Founder and CEO of SCiFi Foods, a cultivated meet company backed by a16oz. Before that, March was Co-Founder and CEO of Conversocial, a call center software firm that was acquired by Verint.
As financial institutions increasingly deploy AI across customer service channels, many are wondering where they should start.
At FinovateSpring in San Diego earlier this year, I spoke withCresta Director of Customer Success Stacy Osorio about how banks, credit unions, and fintechs should think about customer experience, contact center transformation, and AI-driven automation.
One of the biggest opportunities, Osorio explained, is not simply using AI to reduce costs, but leveraging it to improve customer experiences while helping organizations better understand what is happening across customer interactions.
“Looking at customer experience through that lens, they should be thinking about the role of AI in customer experience transforming your contact center to think about ways to use AI to drive additional revenue, helping to drive that customer experience—whether that’s driving satisfaction or helping coach and innovate different ways or more automation through your AI agent,” Osorio said when discussing how financial institutions should think about AI-powered customer experience.
Osorio also noted that financial institutions should think beyond conversational AI and consider how AI can automate workflows, surface insights from customer interactions, and help human agents have better conversations.
Stacy Osorio serves as Director of Customer Success at Cresta, where she works directly with enterprise customers to help them optimize customer experiences and maximize value from AI-powered customer engagement tools.
Founded in 2017, Cresta offers an AI-powered contact center platform designed to help enterprises improve customer conversations, automate workflows, coach human agents, and better understand customer interactions. The company works with enterprise organizations across industries, including customers such as United Airlines, Cox, Acorns, and others. Cresta’s platform combines conversational intelligence, workflow automation, and AI agents to help organizations improve customer experiences while increasing operational efficiency.
AI is transforming banking and financial services. From simple chatbots to sophisticated AI deployments that are acting with increased independence on behalf of customers, AI-based solutions are driving some of the biggest innovations in our industry—both in terms of customer-facing tools as well as back-office operations.
In this conversation with Merlin Bise, Chief Technology Officer with Inbenta, we discuss the growing role that AI is playing in financial services, what challenges financial institutions face when implementing AI, how modern AI integrates with legacy technology and, interestingly, why smaller and mid-tier financial institutions might have an advantage over their larger rivals when it comes to quickly getting up to speed with AI-powered solutions.
There was an initial wave a couple of years ago, in which companies didn’t want to get left behind. So everything was being sold based on fear. There are two ways to sell things: fear and emotion. And I think that was what was driving it. Today, they’ve taken a step back and said, “Why should we be building AI that’s already solved? We should be building AI that impacts our core offering. Let’s let other companies that know how to do chat and search and voice bots and these things really well. Let’s see if we can trust them and they’re willing to build a relationship with us. Let’s let them do that. Let’s focus on our core.”
Founded in 2005 and headquartered in Allen, Texas, Inbenta enables companies to leverage agentic AI to enhance the customer experience. The company’s platform automates user interactions with accurate, intent-driven responses while simultaneously ensuring both safety and regulatory compliance. With more than 1,000 customers around the world, Inbenta’s agentic AI-enabled suite of Chat, Search, Knowledge, Assist, and Learn solutions features an accuracy rate of 95% and supports more than 100 languages worldwide.
Chief Technology Officer with Inbenta, Merlin Bise delivered a special address at FinovateSpring 2026: AI That Makes It to Production: Deploying Trusted CX in Days, Not Months. In his presentation, Bise discussed some of the common strategic mistakes financial services companies make when it comes to deploying AI. He provided a mental model to help leaders evaluate the build vs. buy decision when it comes to AI technology and explained the different challenges and opportunities faced by small financial institutions compared to larger financial institutions when it comes to deploying and scaling AI.
