Hey, fintech fam! 💜

Coming to you on a Wednesday!

A little different from my usual cadence, but the truth is, it’s been heads down over here at Fintech Is Femme HQ.

We are officially two weeks away from FTW: San Francisco, which means my life currently consists of speaker prep, scripts, production meetings, approximately 700 open tabs, and asking myself increasingly concerning questions about LED screens.

So after an event last night, I did something wild.

I went out, had a drink, and chilled for a second. 😂

My fellow event producers know what’s up.

Luckily for me, one of my favorite things about being a journalist and building stages at the same time is when the news cycle starts writing the agenda for you.

Last night, I was at Chime’s new New York office with COO Janelle Sallenave for the opening of its expanded NYC footprint.

There’s something meaningful about the physicality of that.

Chime just opened a new Flatiron hub in what it calls its largest metropolitan market. And, of course, that comes barely a week after the company announced its $590 million agreement to acquire longtime banking partner Stride Bank.

I sat down with Janelle for a quick 1:1 about what that expansion means as Chime keeps scaling.

Conveniently, the next time we sit down together will be live onstage at FTW: San Francisco on October 1.

And every day that goes by, I become more convinced FTW: SF needed to exist.

Because Chime is hardly the only FTW speaker showing up in the stories I’m tracking.

Anthropic is moving into the financial advisor’s workflow. Salesforce is rolling out Legora across its global legal teams. Xero is bringing live small-business financial data into Claude and ChatGPT.

And the more of these announcements I read, the more I think they’re telling us something bigger about where fintech and AI are headed next.

Which, conveniently, is exactly what we’re going to be talking about in San Francisco.

Let’s get into it. ✨

On Monday, Anthropic launched Claude for Financial Advisors, connecting Claude directly to the technology stack financial advisors already use.

When I saw the announcement, my first reaction wasn’t really, "Oh, Anthropic is entering wealth management."

We knew AI was coming for all of financial services. I’ve spent most of this year reporting on it. What caught my attention was where Anthropic is positioning itself inside the financial system.

Claude isn't trying to become Charles Schwab. It isn't replacing BlackRock. It isn't rebuilding the custodian, the CRM, the portfolio management system, or all of the infrastructure underneath an advisor's work.

Instead, it's starting to sit across them.

Anthropic's new offering connects Claude with platforms financial advisors already rely on, including Charles Schwab, BlackRock, Addepar, Envestnet, iCapital, Orion, Wealthbox, and others. Advisors can use Claude to pull information together for client meetings, analyze portfolios, draft follow-ups and documentation, and work across systems that have traditionally required a lot of manual movement between them.

According to Kitces research cited by Anthropic, a typical advisory practice spends only about one-sixth of its time actually meeting with clients.

Wealth management is supposed to be a relationship business, and yet the people responsible for those relationships spend the overwhelming majority of their time doing the work around the relationship.

That makes financial advisors’ relationship-building time scarce because they are always:

That's not unique to wealth management, by the way.

It's basically enterprise financial services. (And, speaking from experience, entrepreneurship).

This manual-work problem is part of the reason the talent pool of financial advisors entering the profession is shrinking.

We have spent decades buying and building increasingly sophisticated technology, and somehow humans still spend an extraordinary amount of time acting as the connective tissue between it all.

Which is why I think the Anthropic announcement is about something much bigger than financial advisors.

Last week, I wrote about fintech's growing interest in owning more of the financial stack.

I don't want to relitigate that argument here, but the Chime deal is worth revisiting because the economics tell us something important.

Chime isn't spending $590 million on Stride Bank because owning a bank suddenly became cool.

A real strategic case exists for owning one.

A bank subsidiary gives Chime more control over product development and lending. It eliminates sponsor-bank fees. It lowers funding costs. It puts a national charter and banking infrastructure underneath Chime's existing technology and distribution. Chime expects the combination to generate more than “$100 million in net synergies,” including through sponsor-bank fee savings, lending expansion, and lower funding costs.

And there's something important about the asset Chime is actually buying.

It's not just a charter.

