Hey, fintech fam 💜

Happy Thursday evening before a long weekend! We did it. We made it through the first half of this year just about — what a gauntlet! I feel like I've been telling people to have a great weekend since like Tuesday.

Fun fact: I stole that joke from our head of community, Kaitlin Domangue. If you don't follow her, do it — she's a marketing and community wiz.

Last week, I wrote about FIS making a clear bet on being the infrastructure and data layer for AI agents in banking, live from FIS Emerald.

For today's newsletter, I've got three fresh news stories for you — a few items that have crossed my desk this month that I'm just getting to. But looks like the agentic AI race is in full force, so let's see who else has their hat in the ring.

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.

Mercury raised $200 million this week at a $5.2 billion valuation — 49% higher than its last round just 14 months ago. TCV led, with Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and Coatue participating.

The numbers are good. But the more interesting story is what Mercury is choosing to do next — and how it compares to the path other fintechs in its cohort have taken.

Mercury has been profitable for four years. It has 300,000 customers, including a third of all early-stage startups, and hit $650 million in annualized revenue. It recently received conditional approval from the OCC to become a federally regulated bank, which would allow it to retain more revenue, expand lending, and join the Zelle network. CEO Immad Akhund told CNBC he wants to take the company public.

Compare that to Brex, which was acquired earlier this year by Capital One — a strong outcome and a smart move for where Brex was. Two very different philosophies about what winning looks like in fintech, and honestly, both are valid.

Mercury is betting on independence and a regulated future. Brex made a bet on scale through a strategic partner. The fact that both paths exist and both are working is itself a signal of how much fintech has matured.

The AI angle is real, too. Mercury has launched tools that let businesses manage accounts through AI agents, with a broader conversational finance interface coming later this year. But what's more interesting is that AI has been a customer acquisition engine for Mercury — because it is creating a new wave of founders, who then open Mercury accounts.

"We've seen a lot of growth, especially recently, and a lot of that comes down to AI being a big enabler for entrepreneurship," Akhund told CNBC.

Why it matters: Mercury is one of the clearest examples right now of fintech maturing into something durable — profitable, founder-native, pursuing a bank charter on its own terms, and eyeing a public market exit. It's also worth noting how much the "banking for startups" category has quietly fractured.

Two years ago, Mercury and Brex looked like direct competitors. Today, they're in different races — Brex moved upstream into enterprise spend management and found a home inside Capital One, while Mercury is going deeper on the independent, full-stack banking relationship for founders.

Both are winning. They're just winning very different games now.

That's not a cautionary tale — it's actually a sign of how much fintech has matured. There's room for multiple models, multiple exit paths, and multiple definitions of what a founder-native financial institution looks like. Mercury is betting on one version of that future. And right now, the market is rewarding it.

The financial industry's race to adopt agentic AI has put real pressure on the largest bank fintech providers — the companies whose core technology underpins most U.S. banks — to enter the game. This month made that race explicit.

Fiserv announced agentOS, an AI agent platform developed in collaboration with AWS and OpenAI, designed to let financial institutions deploy, manage, and scale AI agents across their operations.

The platform includes an AI-native marketplace where banks can access agents that cover workflows ranging from commercial loan onboarding to AML triage. A strategic collaboration with OpenAI runs alongside it, focused on four areas: building agents on agentOS, reimagining how banks modernize their core infrastructure, developing banking-specific AI capabilities, and advancing cybersecurity, according to the announcement.

FIS has been moving in the same direction — and it's worth noting, given my reporting on this last week. The company recently announced a Financial Crimes AI agent built with Anthropic, with BMO and Amalgamated Bank among the first institutions deploying it, designed to compress anti-money laundering investigations from hours to minutes. Two major core banking fintechs, two frontier AI partners, both building toward the same goal from different starting points.

"Financial institutions are dealing with operational challenges that have outpaced what conventional software can solve," said Dhivya Suryadevara, Co-President of Fiserv, in a statement.

That's true. And it's exactly why both companies are moving so fast. The stakes for banks are efficiency, but the guardrails matter just as much — these agents have to operate within compliance and governance constraints that don't flex. Both Fiserv and FIS are building with that reality at the center, not as an afterthought.

What's worth watching: Fiserv and FIS together power the foundation of most U.S. banking infrastructure. When both of them move toward AI agents simultaneously — with different frontier AI partners, different deployment timelines, and different starting points — it signals something bigger than individual product launches. It signals that agentic AI is becoming a baseline expectation for core banking software, not a premium add-on. More fintech companies will follow.

