Hey, fintech fam 💜

The energy this week feels very back in action.

So much is happening in New York right now — the Knicks are in the finals (not a sports gal, but I know what this means to a city), and can we talk about how fun it's been seeing our FTW: NYC venue all over people's screens? That one never gets old.

It's sunny, the vibes are high, and somehow I'm simultaneously very present in New York and completely in my head about San Francisco.

Because that's where we're building next.

FTW: San Francisco — September 29 to October 1 — is being built in public, right before your eyes, and you're going to keep hearing from me on the speakers, the content, the partners, and everything we're putting together for what I genuinely believe is going to be our best event yet.

But first, today's newsletter has three things I'm excited about: one news story, a brand new Humans of Fintech episode that's been a long time coming, and a special guest post from one of our FTW: SF co-producers making a case I think every fintech leader needs to hear.

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.

The CFOs overseeing some of the most consequential capital decisions in tech history right now have something in common. Susan Li at Meta. Amy Hood at Microsoft. Anat Ashkenazi at Alphabet. Sarah Friar at OpenAI. Colette Kress at Nvidia.

They're collectively directing hundreds of billions in AI infrastructure spending — and they're all women.

It's a remarkable data point I first saw reported in Fortune — and honestly, not that surprising if you've been paying attention. Women have been quietly running some of the most complex financial operations in tech for years. What's new is the scale. And what's more interesting is what the role itself is becoming.

Because the deeper story here isn't just who holds the CFO title. It's what the title is becoming — and why fintech has been living this transformation for longer than most people realize.

Sarah Friar put it plainly in Fortune's Most Powerful Women feature this week: "The role today is far more than managing numbers. It's about building companies through complexity and change."

I've heard versions of that line twice this year — from two of the most interesting finance leaders in fintech — and both times it landed as something more than a talking point.

When I sat down with Erica Dorfman, CFO of Brex, at our Leadership Summit during New York Fintech Week, she described the modern CFO in terms that had nothing to do with accounting.

"A successful CFO to me is a really good allocator of capital and investor," she told me. "You need to understand the products, the industry, and how we work as a successful organization."

Dorfman's remit at Brex is unusually wide — FP&A, corporate finance, procurement, accounting, data, business systems, and payment operations all report to her. That breadth isn't accidental. It reflects a belief that finance only works when it's embedded in the business, not when it sits alongside it.

Earlier this year, I covered Sruthi Lanka, CFO of Public, at Brex Mode, and her framing went even further. Lanka, an engineer-turned-accidental CFO, made the case that fintech CFOs may actually be the most important operators in the AI transition right now.

Not because they control the budget — though they do — but because they sit at the exact intersection where AI capability meets the need for deterministic execution.

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

That line is the connective tissue between everything I've been reporting.

Here's the thesis Lanka was building toward — and the one I think the broader Fortune story is circling without quite naming:

AI can accelerate product development, generate insight faster, and automate workflows that used to require armies of analysts. But in fintech — where the product touches money, identity, compliance, and customer trust — there is a layer underneath all of that intelligence that still needs to be deterministic. Rules-based. Auditable. Accountable.

And the CFO is increasingly the person responsible for governing that layer.

Lanka described it as the difference between probabilistic and deterministic systems. At Public, AI is being used to translate unstructured customer intent into structured financial actions — turning investment ideas into repeatable logic. But the actual movement of money still needs rules, checks, and human validation.

Dorfman described the same dynamic from an operational angle. At Brex, agentic workflows now handle the back-and-forth of transaction reconciliation, flag exceptions, and surface only the decisions that genuinely require human judgment. Her accounting team's month-end close has gone from eight days to a path toward three. But the CFO's job didn't shrink. It shifted — from managing process to governing outcomes.

"It doesn't mean you don't have to have people on the finance team," Dorfman said. "It means you get to audit 100% of transactions instead of some small sample."

That's not a cost-cutting story. It's a quality-of-work story. And it's one of the biggest AI companies in the world that is now catching up to — because they're deploying capital at a scale that demands exactly this kind of disciplined governance.

The Fortune piece frames this as an AI industry story. And it is. But fintech has been living this transition for longer — and under harder conditions.

Fintech CFOs didn't get to build clean systems from scratch. They built on top of regulatory complexity, partner-bank dependencies, fraud risk, and consumer-trust requirements that don't flex.

