Hey, fintech fam! 💜

This week I somehow ended up in one of those extremely online LinkedIn threads where someone jokingly suggested I should start writing Sex and the City-style columns… but for fintech.

And honestly?

If Carrie Bradshaw were a 2025 fintech columnist, she’d probably be staring at her laptop typing:

“I couldn’t help but wonder… is financial inclusion the new Manolo?”

Because at this point?

Give me a stable balance sheet over Mr. Big any day.

But the joke stuck with me — because this week had that same chaotic, cultural, capitalism-meets-existential-crisis energy that defined Carrie’s New York era… just with more AI, fewer cosmos.

So grab your wine, your espresso (if you’re reading this before noon), or your existential dread about GenAI — whatever fuels you — because today’s newsletter is stacked.

Let’s get into it. 💜

#TRENDING

#1 Is the AI Bubble About to Pop? And What It Means for Fintech

On Tuesday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised a stark warning on Capitol Hill:

AI isn’t just a technological risk — it’s becoming an economic one.

During a congressional hearing on AI’s psychological and financial dangers, she pointed to something the fintech sector has quietly understood for months: the AI boom is being propped up by sky-high expectations and almost no proven profits.

And that tension is starting to crack.

The Macro Picture: Concentrated Growth, Fragile Foundations

“So the entire U.S. economy growth can be tracked down to seven companies and their AI growth,” AOC said. “40% of U.S. stock market gains this year came from seven AI-heavy tech giants.”

She called this a massive economic bubble that, depending on its exposure, could trigger 2008-style threats to economic stability.

“And that pressure is reflected in the extreme lengths that these companies are going to allow unethical human interactions with these chatbots,” she added. 

And according to the Wall Street Journal, fears of an “AI bubble” contributed to this week’s stock pullback.

Meanwhile, AI leaders — from OpenAI to consumer platforms — still haven’t proven sustainable profitability. And the pressure to monetize is pushing companies into increasingly risky use cases: emotional companionship, unregulated “AI therapy,” and data-mining of deeply personal information that’s not protected under HIPAA.

That’s the macro layer.

But the cracks are even more visible inside fintech.

The Fintech Reality Check: The Bubble Is Already Leaking

Daniel Bedford, Senior Research Analyst at Juniper Research, cited these main data points to look at:

• 42% of companies have already scrapped most of their AI projects (up from 17% last year).

• 70–85% of GenAI deployments miss ROI expectations.

• Only 47% are turning a profit — while 14% are losing money.

Fintech’s AI hype cycle — which promises automated underwriting, AI-powered customer service, and hyper-personalization — is hitting operational walls:

• Poor training data
  

• Bias and compliance risks
  

• Unclear business cases
  

• Integration hell with legacy infrastructure
  

• Mounting customer frustration

The headline example Bedford pointed to?

Klarna’s “AI First” Pivot: A Case Study in Overcorrection

Klarna replaced much of its customer support, partnering with OpenAI to automate marketing and customer service jobs — only to encounter the same pitfalls plaguing AI chat systems across fintech:

• robotic answers
  

• inaccurate information
  

• circular conversations
  

• no empathy
  

• messy escalation to human agents

CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski later admitted that prioritizing efficiency over experience backfired.

As Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg, “cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this, what you end up having is lower quality.”

It’s the clearest reminder yet:

Fintech doesn’t sell information. It sells trust and experiences. And trust requires humans.

The Counterpoint: Nvidia Just Declared “Not So Fast”

While fears of an AI bubble spread, Nvidia’s earnings this week, which I read about in today’s Morning Brew newsletter, are soothing some concerns:

• $57B in Q3 revenue, smashing analyst expectations
  

• $51.2B in data center sales
  

• “Next-gen chips are sold out,” per CEO Jensen Huang
  

• Q4 guidance: $65B

The takeaway:

AI demand is real — but concentrated.

Since October 2022, the S&P 500’s record highs have been carried almost entirely by the Magnificent Seven, which are responsible for 75% of the index’s total gains.

And within that tiny circle, the dependency gets even tighter: Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta alone make up more than 40% of Nvidia’s sales.

Layer on the circular capital loops — OpenAI relying on Microsoft’s cloud, Microsoft relying on Nvidia’s chips, Nvidia investing back into CoreWeave, Oracle buying GPUs to support OpenAI workloads — and you get an ecosystem where the same dollars bounce between the same companies.

