Hey, fintech fam 💜

Go Knicks!! Look, I've said it before, I’m not a sports person — but I am a New York person, and this city is absolutely electric right now. I'll take any excuse to celebrate this energy.

Speaking of energy, we are in full build mode over here. FTW: San Francisco is coming September 29 – October 1, and I can feel the momentum building in real time. More on that below.

This week's newsletter is one I'm genuinely proud of. I sat down exclusively with Dhivya Suryadevara, Co-President of Fiserv, fresh off their Investor Day announcement of agentOS — and her take on what AI transformation in banking actually requires is one of the clearest frameworks I've heard all year. That's story one.

Then I've got two new Humans of Fintech episodes that couldn't be more different from each other — one at the intersection of healthcare and fintech, and one that will completely change how you think about regulation as a founder. Both are worth your time.

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.

Dhivya Suryadevara has spent her career in rooms where the stakes were enormous, and the margin for error was slim.

As Chief Financial Officer of General Motors, she oversaw capital allocation decisions for one of the world's largest industrial companies. At Stripe, she expanded her remit well beyond finance — running operations, risk, and global partnerships at one of fintech's most consequential companies. At UnitedHealth, she ran a $20 billion fintech and health tech business as its CEO, in the early days of deploying AI inside one of the most regulated industries on earth.

Six months ago, she became Co-President of Fiserv.

"Starting with finance gives you a lot of grounding on what makes business sense, what the unit economics look like, making sure you have a good capital allocation hack in everything that you do," Suryadevara told me in an interview. "And Stripe was my first proper immersion into Silicon Valley — the pace at which they operate, the product mindset. Bringing that into the next couple of jobs has been really fun."

I've been covering the AI and banking infrastructure story closely enough to know that the person leading this next chapter matters as much as the product being built. And Suryadevara's specific combination — financial rigor, Silicon Valley product velocity, and early-stage AI deployment inside regulated industries — is an unusually precise fit for the moment Fiserv finds itself in.

Because the moment is significant.

At Investor Day in May, Fiserv announced agentOS — an AI operating system built specifically for financial institutions, developed in collaboration with AWS and OpenAI, designed to let banks deploy, manage, and scale AI agents across their operations.

But what I found more interesting than the announcement itself was how Suryadevara describes the thinking underneath it.

"In an AI world, it's not like — if a process is A plus B plus C — you ask how do I optimize A, how do I optimize B, how do I optimize C," she told me. "It's literally: do I even throw B out? Does this process even need to exist?"

That reframing is the real story. Most enterprise software companies approaching AI transformation are doing exactly what she's describing — taking existing workflows and making incremental efficiency gains. Suryadevara is arguing for something more fundamental: that the arrival of AI requires a complete rearchitecture of the process before you even apply the technology.

She used bank implementation as a concrete example. Core banking migrations have historically consumed months of a financial institution's operational capacity — painstaking data mapping, configuration work, and manual validation.

With AI, Suryadevara sees a path to extracting the business logic and ontology from a bank's existing systems, mapping them to a destination platform, and running AB comparisons automatically — collapsing a process that used to require enormous human effort into something that can be done in a fraction of the time.

"You're better off saying: what are my input functions, what is the underlying business logic, what is my output, and how do I completely change that?" she said.

The name agentOS is deliberate. Fiserv isn't positioning this as a single AI product — it's positioning it as the platform through which banks deploy any AI agent, whether built by Fiserv, a third-party fintech, or the institution itself.

At launch, agentOS includes an AI-native marketplace with agents that cover front-office, middle-office, and back-office banking workflows.

Four are already in beta or proof-of-concept: operational intelligence and reporting; commercial loan onboarding — already live with City National; deposit intelligence; and additional front-office applications. Early results include one institution reducing operational report generation time from 10 minutes to seconds.

Nine fintech partners are already signed to the agent marketplace. That open ecosystem approach is, Suryadevara told me, a governing principle — not a marketing decision.

"We want our clients to have choice," she said. "The way we do that is by giving them an opportunity to deploy whatever agents they need in a governed and safe way."

The governance architecture is built from the ground up — not retrofitted. Every action is logged and traceable. Permissions are role-specific. Human-in-the-loop checkpoints are built into the workflow architecture. Suryadevara described a Friday platform review where her team walked through auditability requirements, permissions structures, and escalation protocols in detail.

"You can't do that as an afterthought," she said. "You've got to do that as the building blocks of the first principles."

The response from Fiserv's client base has been strong. Post-Investor Day, the company sent a note to clients explaining the product and inviting expressions of interest. The inbound was significant — and directionally clear about which use cases banks are most eager to deploy first.

