Hey, fintech fam! 💜

Fall events are coming in hot — which means the countdown is officially on until we get to hang out IRL again.

We’re just one month away from SF Tech Week, where I’m hosting the first-ever Fintech Is Femme AI Summit on Oct. 8.

It’s a full-day takeover with the baddest voices in fintech and AI — founders, investors, and leaders who are building the future and making sure women are at the center of it.

Think sharp panels, real talk about where AI meets money, and a community that doesn’t just talk change, but funds it.

And that’s just the start. Mark your calendars for more fintech moments:

Behind the scenes, I’ve also been working on our first educational course in collab with Frich (yes, finally giving you the frameworks I use every day), new content campaigns, and way more social + video content because you deserve to see this community shine everywhere.

Inside this week’s newsletter: 2 big fintech stories, a fresh podcast episode, and all the events you don’t want to miss.

Let’s get into it.

#TRENDING

When Melinda French Gates launched Pivotal Ventures, her mission was clear: invest in ideas that expand women’s power and influence.

At first, that meant focusing on the care economy — childcare, eldercare, and the infrastructure that underpins how women work. Now, the firm is officially expanding into fintech, with a new vertical dedicated to financial access.

The news came quietly via a LinkedIn post from Renata Aráuz-DeStefano, an investor on Pivotal’s team who has been leading the charge.

Aráuz-DeStefano shared that over the last year, she and her colleagues Brittney Riley Gavini and Sri Varre, with guidance from Nancy Torres, conducted a market scan — digging into fintech investors’ perspectives and interviewing early-stage founders.

The result: a strategy that zeroes in on Series A–B startups building tools for underserved consumers and small businesses.

Fintech isn’t just about faster payments or sleeker apps — it’s about who gets to participate in the economy.

By naming financial access as its own investment category, Pivotal is drawing a direct line between money and power. And they’re putting capital behind the founders working to close wealth gaps that banks and incumbents have left wide open.

It’s also personal. Before becoming a VC, Aráuz-DeStefano started her career as a bank teller and later worked in microfinance, ensuring that entrepreneurs — primarily women — in emerging markets could access fair lending products.

Now, she’s shaping a fintech strategy with the potential to bring that same ethos of equity to the U.S.

For founders, this is a signal: the capital that once flowed primarily into the care economy is expanding into financial systems.

If you’re building fintech for women, families, or SMBs overlooked by incumbents, Pivotal Ventures is now officially taking your calls.

The move also places Melinda French Gates’ firm in the growing ecosystem of investors framing fintech as a tool for financial inclusion and systemic change, not just margin expansion.

And in a landscape where funding for women founders remains stubbornly low, that shift in perspective — and capital — is overdue.

AI hype has dominated fintech headlines this year — but Mastercard just made a move that shows how “agentic commerce” (where AI agents shop, pay, and act on our behalf) is going from concept to reality.

This week, Mastercard announced new tools, collaborations, and consulting services designed to make AI-powered payments both smarter and safer. Think of it as laying down the rules of the road before millions of autonomous money-bots start swiping our cards for us.

The stakes are high: consumers are curious about AI assistants that could handle budgeting, bill pay, and even shopping — but trust remains the biggest barrier. If people don’t believe an AI agent will make purchases securely and transparently, adoption stalls.

That’s where Mastercard is stepping in.

Mastercard is working with Stripe, Google, and Ant International’s Antom, plus banks like Citi and U.S. Bank, to roll out Agent Pay. By this holiday season, every U.S. Mastercard cardholder will be enabled for agentic payments, with global expansion on the horizon.

Early trials mean that U.S. Bank and Citi cardholders will be among the first to experience what it feels like to let an AI agent “check out” on their behalf.

For merchants and platforms, that could mean fewer abandoned carts and faster, more seamless payments — assuming consumers are willing to let AI take the wheel.

To make adoption real, Mastercard isn’t just pushing products — it’s releasing infrastructure:

For issuers and merchants who aren’t sure how to build “intelligent shopping” into their customer experience, Mastercard is also offering agentic consulting services.

The other big play here is standards-setting. Mastercard has a track record of defining global payments infrastructure — from contactless to tokenization. Now it’s working with the FIDO Alliance and its Payments Working Group to develop verifiable credential standards for agentic transactions.

