Hey, fintech fam 💜

Writing to you from sunny Orlando, Florida.

My team and I just wrapped up a fantastic FIS Emerald conference, and we took today to explore EPCOT! It’s our first day off since our 18-week sprint to build FTW: NYC. Well worth it. 🌐

On Monday, I interviewed FIS CEO Stephanie Ferris ahead of the exciting announcement that FIS and Anthropic are partnering to bring agentic AI into banking: you can read more about this partnership in my Forbes story!

More live reporting coming your way next week, but for today: I’m sharing my Humans of Fintech podcast episode with the CFO of Brex, Erica Dorfman, recorded LIVE at the Leadership Summit last week.

Plus, sharing 2 other recent episodes featuring Alyse Belavic from Prove and Luan Cox of FinMkt.

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.

Erica Dorfman spent most of her career moving closer to decision-making.

She started in banking, moved into private equity, then into operating roles at SoFi and later Brex — not because she wanted a traditional finance track, but because she wanted to be closer to building.

That background shapes how she views the CFO role today, and I think you’ll like what she has to say about it.

At Brex, finance isn’t just responsible for reporting performance after the fact. The function is tied directly into:

That’s increasingly becoming the expectation across growth-stage fintech.

As margins tighten and capital becomes more expensive, finance teams are being pulled deeper into strategic planning and operational execution. Especially at companies balancing aggressive product expansion with efficiency targets.

According to Erica, Brex was not actively looking to be acquired before the conversation with Capital One emerged.

What made the deal compelling was the ability to accelerate distribution and infrastructure without slowing product development.

That matters in the current fintech environment.

Many late-stage fintech companies are facing the same pressure:

Capital One gains access to Brex’s modern B2B financial stack and startup customer base. Brex gains access to a balance sheet and operational infrastructure that would take years to replicate independently.

The structure of the deal also reflects a broader trend happening across fintech and banking: partnerships and acquisitions are increasingly centered around long-term platform integration, not just customer acquisition.

One of the clearest themes from Erica’s comments was how aggressively AI is already changing finance operations internally.

At Brex, the focus isn’t just deploying AI externally into products. The focus is reducing manual work inside the company itself.

That includes:

The goal is to remove repetitive work so finance teams can spend more time on forecasting, strategic planning, and resource allocation.

Erica also pointed to a growing challenge that many fintech infrastructure companies are starting to run into: orchestration.

AI tools can generate outputs quickly, but businesses still need systems that coordinate workflows, context, approvals, and decision-making across teams.

That operational layer (not just AI generation itself) is becoming a major focus area across fintech infrastructure.

For fintech employees, operators, and founders, this conversation reflects several broader shifts already happening across the industry.

First, the IPO path is no longer viewed as the automatic end goal for every large fintech company.

Companies are weighing whether partnership models can accelerate growth faster than public-market independence.

Second, finance teams are becoming more embedded in product and operational strategy.

The modern fintech CFO increasingly looks less like a controller and more like a cross-functional operator.

And third, AI adoption inside fintech is moving beyond experimentation.

Companies are now focused on how AI changes internal workflows, team structure, and execution speed — especially in functions like finance and operations that historically depended on large amounts of manual coordination.

Those changes directly impact how fintech companies hire, scale teams, prioritize infrastructure, and compete over the next few years.

For years, identity in fintech was treated mostly as a compliance requirement — something tied to onboarding, KYC checks, and fraud prevention.

But according to Alyse Belavic, Head of Strategic Initiatives at Prove, that framing is starting to shift.

The conversation around identity is moving closer to growth, personalization, and customer experience.

As more financial products become embedded into everyday digital experiences, companies are under pressure to reduce friction without increasing fraud exposure. That means identity systems increasingly influence:

Instead of functioning as a checkpoint at the edge of the customer journey, identity is becoming part of the infrastructure layer shaping the experience itself.

That’s especially important as fintech companies compete on speed and conversion rates while fraud attacks become more sophisticated and automated.

One of the biggest themes in the conversation was how agentic AI could change the way consumers navigate financial decisions.

Alyse pointed to a growing gap between the number of financial tools consumers have access to and their ability to actually coordinate them effectively.

Today, users are expected to manually manage:

The idea behind agentic commerce is that AI systems could eventually coordinate those decisions automatically in the background.

But that future depends heavily on connectivity between systems.

Many fintech products still operate in silos, with fragmented APIs, inconsistent data sharing, and disconnected customer experiences. The infrastructure challenge is no longer just building tools — it’s making systems interoperable enough for AI agents to navigate them intelligently.

That has major implications for payments, digital identity, and commerce infrastructure companies over the next several years.

