Hey, fintech fam 💜

Hope you’re staying cool this week. How is it already July?!

I have 3 stories for you today: Marstone was acquired, Springboard Enterprises is launching an accelerator, and fraud is still more organized than we think.

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.

Exciting news this week for the wealthtech world: Marstone, the digital wealth platform Margaret Hartigan co-founded in 2013, has been acquired by FusionIQ!

Hartigan and her co-founder, Christopher LaVine, are both joining FusionIQ's leadership team.

The acquisition pairs FusionIQ's digital advice and brokerage infrastructure with Marstone's goal-based financial planning tools.

This move gives banks, credit unions, and RIAs a more complete, end-to-end wealthtech offering. 

If you've been reading Fintech Is Femme for a while, you already know Margaret. 

I profiled her back in 2024, talking about what she calls her "10-year overnight success story” and you may have seen her at a few of our events, too!

(Side note: Margaret also told Pulse 2.0 that one of her favorite recent Marstone memories was telling the story on stage at The Leadership Summit in 2024 🥲Thank you, Margaret! 💜)

FusionIQ CEO Eric Noll put it simply: "Margaret and Chris have built something genuinely special, a platform and a culture rooted in the belief that great financial guidance belongs to everyone."

That’s been Marstone's whole thesis since day one. 

Hartigan built the company to bring sophisticated financial planning tools to people who fall below the account minimums that most traditional wealth managers require.

And she did it by integrating into the banks and credit unions those people already trust, rather than asking them to adopt something new.

That’s eliminating complexity in action – just like we talked about on Tuesday. 

It's not a flashy consumer app, but it's exactly the kind of infrastructure work that determines who actually gets access to good financial guidance and who doesn't.

True to her form, Hartigan's own announcement on LinkedIn was less about the deal terms and more about the people who got her there:

That tracks with everything I know about how she's built this company. 

Marstone's whole approach was about integrating into the infrastructure banks already had rather than asking anyone to rip and replace, and it's been the model since day one – even before it was the fashionable strategy in fintech circles.

Wealthtech is projected to grow from roughly $9.28 billion this year to nearly $30 billion by 2034.

And a lot of that growth is going to be won through exactly this kind of consolidation: platforms combining forces so community banks and credit unions get one integrated solution instead of five vendors to stitch together. 

Marstone joining FusionIQ is a good early data point for where that market is headed. 

It's also a test of Noll's line about financial guidance belonging to everyone.

That promise only holds if it finds its way to the person who's never sat across from a financial advisor in their life, not just the ones who've always had a seat at the table.

This story originally appeared in my Forbes column.

The venture capital market has changed. After years of growth-at-all-costs, investors are now prioritizing traction, capital efficiency, and sustainable unit economics.

That shift may create an opening for a founder class venture has long underfunded: women building in fintech.

Springboard Enterprises, the 25-year-old accelerator founded by legendary media executive and USA Network founder Kay Koplovitz, is building its first dedicated fintech accelerator focused on helping women-led companies access capital and scale.

Koplovitz built USA Network before most of the market understood the power of cable television.

Now, through Springboard, she is betting on another underpriced opportunity before the broader venture industry fully catches up: women-led fintech.

The program is being developed with fintech operators, investors and executives, including FinMkt cofounder and CEO Luan Cox, Springboard CEO Umbreen Bhatti and an advisory council with leaders connected to Stripe, AWS Fintech, TD Bank, the Gates Foundation, FinTop, and the American Fintech Council.

The program has not yet formally launched.

Springboard is currently building the ecosystem around it and seeking strategic partners to help shape the accelerator from the ground up.

That early-stage build matters.

For Koplovitz, the fintech opportunity is tied to a familiar pattern: founders spotting white space before the market understands it.

She pointed to Zipcar, one of Springboard’s earliest companies, as an example. Robin Chase built the company around underutilized cars at a time when most people did not yet see the sharing economy coming.

“She saw the need,” Koplovitz said. “Someone who sees white space where other people don’t see it creates the foundation of many iterations to follow.”

Women control a majority of consumer spending and make many of the financial decisions around healthcare, family, home improvement, and household management. Yet much of fintech infrastructure is still not designed around how women actually make, manage, and move money.

That is the bet Springboard is making in fintech.

👉🏽 Read the full Forbes story here

At the Solo Resilience Summit in New York, I sat down with Josh Arjuna Stephens, SVP of Product at Current, for a live recording of the Humans of Fintech podcast.

And he’s saying the same thing Frances Zelazny has been saying at our Security Summits for years:

Criminals are highly organized and share information constantly. While banks, more often than not, don't.

Current serves a huge share of the more than 100 million Americans living paycheck to paycheck.

Stephens says this group has been consistently overlooked by traditional institutions and, because of that, pays close attention to whether a product actually delivers on what it promises.

It always has and always will come back to trust.

KYC also remains siloed industry-wide. Every time someone joins a new financial institution, they start over as a stranger, which creates friction for good customers and openings for bad ones.

That fragmentation is exactly what fraud rings are looking for and exploit.

More verification isn’t the fix, Stephens says, but better portability. Letting institutions share and carry forward what they already know about a customer, rather than each one starting from scratch.

Fraud prevention keeps getting treated like a compliance checkbox, but Stephens' point makes clear it's actually a coordination problem.

Criminals share intelligence in real time; banks, siloed by design and by regulation, mostly don't.

Until KYC data can move with the customer instead of resetting at every institution, fraud rings will keep finding the same gap to exploit.

The industry doesn't need more verification. It needs to start trusting what it already knows.

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

Know your payee. Deepfakes and injection attacks. Managing identity in an agentic world.

These are the conversations happening on October 1st in San Francisco.

And compliance? That’s everyone’s job. Join us in San Francisco this fall!

From Ari’s new album. This song was apparently produced using a technology that emits natural electrical variations of plants… aka a musical melody of sorts. Pretty cool!

Side note: have you noticed the influx of lower-case song titles from pop stars lately? 😆🎤

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📚 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.

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

See you Tuesday!

Love,

Nicole 💜