Hey, fintech fam 💜

Happy June! May came and went so fast I'm still catching my breath — and honestly, I'm just now starting to digest everything that happened and figure out how to apply it all to our next era. FTW: San Francisco is coming September 29 – October 1, and we are sitting on an incredibly successful product launch with New York Fintech Week. We are not letting that momentum go anywhere.

In between all of it — Anton's birthday was this week, which we celebrated beautifully, and wedding planning is... ongoing. Let's just say that entrepreneurship and wedding planning at the same time are their own kind of beast. A wonderful beast. But a beast nonetheless.

Spring in New York has been good to us, though. More on that below.

Now — I've been sitting on this column since our Leadership Summit at New York Fintech Week, and I'm finally ready to share it. Because there's a number that hasn't left my brain since that afternoon.

Seventy percent.

Let’s get into it.

I curated this conversation on purpose.

Not for a product announcement or a funding story — but because I've been reporting on consumer fintech long enough to know that the operational layer is where the real story lives right now.

When I brought together Shanthi Shanmugam, Founder and CEO of Casap, and Janelle Sallenave, Chief Operating Officer of Chime, I wanted to get into the operational reality of what it actually takes to build a financial institution that millions of people trust with their primary banking relationship — and keep earning that trust as you scale.

Shanmugam set the frame from the first moment she took the stage.

"We spent the last decade building better products, better UX, better value," she said. "But now with AI, there's a deeper question: how do we scale trust? How do we show up in moments that matter?"

Shanmugam knows what happens when that question doesn't get answered correctly.

As a second product hire at Robinhood, she helped build and launch Robinhood Crypto, scaling the platform through some of its most consequential — and controversial — moments.

Now, through Casap, she's building AI agents specifically for disputes and first-party fraud: the part of fintech most companies ignore until it's already costing them members and margin.

That's the lens she brought to the conversation. And it made everything Sallenave said land differently.

Chime posted Q1 2026 results last month: 25% year-over-year revenue growth, 10.2 million active members, and its first GAAP-profitable quarter as a public company. Purchase volume hit $39 billion. Platform revenue surged 50%. MyPay, its earned wage access product, is now generating more than $400 million in annualized revenue.

I share those numbers because they matter as context. But the more interesting question — the one I was asking from the stage — is what produced them.

"Fourteen years ago, the policy was the policy — whether it was you or me or my fraudster friends," Sallenave told the room. "Now, with data and with AI, we can be way more personalized in a way that is scalable and allows us to continue to grow a sustainable business."

That shift — from machetes to scalpels, as she put it — didn't happen because Chime got lucky with a model deployment. It happened because the company spent 14 years building the data infrastructure, the compliance architecture, and the member relationships that make AI actually useful in practice rather than aspirational in a press release.

Chime's AI-driven support system, which they call Jade, now handles more than 70% of all inbound member interactions end-to-end. Not routing. Not triage. Full resolution.

And NPS (net promoter score) went up.

"There is no trade-off between driving efficiency and improving the customer experience," Sallenave said. "You can do both at the same time — if you decide it's not cost first or member experience first, but I want both, and I'm not willing to trade them."

I've heard a version of that claim from a lot of companies. What's different here is that Chime is saying it as a now-public company that just delivered its first profitable quarter, with a member base transacting more than 50 times per month on average.

That's not a vision statement. That's a result.

When Shanmugam turned the conversation toward practical advice for the operators and founders in the room, Sallenave offered a framework I haven't heard articulated this clearly anywhere else.

"The biggest mistake is to start with AI and go looking for a problem," she said. "Start with the most important unmet customer need. Then figure out how to bring the tech to it."

She described it as the intersection of three things:

All three are required. None of them can be shortcut.

The data set matters because personalization without a behavioral signal is just a guess.

Chime's members transact more than 50 times a month on average — a real-time financial picture that most institutions simply don't have access to. That's what allows Chime to underwrite differently, offer earned wage access responsibly, and deploy AI that understands context rather than pattern-matching on surface behavior.

The tech stack matters because good intentions don't scale on bad infrastructure.

Sallenave was direct about this — Chime spent years fully owning its stack, not because it was the fastest path, but because it was the only path to moving at the speed and precision the member experience demanded.

And then there's trust — the one that gets lost in the noise of every AI conversation.

"As AI works its way into every part of our lives, especially financial services, there is a very important trust component," Sallenave said. "I need to be willing to let that guidance help me rebalance my debt or optimize my cash flow. That trust has to be earned before I'm willing to say, 'Please do that for me.'"

Chime just appeared on Newsweek's list of America's most trusted companies — third in the financial services category. That didn't come from a campaign. It came from 14 years of showing up correctly in the moments that matter most — and compounding that record into something that now reads as institutional credibility.

Here's where Shanmugam's perspective sharpens the whole conversation. From her seat, the moments that define member trust aren't product launches or feature drops — they’re disputes. Fraud claims. The experience of something going wrong with your money and needing your institution to respond — fast, fairly, and correctly.

Every fintech talks about the front-end experience. Almost nobody talks honestly about what happens when the system breaks down.

"You want to instantly resolve an issue for an honest person," Shanmugam said. "But you don't want to lose money to the less honest people. Using your data, you can figure out who's who — and how to manage that."

Sallenave didn't soften the complexity of that challenge.

Chime's members are more susceptible to third-party fraud — scams, specifically — than the average banking customer. First-party fraud exists, too, and the line between intentional abuse and genuine confusion is rarely clean.

The same data set that powers Chime's best product decisions is the same one governing its fraud and dispute decisioning.

"That data set bookends the way we think about how we create great experiences," Sallenave said. "Whether that experience is a product feature — or how we handle a dispute, how we handle a customer support moment when the member feels their needs aren't being met — how do we get them back on the happy path?"

Shanmugam has been making this argument for a while — that fraud and disputes aren't back-office problems, they are core infrastructure. The place where trust either holds or breaks at the exact moment it matters most.

Watching the two of them work through it together on stage, I was struck by how much of what gets called an "AI strategy" in fintech is really just an operations story that hasn't been told honestly yet.

I've been covering fintech long enough to have watched the industry cycle through several versions of the same story.

The hot product. The breakout funding round. The narrative that technology alone is sufficient.

What's different about this moment — and what I think Sallenave and Shanmugam were both pointing at from different angles — is that the companies pulling ahead aren't the ones with the most sophisticated models. They're the ones who built the operational foundation that makes those models trustworthy.

There are no shortcuts here. Not to the data. Not to the tech stack. Not to the 14 years of showing up correctly in the moments that matter. Now, they're doing it at a scale and a margin profile that's starting to look a lot less like a challenger and a lot more like an institution.

The 70% automation number is impressive. But the increase in NPS is the real story. Because it means Chime didn't trade trust for efficiency. They used one to build the other.

And in consumer fintech, that's the only kind of growth that lasts.

🎙 Tune into my full interview with Shanthi Shanmugam, CEO and Founder of Casap

We're taking everything we built at New York Fintech Week — the summits, the executive-level community, the intentional programming — and bringing it to the West Coast.

More details are coming soon, but if you want to be in the room, be first to know, or bring your brand to the table — reply to this email or reach out directly.

See you there. 💜

June energy, wedding planning era, still grinding. What's on your playlist right now?

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Thanks for spending time with me today.

Love,

Nicole 💜