Hey, fintech fam 💜

As we came off International Women’s Day this weekend, I kept thinking about the difference between celebrating women and actually shifting power toward them.

Last week at our second-annual FEMMY Awards, I watched a room full of women in fintech move the conversation beyond representation and into something far more consequential: capital allocation, ownership, and infrastructure. That shift was intentional.

Now, as we head into Fintech Meetup, where the broader ecosystem gathers to shape what’s next, that momentum continues.

Fintech Is Femme will be back at Fintech Meetup with our Fintech Penthouse Series — hosting a breakfast, an evening reception, and live recordings of Humans of Fintech on the show floor. These gatherings are designed for real conversations, real connectivity, and real deal flow. (More details in Thursday newsletter — I hope to see you there).

But first: I wrote a proper column on what actually happened at the FEMMYs — and what it signals for fintech’s next chapter.

Let’s get into it. ✨

By the time the first award was handed out, the room had already made its point.

Champagne glasses caught the stage light. Chairs were filled. Founders, operators, investors, legends, ecosystem builders — some of the most powerful women in fintech gathered inside Silver Lining Lounge in New York City as if this were the most natural thing in the world.

And maybe that was the point.

Not novelty. Not an exception. Not “look, women in finance!” as though competence with capital were a delightful surprise.

Just a room built to hold power — and women arriving ready to use it.

That was the energy at the FEMMY Awards on March 2. 

As the founder of Fintech Is Femme, I was both inside the moment and slightly outside of it — toggling between builder mode and observer mode. One part of my brain scanned logistics. The other tried to understand the emotional architecture unfolding in real time.

What struck me most was this: the FEMMYs did not feel like a celebration of women's inclusion in fintech.

It felt like a gathering of women who had already decided inclusion was too small a goal.

The room wasn’t asking for a seat at the table.

It was comparing notes on who should own the table next.

That distinction matters.

Because in industries adjacent to power, women are still too often expected to make themselves legible before they make themselves heard. Be excellent, but not too loud. Ambitious, but grateful. Visionary, but polished into something digestible.

The women on that stage were done with that performance.

They were there to talk about building. About capital. About conviction. About infrastructure. About checks. About shaping markets before markets have language for what they’re building.

No one was asking permission.

No one was minimizing the stakes.

No one was pretending money wasn’t the point.

Instead, there was a throughline all night: build it, fund it, protect it — and bring more women with you.

That theme crystallized the moment Luan Cox, Founder & CEO of FinMkt, took the stage.

Sheila Lirio Marcelo introduced her with the kind of respect only one category-defining builder can offer another.

Sheila — who built Care.com into a public company and became the first Asian American woman to take a company public — reframed innovation not as speed, but stamina. Not the flashy launch, but the conviction to stand by what you’re building before the market fully understands it.

Luan picked up that thread immediately.

“In my experience,” she said, “innovation looks a lot more like stubbornness.”

That line has stayed with me.

Fintech loves trend cycles. Splashy rounds. Founders who narrate the future in a way that makes the present feel obsolete. But Luan, who has spent more than 25 years building financial infrastructure, told the truth: real innovation looks deeply uncool while it’s happening.

It looks like being told no.

It looks like building something no one wants — yet.

It looks like staying with a problem long enough for the market to catch up.

“Bet on a future you can’t see yet,” she said, thinking of her mother who brought her to the United States from Vietnam at age three and built a life for them without guarantees. “And never, ever quit.”

She spoke about being nationally ranked in tennis, burning out by 17, and learning an early lesson: when a road ends, you build another one.

That’s not just founder advice. That’s women’s history.

She talked about selling life insurance to 21-year-olds in Texas bars. About helping build the systems that brought stock quotes onto the internet when brokerage firms insisted no one would want that access. About starting FinMkt and being told — again — that no one wanted a multi-lender point-of-sale platform.

“Everything I’ve ever built, people said nobody wants this.”

The room laughed because every builder in it had heard some version of that sentence.

Luan’s genius wasn’t just that she persisted. It was that she treated resistance as a signal. If incumbents fight you that hard, there’s probably something worth building on the other side.

By the time she shared FinMkt’s numbers — nine years in business, $15 million raised, 160 employees, profitable — her speech had become a case study in disciplined execution.

“We are forced, as female founders, to be capital efficient,” she said. “We’re already wired to be better.”

Women rarely get to build sloppily. We don’t get handed millions to “find product-market fit” in public. We’re asked for revenue earlier. Proof earlier. Precision earlier.

It’s unjust.

It also produces sharper operators.

You could feel the echo of reality when Lule Demissie took the stage.

Lule, former CEO of eToro U.S., opened with humor and then went straight to the moment we’re living in.

“We live in weird times.”

The room laughed knowingly.

But she wasn’t interested in despair. She was interested in discipline.

“Weird times are when character is forged.”

That line landed because it didn’t comfort anyone. It challenged us. Not to harden into cynicism, but to sharpen into usefulness. To get clearer about who we are and what we’re building.