This could become the backbone of AI payments: confirming amount, merchant, and product so that consumers (and regulators) know the purchase was truly authorized.

In other words, no rogue AI ordering 100 pizzas at midnight without your consent.

For all the buzz around generative AI, the real frontier isn’t just content — it’s commerce. Agentic transactions represent a seismic shift: instead of clicking “buy now,” we’ll give AI agents the authority to buy for us.

That future won’t scale without trust. Mastercard’s bet is that by building the rails — technical, regulatory, and cultural — it can accelerate adoption while keeping fraud and fear at bay.

As Craig Vosburg, Mastercard’s chief services officer, put it: “Payments must be native to the agentic experience. We’re building the infrastructure for a new generation of intelligent transactions.”

The bigger question is whether consumers are ready to hand over their wallets to AI.

If Mastercard and its partners can get the trust equation right, this holiday season may be remembered not just for what we bought — but for how.

What happens when you trust your gut — even when the data says no?

Shivani Siroya has the answer.

As the Founder & CEO of Tala, Shivani has raised nearly $500M in venture capital to back one radical conviction: that billions of underserved people around the world are not “too risky” — they’re simply overlooked.

Today, Tala has disbursed more than $6B in credit to 11M customers across Kenya, the Philippines, Mexico, and India. But Tala’s origin story started with Shivani on the ground, conducting 3,500+ in-person interviews to understand how people actually lived, earned, and borrowed.

In her words:

In this week’s episode of Fintech Mavericks (sponsored by Brex), Shivani shares:

This episode isn’t just about inclusion. It’s about redefining risk and proving that building for the underserved can be both profitable and transformative.

Because as Shivani puts it, the future of financial inclusion is clear:

“Unleashing the economic power of the global majority.”

Join us every Thursday to keep up with fintech events!

Fintech Is Femme and Empire Startups are teaming up to spotlight the next generation of builders redefining money as we know it. From lending to payments, wealth to insurance, capital markets and beyond — these are the founders creating the future.

At each event, five early-stage companies will take the stage. A panel of sharp investors will weigh in. And together, we’ll crown fintech’s Best in Show.

This isn’t just a pitch event — it’s where ideas meet capital, culture, and community.

✨ Save your spot:

It’s official: Fintech Is Femme AI Summit is part of #SFTechWeek 2025 - it’s the biggest one yet. We've made history, and we're doing it again.

Co-hosted with powerhouses like Stripe, Brex, Middesk, Kroolo, Goodfin, and networking powered by Fiat Growth and wellness hour powered by J.P. Morgan — we’re building the most tactical, women-led fintech + AI experience of the week. (More co-hosts to be announced! 👀 )

Why AI, why now?

Because the story of AI in fintech shouldn’t just be told by the same voices on every stage.

It’s time to change the narrative — with women and diverse thinkers, builders, founders, operators, and investors actually leading with AI in their product, compliance, GTM, and growth.

🎤 On stage this year:

More to be announced 👀

Our full agenda can be seen on our website here. Only 200 seats!

Climate tech is about directing capital toward a livable planet — and that makes it fintech. 🌍💸

From funding clean energy and scaling carbon markets to embedding sustainability in everyday transactions, these innovations depend on the same rails that power our financial system. And just like fintech, climate tech isn’t just about technology — it’s about access.

When climate solutions are paired with financial inclusion, we unlock systems that regenerate value for people, planet, and profit.

🚨 We’re just 1 week away from the Climate Fintech Summit during Climate Week. Join me and Bhuva Shakti of WalletMax on September 19 for a powerful conversation on why climate fintech isn’t the future — it’s the now.

Alright, I just watched the Netflix show Popstar Academy and saw how the global girl group Katseye came together — and let me tell you, these young women put in the work. Now I’m officially obsessed.

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🎤 Host an epic event by booking me as a speaker, moderator, or emcee.

📚 Increase your expertise by ordering your copy of my book, Fintech Feminists: Increasing Inclusion, Redefining Innovation, and Changing the Future for Women Around the World.

⭐️ P.S. If you’ve read Fintech Feminists (or listened to the audiobook!), I’d be so grateful if you could take 30 seconds to leave a review or rating on Amazon here. Your support means the world to me. A million thanks in advance!

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

Love,

Nicole 💜