Hey, fintech fam 💜

Happy 2026. Truly — we made it.

I love the energy of a new year, but this one feels different. Not because everything is shiny or solved (it isn’t), but because the signals are finally clear.

Fintech is growing up. The stakes are higher. And the stories that matter now are sharper, more human, and far more consequential.

At Fintech Is Femme, we don’t chase trends. We watch where systems strain — and cover who steps up to fix them.

Behind the scenes, we’ve been deep in planning mode, mapping the coverage, conversations, and rooms we’re building in early 2026. January through April is already booked and busy — and yes, we’re stepping back into New York Fintech Week in a much bigger way.

The format is evolving. The focus is sharper. And alongside Drew Glover and Frances Zelazny, we’re building something that turns content and community into pipeline (see below for more on this).

Our flagship event, the Fintech Is Femme Leadership Summit, returns for its third year, and early-bird tickets are now available. Details (and tickets) are here.

January virtual events are on deck. The FEMMY Awards return in February. March brings the next chapter of Fintech Penthouse with Fintech Meetup. We’re just getting started.

Alright — let’s get into it.

Health, wealth, and fraud are setting the agenda for 2026, and today’s stories sit right at the center of it all.

#TRENDING

What’s Up In Fintech

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.

#1 HSBC Bets on Ida Liu as $100 Trillion in Wealth Changes Hands

HSBC is making a clear statement about where private banking is headed — and who it believes should lead it there.

On December 22, the British bank announced that Ida Liu, former global head of Citi’s private bank, will become CEO of HSBC Private Bank effective January 5, 2026. Liu will report to Barry O’Byrne, CEO of HSBC International Wealth and Premier Banking, and will be charged with deepening HSBC’s leadership among ultra-high-net-worth clients while accelerating global growth.

In her announcement, Liu called this “a defining moment for wealth,” pointing to a client base that is increasingly global, entrepreneurial, and multi-generational. 

That framing isn’t new for her — it’s been her thesis for years.

Liu arrives at HSBC after more than two decades in wealth management and strategic advisory roles, including 18 years at Citi Private Bank, where she helped build and scale its platform from the ground up.

She exited Citi earlier this year after the bank eliminated her role in favor of a regional leadership structure — a move that underscored growing tensions around how global wealth franchises should be run in an increasingly fragmented, cross-border world.

HSBC, by contrast, is doubling down on a single global leader at a moment when private banking clients are becoming harder to define — and harder to serve.

Why Ida Liu — and Why Now

I met Liu back in 2020, when I was still at InvestmentNews, prepping her for an episode of Her Success Matters, a women’s leadership podcast I helped produce. Even then, what stood out wasn’t just her résumé — it was her clarity. She spoke less about legacy structures and more about what wealth needed to become.

She’s been remarkably consistent ever since.

On stages from Bloomberg to The Female Quotient, Liu has repeated a fact that should be keeping every private bank executive up at night: we are already in the middle of the largest wealth transfer in history.

Roughly $100 trillion is expected to move to next-gen and millennial clients over the next decade. About $30 trillion of that is moving into women’s hands — and by 2030, women are projected to control more than half of global wealth.

That’s not a niche shift. It’s a regime change.

What changes isn’t just who holds the money — it’s how they expect it to work. Women and next-gen clients don’t want impact investing as a side pocket. They expect purpose, values, and long-term thinking to be embedded into the core of their portfolios. They want education, community, and platforms that reflect the complexity of their lives — not a rebrand of old models.

From Fashion to Finance, by Way of Cultural Fluency

Liu’s perspective is shaped by a career path that doesn’t resemble the traditional private banking playbook.

An American-born Chinese raised between the U.S. and Asia, Liu credits her bicultural upbringing as a competitive advantage in global business. After graduating from Wellesley College, she began her career in investment banking before pivoting into fashion, joining designer Vivienne Tam.

There, she expanded the brand into Europe and China, doubled revenue, and forged strategic partnerships with companies like Mandarin Oriental and Cathay Pacific.

