Hey fintech fam, 💜  

Financial services isn’t short on ideas right now. It’s short on breakthroughs that actually hold up.

And that gap? That’s exactly where fintech keeps showing up — and maturing. Because what we’re seeing in this market isn’t one isolated problem.

It’s the same limitation surfacing everywhere:

That’s the real bottleneck.

And if we’re being honest, the next phase of fintech isn’t about more products.

It’s about building the right ones — with the right partners — that actually change how the system works for more people.

That’s the job.

And it’s exactly what we’re building toward at the Fintech Is Femme Leadership Summit, the Security Summit, and our VIP experiences — from our Big Leap VIP Happy Hour to our private founder and operator rooms.

Because the conversations that move this industry forward?

They don’t happen in isolation. They happen in rooms like these.

Let’s get into it 👇🏽

#TRENDING

Every Thursday, I break down the fintech stories that matter most — grounded in my reporting, interviews with industry leaders, and what I’m seeing unfold across the industry.

The $1 trillion gap we keep citing — in women’s economic participation and funding — isn’t just a distribution problem.

It’s a pattern recognition problem.

Capital still flows toward what it already understands: familiar business models, familiar founder profiles, familiar definitions of scale.

And in doing so, it keeps missing where value is actually being created.

Because some of the most important companies right now aren’t building in obvious markets.

They’re building in the in-between — where financial behavior, access, and outcomes intersect, and where traditional venture frameworks don’t quite know how to measure what’s happening yet.

That’s the gap.

And it’s exactly why this moment — and this cohort — matters.

Fintech is where financial behavior becomes visible.

Not in theory — in real time.

It’s also where the consequences of financial systems show up fastest. When money moves instantly, every edge case becomes a product decision. Every exception becomes a test of whether the system actually understands the user.

That’s the same pattern we’re seeing across disputes, fraud, and decision systems.

Springboard’s framing of financial health pushes that idea even further upstream.

Because financial outcomes aren’t separate from people’s lives anymore.

They show up in healthcare access, debt burden, small business survival, and long-term stability.

Which means the companies that matter most right now aren’t just moving money.

They’re shaping outcomes.

And if you zoom out, it’s all the same system problem:

How do financial institutions make decisions about people — under uncertainty — at scale?

Springboard’s advantage isn’t just capital.

It’s repetition.

Twenty-six years of seeing which companies get underestimated early — and which signals actually matter before markets fully form.

That includes backing founders building in spaces without clean metrics yet.

Where value is distributed across users, not captured neatly in revenue lines.

So the question shifts.

Not just: Is this big?

But: What does the world look like if this works — and who is being left out of that future?

That’s a very different lens.

And it’s one that has consistently shown up before consensus.

In fintech, that lens becomes very specific:

The next generation of breakout companies won’t just expand access.

They’ll improve outcomes.

That distinction matters more than most people realize.

Because access — at least at the surface — has largely been solved.

What hasn’t been solved is everything that comes after:

That’s the messy middle.

And it’s exactly where fintech is converging with everything we’re seeing across fraud, behavior, and trust systems.

Springboard is making a clear bet:

That the next wave of category-defining companies will be built right there.

Three things are happening at once:

That creates a blind spot.

And historically, that’s exactly where new categories are born.

This is where I’ll leave you:

If you’re building in fintech right now — especially in the places that don’t fit neatly into a category yet — this is the room you want to be in.

Springboard Enterprises is launching its first fintech cohort, backing founders building at the intersection of financial access, behavior, and outcomes.

Not the obvious ideas.

The important ones.

And they’re actively bringing in partners, investors, and operators who understand that this next chapter of fintech will be built differently.

👉 If that’s you — whether you’re a founder, an investor, or someone who wants to be closer to where this is all heading — this is your moment to get involved.

Because the next generation of fintech won’t just move money better.

It will decide what better actually means.

And if that’s where venture is starting to pay attention, the next question is:
what are these systems actually solving for in practice?

If disputes and fraud are where trust breaks after the transaction, then this next layer determines how behavior is interpreted in the first place.

