Hey, fintech fam 💜

As you’re reading this, Fintech Is Femme Creative Director Anton, and I are out in SoHo for a much-needed date night (yes—life and business partners over here), seeing one of my forever media idols, Issa Rae, alongside one of Anton’s favorite musicians, Anderson .Paak.

The night is hosted by Intuit, which is doubling down on something I’m increasingly fascinated by: in-person storefronts that blend local, human connection with AI-powered financial tools. Think modern bank branches—without feeling like a bank. I’m curious, I’m paying attention, and I’ll report back.

Speaking of being in the room—be sure to scroll to our events section. We’ve got new events dropping weekly, including our upcoming FEMMY Awards and expanded access to our powerhouse private community, The Academy of Fintech.

Alright—time for the news.

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.

On Monday, fintech giant Fidelity National Information Services (FIS) closed its $13.5 billion acquisition of Global Payments’ Issuer Solutions business (formerly TSYS) ahead of schedule — while simultaneously selling its remaining minority stake in Worldpay back to Global Payments.

Then FIS did something most legacy fintechs don’t do the moment a massive transaction closes:

It shipped product.

Alongside the close, FIS announced a new agentic commerce offering for banks, built with Visa and Mastercard, designed to let AI agents safely initiate and complete transactions across card networks.

That speed wasn’t accidental.

“The market moved, the technology moved, and the window to lead moved with it,” FIS President and CEO Stephanie Ferris told me in a follow-up interview.

She framed the moment as generational.

“There are two trends coming together,” Ferris said. “A regulatory environment that’s finally geared toward growth again — and the fastest adoption of AI I’ve ever seen inside banking.”

Last April, FIS announced a bold three-way reshuffling with Global Payments and GTCR: Global Payments would acquire Worldpay, while FIS would buy Issuer Solutions for $13.5 billion.

At the time, it looked like strategic focus in a cautious market.

Now, with the issuer business officially folded into FIS Total Issuing Solutions, the scale is clear: presence in 75+ countries, more than 40 billion transactions processed annually, and partnerships with over 150 financial institutions.

The financial case is straightforward. FIS says the deal expands its banking segment’s addressable market to $28 billion and adds $500 million in incremental adjusted free cash flow in 2026 — growing to $700 million by 2028.

But the more interesting signal is what FIS chose to launch alongside it.

“We now have the largest amount of consumer and commercial accounts on file across core banking, debit, and credit,” Ferris said. “That data foundation is what allows banks to do meaningful things with generative AI.”

Agentic commerce sounds abstract until you map it to real behavior.

We’re already used to AI narrowing our choices. The next phase is autonomous purchasing — where an AI agent books flights, pays merchants, and completes transactions on your behalf.

That breaks traditional fraud models.

Banks are trained to recognize you: your devices, habits, timing, and merchants. AI agents behave differently by design — buying at odd hours, from new vendors, through unfamiliar interfaces.

“What banks don’t want is to decline a good transaction,” Ferris said. “So fraud models have to be rebuilt for an agent-driven world.”

FIS’s new offering is designed to let banks identify and authorize AI-initiated transactions within existing authorization and dispute frameworks, while introducing a new concept: know your agent (KYA) data.

Translation: this is about keeping banks central as AI begins to transact.

If banks don’t lean in, they risk getting disintermediated. This move is FIS “tripling down” on banks at the center of the agentic commerce era, says Ferris.

With Issuer Solutions in-house, FIS now sits on one of the industry’s most comprehensive data engines — spanning core banking, debit, and credit.

Ferris emphasized the point carefully: this is bank-owned data, not a free-for-all. But centralizing it securely — and making it usable in real time — is what enables AI models to actually work in production.

That’s why she calls this moment generational: a banking sector newly focused on growth colliding with a technology shift banks are adopting faster than any previous wave.

Agentic commerce could generate up to $1 trillion in U.S. retail revenue by 2030, according to McKinsey. But no single player wins alone.

Ferris’s non-negotiables are clear: partnerships must scale, endure volume, and work inside regulated systems.

“Innovation only matters if it survives contact with scale,” she told me.

Last year, FIS made the leap.

This year, it landed — and immediately started building what comes next.

👉 Read my full Forbes column for deeper analysis on what this means for banks, AI, and the future of fintech infrastructure.

On Tuesday, Democrats on the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services convened a hearing on:

“Delivering for American Consumers: A Review of FinTech Innovations and Regulations.”

As fintech products increasingly function as core financial infrastructure — powering wages, payments, credit, and fraud prevention — lawmakers are grappling with a harder question: who carries the risk when innovation moves faster than accountability?

The witness list reflected that tension. Industry leaders from payments and earned wage access (EWA) testified alongside academics — and, critically, consumer advocates.

One of them was Delicia Reynolds Hand, Senior Director of the Digital Marketplace at Consumer Reports, and a recent guest on Humans of Fintech.

Her message was direct: fintech isn’t failing consumers — but too often, it’s shifting the cost of speed and efficiency onto them.

By the end of 2025, two things are clear.

First, fintech is no longer “alternative.” It’s how millions of Americans get paid, move money, and access liquidity.

Second, artificial intelligence isn’t emerging — it’s embedded. AI systems are approving transactions, flagging fraud, freezing accounts, and denying credit at machine speed.

According to Consumer Reports research, consumers value convenience and access — but they’re increasingly worried about hidden fees, unclear dispute rights, excessive data sharing, and who’s accountable when things go wrong.