That’s not diversification.

That’s concentration risk dressed up as innovation.

And concentration is exactly how bubbles form.

When the market leans on:

• a handful of chipmakers,

• a handful of cloud providers,

• a handful of model companies,

• all transacting with and propping each other up…

We don’t get resilience.

We get fragility disguised as growth.

So… Is This a Bubble? And What Does It Mean for Fintech?

Here’s what you won’t hear on earnings calls:

Fintech is the canary in the AI coal mine.

Because fintech faces the most stringent constraints — compliance, accuracy, privacy, regulation, trust — it feels the pressure of hype cycles sooner than other industries.

And right now, fintech is quietly signaling three things:

1. The AI Bubble Won’t “Pop”… but It Will Correct Hard

Fintechs are already:

• reducing spend

• killing underperforming GenAI pilots

• pivoting from “AI-first” to “AI-when-it-makes-sense”

• investing in fraud/ops AI over flashy consumer features

This is not a collapse.

This is discipline.

2. The Winners Will Be Hybrid — Not AI-Only

Klarna learned it.

Banks know it.

Consumers are demanding it.

The next phase of fintech AI is augmented financial services — not automated ones.

AI handles:

• routing

• classification

• predictions

• fraud patterns

• operations

Humans handle:

• exception cases

• empathy

• trust

• context

• resolution

This is where fintech actually shines.

3. Trust Will Become the New Differentiator

As the hype deflates, one moat remains:

Fintechs that can deploy AI without compromising trust will dominate.

That means:

• transparent models

• explainability

• provable fairness

• human-backed systems

• customer-first escalation

• clear value creation

• responsible data practices

This is why the industry’s most successful AI products today are… not sexy.

They’re in:

• fraud

• compliance

• KYC/KYB

• AML

• credit risk

• ops automation

Because in fintech, safety is innovation.

Why It Matters 

Fintech is entering a new era — beyond AI hype and into AI accountability.

You don’t need thousands of models.

You need the right one, deployed responsibly, in the right use case.

And here’s the truth I want leaders to absorb:

Fintech will not be defined by who uses more AI — but by who uses AI with more discipline, transparency, and trust.

The bubble won’t burst catastrophically, it seems. 

But it will demand a correction.

And the fintechs who survive it?

They’ll build human-centered systems that scale — because they scale trust.

#2 Women Are Behind Nearly 1 in 2 New Businesses — Here’s What That Means for Fintech

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you know I’m obsessed with one question: Who is actually building the future of our economy?

According to Gusto’s 2025 New Business Formation Report, women started 49% of all new businesses in 2024 — up from 29% in 2019.

That’s a 69% surge in five years.

This isn’t a trend. It’s a re-architecture of entrepreneurship itself.

A New Entrepreneurial Majority — and It’s More Diverse Than Ever

Gusto’s data shows that this wave isn’t just bigger — it’s younger, more diverse, and more intentional:

• Black and AAPI women were more likely to start a business than men in their communities.
  

• Millennial and Gen Z women drove the majority of new entrepreneurship among younger founders.
  

• In sectors like community care, health, retail, and personal services, women make up 58–68% of new founders.

This is the kind of demographic shift that permanently rewrites how capital flows, how services are built, and who fintech should be designing for.

Because when nearly half of new businesses are women-led, the customer profile of business finance as “default male” fundamentally changes.

Why Women Are Starting — Autonomy Over Everything

Gusto found that 73% of women founders started a business to control their schedule, and 62% wanted to be their own boss.

This isn’t “side hustle culture.”

It’s a structural rejection of workplaces not designed for them — and a move toward economic sovereignty.

Flexibility + autonomy + financial stability = the new entrepreneurial formula.

And that shift has real implications for fintech categories like:

• SMB banking

• Vertical SaaS

• Payroll & HR

• Financing

• Insurance

• Creator economy infrastructure

If founders want flexibility and control, fintech must deliver it.

The Capital Gap: Women Are Funding Businesses With Debt, Not Equity

This was one of the most sobering insights from Gusto’s report:

• Women were significantly more likely to rely on personal loans or friends and family
  

• Only 30% of businesses using private capital were women-owned
  

• Women were 75% less likely than men to receive equity financing
  

• And only 42% of SBA-backed loans (which protect personal assets) went to women

Translation:

Women are building half of new businesses — while taking on more personal financial risk to do it.

