IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

Hey, fintech fam 💜

Hope you’re staying warm wherever you’re reading from. Over here in Brooklyn, it’s full-on winter — but the upside is that event season is officially heating up!

I’m especially excited to kick off Women’s History Month with the FEMMY Awards on March 2, celebrating powerhouse women in fintech like Asya Bradley, Frances Zelazny, and Luan Cox. You can register here — it’s going to be a special night with live performances, endless martinis, and celebrating in community.

Early bird tickets for New York Fintech Week and our third-annual Fintech Is Femme Leadership Summit are live and already moving, so grab them while you can.

And ICYMI, today’s column dives into our first-ever collaboration with Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business — a milestone moment and a great look at where fintech leadership is headed.

Alright — let’s get into it. ✨

P.S. It’s content and event-planning season. If you’re looking to plug into everything we have coming up — from Fintech Meetup to New York Fintech Week — check out our media kit here, then reply to this email or fill out the form. I would love to build something great with you in H1.

_{#SPONSORED BY FINTECH MEETUP}

🎙 Want to attend Fintech Meetup for FREE and get featured on Humans of Fintech?

Let’s be real — Fintech Meetup is where fintech deals actually happen. 

And this year? Humans of Fintech is taking it over.

Well, the podcast booth that is. 

For the first time ever, Humans of Fintech is hosting the premier podcast booth on the Fintech Meetup show floor — putting the spotlight on the people building the industry, not just the logos.

We’re opening up a special nomination contest just for the Fintech Is Femme community.

That means:

✨ Nominate yourself (yes, really), or someone you think deserves the mic

✨ Two winners — the nominator and nominee — score FREE VIP passes

✨ The selected nominee records a live episode of Humans of Fintech with me

✨ Their story gets distributed to 100,000+ fintech leaders across our network

Translation?

• Free access to fintech’s most important conference

• Instant visibility with the people who actually move money and markets

• A permanent piece of content that lives far beyond the conference floor

If you’ve built something, learned something, or are shaping where fintech is headed — this is your moment.

🔗 Nominate now and put yourself (or someone brilliant) in the spotlight:

Already know you’re going?

🎟 Lock in your Fintech Meetup ticket here (prices go up at the end of this week):

_{ON INNOVATION}

Fintech Business Class: What Three Leaders at the Center of Digital Finance See Coming Next

Quick note for anyone exploring an MBA: This conversation was hosted in partnership with the Georgetown McDonough School of Business, whose MBA curriculum emphasizes global policy, innovation, regulation, and the use of fintech to drive economic inclusion. All three guest interviews below are Georgetown alumni.

For much of the last decade, fintech has been framed as a story of speed: faster payments, faster onboarding, faster growth. But the most important conversations in financial services right now are about pairing velocity with readiness.

That tension was on full display last week during a virtual event I hosted with Georgetown McDonough School of Business, where three leaders operating at very different layers of the financial system—global policy, enterprise AI, and capital markets—offered a clearer picture of where fintech is actually headed.

Before the interviews began, I opened with a reminder that often gets lost in the “future of finance” narrative: women didn’t enter fintech—they built it.

From Ada Lovelace’s first algorithm to Grace Hopper’s COBOL, the infrastructure of modern finance has always been shaped by women, even when their contributions were written out of the record.

That historical context mattered, not as inspiration, but as framing. Because the challenges fintech faces now—regulation, scale, trust, long-term value—are not new. What’s new is how compressed the timelines have become.

So, how do we prepare for this new era where velocity meets momentum?

From Experimentation to Infrastructure

​Sandra Waliczek, who leads the Blockchain and Digital Assets Platform at the World Economic Forum, joined the conversation directly after Davos. Her takeaway from the week was not enthusiasm—it was maturation.

“Davos last week was definitely a momentous week,” she said, pointing to “geopolitics, the economy,” and the digital assets agenda all colliding at once.