Stride brings the operations, risk management, compliance capabilities, and banking infrastructure required to operate a regulated financial institution. Chime has spent more than seven years accessing some of those capabilities through a partnership with Stride. Assuming the acquisition closes, Chime will own the institution underneath that relationship.

Of course, ownership cuts both ways.

You don't simply acquire the benefits of being a bank.

You acquire the responsibilities of being one.

The compliance operation is yours. The risk is yours. The regulatory relationship is yours. The infrastructure is yours to maintain. The balance sheet becomes something you have to manage.

And that gets us to the question I find much more interesting than “Are fintechs becoming banks?”

Can a technology-first company combine bank ownership with AI and modern infrastructure to create a financial institution that is actually more profitable and scalable than either model was on its own?

Because that would be a much bigger story.

Fintech has already proven it can compete with incumbents on experience.

It has proven it can compete on distribution.

It has proven it can acquire customers differently and build products faster.

But the largest incumbent financial institutions still have something incredibly difficult to replicate: scale.

Deposits.

Balance sheets.

Regulatory infrastructure.

Enormous amounts of proprietary financial data.

The fintech model historically got around some of that by partnering for the regulated infrastructure underneath the product.

Now companies like Chime are saying: What if we own that too?

And AI enters the picture at exactly the right moment.

Chime itself is framing the Stride acquisition around creating an end-to-end platform for the AI era, arguing that integrating its proprietary technology stack with Stride's banking infrastructure can unify data and decisioning while reducing handoffs.

That language caught my attention.

Unify data. Reduce handoffs.

Because that's also what Anthropic is trying to do for the financial advisor.

Different company. Completely different part of financial services.

Same underlying problem.

Financial services has an enormous amount of technology. What it hasn't always had is technology that works particularly well together, and maybe that's where AI changes the economics of rebundling.

Not because AI magically makes banking cheap.

It doesn't.

But because intelligence sitting across a modern, integrated financial stack could make that stack substantially more productive.

And potentially, more products delivered across the same customer relationship without recreating the operational complexity that made the old bundled bank so difficult to change in the first place.

That's the experiment I think we're actually watching.

Can you take the scale advantages of a bank, the technology architecture of a fintech, and the intelligence of AI and create a fundamentally different economic model?

I don't know yet.

But suddenly, a lot of companies appear to be placing bets around some version of that question.

Which brings me to another FTW speaker who casually showed up in my news feed this week.

Legora, whose CMO Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir is joining us in San Francisco, has been selected by Salesforce for a rollout across its legal teams in the U.S., Europe and APAC.

I find this one particularly interesting because Salesforce isn’t exactly an enterprise sitting around waiting for someone else to figure out AI.

Salesforce has Agentforce. It has Slack. It has been vocal about building its own internal legal technology.

And it's still bringing Legora into its legal stack.

Salesforce VP of Legal Innovation and Strategic Initiatives Erica Swainson said Legora will support research, drafting, and other workflows so the legal team can spend more time on work requiring its “expertise and judgment.”

There are those words again.

Expertise and judgment.

This is why I don't think the enterprise AI story is simply about automating as much work as possible.

It's increasingly becoming a question of what work the machine should do so the human can spend more time doing the work only the human can do.

Another layer here matters.

Salesforce is perfectly capable of building AI technology.

It already does.

Yet it's still choosing to bring in a specialized external platform for part of the workflow.

Sound familiar?

Because this is essentially the build, buy or partner question being rewritten for the AI era.

And the answer appears to be getting more nuanced, not less.

Some intelligence will be proprietary.

Some will come from specialized platforms.

Some infrastructure will become more important to own.

Some will become easier to abstract away.

Some workflows will be automated.

Others will become more valuable precisely because they require human expertise.

The technology may be moving faster. The strategic decisions aren't getting any easier.

And I think this is where the Chime, Anthropic, and Legora stories actually connect.

Three very different companies are making three very different decisions.

Chime is deciding that part of the infrastructure underneath its product is strategically important enough to own.

Salesforce is deciding that even though it has enormous internal AI capabilities, Legora's specialized technology is still worth buying.

