Hey, fintech fam 💜

Yes, I was in NYC this Saturday watching the Knicks — and the uproar that was New York City all Saturday evening. I'm late to the discourse, but that's kind of what underdogs do — they sneak up on you.

This Knicks run genuinely rewired something in my brain. Maybe because I'm a journalist, and after a decade of reporting, I've learned that some moments are bigger than the thing itself. They're cultural moments. Moments that tell a larger story about who we are.

I moved to New York after graduate school in Texas. Born in California. Partly raised in Texas. But from the first time I visited New York as a kid, I felt something I hadn't felt anywhere else: home.

This city will test you. Humble you. Break your heart. Take your money. Make you question everything. And then somehow convince you to get up and do it all over again, all because you believe in yourself.

That's why this Knicks run feels bigger than basketball. It's about resilience. Believing before the results show up. And honestly? It reminded me a lot of building Fintech Is Femme. A lot of producing FTW: NYC — where our lean team stepped in as underdogs and built our conference home inside Madison Square Garden.

The thing about underdogs is we don't know we're supposed to lose. We just keep showing up.

Now we're building FTW: San Francisco. Different city. Same spirit.

Other than celebrating the Knicks…

I went rollerblading this weekend, did some wedding prep (check out my IG post for my best wedding tips for busy founders and leaders!!), and visited the dentist for an emergency wisdom tooth extraction 😅

Let's get into it. ✨

Julian Torres Gomez spent $80,000 trying to expand his first company into Mexico City.

Legal fees. Entity formation. Compliance costs. All the bureaucratic machinery is required to simply put boots on the ground in a new market. And when the idea didn't work? The money was gone. No refund. No flexibility. No way to test cheaply and move on.

Gomez knows that feeling intimately — it's why he built fintech startup OnTop. "If I had it then," he told me from the stage at our Leadership Summit during FTW: NYC, "I would have spent two grand, three grand. That's it. Just hire a couple of boots on the ground, test the market, and see what happens."

That $80,000 lesson became the founding thesis of his next company. But it also reveals something the fintech industry has been slow to reckon with: we built the rails for global money movement. We haven't finished building them for the global workers who need to move with it.

I've argued all year that fintech is the new operating system of the AI era — the infrastructure layer underneath every major shift happening in financial services right now. FIS is building the AI governance layer for banking. Casap's Shanthi Shanmugam is rebuilding how financial institutions handle disputes and fraud at scale. Every major player is converging on fintech as the connective tissue of the modern financial system.

But there's a layer underneath all of that — one we talk about far less — and it's the financial infrastructure that supports the people actually building these companies.

That infrastructure is still, in many cases, broken. And the workforce depending on it is growing faster than most people realize.

I curated this conversation with Gomez, CEO and Founder of OnTop, because I think it's one of the most important ones fintech needs to have right now.

Since 2020, something significant has shifted in how people work — and who's doing the building.

Women now start roughly half of all new businesses in the United States, accounting for 40% to 45% of all entrepreneurs. Women-owned businesses account for around 39% of all enterprises, generating approximately $3.3 trillion in annual revenue and employing millions of workers. The pandemic didn't create female entrepreneurship — but it accelerated it in ways that are still compounding.

Remote work was a catalyst. Freed from the physical constraints of the traditional office, a generation of women built businesses from their homes, their kitchen tables, their living rooms — on their own terms, at their own pace, with global teams they couldn't have assembled before. I know because I'm one of them. I built Fintech Is Femme from Brooklyn, with remote workers in Argentina, Mexico City, and Missouri, producing a publication that reaches 100,000 fintech leaders worldwide.

But here's the problem Gomez is pointing at: the financial infrastructure underneath this new workforce hasn't kept pace with the workforce itself.

Gomez's argument is intentionally provocative — and worth sitting with.

The full-time employment model was designed for a different era. Factory floors. Time clocks. Physical presence as proof of productivity. The infrastructure built around it — employer-of-record, traditional banking relationships, benefits tied to geography — reflects that world. Not this one.

"The future of work looks more like a contractor agreement," he said. "And that scares a lot of people."

It should. Because if he's right, the financial services industry has a massive opportunity — and a massive problem — sitting right in front of it.