It was in fashion — not finance — that Liu spotted a gap in wealth management services for creative, global, and entrepreneurial clients. She took that insight to Citi, where she helped build a private banking division tailored to founders, executives, and families operating across borders.

Private Banking’s Next Evolution

HSBC’s bet on Liu aligns closely with its broader fintech outlook.

In a 2025 report, HSBC Innovation Banking identified a new inflection point driven by platform convergence, embedded finance, and AI-native products. The message was clear: all companies are becoming fintechs — and wealth management must evolve alongside them.

As platforms collide and financial services embed deeper into non-financial ecosystems, private banking can no longer afford to be static or siloed. It has to operate seamlessly across geographies, generations, and business models. Private banks that can’t integrate modern platforms, understand entrepreneurial liquidity cycles, or serve globally mobile clients will lose relevance — fast.

As fintech and wealth collide in 2026, the question won’t be whether private banking modernizes.

It will be who gets to define what “modern” actually looks like.

HSBC’s move suggests it wants to be part of that answer.

And Ida Liu has been preparing for this moment her entire career.

#2 Forela Is Tackling Healthcare’s Most Expensive Failure — Fragmentation

If you’ve followed my work over the years, you know wealth management innovation (read: wealth tech) was one of my favorite beats. A newer one I’ve been paying closer attention to? Health care colliding with fintech. 

In the United States, healthcare isn’t just a policy debate. It’s a balance-sheet event. Even for people with insurance, care is expensive, fragmented, and exhausting. And for women — especially those with chronic or autoimmune conditions — the system has failed quietly, over decades.

That’s the gap health tech startup Forela is working to close.

I recently spoke with Juliana Di Simone, Forela’s founder and CEO, and her story crystallizes why health tech is becoming a fintech problem — fast.

A Systemic Cost Problem Hiding in Plain Sight

We talk about healthcare as if it’s a system. In reality, it’s a collection of silos—each optimized for itself, rarely for the whole. The result isn’t just frustration or delay; it’s a slow, accumulating cost that ripples through patient outcomes, workforce productivity, and the economy at large.

Autoimmune diseases cost the U.S. economy approximately $180 billion annually in direct healthcare expenses, not to mention the billions more in lost productivity.

This isn’t a niche women’s health issue. It’s a structural failure with massive economic consequences.

Today, 1 in 5 Americans lives with an autoimmune condition. Roughly 80% are women, yet care models still largely ignore female biology and the reality that these conditions are often multi-system, not isolated.

There are more than 100 known autoimmune diseases, many with overlapping symptoms, inflammatory pathways, and comorbidities — yet care remains siloed by specialty. 

Conditions like endometriosis, which affects 1 in 10 women, frequently coexist with autoimmune and inflammatory disorders, acting as early warning signals of broader dysfunction across immune, gut, hormonal, and nervous systems.

The financial impact is staggering. The cost of fragmentation shows up everywhere:

• ~$500 billion per year in overall economic burden

• $100+ billion annually in payer costs driven by repeated utilization and escalation

• ~$580,000 in annual losses per 1,000 employees from just five autoimmune conditions

• ~$81,000 per disability claim, with long-term disability averaging 287 lost workdays per year

• Women shoulder higher out-of-pocket costs and disproportionate financial toxicity

The system keeps paying — repeatedly — for misdiagnosis, delay, ER visits, unnecessary escalation, and long-term disability. Not because the care doesn’t exist, but because no one owns continuity.

Why Forela Exists

Forela was born out of Di Simone’s own experience navigating 27 years of undiagnosed endometriosis and related comorbidities.

What ultimately helped her recover wasn’t a single drug or procedure. It was coordination — understanding how symptoms across her body connected over time, and aligning multiple specialists around a shared picture of what was actually happening.

That insight became Forela.