This is where fintech has an enormous opportunity (and responsibility):

Build underwriting models that don’t punish nontraditional credit profiles.

Expand access to government-backed lending.

Make alternative financing safer and more transparent.

Support entrepreneurs who weren’t born into networks of capital.

Why It Matters

Women entrepreneurs are no longer a “segment.”

They are the market.

And yet, they’re navigating:

• higher capital barriers

• increased personal risk

• discrimination in underwriting

• outdated financial products

• and an ecosystem still optimized for male-led business creation

If your fintech company doesn’t build for this new entrepreneurial majority, your competitor will.

Women founders represent:

• the next wave of SMB banking demand

• the fastest-growing pool of loan applicants

• the highest adopters of AI-enabled tools

• and the most intentional users of fintech infrastructure

Fintech that wins 2026 and beyond will meet women where they already are — building the economy from the ground up.

#3 Exclusive from the Fintech Is Femme AI Summit: Inside the $1.8 Trillion Crisis Laurel Taylor Is Actually Solving

In this special live episode recorded at our Fintech Is Femme AI Summit in San Francisco, we took on one of the most urgent—and deeply personal—financial challenges in America: student debt, and what it really takes to build infrastructure that unlocks wealth rather than suffocates it.

Co-hosted by me and Drew Glover, this conversation features Laurel Taylor, Founder & CEO of Candidly—a leader who isn’t just talking about reform, but rebuilding the financial plumbing that touches more than $1.8 trillion in student loans.

Laurel has raised $60M+, partnered with institutions like Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Empower, Lincoln Financial Group, PNC, Schwab, and Vanguard, and is reshaping the way employers and financial institutions support the 99%.

Fresh off speaking at the World Economic Forum’s roundtable at the London Stock Exchange, Laurel breaks down:

• How to embed AI inside the most risk-averse incumbents in the world

• Why Candidly built a deterministic AI engine that regulators can actually trust

• How the new Candidly Intelligence Center will serve mass-market workers at scale

• Why “margin drives the mission” is the only way venture-backable impact survives

• The real story behind her own student debt—and her mom’s—that fuels the mission

• Why employers using Candidly are seeing turnover drop by up to 76%

This is an episode for anyone building fintech that aims to improve financial wellness, pushing AI into highly regulated environments, or proving (finally) that purpose-built inclusion can scale with venture returns.

Get Laurel’s playbook by tuning into the whole episode.

_{MARK YOUR CALENDARS}

Join us every Thursday to stay up to date on our fintech events! We are working on our next event, but until then…

[COMMUNITY] THE ACADEMY OF FINTECH 

We’re closing out the year in full build mode — mapping new events, new series, new collabs, and a 2026 strategy that feels bigger, bolder, and more aligned than anything we’ve done before.

At the center of all of it?

Our private membership community: The Academy of Fintech.

When I launched the Academy last year, it wasn’t just another “program.” It was a bet — on you, on this industry, and on what happens when ambitious people have real access, real accountability, and a circle that actually shows up for them.

The Academy is where that happens.

It’s where we get to roll up our sleeves together and turn ideas into traction.

And as we head into 2026 with a renewed vision (and a few lessons learned), I’m opening the doors again for a new cohort — the builders, leaders, and creators who want to scale with intention.

Here’s what you’ll get when you join us:

✨ Two live virtual sessions every month — strategy, storytelling, brand, and the behind-the-scenes of scaling in fintech

✨ Members-only pricing for all Fintech Is Femme summits and events

✨ Direct access to me and my team for guidance and support

✨ A curated community of women and allies who want you to win — loudly, consistently, and with receipts

Our first private event of 2026 kicks off in February, and trust me… you’ll want to be in that room.

More details soon — but for now…

_FINTUNES

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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.

⭐️ P.S. If you’ve read Fintech Feminists (or listened to the audiobook!), I’d be so grateful if you could take 30 seconds to leave a review or rating on Amazon here. Your support means the world to me. A million thanks in advance!

That wraps up today’s edition—thanks for reading!

Until next week, keep innovating and challenging the status quo. See you Tuesday!

Love,

Nicole 💜