"Banks have told us: listen, our job is to provide better service to our customers and our members," Suryadevara said. "If you give us these tools, we can redirect our talent to the things that matter most to clients."

I saved the leadership questions for the end — and Suryadevara's answers were the ones I've been thinking about since.

I asked her how she balances the speed, responsibility, and weight of leading a transformation on this scale. Her answer wasn't about strategy or structure. It was about learning.

"The marginal cost of intelligence is dropping significantly," she said. "People are learning a lot faster. If you've not been exposed to area X, Y, and Z, that doesn't matter anymore. You can open Claude or ChatGPT, pick your LLM of choice, spend a weekend getting deep in a topic, and come out quasi-expert in a domain you were completely unfamiliar with."

She called that slope of accelerated learning one of the most energizing parts of her job. And she was clear that the other is the team.

"Every job I've had, the sum total of what you're able to accomplish is quite literally how good your people are," she said. "I've been fortunate enough in every role to assemble a team that I will take to war in any scenario. The whole is bigger than the sum of its parts."

Six months into one of the most consequential roles in financial technology infrastructure, Suryadevara is building something that she believes will fundamentally change how banks operate — not by optimizing the existing process, but by asking whether the process needed to exist at all.

That's a different kind of question. And it's exactly the right one for this moment.

Why are we still saving paper receipts in 2026 to access our own healthcare money?

That's the question I couldn't shake after sitting down with Danny Friday, Founder and CEO of Sail, for the latest episode of Humans of Fintech — and it's the kind of question that reveals something much bigger than a product problem.

Underneath every healthcare experience is a financial experience. Payments. Reimbursements. Claims. Benefits. Access. And somehow, across all of it, the infrastructure still isn't built for the way people actually live.

Friday is building Sail to fix that — starting with HSA reimbursements, one of the most quietly broken financial workflows in everyday life. But what I found most interesting in our conversation wasn't the product. It was the pattern recognition. The best founders see infrastructure gaps that everyone else has normalized. They don't just build features. They build new operating systems for broken systems.

One moment from the episode I haven't stopped thinking about: Friday became the first guest in Humans of Fintech history to bring me a gift during recording — HSA-eligible lip balm. Which is honestly a perfect encapsulation of the problem he's solving. A category so complicated that even lip balm becomes a fintech conversation.

Healthcare is one of the biggest opportunities for fintech innovation hiding in plain sight. I've wanted to spend more time reporting at this intersection, and this conversation felt like exactly the right place to start.

🎙️ New episode of Humans of Fintech: Building at the Intersection of Healthcare and Fintech with Danny Friday, Founder & CEO of Sail. Listen here.

Most founders hear the word "regulation" and think: slow, expensive, obstacle.

Katy Ryan thinks they're getting it exactly wrong.

Ryan is a Partner at Orrick, one of the leading global law firms for tech companies — but she's also a founder who has built and sold a business herself. That combination of legal expertise and operator experience gives her a perspective on compliance that most lawyers can't offer: she's sat on both sides of the table, and she knows what high-stakes moments actually feel like from the inside.

I sat down with Ryan live at Fintech Meetup for the latest episode of Humans of Fintech, and the conversation shifted something for me.

The founders who build the most durable companies aren't the ones who treat legal as a late-stage checkbox. They're the ones who use regulatory infrastructure as a competitive moat — building early, building correctly, and unlocking the kind of bold product decisions that founders who cut corners simply can't make later.

Ryan calls it issue spotting — the ability to see the small decisions made early that either unlock growth or quietly become the thing that slows everything down at exactly the wrong moment. It's a superpower most founders don't fully understand until they need it.

Her other point that stayed with me: investors are getting significantly more sophisticated about compliance. Which means the way companies have to build — and what they have to prove before a term sheet — is changing faster than most founders realize.

This is one of those conversations that sounds like it's about legal strategy but is really about how to build something that lasts.

🎙️ New episode of Humans of Fintech: Regulation as a Growth Lever with Katy Ryan, Partner at Orrick. Listen here.

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_{Trade responsibly.}

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

After the energy of FTW: NYC, we're officially headed west.

FTW: San Francisco is coming September 29 – October 1 — and we are deep in it. The most iconic names in fintech are already locking in as core partners, and inventory is moving faster than I expected.

If NYC showed us anything, it's that this industry is craving real community again. Not panels and pitch stages — actual conversations between the operators, builders, banks, fintechs, and infrastructure leaders who are deciding what comes next. That's what we're building in San Francisco.

If you want to be in the room — or bring your brand into it — now is the time. Early-bird passes are live, and partner inventory won't last long.

Nothing like three powerhouse groups reminding us that the best response to your haters is becoming undeniable. Own it.

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

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📣 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 💜