Rather than treating healthcare as episodic and reactive, Forela acts as a longitudinal intelligence layer, bringing together symptoms, labs, imaging, medications, and real-world context. The goal isn’t to replace clinicians — it’s to give both patients and providers better visibility, earlier signals, and fewer expensive mistakes.

As Di Simone told me: patients are already doing the work of care coordination themselves. 

Forela’s aim is to shift continuity from something women are forced to create, into something the system can finally hold.

The ROI of Fixing Fragmentation

Here’s where fintech leaders should be paying attention.

Research from IQuity suggests that using predictive analytics to identify at-risk autoimmune patients could unlock more than $18 billion in potential health system savings. Not through new drugs. Not through moonshot breakthroughs. But by doing something deceptively simple: seeing patterns earlier and acting on them together.

Imagine a system where care is coordinated before patients spiral into emergency visits. Where the right specialist is engaged at the right time. Where adherence improves because plans actually reflect how people live. Where disability and escalation are the exception, not the default.

The value doesn’t come from reinventing medicine. It comes from making existing care work the way it was always supposed to.

Forela’s insight is refreshingly clear: the ROI isn’t in AI replacing clinicians — it’s in intelligence helping clinicians intervene earlier, route smarter, and stay aligned over time.

That’s a fintech thesis applied to healthcare infrastructure: reduce friction, surface risk sooner, and align incentives so the system finally rewards prevention over repair.

And if that sounds familiar, it should.

Where Forela Is Headed

Forela is preparing to launch a closed beta in early 2026, partnering with eight specialist providers and supporting roughly 400 patients. The company is intentionally early-stage and moving carefully — prioritizing clinical validation, accuracy, and trust over speed.

Forela starts with women and complex chronic care because that’s where fragmentation is most visible — but the long-term vision is broader: becoming part of the infrastructure that allows complex care to function across systems.

As fintech continues to argue that financial health is health, Forela is doing the complex work: building the connective tissue that makes that statement operational. And that’s exactly the kind of crossover this industry should be watching.

Join Forela’s waitlist here.

#3 The Next Identity Reckoning: What to Prepare for in 2026

If 2025 was the year fraud became impossible to ignore, 2026 will be the year it stops being treated like a side problem.

That’s the throughline in Frances Zelazny’s 2026 predictions on fraud, biometrics, and digital identity — and it’s one every fintech leader should be paying attention to.

Zelazny, co-founder and CEO of Anonybit, has spent years operating at the intersection of identity, privacy, and fraud prevention. Her takeaway heading into 2026 is clear: the systems we rely on to prove who someone is — and protect them when things go wrong — are being stress-tested from every direction at once.

Fraud Is Getting Smarter — And Less Visible

Much of the public conversation has focused on deepfakes. But Zelazny argues the bigger threat is quieter: injection attacks.

Unlike deepfakes, injection attacks bypass cameras and sensors entirely, feeding synthetic data directly into capture pipelines. That makes traditional defenses like liveness detection irrelevant. It’s not a future problem — it’s a present blind spot.

In 2026, she predicts organizations will be forced to rethink verification architecture itself, not just detection models. Secure capture, end-to-end integrity, and system-level controls will matter as much as — if not more than — AI accuracy.

Privacy Moves From Marketing to Procurement

Another inflection point: biometric privacy.

For years, vendors treated privacy as a positioning exercise. In 2025, buyers started asking harder questions — where biometric data lives, whether it can be reconstructed, and what happens when identity needs to move across systems.

Zelazny believes 2026 is when privacy-by-design becomes table stakes. Secure biometric storage won’t be a “nice to have” — it will be a procurement requirement. Proof will matter more than promises.

The Beginning of the End for Standalone IDV

Identity verification surged in help-desk and account recovery flows over the past year. But IDV is slow, expensive, and frustrating — and it doesn’t scale well.

In 2026, Zelazny expects reliance on standalone IDV to plateau as new models take shape: server-side biometrics embedded into workflows, risk-based authenticators using real-time signals, and continuous identity assurance that blends both.

Together, they mark a shift away from episodic checks toward persistent trust.