Anthropic is positioning Claude as intelligence that can sit across an existing financial ecosystem rather than trying to rebuild every component underneath it.

Own. Buy. Orchestrate.

Those may be three of the defining strategic decisions of the AI era.

And notice what's missing from that framework.

Build everything yourself.

For all the talk about AI making software cheaper and easier to create, the companies making some of the biggest bets right now seem to be getting more intentional about what belongs inside their walls, not less.

Because building something and gaining a strategic advantage by owning it are two very different things.

When I started programming FTW: San Francisco, I wasn't trying to predict which companies would make announcements two weeks before the event.

I was trying to figure out which questions would matter enough that we would still be asking them when we got into the room.

At our Leadership Summit, Laurel Taylor, founder and CEO of Candidly, and Legora's Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir are sitting down for a conversation about what happens when AI stops being a tool and starts changing how entire industries actually work.

Then Laurel joins Racquel Oden of HSBC and Debbie Hsu of Experian, who was just named COO of Experian, for a conversation I've intentionally titled:

You Can't Move Fast And Break Things With People's Money.

Then Rodney Robinson, co-founder and CEO of TabaPay, is joining us for a conversation about one of the questions his own company is actively living through:

Build, buy or partner?

TabaPay announced plans to acquire a bank just days before Chime did.

So suddenly, the question I'm asking Rodney onstage isn't an abstract strategy exercise.

What should a financial technology company actually own when technology is changing this quickly?

Later, we're asking:

Who banks the AI agent?

And the Anthropic news adds yet another dimension to the conversations we're having with leaders like Laurel, Racquel, and Alexandra Mysoor of Alix around AI, wealth, financial guidance, and what happens to human judgment as software becomes capable of doing more of the work around a financial decision.

These were interesting questions when I put them on the agenda.

They're becoming operational questions now.

That's the difference.

And I think there's an even bigger question sitting underneath all of them.

This is the part I want to spend more time reporting on.

For the first chapter of fintech, we made financial products better by pulling them apart.

We created better interfaces, better distribution and entirely new categories of companies.

Now we're watching some of those companies reach a level of maturity where they are asking a different question:

What would the financial institution look like if we put some of those pieces back together, but built it around modern technology from the beginning?

And AI changes what that question means.

Because we're not rebundling financial services with the same technology that powered the old bundle.

If AI really can connect data, automate workflows, improve decisioning and allow humans to focus on higher-value judgment, then perhaps owning more of the financial stack doesn't necessarily recreate the complexity fintech spent a decade trying to escape.

Maybe it changes the economics of owning the stack.

That's the bet.

Can a fintech own the infrastructure without inheriting all of the inefficiency?

Can AI make a vertically integrated financial company more productive than the institutions that came before it?

Can these companies expand products and deepen customer relationships without rebuilding the organizational silos that made traditional financial institutions so difficult to change?

And ultimately:

Can the combination of fintech distribution, bank infrastructure, and AI intelligence create a business capable of competing with the incumbents not just on experience, but on economics and scale?

I don't have the answer yet.

I don't think anyone does.

But that's what makes this moment so interesting.

Because the news isn't showing us a finished model.

It's showing us the bets being placed to build one.

And conveniently, a lot of the people placing those bets are about to be in the same room in San Francisco.

Needless to say, I have questions.

P.S. Since you made it to the end of today’s column — as a thank you for coming on this journey with me — here’s a major discount code to grab your ticket to FTW: San Francisco.

Not a conference agenda written six months ago and frozen in time.

A live newsroom.

A curated room where the people building the technology sit with the people deploying it, operating it, financing it, securing it, and deciding whether to trust it.

Because I don't think the next financial system gets built by 10,000 people wandering a conference hall hoping to find each other.

It gets built when the right people get into a room with intention.

When conversations become partnerships.

And when those partnerships turn into what gets built next.

The news is moving fast.

Good thing we're getting everyone in the same room.

See you in San Francisco. 💜

In need of some radical optimism this week.

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Thanks for spending time with me today!

Love,

Nicole 💜