They learned early that you can't separate financial strategy from operational execution — because in fintech, a bad decision at the operational layer is a compliance event, a customer trust problem, and a P&L hit all at once.

Lanka made this point directly: 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 generalist software companies assume. The moat isn't just code. It's a regulated execution.

That's the CFO's domain. And it's becoming the most strategically important domain in the company.

This isn't primarily a story about who holds the CFO title. It's a story about what the CFO role is becoming — and why the organizations that figured that out earliest will have a structural advantage as AI reshapes every layer of how businesses operate.

Fintech figured it out early. Not by design necessarily — but because the complexity of the environment demanded it.

Dorfman closed a multi-billion dollar acquisition in 40 days because her house was clean. Lanka is using AI to compress manual treasury workflows from thousands of exceptions to a handful. The finance chiefs at Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI are now making the same kinds of decisions — at a different scale, with different stakes, but with the same underlying logic.

The CFO stack is changing. And the leaders who understand that finance is no longer about keeping score — but about governing the systems that decide where capital flows, how risk is managed, and whether AI can be trusted at the point of action — are the ones shaping what comes next.

Fintech has been building that leader for a decade.

The rest of the world is just catching up.

If you've been following my reporting this year, you've heard Stephanie Ferris's name more than once.

I covered the $24 billion Worldpay deal — and the conviction it took to close a transaction of that size in a volatile market. I reported live from FIS Emerald on the Anthropic partnership and what it signals about who actually controls the AI governance layer in banking. I've argued in this newsletter that FIS isn't trying to become an AI model company — it's positioning itself as the control layer between frontier AI and the financial system.

Every time I've spoken with Ferris, she's been precise about the strategy. Focused. Unambiguous about where FIS is going.

But this interview — recorded live at FIS Emerald in Orlando for a special edition of Humans of Fintech — is the most complete version of that story yet.

We went deeper than any previous conversation.

On what it actually means to be the infrastructure layer for agentic AI in banking.

On why FIS partnered with Anthropic specifically — and what the Financial Crimes AI agent already deployed at BMO and Amalgamated Bank tells us about where enterprise AI is actually maturing inside regulated institutions.

On the $13.5 billion acquisition of Global Payments' Issuer Solutions business and how it fits into a larger strategic thesis about focus, scale, and what it takes to win the next decade in fintech infrastructure.

And on leadership — what it means to make decisions of this magnitude under pressure, in volatile markets, with 50,000 people and the global financial system watching.

Ferris has a line I keep coming back to: "If you're not making a decision where you feel nervous or uncomfortable, you're probably not playing the game hard enough."

That's the energy of this interview. And I think it's one of the most important conversations I've had this year.

This is a special edition of Humans of Fintech — Emerald 360°, powered by FIS — and it's live now.

🎙 Listen to the full episode here.

One of the things I've been intentional about as Fintech Is Femme grows is making sure this newsletter reflects not just my voice — but the voices of the leaders I'm actually building with.

Frances Zelazny is one of those people.

As the co-producer of the Fintech Security Summit — our next one coming October 1 in San Francisco as part of FTW: SF — Frances brings a depth of expertise in identity, trust, and fraud infrastructure that I deeply respect. She thinks about these problems differently than most people in the industry, and that perspective shows up in everything she builds and writes.

Starting today, you'll occasionally see guest contributions from leaders like Frances in this newsletter. These are people I trust, people I'm in the trenches with, and people whose thinking I believe our community deserves direct access to.

This week, Frances makes a case I think every fintech leader needs to hear — that fraud prevention isn't just a cost center. It might be one of your most underleveraged growth strategies.

And if you've been following my reporting, you know this isn't a new thread. I've been covering the fraud and disputes infrastructure story closely — from my conversation with Casap's Shanthi Shanmugam and Chime's Janelle Sallenave at our Leadership Summit, to the broader AI in banking buildout happening at FIS, Fiserv, and beyond. Frances takes that thread and pulls it somewhere important.

Over to you, Frances. 💜

By Frances Zelazny, Co-Producer, Fintech Security Summit | Identity Strategist

For years, fraud teams have been measured by what they stop: account takeovers prevented, losses avoided, suspicious activity blocked. The implicit assumption is that fraud prevention is a defensive discipline, a cost center whose job is to minimize harm.