The contractor workforce is growing by millions every day. And yet contractors in emerging economies can't easily get loans. Can't access credit. Can't plan for retirement in any meaningful way. Can't hold money in a stable currency without significant friction. The same person doing high-quality work for a company in New York from their home in Bogotá is, from a financial infrastructure standpoint, still a second-class citizen.

"Go to a bank and try to get a loan as a contractor," Gomez said. "Try to get healthcare. Try to plan for retirement. The older generation said you must be a full-time employee — and that's ridiculous."

OnTop is building the global account for work — USD accounts, cards, credit access, retirement planning — designed specifically for the contractor class. Not as a workaround. As the primary financial relationship.

"Why would you fish in a pool with 1% of the fish when you can fish in a pool with 99%?" he said.

I brought my own experience into this conversation — because it's real.

I have remote workers on my team from Argentina. I've navigated the patchwork of PayPal, Wise, Remitly, and whatever else gets the money where it needs to go, when it needs to get there. I know firsthand what it means to work around infrastructure that wasn't built for this.

"A lot of you pay people through PayPal, Wise, Remitly — and you think you're so sophisticated," Gomez said, with the kind of directness I find genuinely refreshing. "But that's not compliant. You might get into trouble."

The payment problem is the fintech hook underneath the entire future-of-work conversation. It's not just about whether someone works remotely or in an office. It's about whether the financial infrastructure moves with them — and whether it treats them as a full participant in the economy rather than an afterthought.

When that infrastructure works — when contractors have stable currency accounts, access to credit, the ability to consolidate income from multiple sources — something interesting happens. Gomez described it as a flywheel.

"Your design contractor becomes your business partner in some other venture," he said. "You start raising standards so that everyone participates in the flywheel."

I've been reporting on flywheel effects all year — in consumer fintech, in banking infrastructure, in wealth management. This one feels underreported. And it connects directly to something I heard from Ida Liu, CEO of HSBC Private Bank, at our Leadership Summit earlier that same day.

Liu talked about the $100 trillion wealth transfer underway — and the financial infrastructure that still isn't built for the next generation of wealth holders. Gomez is talking about a parallel gap: the financial infrastructure that still isn't built for the next generation of workers. Different populations. Same underlying problem. The system wasn't designed for how people actually live and build today.

I can't have a conversation in fintech right now without the AI thread surfacing — and this one was no exception.

Gomez's take on where AI is headed in the future of work isn't the anxiety-driven narrative you hear most often. It's more interesting than that.

"There's going to be a lot of AIs and machines doing the work for us," he said. "What's left? Meaningful work. Interconnection. Relationships. Empathy. Tasks that only humans can do."

I've been hearing that same argument from the infrastructure layer up.

FIS has been deploying its Financial Crimes AI agent — built with Anthropic and already live at BMO and Amalgamated Bank — with a governing principle that the human stays in the loop at every consequential decision point.

Casap's Shanmugam has been making the case all year that AI in financial services only works when it's calibrated around the moments that matter to real people — disputes, trust, the experience of something going wrong with your money, and needing your institution to show up.

The through line is consistent: the value of human work isn't being eliminated by AI. It's being clarified. What's left — after the tasks get automated — is connection, judgment, trust, and the kind of relationship that no agent can replace.

Which makes the financial infrastructure underneath the global contractor workforce more important, not less. If the future of work is human connection at scale, across borders, in multiple income streams, and collaboration networks, then the rails that support that workforce have to actually work.

Gomez is building for that world. And for the founders in our community who are already operating across borders — or thinking about it — his practical advice is worth taking seriously.

Start with one or two contractors in Latin America. Test an entry-level role. Experience the arbitrage firsthand. Iterate fast. And treat the people you hire as first-class citizens — because the infrastructure to do that finally exists.

"It's not about remote work and contracts in the end," he said. "It's how people get paid. How they feel acknowledged. How they feel valued."

That's not a product pitch. That's the whole thesis.

And fintech — if it moves fast enough — is the only industry positioned to make it real.

We're taking everything we built at New York Fintech Week — the summits, the executive-level community, the intentional programming — and bringing it to the West Coast.

More details are coming soon, but if you want to be in the room, be first to know, or bring your brand to the table — reply to this email or reach out directly.

See you there. 💜

Olivia Rodrigo stands as a young living legend, and it's thrilling to witness her craft songs that delve into the intricacies of breakups, the experience of falling in love, and the subsequent unraveling of emotions.

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Thanks for spending time with me today.

Love,

Nicole 💜