By the time something becomes a dispute, most of the system design has already happened upstream.

That’s the common thread between Zelle, Robinhood, and Candidly.

They sit in different parts of the financial stack, but they’re solving the same operational problem: how to interpret user behavior at scale, in real time, under constraint.

This goes beyond moving money or enabling access.

It’s about deciding what that behavior means.

Zelle operates in one of the most sensitive environments in payments: near-instant, bank-to-bank transfers that are often irreversible (cue me checking I sent it to the right person 10 times).

When something goes wrong, there’s no rollback. Resolution becomes a coordination problem across institutions, users, and fraud teams — often after the fact, often with incomplete information.

Robinhood sits on the other side of behavior.

It doesn’t just process transactions — it shapes how people interact with markets. That means managing high-velocity trading, retail sentiment spikes, and real-time risk controls without interrupting legitimate activity.

Candidly operates earlier in the lifecycle, but faces the same core challenge.

Student debt and financial planning aren’t static. They’re behavioral over time — shaped by repayment decisions, timing, and shifting personal context.

Different surfaces. Same underlying issue:

All three are constantly making calls about user intent under uncertainty.

What connects them operationally is not the product category. It’s the infrastructure they’re solving for underneath.

They all require systems that can:

This is the same tension we see in fraud and disputes.

Too much friction, and users disengage.

Too little control, and risk compounds quietly.

There’s no perfect version of that tradeoff at scale.

So the work becomes operational, not theoretical.

Who reviews edge cases?

What signals are trusted?

Where does human escalation happen?

How do systems stay consistent when they weren’t built to talk to each other?

The hardest part isn’t building models.

It’s aligning risk, product, support, and compliance — all optimizing for different definitions of “correct.”

The deeper shift across all three companies is that behavior is no longer a secondary signal.

It is the system input.

Every transaction, trade, or repayment feeds a system that informs the next decision — from fraud detection to customer support.

This is where the overlap with companies like Chime and Casap becomes clear.

Once behavior becomes the input, dispute resolution isn’t a separate workflow.

It’s part of the same decision layer governing how users are treated in the first place.

That creates a loop:

Three shifts are colliding at once:

First, real-time money movement has become normal. Users expect instant execution across payments, transfers, and investing. That removes the buffer time that used to exist for verification and correction.

Second, user behavior has become more adaptive. People understand how financial systems respond — from chargebacks to disputes to incentive structures — and some behavior is now shaped around that knowledge.

Third, institutions are dealing with higher volume and greater variance simultaneously. More users, more edge cases, more types of “valid but messy” scenarios.

That combination puts pressure directly on decision systems.

Not on interfaces. Not on features. On how judgments are made.

Getting to this level of system maturity is not a product decision. It is an operational one.

Leaders in these environments are typically working through a few hard constraints:

None of this is visible to users. But it determines every visible outcome they experience.

Once money moves instantly — and behavior is trackable in real time — the system’s job shifts from processing transactions to interpreting them.

That interpretation layer is becoming the real infrastructure of fintech.

And right now, it’s still being built under pressure.

And that’s exactly why Zelle, Robinhood, and Candidly belong on this stage together.

Not because they operate in the same category — but because they’re all building inside the same constraint: interpreting behavior, managing risk, and maintaining trust at scale.

Different surfaces. Same system pressure.

And in a moment where fintech is shifting from moving money to understanding it, these are the operators closest to the work.

One of the hardest problems in fintech is showing up after the transaction is complete.

When something goes wrong (an unfamiliar charge, a failed payment, a disputed purchase…), the user's expectation is simple.

They obviously want their money back, and they want the issue resolved quickly. It doesn’t matter to them whether the issue started with a merchant, a network, or their own mistake. The responsibility automatically lies with their bank.

That expectation has reshaped the role of financial institutions, and what used to be a back-office function is now one of the most visible parts of the product experience.

The way a company handles disputes and fraud is often the moment a customer decides whether to stay or leave.

Hard truth: most fintech companies did not design their systems for this level of pressure.

