Hey, fintech fam 💜

The first major fintech conference of the year — Fintech Meetup — is just weeks away, and Fintech Is Femme is showing up in a big way.

We’re kicking things off by recording Humans of Fintech LIVE from our podcast booth on the show floor. If you’ve ever wanted to join the conversation, this is your moment.

And we’re bringing back the Fintech Penthouse Series at Mandalay Bay with two signature gatherings:

Fintech Penthouse: Women Who Prove Networking Brunch

Networking Breakfast + Live Podcast

Fintech Penthouse: Growing Global Networking Reception

Evening Networking Reception + Live Podcast

If you’re going to be in Vegas, come plug in. RSVP, join us IRL, and let’s build in real life.

Now, let’s get into the news. ✨

#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.

This week, I had an inside look at Brex Mode, the company’s self-described Intelligent Finance Summit in New York. And one thing became clear:

Fintech’s next phase won’t be defined by prettier dashboards or marginally faster workflows.

It will be defined by whether finance becomes intelligent, predictive, and deeply embedded in business operations to the point that it stops feeling like back-office software — and starts functioning like infrastructure.

That was the thesis on stage.

Brex is using this moment — and its pending Capital One acquisition — to reposition itself as more than a corporate card company. And the finance leaders it brought to the stage helped explain why that repositioning matters.

Here are my three biggest takeaways from inside the event. 

Brex Founder and CEO Pedro Franceschi opened the summit by naming the shift directly: finance is entering a new mode.

His argument wasn’t simply that AI is changing manual work, though that was the headline. It was that the software era in finance is giving way to an automation era — and Brex intends to lead that transition.

“The next evolution of Brex is what we’re calling intelligent finance,” Franceschi said.

That’s a meaningful reframe for a company that helped define the modern spend management category.

Brex built its name by bringing corporate cards, expense management, bill pay, and accounting workflows into one platform. But Franceschi’s pitch now is that software alone is no longer the endgame.

In his framing, the old model was software-as-scaffolding: a dashboard where humans still had to do most of the work. The new model is an agent that can actually take on portions of human judgment and execution.

And Brex is not alone in moving this direction.

Across fintech, the race toward agentic finance is accelerating.

In recent months, that shift has surfaced across the money lifecycle: FIS launched agentic commerce tools for banks, Alinea Invest introduced AI agent wealth guidance, shopping startups like Phia began building agents that influence transactions before checkout, and Anthropic pushed deeper into financial services with enterprise tools aimed at wealth and investment workflows.

The live demo drove that home. Brex showed expense assistant, review, and audit agents working together to automate the full T&E process — collecting documentation, flagging policy exceptions, requesting employee clarification, and resolving many cases without human intervention.

The real point wasn’t the receipts. It was the inversion of control.

“What if [the finance team] were in every room, in every financial decision that the company makes?” Franceschi asked.

That line, to me, was the most important one of the day.

Because it gets at something bigger happening across fintech right now: the ambition is no longer just to build software for finance teams to log into. It’s about building systems that sit within the flow of decision-making itself.

That’s also where Capital One’s $5.15 billion acquisition starts to look more strategic.

Franceschi framed the pending transaction — and Capital One’s planned $950 million investment in Brex’s product roadmap over three years — as a way to accelerate product velocity, not change direction. His message was simple: Brex is staying Brex, just with more resources and more speed.

That matters because the real race in fintech right now is increasingly about which platforms can move from workflow tooling to decision infrastructure.

And Brex is betting that AI agents are the bridge.

The broader fintech signal here is that AI-native finance is becoming a category fight.

If Brex succeeds, it won’t just compete with card issuers or expense software vendors. It will compete for ownership of the finance function itself.

That’s a much bigger prize.

If Franceschi offered the founder thesis, Elena Gomez, President and CFO of Toast, brought the operator reality check.

And honestly, it was one of the most useful conversations of the day.

Gomez has spent decades across finance and technology — from Charles Schwab to Visa to Salesforce to Zendesk and now Toast — and her perspective was clear: AI may be changing how work gets done, but it does not change the fundamentals of building a great business.

“We will still be talking about revenue growth and profitability,” she said. “But how we deliver on those business outcomes is going to fundamentally change.”

That’s the distinction many AI conversations still miss.

Gomez didn’t speak about AI as a futurist. She spoke as a CFO: measuring it against productivity, talent leverage, customer experience, and financial outcomes.

Her framework for the modern finance leader included 5 priorities:

That’s not the old CFO playbook.

That’s the profile of a systems architect.

And Gomez made a strong case that finance teams are uniquely positioned for this moment because they already sit at the crossroads of business decisions. They see revenue, cost, customer behavior, vendor risk, and operational bottlenecks in one place.

