With PayNearMe’s acquisition of Marr Labs and Envestnet’s acquisition of Vestmark, we continue to see evidence that fintechs are conducting M&A at a faster pace than banks in 2026.
Payment experience management company PayNearMe has acquired Marr Labs’ technology and hired its ‘key employees.’ Founded in 2023 and headquartered in San Francisco, Marr Labs builds AI agents that provide compliant voice automation, document intelligence, intelligent workflow orchestration, and real-time compliance enforcement. The acquisition will enhance PayNearMe’s ability to deliver agentic AI automation to its clients, leveraging Marr Labs’ expertise in building and operating sophisticated AI systems at scale.
“PayNearMe has always focused on understanding and continuously improving the entire payment journey,” PayNearMe CEO and Founder Danny Shader said. “AI provides powerful opportunities to further improve the experience delivered by our PayXM platform. The Marr Labs team has proven its ability to build and deploy sophisticated AI systems at massive scale. Combining that expertise with PayNearMe’s deep understanding of our clients’ needs and challenges makes this combination so exciting.”
PayNearMe’s PayXM platform is designed to manage the payment experience from payment request through reconciliation. The company’s end-to-end approach accelerates the payment process and lowers the total cost of payment acceptance. By embedding agentic AI into the payment experience, and providing these agents with access to the right data, business rules, and workflows, PayNearMe is able to enhance every touchpoint in the payment journey. This enables the company to deliver highly configurable and specialized payment capabilities to credit unions, lenders, mortgage servicing firms, and more.
“We’ve spent years building AI that can work reliably at scale, and wanted to put that experience to work where it could have the greatest impact,” Marr Labs Co-Founder and CEO Dave Grannan said. “PayNearMe has built a trusted platform serving thousands of businesses and has a deep understanding of the payment problems they need to solve. Joining PayNearMe gives our team the opportunity to bring what we’ve learned to a much broader market and help shape the future of payments.”
PayNearMe offers a payments platform that facilitates self-service, reduces manual intervention, and lowers the cost of acceptance. The company’s Payment Experience Management platform powers payments for thousands of businesses around the world, and supports all major payment types and channels, including PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, Apple Pay, Google Pay, cards, and ACH to cash at 62,000+ US retail locations. Named to CNBC’s “World’s Top Fintech Companies for 2026” list and a three-time Finovate Best of Show winner, PayNearMe processes more than $50 billion a year.
Meanwhile, in the wealth management space, wealthtech firm Envestnet has agreed to acquire portfolio management technology provider Vestmark. AI may not be the headline here, but executives from both companies highlighted its role in the combined offering.
“For 25 years, Vestmark has focused on helping wealth management firms navigate increasingly complex portfolios with greater scale, personalization, and efficiency,” Roessner said. “Envestnet and Vestmark bring complementary capabilities and expertise to the market, and together we can create something neither company could deliver on its own.”
Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Wakefield, Massachusetts, Vestmark provides portfolio management solutions and outsourced services for financial institutions and their advisors. The company helps wealth management firms efficiently manage customized client portfolios via an enterprise-grade platform. With more than $2 trillion in assets and more than five million investor accounts, its clients include BlackRock, Invesco, and Vanguard.
The acquisition will enable Envestnet to support its clients across a broader range of products and services, from financial advice and planning through portfolio construction, personalization, trading, tax management, and ongoing portfolio management. The addition will give Envestnet enhanced capabilities and the modularity to serve sophisticated wealth management workflows in a single adaptive ecosystem with no forced migration. Post-acquisition, both companies will continue to invest in and develop their existing product lines. This includes VestmarkOne, VAST, Envestnet Enterprise, Tamarac, and MoneyGuide, as well as incremental investments in AI-powered workflows and automation.
“Wealth management offerings have been siloed for too long, with advisors, traders, and portfolio managers each locked into their own piece of the puzzle,” Envestnet CEO Chris Todd said. “Bringing Vestmark into the Envestnet ecosystem changes that. Wherever a firm sits today, and wherever they’re headed next, they’ll have a platform that can grow with them. We’re not slowing down to make this happen—we’re speeding up, protecting what makes each company great and putting even more behind the roadmap our clients are counting on. Our AI strategy unifies, orchestrates, and personalizes the advisor experience at Envestnet, and will extend across Vestmark’s workflows too. That’s a real reimagining of how advisors do their jobs.”
Envestnet serves more than a third of all advisors across its platforms and has $8 trillion in platform assets. Founded in 1999, the company most recently demoed its technology on the Finovate stage at FinovateFall 2021. Envestnet’s acquisition news arrives amid a flurry of announcements from the Pennsylvania-based fintech, including enhancements to its wealth management, portfolio reporting, and financial planning platforms.
Envestnet’s acquisition of Vestmark is expected to close in Q4 2026. Financial terms of the transaction were not immediately available.
Photo by Alan Aprilio on Unsplash