After years of pilots and proof-of-concepts, Waliczek said the conversation around blockchain and digital assets has shifted decisively toward implementation. Regulatory clarity, she argued, is changing who shows up—and how serious they are.

“That regulatory clarity is providing more of a shift and acceptance… across these large financial institutions,” she said. And in Davos, you could “sense a shift in the conversations.”

The significance isn’t that stablecoins or tokenized assets are “winning.” It’s that no single model is. Waliczek described a future where multiple forms of digital money—stablecoins, deposit tokens, central bank digital currencies—operate in parallel, with interoperability becoming more important than dominance.

“We’re not clear yet… is there a winner in digital payments,” she said, adding that the more realistic scenario is that “most of these digital payments will be operating in parallel.”

Where she does see momentum is tokenization—particularly when it moves from crypto-native firms into market infrastructure.

On tokenization of real-world assets, she pointed to movement from major institutions: “We’re seeing… tokenization of stocks, bonds, commodities, private equity.” The latter categories remain experimental, but the direction is clear—legacy institutions aren’t just observing anymore.

The deeper issue, in Waliczek’s view, is how we build systems that scale without leaving countries behind. Interoperability, she emphasized, isn’t just technical—it’s regulatory and geopolitical.

“This technology has the most net benefit when we’re able to have that interoperability,” she said, specifically calling out the need for alignment “from a regulatory perspective, but also a technical perspective.”

That matters most for inclusion. Developing economies, she noted, have the opportunity to leapfrog legacy infrastructure entirely—if new rails are built with access and participation in mind.

“They actually have the opportunity to leapfrog existing financial systems,” she said. And even within developed economies, the promise is practical: reducing friction, cost, and time in financial transactions.

The lesson for fintech leaders is uncomfortable: scale without coordination doesn’t compound. It fragments.

Why AI Pilots Rarely Survive the Enterprise

If Waliczek’s perspective highlighted progress, ​Jocelyn Byrne Houle’s underscored friction.

An investor, founder, and longtime operator in highly regulated environments, Houle has held key roles as an Operating Partner at Capital One Ventures, investing across data, AI, and cybersecurity, and as an early executive at Securiti.ai, which was acquired last month for $1.8 billion.

She has seen firsthand why AI adoption stalls inside financial institutions—not because the models fail, but because organizations aren’t built to support them.

The gap, she explained, isn’t a lack of vision. It’s execution.

“There’s just a lot of excitement in the executive suite around AI,” she said. But “these timelines… aren’t realistic to those who have to implement and adopt in reality on the ground.”

That’s the pattern she’s spent her career trying to bridge: how you get from a proof of concept—often “100k… 500k”—to something “distributed throughout the organization.”

And when companies can’t make that leap, she said the failure points are remarkably consistent: “It’s really around data, identity, and processes.”

Houle also made a point that many fintech leaders still underestimate: scaling AI isn’t like scaling SaaS.

“In the world of AI, you’ve got… afterthoughts that are required to be thought about earlier,” she said, naming GPU cost and orchestration—then tightening the focus where regulated industries always get stuck: “Are you keeping that data safe?”

Her most structural insight was about non-determinism—an issue that becomes existential the moment AI touches customers.

“We really don’t know how it’s working. That’s by design,” she said. But in a “highly regulated organization,” the question becomes how you monitor outputs continuously when there isn’t “one place to monitor it.”

Her metaphor landed because it translates abstraction into operations: “In the old days… you would have your coffee and then your milk and then your sugar. In the world of AI, we’ve mixed these together, and you can’t… pull it out after the fact.”

That’s the reality leaders are walking into: upfront planning becomes mandatory, not optional. Monitoring becomes core infrastructure, not a compliance add-on.

And then, Houle dropped the line every buyer and board member should tattoo on their forehead:

“Please don’t tell people you can have it up and running in 20 minutes,” she said. “That is my biggest red flag.”

Because that promise isn’t optimism—it’s context failure. “That founder… has never implemented in a complex financial [institution] before,” she added. Not that they can’t—but they don’t understand the terrain.