“The CFO and the finance organization are very much at the center of that transformation,” she said.

What stood out most was how concrete her use cases were.

At Toast, AI is already being applied to restaurant operations through Toast IQ, a conversational system that helps operators ask questions about performance and customer patterns in real time. Internally, AI is helping automate support flows, T&E policy questions, and even contract analysis across thousands of vendors.

The point was not that finance teams are getting replaced.

It was that they are being redeployed.

“We’re growing through technology, and not necessarily through humans,” Gomez said.

That line makes people pause.

Not because AI is replacing finance teams, but because scale may increasingly come from intelligence rather than headcount.

Finance leaders are no longer just the stewards of cost discipline. They are becoming the translators between AI experimentation and enterprise transformation.

That means the leaders in this category-defining shift will be those whose finance leaders can operationalize AI agents to improve workflows, make better decisions, and drive better growth.

The closing fireside came from Sruthi Lanka, CFO of Public.

Lanka — an engineer turned finance leader who described herself as an “accidental CFO” — offered a smart counterpoint to one of the biggest anxieties in tech right now: that AI will flatten product differentiation and make application-layer software easier to disrupt.

Her argument was that fintech may be unusually resilient in this environment.

“Fintech is really having a moment,” she said.

Why? Because, unlike pure software, fintech is still entangled with regulation, money movement, trust, and real-world financial workflows that are simply harder to displace.

That is a critically important point.

For years, people have assumed the biggest tech platforms — like Google or Apple — would dominate financial services. But as Lanka noted, that hasn’t really happened at scale because moving money, managing risk, and operating in regulated environments create moats that don’t disappear just because the models get better.

AI can accelerate product development. It can improve insights. It can generate code and automate analysis. But the actual execution of financial decisions still requires determinism and trust.

“Execution still sits with a person at the end of the day,” she said.

That line paired nicely with one of her most useful distinctions: deterministic vs. probabilistic systems.

In consumer fintech, Lanka said, Public is using AI to translate unstructured customer intent into structured financial actions — turning investment ideas into repeatable logic. But the actual movements of money still need to be deterministic.

In other words: AI can help draft the recipe, but the system still needs rules, checks, and human validation.

That feels like the real opportunity zone for fintech.

Not replacing trust with AI.

Using AI to generate insight faster while preserving trust at the point of action.

Lanka also shared one of the day’s best examples of real-world finance automation: cash transaction categorization and treasury workflows that used to require manual review of thousands of exceptions each month are now down to just a few with AI-assisted natural language processing.

That’s not hype. That’s a real workflow change.

And her bigger point was equally important: fintech companies that already have strong data infrastructure, tight systems, and real regulatory muscle may actually be better positioned for the AI era than many people assume.

Lanka’s comments point to a deeper fintech thesis.

AI may compress some software advantages. But in fintech, where the product touches money, identity, compliance, and customer trust, the moat is not just code.

It’s regulated execution.

That’s why fintech may be entering this next cycle with more durability than many generalist software companies — and why so many finance leaders suddenly sound less defensive about AI and more ambitious about it.

Brex Mode was ostensibly about intelligent finance. But beneath the AI demos and fireside chats, the deeper story was this:

Finance is moving from reactive to predictive.

From workflow software to embedded systems.

From human-only operations to human-supervised agents.

And fintech is right in the middle of that shift.

Pedro Franceschi wants Brex to become the platform that automates finance. Elena Gomez sees finance leaders as the operators best positioned to lead enterprise transformation. Sruthi Lanka argues that fintech’s trust, regulation, and execution layers may make the sector more, not less, defensible in the AI age.

Three very different vantage points.

One clear direction of travel.

The CFO stack is changing fast.

And fintech is no longer just building tools for finance.

It’s building the operating layer for it.

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

Join us for an exclusive networking breakfast hosted by Women Who Prove x Fintech Is Femme, featuring brunch, mimosas, and a special live taping of Humans of Fintech with Mary Ann Miller — Fraud & Cybercrime Executive Advisor and VP of Client Experience at Prove — inside the private Penthouse at Mandalay Bay during Fintech Meetup.

Small businesses power the global economy — and fintech is rewriting how they access capital. Join us at Fintech Meetup for an exclusive evening reception featuring a live Humans of Fintech conversation with Fundbox COO Rina Jariwala on scaling infrastructure for the global SMB economy. Champagne, founders, operators, and the conversations that actually move the industry forward.

See you in New York! More updates, including our agenda, speakers, and partners, are coming soon.

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

Love,

Nicole 💜