But what if that framing is costing financial institutions more than the fraud itself?

A recent survey of fraud and identity practitioners put some numbers to what many in the industry already sense. Nearly two-thirds of respondents said fraud is viewed primarily as a risk mitigation function inside their organizations.

Only 15% described it as a strategic driver of growth. And yet, when asked what they're actually optimizing for, nearly three-quarters said they're trying to balance fraud prevention, customer experience, and growth simultaneously. Only a small minority are focused on loss reduction alone.

The most effective fraud programs aren't just protecting organizations. They're helping them grow. And the distinction matters more than most executives realize.

Think about what fraud prevention actually touches: every new account opening, every login, every transaction, every moment a customer decides whether to trust a digital channel with their money.

Fraud teams sit at the intersection of risk and customer experience, which means they're also sitting on one of the most underleveraged strategic assets in financial services. The harder question isn't how to stop fraud. It's how to build a stack that says yes to more good customers, reduces unnecessary friction, accelerates onboarding, and supports growth while managing risk.

So what's standing in the way? The same survey asked practitioners to identify the biggest barriers to making fraud a growth driver. Lack of real-time decisioning capabilities topped the list, followed closely by siloed teams, inflexible or legacy technology, and misaligned KPIs and incentives.

When asked to rate their confidence in their current decisioning stack's ability to scale with the business, the most common answer was a 3 out of 5. Not failing, but nowhere near ready.

The operational framework for improvement isn't complicated: align with business stakeholders, build flexible technology, integrate meaningful signals, create adaptive policies, and measure outcomes in terms of business value, not just loss avoidance.

The challenge is cultural and organizational, not technical. And yet even institutions that have embraced this mindset shift are hitting a wall; not a strategy wall, but a data wall.

Across the industry, organizations have invested heavily in fraud and identity technologies and continue to struggle with accessing, organizing, and operationalizing the data needed to make those investments pay off.

Data ownership disputes, inconsistent taxonomies, governance requirements, integration complexity: these aren't edge cases. They're the norm. Fraud outcomes that should be feeding back into decisioning platforms sit siloed. Sophisticated tools run on incomplete inputs. Teams make consequential decisions with fragmented visibility.

This is where orchestration platforms become critical infrastructure. Alloy, for example, is purpose-built to aggregate data across identity, fraud, and compliance workflows,  pulling signals from disparate sources into a unified decisioning layer.

Rather than forcing teams to manually reconcile outputs from multiple vendors, platforms like Alloy create the connective tissue that lets fraud programs actually function as integrated systems. The technology to solve the data problem largely exists. The gap is in recognizing it as a strategic priority, not an IT backlog item.

The uncomfortable truth is that fraud technology has outpaced fraud data infrastructure. Competitive advantage increasingly depends not on which vendor you've selected, but on whether you've built the cohesive data foundation that lets your tools and your people actually work.

Fraud prevention may begin with stopping bad actors. Its greatest value lies in enabling good customers to engage with confidence. The organizations that internalize that distinction, and build their data infrastructure accordingly, will be best positioned for growth in the years ahead.

Frances Zelazny is an identity strategist, fintech operator, and the independent authority on identity and security at FTW: SF. As co-producer of the Fintech Security Summit, she brings together compliance leaders, security experts, and fintech operators to tackle the most pressing challenges in financial services in an AI-driven landscape. She is one of the most trusted voices at the intersection of fraud, identity, and financial infrastructure.

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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.

One of my favorite parts of building Fintech Is Femme has been watching The Academy of Fintech community grow into such an incredible network of operators, founders, executives, and emerging leaders across the industry.

What makes this community special is the people inside it.

Leaders from J.P. Morgan, Amex, Prove, and many more are already part of the network — sharing ideas, making introductions, supporting each other, and helping shape the future of fintech together.

Inside The Academy, members get:
• semi-monthly virtual events
• curated networking opportunities
• direct access to me and the Fintech Is Femme team
• leadership conversations with top operators across fintech
• and a trusted community of people genuinely invested in helping each other grow

If that sounds like your kind of fintech community, we’d love to have you.

Totally vibing with Dua Lipa's latest live music this week. And can we talk about the cosmic coincidence that both she and I are living through our bridal eras at the same time? Great minds.

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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.

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

See you Tuesday!

Love,

Nicole 💜