Hey fintech fam 💜

There’s a version of fintech that lives in headlines — product launches, funding rounds, AI this, AI that.

And then there’s the version you only really understand when you sit inside the conversations shaping it.

That’s the version I’ve been thinking about a lot as we’ve been building the Fintech Is Femme Leadership Summit.

Because when you zoom out, this moment in fintech doesn’t feel like it’s about what’s new.

It feels like everything is being stress-tested at once.

How wealth is shifting.
How companies scale globally.
How decisions get made in real time.
How trust holds — or doesn’t — when something breaks.

And what’s become really clear to me is this: The next chapter of fintech won’t be defined by better products.

It will be defined by better decisions.

Here’s who I want to keep building — and making decisions — with.

On Wednesday, April 29, in New York, senior fintech leaders will gather for the Fintech Is Femme Leadership Summit — at a moment when the industry isn’t just evolving, it’s being tested.

Because underneath all the noise — AI, infrastructure, embedded everything — there’s a deeper shift underway in how wealth is created, held, and moved.

And yet, most institutions are still trying to apply old frameworks to a completely new reality.

That tension sits at the center of the opening conversation with Ida Liu, CEO of HSBC Private Bank — someone who has spent her career advising the people reshaping wealth while simultaneously helping a legacy institution evolve in real time.

This isn’t just a conversation about private banking.
It’s about what happens when the system underneath wealth starts to change — and who adapts fast enough to stay relevant.

From there, everything expands outward.

Because once capital moves globally, companies don’t get the luxury of staying local.

Scaling a fintech today isn’t about launching in a new market and seeing what sticks.
It’s regulation, infrastructure, culture, and capital — all colliding at once.

Operators from PayPal, Andreessen Horowitz, Addepar, and Osborne Clarke are treating expansion less like a growth lever and more like a precision exercise:
where to go, when to go, and how to do it without breaking something critical.

The companies that win globally right now aren’t the fastest.
They’re the ones making the most intentional decisions under pressure.

And that same pressure is showing up inside companies, too.

The CFO role — once seen as a steward — has quietly become one of the most strategic seats in fintech.

In a live recording of Humans of Fintech, Brex CFO Erica Dorfman will unpack what it actually looks like to operate at that intersection of capital, product, and long-term strategy — especially in a moment where growth, profitability, and positioning are all being recalibrated in real time.

Alongside her, finance leaders like Sruthi Lanka of Public and Karan Parekh of Clay bring another layer to the conversation — one that reflects how modern finance teams are no longer reporting on the business, but actively shaping what gets built next.

If you want to understand how fintech companies actually scale, this is where you look.

But if there’s one place where the shift becomes impossible to ignore, it’s in the customer experience.

That’s why bringing together Janelle Sallenave, COO of Chime, and Shanthi Shanmugam, CEO of Casap, matters.

Because this is where fintech gets real.

At Chime, AI now powers the majority of customer interactions — and somehow, satisfaction has gone up, not down. That’s not hype. That’s operational discipline at a level most companies never reach.

At Casap, Shanthi is building in the exact place where systems fail — disputes, fraud, and everything that happens after the transaction.

Together, they’re unpacking a shift the industry can’t ignore anymore:
Fintech is moving from feature-building to trust-building.

Zoom out further, and the pattern becomes hard to miss.

Companies like Robinhood, Zelle, and Candidly — very different on the surface — are all solving for the same underlying challenge:

How do you interpret user behavior at scale, in real time, without getting it wrong?

Because money moves instantly now.
There’s no buffer. No pause. No “we’ll fix it later.”

Every transaction becomes a judgment call.
And those judgment calls? They are the product.

That invisible decision layer — not the UI, not the feature set — is quickly becoming the real infrastructure of fintech.

And right now, most of it is still being built while under pressure.

The conversation doesn’t stop at systems. It extends into how people work — and where talent flows next.

In a fireside with OnTop CEO Julian Torres Gomez, the focus shifts to the future of global work — where payments, employment, and access to opportunity are increasingly borderless, but still constrained by outdated systems.

Because if fintech is going to power the global economy, it has to work for a workforce that already is.

And then there’s growth.

Not growth as we’ve known it — acquisition at all costs — but growth that actually holds.

Nicole Patterson of CleverTap will bring that into focus, unpacking how fintech companies are rethinking engagement in a world where users have options, attention is fragmented, and loyalty is no longer a given.

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth:

Fintech spent the last decade winning on product.
Now everyone has a good product.

Customers don’t switch anymore.
They drift.

Which means the next challenge isn’t growth.
It is maintaining relevance.

The day closes by widening the lens.

A keynote with Springboard Enterprises brings the focus to capital allocation itself, because there’s still a massive gap between where capital flows and where value is actually being created.

And if you’ve been reading Fintech Is Femme for a while, you already know — that gap is inefficient.

Entire categories and founders are still being overlooked simply because they don’t fit traditional venture pattern recognition.

Springboard has spent decades building against that, building its own pattern recognition that finds women-led companies are ROI drivers across industries.

And now, with its fintech cohort, it’s leaning directly into this moment — where financial outcomes, health, work, and access are all colliding into one system.

Then we step into the VIP Lounge for the Big Leap: The Age of Relevance.

Because the playbook has changed — and most companies haven’t caught up yet.

We’re bringing together leaders from Prove, Zip, Betterment, and beyond for the kind of conversations that usually don’t happen on stage — the ones about what’s actually working, what’s breaking, and what it takes to matter in real time.

If you zoom out, all of this connects.

Wealth is shifting.
Systems are scaling.
Decisions are getting harder.
Trust is getting tested.

AI is influencing all of it.

Fintech isn’t missing ideas.

It’s being asked to grow up.

And the people in this room?
They’re the ones doing that work.

→ Join us at the Fintech Is Femme Leadership Summit
→ Apply for access to The Big Leap VIP experience

Because in this next era, the companies that win won’t just build faster.

They’ll build systems people trust.

📰 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.

Thanks for spending time with me today. See you in New York on April 29th?

Love,

Nicole 💜