Hey, fintech fam 💜

Team Fintech Is Femme has been working out of our NYC HQ this week while everyone was in town for the FEMMY Awards, and it’s been such a joy to have our team together in person.

Fun fact: some of our teammates flew in from Mexico City and Missouri just to be here for the celebration.

And last night’s FEMMYs…

was electric.

Tables sold out. Standing room only.

A room filled with founders, operators, investors, and some of the most iconic women shaping financial services and technology.

I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who showed up to celebrate with us. It’s not lost on me how special it is to have women in that room who helped shape this industry — and who, in many ways, helped shape Fintech Is Femme itself.

And a huge thank you to our incredible co-hosts who made the night possible:

Candidly • Stripe • Springboard Enterprises • Spave • Aprio • Orrick

You helped us build a room that felt truly powerful.

Some of the best moments of the night came from the leaders in the room.

Luan Cox taught us how to “bet on a future you can’t see yet, and build before the market wants it.”

Lule Demissie reminded us of a core truth about leadership: “Where capital flows, power lives… investing in your community is the way to success, both personal and professional.”

Asya Bradley delivered one of the most practical pieces of advice of the night: “Never be the only woman in the room,” and “always be willing to write the first check.”

And Frances Zelazny, our inaugural FEMMY MVP Award winner, reflected on something deeper about this industry: “This community represents something powerful. It is proof that people who want to see you win will help you win.”

And that, truly, is what Fintech Is Femme and the Academy of Fintech has always been about.

One of the biggest moments of the night was awarding Fintech of the Year to Laurel Taylor and the team at Candidly — a growth-stage fintech tackling the $1.7 trillion student debt crisis.

We were also honored to celebrate alongside Kay Koplovitz — the first woman in the U.S. to lead a television network.

She built USA Network, and through Springboard Enterprises has since helped create $76 billion in enterprise value across women-led companies.

Absolute legend status.

During the ceremony, we shared a special sneak peek at the upcoming New York Fintech Week.

We are honored to take the torch for this incredible ecosystem moment alongside our brilliant event co-producers: Drew Glover (Fiat Growth), Frances Zelazny, Angelique Angeles-Strauss (AScaleX)

and co-collaborators: This Week in Fintech and RevTech Labs Foundation.

For the past four years, we’ve invested deeply in New York Fintech Week — from moderating the Titans of New York Fintech panel to hosting masterclasses at Empire Startups to producing our own Leadership Summit, where 500+ of you showed up to build, learn, and connect.

Now we’re taking it to the next level.

Between the FEMMYs, our upcoming Fintech Penthouse series at Fintech Meetup, and our biggest moment of the year — New York Fintech Week — our team is running full speed ahead.

A full FEMMYs recap is coming soon.

But today, I’m still soaking it all in.

And in that spirit, I want to share a story I recently wrote in my Forbes fintech column about two founders building something incredibly important in the next era of fintech.

Let’s get into it ✨

Fresh off the FEMMY Awards and a week celebrating the builders shaping financial services, I found myself thinking about a story I recently reported in my Forbes fintech contributor column.

Kobalt Labs recently raised $12.7 million to automate one of fintech’s least glamorous — and most stubborn — bottlenecks: compliance work that still runs on spreadsheets, screenshots, and humans combing through hundreds of pages of documentation.

And if you zoom out, it’s a signal of where fintech is actually heading as AI agents start showing up across the financial stack.

In just the past few weeks alone, we’ve seen:

• FIS launch agentic commerce tools for banks

• Alinea Invest introduce AI-native financial education

• Startups like Phia building AI agents that influence purchasing decisions before checkout

• And companies like Anthropic pushing deeper into enterprise finance workflows

AI is clearly moving from novelty to infrastructure.

But here’s the constraint most people aren’t talking about yet:

You can’t scale AI agents if your compliance team is still manually reviewing 200-page PDFs.

Kobalt’s focus is something called third-party risk management (TPRM) — the due diligence financial institutions conduct before onboarding vendors, fintech partners, or infrastructure providers.

It’s the work behind the work.

Reviewing contracts.

Security documentation.