Still, her closing message wasn’t caution. It was momentum.

“You can’t let the fear stop you,” she said. “You got to keep putting one foot in front of the other.”

Designing Careers That Outlast Cycles

​Karen Snow, CEO of Rose & Co. Capital and former Global Head of Listings at Nasdaq, brought the conversation back to fundamentals: timing, preparation, and endurance.

Snow has advised thousands of companies through IPOs and market transitions, and her message was consistent with the other speakers’ themes. Markets open and close. Technologies rise and fall. What lasts is readiness.

Borrowing Houle’s framing, Snow echoed: “Don’t let the fear stop you.” Especially, she added, because “women… tend to over prepare for things and not trust enough in our own abilities and confidence and networks.”

Her model for major career moves was deliberately unglamorous—which is why it was so useful. She framed transitions around two lenses: setup and timing.

“Do you have the right product service?… the right business model?… the right partners and talent?” she asked. And then: is it the right time “for you personally,” and “the right time in the marketplace”?

Because the reality is not linear. “There’s going to be some real ups and some real downs,” she said, “and you really have to have the confidence to endure them.”

When we moved into long-career design—what lasts beyond one job—Snow reframed a career as compounding infrastructure.

“Sometimes I think people think about careers as… their job,” she said. “And it’s actually this continuous thing.”

She described treating each role as a “stepping stone,” asking what she wanted to extract: visibility, skill-building, network, and reputation. Over time, those inputs create optionality—so you’re not waiting to be chosen. You’re choosing.

That’s how you get to what she called “being in command.”

On IPO readiness and exits, Snow’s most pointed observation was that too many companies treat going public as an endpoint rather than a transformation.

“You’re not going to be successful if you haven’t planned for what’s to come,” she said. Public markets require operational discipline—forecasting accuracy, stable KPIs, tight positioning, and long-term investor relationships.

Then she turned to education—the part everyone wants to dismiss until they need it.

An MBA, she argued, “schools you across all the disciplines really quickly”—leadership, strategy, accounting, finance, marketing—skills you may not use immediately, but “as you rise through the ranks, you’re going to use all of those things.”

What Ties It All Together

What made these conversations compelling wasn’t that they agreed. It’s that they converged.

Across global policy, AI infrastructure, and capital markets, the same themes surfaced repeatedly: coordination over disruption, preparation over speed, trust over hype.

Fintech’s next phase will not be won by the fastest mover. It will be won by institutions and leaders who understand how technology reshapes systems—not just products.

That’s why partnerships between industry and education matter more now than they did a decade ago. Not because universities can predict the future, but because they create space to interrogate it.

I really appreciated Georgetown’s role here. By convening leaders across policy, technology, and capital—and by producing alumni who can move across those layers—it reflects something fintech often lacks: time to think.

The irony is that fintech’s greatest challenge may no longer be innovation. It may be synthesis—connecting ideas, disciplines, and incentives before fragmentation sets in.

For leaders paying attention, the message from this “business class” was clear: the future of finance won’t be decided by tools alone. It will be shaped by the institutions—and people—ready to integrate them responsibly.

And readiness, as these leaders reminded us, is never accidental.

(If you’re interested in the Georgetown McDonough MBA—especially if you’re drawn to the intersection of fintech, regulation, innovation, and global economic inclusion—it’s worth a look. This event was a strong snapshot of the kinds of leaders the program cultivates. Check it out here.)

Kick Off Women’s History Month In The Room That Matters

We’re opening Women’s History Month the only way that makes sense:

by celebrating the women actually shaping fintech’s future — together, in one room.

The FEMMY Awards aren’t just a gala. They’re a convening of builders, decision-makers, and power players across fintech — founders, operators, investors, and executives who don’t just watch the industry evolve, but actively move it forward.

And this night is powered by The Academy of Fintech — our private membership community.

I built the Academy for people who want more than surface-level networking or hot takes. It’s for leaders who want access, insight, and relationships that compound over time.

