IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

Hey, fintech fam 💜

Chime and Candidly have both been in the news for the last few weeks for pretty exciting reasons.

Chime launched Chime Invest (wait till you read the stat about American investors that tells you why), and Candidly is taking the AI conversation by storm with brand-new feature releases that all fintechs need to catch up on.

This news is why I’m excited to announce that both Chime and Candidly are sponsors of FTW: SF happening this fall!

And taking the stage are Chime’s COO, Janelle Sallenave, and Candidly’s CEO, Laurel Taylor.

They also both spoke at FTW: NYC, and if you were there, you remember just how many insights they shared on stage. Expect even more in SF 🤑

FTW aside, this news (and the third story we’ll get into after) matters for the work you’re doing today.

Let's get into it. ✨

The financial services industry is deep in the agentic AI era. But the operators building the next generation of financial infrastructure know something the headlines are missing: AI agents need more than capability. They need accountability. And that accountability layer is blockchain.

Alumni Ventures is one of the most active venture capital firms in the country — and one of the few democratizing access to startup investing for accredited investors.

Through its Blockchain Fund and Women's Fund, Alumni Ventures backs frontier technology companies at the intersection of decentralized infrastructure, AI, and digital finance — including early investments in Bluesky and cross-border payment infrastructure reshaping how money moves globally.

Here's what most people don't know: you don't need to be a Silicon Valley insider to invest alongside institutional-grade venture deals. Alumni Ventures' syndicate groups give you a front-row seat to real deals — the memos, the analysis, the founder conversations — so you can see exactly how the best investors evaluate opportunities. Join to learn. Stay to invest. Work alongside partners like Sophia Zhao.

Over 850,000 community members. 11,000 active investors. A portfolio of more than 1,500 companies. And a community of forward-thinking builders and backers who believe the next generation of financial infrastructure is being built right now — and that the best time to be in the room is before everyone else realizes the room exists.

If you want to back the founders building the future of blockchain and AI — this is your community.

Not an offer to sell, or solicitation of an offer to purchase, any security. Venture capital investing involves substantial risk, including risk of loss of all capital invested.

#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, Chime launched Chime Invest, bringing commission-free stock and ETF trading, plus expert-managed portfolios, built directly into the existing Chime app, with a $1 minimum to start.

The feature is simple by design. But what it represents is anything but.

About 40% of Americans report owning no stock at all. The average Chime member interacts with the app 5x a day and makes over 50 transactions a month, according to the company. Now, the banking app’s 9.5 million active members — the ones who are already showing up, already trusting Chime with their paycheck, and have never had a real on-ramp to building wealth are unlocking the natural next step to financial progress.

Let me take you back to FTW: NYC in April.

Chime Chief Operating Officer Janelle Sallenave was on our mainstage at the Leadership Summit, and the conversation that day was about what it actually takes to scale trust in the agentic AI era — not just scale a product. She was unambiguous about Chime's approach.

"There is no trade-off between driving efficiency and improving the customer experience," she told the room. "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."

That philosophy didn't start with a product launch. It started 14 years ago, with a company that decided to build its entire business around the financial progress of everyday Americans — and then put in the time, the infrastructure, and the compounding member relationships to earn the right to say so.

Chime spent over a decade building the data infrastructure, the owned tech stack, and the member trust that make a product like Chime Invest useful rather than aspirational.

Jade, its AI support system, was already resolving more than 70% of inbound member interactions end-to-end — and NPS was climbing alongside that number. Chime recently appeared on Newsweek's list of America's most trusted companies, ranking third in financial services. That didn't come from a campaign. It came from showing up correctly in the moments that matter most, and compounding that record into something that now reads as institutional credibility.

Chime Invest is what you can build when that foundation is already in place.

In Chime's own member survey, the barriers to investing weren't disinterest.

They were time, competing financial priorities, and the cost of advice.

So the response is:

This is also, notably, a customer relationship deepening play of the highest order. Chime didn't need to acquire new customers to launch an investment product. It needed to deepen what already existed with 9.5 million active members who trust it with their primary banking relationship.

Every member who moves from banking to investing inside the Chime app is expanding their financial life within a single ecosystem — which is exactly where Chime wants them. Chime didn’t go looking for a problem that didn’t exist; they solved one their members already had and told them about.