Policies.

Disclosures.

Ongoing monitoring requirements.

Every bank that wants to launch embedded finance or partner with fintechs runs into the same reality: the compliance workload multiplies quickly.

“If you want to grow embedded finance safely, you can’t just hire your way through compliance,” said Kalyani Ramadurgam, Kobalt’s co-founder and CEO. “You have to scale with technology.”

That line stuck with me.

Because it reframes compliance from a cost center into something closer to infrastructure.

Kobalt’s platform uses AI to perform the first pass across large volumes of documentation — surfacing issues for human reviewers rather than forcing compliance teams to read every page themselves.

Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Ashi Agrawal said the platform has produced major speed improvements in practice: marketing reviews taking roughly 75% less time and vendor reviews shrinking from hours to minutes in some client workflows, based on internal metrics shared by the company.

But speed is only part of the value.

The other issue Kobalt is trying to solve is consistency.

In many institutions, compliance processes aren’t standardized. People learn how to evaluate vendors or disclosures from their manager, who learned it from theirs. The result is variation across teams and institutions.

Automation, in this case, isn’t just about efficiency.

It’s about making decisions more predictable and repeatable.

And in finance, that matters.

It would be easy to categorize Kobalt as just another regtech startup.

But I actually think it represents something bigger: fintech growing up.

The past decade rewarded fintech companies for building better front ends.

Better UX.

Better onboarding.

Faster payments.

The next decade may reward something different — the companies building trust infrastructure.

Because every new fintech integration increases risk.

A missing disclosure.

A weak vendor control.

A poorly reviewed contract.

These aren’t just operational hiccups. They’re the kinds of issues that trigger regulatory scrutiny and enforcement actions — the kind that can slow a company’s growth for years.

As AI tools move deeper into financial services, that risk only increases.

Agents making decisions about payments, credit, marketing claims, and financial guidance all operate inside regulated environments.

Which means governance becomes the limiting factor.

Ramadurgam’s background explains why she’s focused on this problem.

Before starting Kobalt, she worked at Apple, where part of her role involved preventing individuals on terrorism watchlists from accessing Apple Pay. Agrawal worked at Affirm, and the two met at Stanford before joining forces and going through Y Combinator.

Even inside one of the most sophisticated tech companies in the world, Ramadurgam said compliance processes were still deeply manual.

In a separate Forbes profile tied to her Forbes Under 30 recognition, Ramadurgam described how even at Apple, the compliance process remained analog and document-heavy.

“Organizations were just throwing bodies at the problem,” she said.

That approach doesn’t scale in a world where AI agents are touching more financial decisions.

And that’s why this funding round caught my attention.

We talk a lot about AI agents that can shop for us, invest for us, and manage our financial lives.

But those systems can only move as fast as the compliance infrastructure behind them.

The bottleneck isn’t imagination.

It’s governance.

And the fintech companies that figure out how to scale both at the same time — speed and safety — are the ones that will win the next phase of this industry.

If you want the deeper reporting on Kobalt’s funding, their customers, and what the founders are building, I break it all down in my latest Forbes fintech column.

→ Read the full story here.

Our upcoming member-led event is happening this Friday — an intimate evening hosted by Fintech Is Femme for the women shaping the future of community banking.

Step into an intentional space designed for meaningful connection, elevated conversation, and real community.

This curated gathering is for founders, operators, and leaders in community banking looking to connect with peers and partners beyond the noise.

Location details will be shared upon approval.

FTW: NYC — a three-day, high-impact conference experience convening fintech’s most influential brands and leaders across innovation, leadership, and security in the global capital of financial innovation.

Early bird tickets are going quickly — and so are our Community Bundles, which include access to all three summits plus year-round membership to The Academy of Fintech.

📰 Share this newsletter with a friend and start growing your network.

🔗 Connect with me on LinkedIn for daily insights on leadership.

🤝 Grow your business through content & community by partnering with me.

📣 Promote yourself to 50,000 subscribers by sponsoring this newsletter or the Humans of Fintech podcast.

🎤 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.

That’s all for now! See you on Thursday.

Love,

Nicole 💜