And then she delivered the thesis of the evening:

“Where capital flows is where power lives.”

There it was.

Not branding.

Power.

Capital decides what scales. What survives. What becomes inevitable.

Which is why when Asya Bradley, fintech founder, investor, LP, and VC Partnership Lead at Stripe, took the stage, the conversation moved from philosophy to tactics.

Asya did not come for polite inspiration.

She came to talk about money.

She told the room to be transactional. She offered to write checks. She told the founders to DM her. She dismantled one of the most tired flexes in corporate culture: the woman who proudly says she’s the only one in the room.

“It is not a flex,” she said. “It is not a flex.”

Then she pushed further.

“If you are in a company for longer than a year and you haven’t managed to bring another woman into the room, you’re the problem.”

It hit like a New York City blizzard.

For years, women have been taught to survive systems individually. To endure. To outperform. To be exceptional enough that exclusion becomes tolerable.

Asya’s point was that survival is too small a goal.

If you made it into the room, change the room.

“Don’t be the only woman in the room for a split second,” she said. “See yourself as the first woman in the room.”

That’s not optics. That’s multiplication.

And multiplication was everywhere that night.

In my opening remarks, I repeated something Asya once told me: women are multipliers by nature. We don’t just build success — we compound it.

Susan Langer, Founder & CEO of Spave, brought that idea into focus in another register. She spoke about generosity as infrastructure. About women in Tanzania repaying microloans at a 99% rate. About the proverb that has become part of our own DNA: little by little, a little becomes a lot.

In an industry obsessed with extraction, she built infrastructure for contribution.

And then came Frances Zelazny’s remarks, read in her absence, which somehow hit even harder.

“This community represents something powerful,” she wrote. “It is proof that people who want to see you win will help you win.”

That line explains the difference between a room and an ecosystem.

A room is one night.

An ecosystem is what happens after.

The intro sent the next morning.

The DM that turns into diligence.

The check written because trust already existed.

The partnership formed because two women skipped pretense.

That is what I’ve been building.

Not just a content brand.

Not just events.

Infrastructure.

That word keeps resurfacing because it’s the right one.

Infrastructure is what makes power durable.

One of the most meaningful moments of the night was awarding Fintech of the Year to Laurel Taylor and the team at Candidly. Laurel looked at a $1.7 trillion student debt crisis and decided incremental reform wasn’t enough. She built rails instead. She raised more than $60 million. Influenced legislation. Built a company reshaping how employers think about financial wellness.

At one point, I quoted her saying, “I’m going to write a thank you letter to the people who doubted the idea.”

More of us should have that energy.

She didn’t wait for policy to catch up.

She built rails.

That language — rails, systems, architecture — kept surfacing throughout the night. It struck me how little anyone was interested in being ornamental.

These women weren’t there to accessorize fintech.

They were there to wire it.

And that may be the most important revelation of the FEMMYs.

The future of women in fintech is not a diversity story.

It is an infrastructure story.

It is about who funds what.

By the end of the evening, the room softened.

Photos were taken. Music returned. Heels eased. Phones came out. But even in the loosened posture of celebration, something else was happening.

Meetings were being set.

Introductions were being made.

Capital was being considered.

Strategies were being compared.

That’s when I understood the night most clearly.

The FEMMYs were about what happens when women who already understand capital decide to coordinate it.

Infrastructure is control.

And control — over capital, over rails, over access — is what determines the future.

The smartest leaders in fintech should be paying attention.

Because this is not a parallel ecosystem forming on the sidelines.

This is leadership recalibrating in real time.

The room wasn’t asking for validation.

It was confidently deciding what comes next.

And that is a much more powerful thing to witness.

FTW: NYC is a three-day, high-impact gathering designed to shape what fintech builds next.

We’re convening the industry’s most influential founders, operators, investors, CISOs, and global brands across three focused summits: innovation, leadership, and security — all under one roof in the global capital of finance.

This isn’t another conference. It’s where strategy gets sharpened, partnerships get forged, and real deal flow happens.

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

And I just confirmed new keynote speakers who are… next level. The kind of leaders who don’t just talk about the future — they move markets.

More to come very soon. 👀

And if you haven’t seen our latest promo video yet, check it out here!

📚 Today’s Read: Candidly’s Early Findings Report on Cait

Laurel Taylor announced this week that Candidly is divesting its College Finance marketplace capabilities and doubling down — fully independent, fully VC-backed, fully focused.

But what caught my attention wasn’t the structural move. It was the data.

That’s a behavioral shift.

This is what AI looks like when it’s domain-specific, mathematically precise, and engineered for trust — not hype. Deterministic infrastructure layered over real distribution. Category-defining energy.

→ See what Cait is making possible in the Early Findings report.

🎬 Today’s Watch: Stripe’s Sophie Sakellariadis is teaching us all about Stablecoins in the latest episode of Humans of Fintech. Watch here.

💫 Today’s Activity: Audit your power.

Ask yourself:

Then make one move this week that compounds.

Little by little, a little becomes a lot.

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

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

Love,

Nicole 💜