And they didn’t really have to. Disputes and fraud were historically treated as operational workflows. It was something to manage through support teams, rules engines, and manual reviews.

That model starts to break down at scale. Volume increases, edge cases multiply, and consistency becomes harder to maintain.

At the same time, the nature of fraud has changed. (Get your tickets to the Security Summit on April 30th and learn more about this!)

Fraud is no longer limited to external attacks. A growing share comes from first-party behavior, where users dispute legitimate charges or learn how to navigate systems in ways that increase their chances of getting a refund.

This creates a more complex environment where the line between legitimate and fraudulent activity is not always clear.

When strain shows up like we’re seeing here, it does not stay contained.

Disputes start to drive real outcomes: rising loss rates, slower resolution times, and inconsistent decisions that customers notice immediately.

Support teams get overwhelmed, which leads to longer wait times or over-reliance on automation that isn’t equipped to make nuanced calls.

And on the other side, overly rigid systems push legitimate users into friction they don’t understand, which erodes trust just as quickly as a bad fraud decision.

One of the clearest takeaways from Shanthi’s experience is that these “moments that matter” are not edge cases.

They are quite literally the moments customers remember and set the tone for your entire brand.

We know that trust isn’t built through features or onboarding flows. Trust is built when something goes wrong, and the institution responds in a way that feels fair and competent.

That’s where most systems fall short today. They are designed to process claims, not to make good decisions.

Though Casap uses AI to automate disputes, in Shanthi’s view, the solution is NOT “add automation!” and forget about it. It’s about improving the quality of decisions being made.

From Shanthi’s perspective, AI is useful when it acts less like a replacement for humans and more like an experienced operator.

In Casap’s case, instead of routing tickets or applying fixed rules, it evaluates behavior in context… like how a user has transacted over time, how this situation compares to past patterns, and whether the claim aligns with what a trustworthy customer typically looks like.

It means you can treat users differently at scale in real time.

A customer with a long history of consistent behavior can be resolved quickly with minimal friction. A higher-risk scenario can be slowed down and investigated more carefully.

The goal is not blanket enforcement, but calibrated response. Also, disputes are no longer just about recovering funds, but increasingly tied to customer retention metrics.

If a user feels like they have to fight their bank to get a resolution, the relationship is already damaged, and that impacts numbers. Even if the outcome is technically correct.

This is where iconic fintech companies like Chime have evolved. And Chime’s former Chief Experience Officer and now Chief Operating Officer, Janelle Sallenave, is at the center of that evolution.

Janelle and Shanthi will both be on stage in an exclusive interview at The Fintech is Femme Leadership Summit on April 29th! Get your 1-Day Summit pass right now and hear them speak about operational excellence, customer experiences, AI, and more.

At scale, Chime cannot afford for every dispute to become a manual investigation, but they also cannot afford to get those decisions wrong.

The system has to balance speed, accuracy, and consistency all at once. And they’ve achieved that balance, because 70% of Chime’s member interactions are now powered by automation, while doubling customer satisfaction.

What emerges from this is a different way of thinking about the problem.

Fraud and disputes are becoming a continuous decision layer within the product. It’s no longer a separate workflow that happens after the fact.

The systems that perform best are the ones that can learn over time, adapt to new patterns of behavior, and make decisions that feel coherent to the user.

We already know that, but this way of thinking requires better signals, better models, and a tighter connection between support, risk, and product teams than most organizations have historically built.

It also requires accepting that there is no perfect outcome. Only better trade-offs.

The companies that figure this out are not eliminating disputes or fraud. They are getting better at quickly and consistently deciding how to handle them.

That’s operational excellence in service of a better customer experience. On April 29, we’ll hear directly from the leaders building it — and how they made it work.

Let’s keep you booked and busy. Every Thursday, I share fintech events worth adding to your calendar— both IRL and online.

It’s a state of mind.

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That wraps up today’s edition—thanks for reading! Until next week, keep innovating and challenging the status quo.

See you Tuesday!

Love,

Nicole 💜