Alyse also spoke candidly about her career path, describing it as non-linear and heavily shaped by relationships rather than a rigid long-term strategy.

She emphasized that the environments where she grew the most were the ones where:

Imagine that.

That perspective came up again later in the discussion around leadership and “work-life harmony” — the idea that for many people in fintech, professional and personal communities are deeply interconnected.

In an industry that moves quickly and constantly restructures around new technologies, relationships often become one of the few long-term constants.

That’s especially true in fintech right now, where hiring, partnerships, fundraising, and business development increasingly happen through trusted networks and community ecosystems.

This conversation highlights several shifts happening simultaneously across fintech infrastructure and consumer experience.

First, identity is evolving from a defensive function into a competitive advantage.

Companies that reduce friction while maintaining trust will likely see stronger conversion, retention, and customer lifetime value.

Second, AI in fintech is moving beyond chat interfaces and automation pilots toward orchestration.

The next challenge is helping systems communicate across fragmented financial ecosystems in ways that are actually useful for consumers.

And third, the human side of fintech still matters deeply — especially in a market where technology changes faster than organizational structures can keep up.

Relationship-building, trust, and collaborative networks remain central to how opportunities are created and how companies scale.

For fintech operators, these are no longer separate conversations. Infrastructure, AI, identity, and community are increasingly shaping the same competitive landscape.

Luan Cox has spent her career building at the intersection of finance, technology, and infrastructure — long before embedded finance became a buzzword.

In this episode of Humans of Fintech, the FinMkt CEO talks about what founders often get wrong about sales, why narrative matters as much as product, and how AI is changing the way financial systems connect behind the scenes.

One of the more tactical parts of this conversation was how Luan Cox thinks about timing.

Her approach isn’t to build for where fintech is today — it’s to build for where traditional financial institutions are inevitably heading next.

That’s a smart way to build. And that’s a big reason why FinMkt focused early on embedded finance infrastructure and partnerships with incumbents instead of chasing the “disrupt the banks” narrative that dominated fintech for years.

Luan talks about identifying where decision-making power actually sits inside financial services ecosystems — and designing products around those realities instead of around hype cycles.

For operators in fintech, that distinction matters.

Distribution, compliance, and enterprise adoption still shape whether products scale. Selling into existing financial infrastructure is slower, but it’s often more durable.

The AI section of the conversation gets very practical very quickly.

Luan talks about AI less as a flashy interface layer and more as a systems problem. Agentic workflows only work if underlying financial systems can actually communicate with each other cleanly.

Otherwise, AI just creates faster fragmentation.

That has major implications for fintech teams right now:

The conversation also touches on something many fintech operators are realizing: consumers increasingly expect financial experiences to feel invisible.

The winners may not be the companies with the loudest AI positioning, but the ones that remove the most friction from decision-making.

A recurring theme throughout the episode is Luan’s view that “narratives open wallets.”

She shares lessons from early sales roles in insurance and financial services, where learning how institutions actually make purchasing decisions became more important than product features alone.

That perspective shaped how she approached fundraising, enterprise sales, and company building later on.

There’s a useful reminder here for founders: markets rarely reward the best technology in isolation. They reward companies that can clearly explain:

Especially in fintech — where products often involve behavior change, regulation, procurement cycles, and trust — storytelling becomes operational, not cosmetic.

This episode lands at an important moment for fintech.

The industry is shifting away from pure growth narratives and back toward infrastructure, profitability, partnerships, and operational durability.

Luan’s perspective reflects that evolution closely: build products that fit into how financial systems actually work, not just how startups wish they worked.

The conversation around the new Springboard Enterprises fintech accelerator is also notable for a bigger reason.

Women-led startups still receive a disproportionately small share of venture funding, despite women driving enormous financial decision-making power across households and businesses.

The cohort is attempting to address a structural pipeline problem, not just a networking gap:

For fintech employees and founders, that matters because the next generation of category leaders will likely look very different from the last one — especially as AI lowers barriers to building products while distribution, trust, and operational execution become even more important differentiators.

Learn more about Springboard’s venture accelerator below 👇🏽

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

👉🏽 Enjoyed FTW:NYC? Make sure you get your tickets here for San Francisco in the fall!

One of my favorite parts of running Fintech is Femme is meeting with members of my private membership community, The Academy of Fintech — click here to learn more about it!

The folks in this community are leaders in every sense of the word.

They’re committed to the work they do, they’re ready and willing to help others, and they are doing it in a way that makes fintech proud.

Leaders from J.P. Morgan, Amex, Prove, and more are already inside.

If you’re interested in semi-monthly virtual events, a network of leaders to meet and learn from, and direct/priority access to me and my team: join us in The Academy of Fintech!

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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 💜