What Membership Really Unlocks

• A private Slack with founders, VPs, investors, and operators across fintech

• Monthly salons and masterclasses with industry leaders and decision-makers

• Exclusive fireside chats you won’t find on a public stage

• 40+ on-demand lessons designed to accelerate influence, not just knowledge

• Early access + preferred pricing for all in-person events — including complimentary access to the FEMMY Awards and priority access to New York Fintech Week

But here’s the real differentiator: the room.

This is proximity to people who can change your trajectory — leaders from companies like Stripe and Mastercard are already inside. Conversations here turn into partnerships, roles, deals, and long-term collaboration.

If you’re looking for a high-signal, low-noise community built for people actually doing the work — not just talking about it — membership is now open.

Or secure your Academy membership + complimentary FEMMY Awards ticket directly on the FEMMYs event page.

This is the room. Hope to see you in it. ✨

_{THE OFFICIAL NEW YORK FINTECH WEEK CONFERENCE: APRIL 28-30}

In 2024, Fintech Is Femme launched its first Leadership Summit, creating a space where senior leaders and decision-makers could gather, connect, and set a new standard for the industry.

In 2025, the vision expanded. Fintech Is Femme introduced both the Leadership Summit and the Fintech Security Summit, hosting them at The Times Center — inside the New York Times Building — signaling that these conversations now belonged at the center of business, media, and power.

In 2026, the industry is ready for more.

Now, Fintech Is Femme presents FTW: NYC — the official New York Fintech Week conference — bringing three summits under one roof at 2 Penn, a modern, iconic space on the Madison Square Garden campus, purpose-built for impactful gatherings of leaders.  

Across three cornerstone events — The Fintech Summit by Fiat Growth, The Fintech Is Femme Leadership Summit, and The Fintech Security Summit — FTW convenes the founders, operators, investors, and global brands actively building the future of financial services. Not talking about it. Doing it.

While behind the scenes, creative partners Ascalex and The Bench helped shape the flow, design, and feel of the experience — ensuring the environment matched the caliber of the conversation.

This is where the industry gathers in the heart of Manhattan to set the agenda for the year ahead — powered by trusted voices, sharp strategy, and high-intent relationships.

FTW is about showing up to build — an economy where everyone wins.

Interested in sponsoring? I’m already in conversations with iconic brands to shape this stage. Reply to this email and let’s make sure your company has a standout presence at New York Fintech Week.

_{I WANT IT, I GOT IT}

• 📚 Today’s Read: Our Head of Digital Content (aka our resident Gen Z at FIF HQ) gifted me Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation — and it’s a gentle reminder I want to lean into more this year: reading purely for fun and creative joy.

• 🎬 Today’s Watch: We dropped our first scripted short film, Fintech Fever Dream—and yes, I’m biased, but it’s a must-watch. A creative take on biometrics and a glimpse into the kind of fintech storytelling we’re building next. If you want to follow our journey creating more video content, subscribe to our YouTube channel!

• 🌍 Today’s Activity: A very on-brand IKEA run this weekend to keep building out the Fintech Is Femme HQ content studio. Desks, lights, little details that make a space feel intentional—and yes, the walls are officially purple. Because if you’re going to build the future of fintech media, you might as well do it in a room that feels bold, creative, and unmistakably us.

_FINTUNES

🎵 Olivia Dean - Nice To Each Other

Been listening to this queen for years, and watching a hardworking woman get her flowers never gets old.

This year, she took home Best New Artist at the Grammys — proof that “new” doesn’t mean overnight. It means years of showing up, refining your craft, and staying the course long before the spotlight finds you and the world catches on. 👑🎶

_{LET’S CONNECT}

📰 Share this newsletter with a friend and start growing your network.

🔗 Connect with me on LinkedIn for daily insights on leadership.

🤝 Grow your business through content & community by partnering with me.

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

🎤 Host an epic event by booking me as a speaker, moderator, or emcee.

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

Love,

Nicole 💜