That anxiety cuts across product categories:

The pattern isn’t anti-innovation. It’s anti-opacity.

The hearing examined several draft bills that could reshape fintech’s regulatory future, including:

Consumer Reports raised a consistent warning: regulation should follow function, not labels.

When products advance money, charge time-sensitive fees, and are repaid later, consumers deserve protections — regardless of how the product is marketed.

What makes this moment particularly fraught is what wasn’t fully addressed in the hearing room.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — the primary “cop on the beat” for consumer finance — has seen its enforcement capacity sharply reduced. At the same time, Congress is considering legislation that could expand fintech activity and waive existing safeguards.

That combination matters.

As Hand noted, guardrails aren’t anti-innovation. They’re what prevent consumers from becoming the shock absorbers of automation — especially as AI-driven decisions scale instantly and invisibly.

This hearing wasn’t about slowing fintech down.

It was about whether trust can scale alongside technology.

For founders, operators, and investors, the takeaway is clear: products that win in the next cycle won’t just be fast or clever — they’ll be legible, fair, and accountable when something breaks.

Because access without affordability isn’t access. It’s risk transfer.

I recently sat down with Delicia Reynolds Hand and her Consumer Reports colleagues on Humans of Fintech to explore in greater depth what real consumer trust requires.

Listen to the episode here.

If 2025 told us anything about fintech funding, it’s this: capital didn’t disappear — it got picky.

New data from Fintech Global Research shows global fintech funding rose 7% year-over-year to $96 billion, even as overall deal volume fell 19%. Fewer deals. Bigger checks. Much higher standards.

The clearest signal is at the top of the market:

This isn’t a comeback. It’s a reallocation.

Compared to the frothy peak of 2021 — when fintech pulled in $375 billion across more than 16,000 deals — today’s market is still down 74% in funding and 78% in deal volume. What’s changed isn’t investor appetite. It’s investor tolerance.

The money is moving toward companies that already function as infrastructure.

A case in point: FNZ, the UK-based wealthtech platform, raised $650 million in one of the largest fintech deals of the year. FNZ supports more than $2.1 trillion in assets, works with 650+ financial institutions, and sits quietly behind the scenes of global wealth management.

It’s not flashy. It’s embedded. And that’s exactly why it got funded — again.

This ties directly to what we’re seeing elsewhere in fintech right now.

In Story #1, FIS doubled down on issuing infrastructure and agentic commerce — not experimentation, but scale and defensibility.

In Story #2, lawmakers and consumer advocates made it clear that trust, transparency, and accountability are no longer optional as fintech becomes core financial plumbing.

Funding is following the same logic.

In 2026, venture dollars aren’t chasing ideas. They’re chasing inevitability.

If your product disappears when budgets tighten, the market will remind you. If it stabilizes cash flow, protects consumers, or keeps money moving at scale — capital still shows up.

That’s the signal.

Booked and busy? Same. Every Thursday, I share fintech events worth adding to your calendar— both IRL and online.

On February 16, we gather for one of the most intimate and meaningful nights in fintech: The FEMMY Awards, presented by The Academy of Fintech.

The Academy of Fintech is a private, invite-driven membership community of 150+ fintech leaders inside the Fintech Is Femme ecosystem — founders, operators, investors, and executives shaping how money actually moves. Inside the Academy, we host ongoing masterclasses, closed-door conversations, and exclusive interviews with the people building momentum across fintech every single day.

The FEMMYs are our moment to come together — in person — and make that community visible.

This isn’t a typical awards show. It’s a rare room. One where relationships are built before the applause, where access is real, and where proximity matters. It’s also the one night a year when we open the doors and invite new members to experience the Academy in action.

This year, I’m thrilled to share our FEMMYs speaker lineup, featuring women who are actively shaping the future of fintech:

Sheila Lirio Marcelo, our 2024 Innovator of the Year, will return to present the 2025 Innovator Award to Luan Cox, President & CEO of FinMkt.

Lule Demmissie, our 2024 Vanguard Award recipient, will present the 2025 Vanguard Award to Asya Bradley — founder, investor, and VC Partnerships Lead at Stripe.

We’ll also hear remarks from Susan Langer, Founder & CEO of Spave and President of the Board of The Academy of Fintech, who will present the MVP award to Frances Zelazny, Founder & CEO of Anonybit, alongside our event co-chair, Melissa Magner.

This year, we’re going bigger, bolder, and more iconic:

I’m so excited to officially share FTW: New York — a three-day, three-summit anchoring New York Fintech Week.

From April 28–30, the most influential operators, founders, investors, and decision-makers in fintech will gather in New York City — not for surface-level panels, but for real conversations about where this industry is actually headed.

After two years of strong growth from our flagship Fintech Is Femme Leadership Summit and the successful launch of the Fintech Security Summit, we’re expanding with intention. This year, we’re partnering with leaders across venture, go-to-market, identity, and security to host three focused summits, each designed to go deeper — and deliver real value.

Here’s how the week breaks down:

The Fintech Summit — hosted by Fiat Growth and Drew Glover

→ AI, stablecoins, growth, distribution, and the next phase of fintech scale

The Fintech Is Femme Leadership Summit — with me, Nicole Casperson

→ Power, capital, executive leadership, and the people shaping fintech’s future

The Fintech Security Summit — led by Frances Zelazny

→ Fraud, identity, biometrics, and trust as economic infrastructure

🎟️ Early bird tickets are live now.

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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 💜