Passkeys Aren’t the Finish Line

Passkeys made real progress in 2025, dramatically reducing phishing and credential theft. But they didn’t solve account takeover — they just moved attackers to softer edges like recovery flows, shared devices, and social engineering.

In 2026, passkeys will be treated as a starting point, not a solution. The pressure will be on organizations to address what happens after authentication: recovery, governance, and identity continuity.

Fraud Budgets Will Have to Justify Themselves

With tighter budgets ahead, Zelazny predicts fraud and identity leaders will need to quantify their impact more clearly than ever.

Fraud isn’t just losses — it’s operational drag, customer support costs, false positives, abandoned applications, and lost lifetime value. In 2026, the teams that can translate identity decisions into business outcomes will win budget — and influence.

The Bigger Shift

Taken together, these trends point to a bigger transition: from fragmented point solutions to end-to-end identity platforms, where trust is continuous, privacy is foundational, and accountability is built in.

Fraud is no longer just something fintech reacts to. It’s something fintech is being redesigned around.

If you want the full breakdown — including predictions on agentic AI, scams, regulation, and insurance-backed guarantees — Frances’ complete 2026 outlook is well worth the read.

Consider this your primer. The reckoning is already underway.

_{MARK YOUR CALENDARS}

Booked and busy? Same. Every Thursday, I share fintech events worth adding to your calendar— both IRL and online.

_{APRIL 28-30}

[NEW YORK] New York Fintech Week is back — and this year, we’re anchoring the week.

From April 28-30, the most influential operators, founders, investors, and decision-makers in fintech will gather in New York City.

Instead of scaling one massive event, we’re expanding into three focused summits, each designed to go deeper — more valuable:

Tuesday, April 28

The Fintech Summit, hosted by Fiat Growth and Drew Glover

→ Technical, AI, stablecoins, growth, distribution, and the next phase of fintech scale

Wednesday, April 29

The Fintech Is Femme Leadership Summit with Nicole Casperson

→ Power, capital, executive leadership, and the people shaping fintech’s future

Thursday, April 30

The Fintech Security Summit, led by Frances Zelazny

→ Fraud, identity, biometrics, and trust as economic infrastructure

Together, these three summits anchor New York Fintech Week — a citywide moment filled with invite-only dinners, meetups, closed-door conversations, and rooms where real decisions get made.

Last year, we could’ve grown the Leadership Summit beyond 500 attendees.

Instead, we chose something better: depth, focus, and intentional rooms filled with career-defining opportunities.

🎟️ Early bird tickets are live. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.

_{MONDAY, FEBRUARY 16}

[NEW YORK] THE FEMMY AWARDS: Presented by The Academy of Fintech

The FEMMYs are back.

An unapologetic celebration of the women building, funding, and shaping fintech — and the rooms that support them.

At the FEMMYs, Fintech Is Femme and our private membership community, The Academy of Fintech, crown fintech’s Vanguard of the Year, Innovator of the Year, and MVP.

Expect a dressed-up night, meaningful recognition, and the kind of networking that only happens when the right people are in the room.

Invite colleagues, clients, and peers, and come dressed to impress.

_{MONDAY, JANUARY 12}

[VIRTUAL] FINTECH BEST IN SHOW: Female-Led Showcase

We’re kicking off the year by spotlighting what’s next.

Empire Startups and Fintech Is Femme are teaming up to showcase category-defining, women-led fintech startups reimagining:

Lending • Payments • Wealth • Insurance • Capital Markets • and more

Each showcase features:

• Five standout companies

• Live pitches

• A panel of expert investors (Mastercard, FIS, Fiserv, Trustage Ventures, Artemis)

• One winner crowned Fintech Best-in-Show

Let’s start 2026 the right way — by putting capital, attention, and momentum behind the women shaping fintech’s future.

_FINTUNES

🎵 Kelela - Raven

Loving this entire vibe and album.

_{LET’S CONNECT}

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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 💜