Sallenave articulated why that trust layer matters so much before any of this is possible.

"As AI works its way into every part of our lives, especially financial services, there is a very important trust component," she 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 earned it. Now it's putting it to work.

Chime Invest might not be riddled with AI-native language and features. It isn't trying to be. It's solving a problem its members already had and already told them about — which is, as Sallenave said on our stage, the only way to build.

"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."

That's exactly what Chime Invest is. A product built on 14 years of data, trust, and member obsession — not on a feature roadmap that started with technology and went looking for a use case.

Chime Invest is the clearest example yet of what it looks like when a fintech company scales trust before product — and then monetizes that trust by deepening the relationship rather than expanding the customer base.

That's not just a product launch. That's a wealth-building infrastructure play for the Americans who have been waiting for one.

At the end of the day, stories like Chime Invest remind us that sometimes all your customers want are the basics with a platform they trust.

Candidly released six new guidance capabilities this month inside its Intelligence Center platform:

Each one is built from the same five components: curated knowledge bases, deterministic skills and tools, permissioned data, actions that complete a step like a contribution change, and inline visuals, and each is deployable independently through Candidly's MCP gateway and API.

Founder and CEO, Laurel Taylor, has been building toward this since 2016, when she left Google to focus on student debt.

This decision was rooted in her own experience missing two decades of compound interest while repaying loans.

Candidly's model has always been B2B2C, embedded into the infrastructure of work rather than sold as a standalone app.

And the six newly released capabilities extend that same logic across a much wider span of a person's financial life: a 22-year-old choosing a 401(k) match strategy, a 35-year-old modeling equity compensation, a parent opening a new account for a child, a retiree working through decumulation.

"These six capabilities unlock what we've always believed is possible," Taylor said.

"Enabling the industry to meet every participant and investor where they are, with holistic, N=1 personalized guidance that harmonizes across both sides of the balance sheet."

Candidly's guidance is computed against a person's actual payroll, balances, and benefits elections rather than a generic profile or an averaged recommendation.

Financial guidance has historically been delivered in silos, one tool for student debt, another for retirement, another for budgeting, each built without visibility into the others.

Candidly's bet is that a person's 401(k) decision, their equity comp decision, and their kid's new investment account are not separate financial events but one continuous picture, and that guidance calculated without that full picture misses the actual math of a person's life.

This story is a guest article by Frances Zelazny.

For years, fraud prevention in financial services has focused on stopping bad actors at individual moments in time.

Can we trust this login? Should we approve this payment? Is this account opening legitimate?

Today's fraud economy is a sophisticated commercial ecosystem.

Credentials are bought and sold, synthetic identities are manufactured, AI generates convincing voices and faces on demand.

Fraud-as-a-service platforms allow criminals with little technical expertise to launch sophisticated attacks.

To better understand how practitioners are thinking about this challenge, we surveyed attendees ahead of a recent industry discussion on the dark web and the underground fraud economy.

The results were telling.

When asked which underground activity presents the greatest risk to organizations today, respondents overwhelmingly selected AI-powered impersonation, accounting for 33% of responses.

It outpaced synthetic identity creation (14%), fraud-as-a-service marketplaces (12%), large-scale identity aggregation (12%), and the sale of breached credentials (12%).

The conversation is no longer just about stolen data.

It is about what criminals can do with that data once AI allows them to create convincing voices, faces, conversations, and identities at scale.

For fintechs that rely on digital onboarding and remote authentication, this dramatically raises the stakes.

Fraud prevention is no longer just about detecting suspicious transactions, but understanding identities over time.

The organizations that will win won't necessarily have the most fraud data.

They will have the best ability to correlate signals across onboarding, authentication, payments, devices, breached credentials, behavioral patterns, and external intelligence to determine whether an identity actually makes sense.

For fintechs, this is about more than stopping fraud.

It's about preserving the seamless customer experiences that differentiate them in the market without creating exploitable gaps for increasingly sophisticated adversaries.

The fraud economy has evolved into an industry.

Fintech defenses now need to do the same.

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

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

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

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

📣 Promote yourself to 50,000 subscribers by sponsoring this newsletter.

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

See you Tuesday!

Love,

Nicole 💜