Why it matters: The question for banks right now is which infrastructure partner they trust to govern AI agents within the compliance environment they actually operate in. That trust question — more than any individual feature — is what Fiserv and FIS are both working to answer. And the banks that move earliest with the right partners will have a meaningful operational advantage over those still waiting to see how it plays out.

This month, Xero announced a live integration with Anthropic's Claude and, alongside it, the launch of XeroForce — an AI agent builder for small businesses and accountants. The agent builder is in alpha and invite-only for now.

Here's the context that matters: the conversation around agentic AI in financial services has been almost entirely focused on banks and enterprise institutions. Which makes sense — the compliance complexity is real, the stakes are high, and the budgets are there. But that focus has left a significant gap.

Small businesses account for the majority of the global economy, and most still manage their finances manually across fragmented tools, lacking the infrastructure to make the most of them.

Under CEO Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Xero has been vocal about its ambition to be the financial operating system for small businesses worldwide.

Xero has 4.9 million customers in more than 180 countries. Most of them are small business owners and the accountants who serve them. The Claude integration means those customers can now bring their live financial data — cash position, overdue invoices, profit tracking — directly into Claude conversations without switching tools or exporting anything.

"When customers engage in wide-ranging conversations with Claude about their business strategy or day-to-day operations, they can now use Claude to instantly pull up their cash position," said Diya Jolly, Xero's Chief Product and Technology Officer.

XeroForce extends that further — letting accountants and small business owners build custom AI agents in plain language, with audit trails baked in for compliance.

Why it matters: Agentic AI in finance is only as meaningful as the breadth of who it actually reaches. The infrastructure being built for banks is connected to the SMB layer — the accountants, the small business owners, the people running their finances out of a single platform. So if SMBs get left behind in this AI agent shift, that's a real problem. Xero is making a direct bet that it doesn't have to be that way.

In Q1 2026, the non-traded BDC market hit $20.8B in redemption requests — most investors received roughly half of what they asked for. Moody's revised the U.S. BDC sector outlook to Negative. Investors who thought they owned liquid private credit found out their fund manager decided whether they could get out.

On Percent's marketplace that same quarter: new issuances, scheduled payments, and a 0.44% lifetime net loss rate on asset-based deals that's held since inception.†

The difference is structural. BDCs often own concentrated corporate loans with quarterly redemption windows that close at the manager's discretion. Percent finances specialty lenders against pools of performing receivables — diversified, overcollateralized, short duration.

Track record through 3/31/26:†

See what private credit built for individual investors looks like.

^{Alternative investments are speculative. No assurance can be given that investors will receive a return of their capital. Secondary market transactions are subject to availability and issuer approval; liquidity is not guaranteed. †Past performance is not indicative of future results. Terms apply.}

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

The Fintech + Insurtech Generations Conference is happening June 10 as part of Charlotte Fintech Week (June 8–12), bringing together leaders across banking, fintech, insurance, and financial infrastructure.

Charlotte continues to quietly build one of the strongest fintech ecosystems in the country, especially across banking infrastructure and enterprise fintech.

Definitely worth checking out if you’ll be nearby.

After the energy of FTW: NYC, we’re officially headed west.

FTW: SF is coming September 29 - October 1, and we’re already deep in planning mode.

If NYC showed us anything, it’s that the fintech industry is craving real community again — not just panels and pitch stages, but actual conversations between operators, builders, banks, fintechs, and infrastructure leaders shaping what comes next.

Grab your early bird passes now…

One of my favorite parts of building Fintech Is Femme has been watching The Academy of Fintech community grow into such an incredible network of operators, founders, executives, and emerging leaders across the industry.

This photo is from one of my favorite recent moments with Academy members and sponsors at the Fintech Is Femme Leadership Summit ✨

What makes this community special is the people inside it.

Leaders from J.P. Morgan, Amex, Prove, and many more are already part of the network — sharing ideas, making introductions, supporting each other, and helping shape the future of fintech together.

Inside The Academy, members get:
• semi-monthly virtual events
• curated networking opportunities
• direct access to me and the Fintech Is Femme team
• leadership conversations with top operators across fintech
• and a trusted community of people genuinely invested in helping each other grow

If that sounds like your kind of fintech community, we’d love to have you.

Running this gem back because last weekend I got to have some sunshine, and I'm holding onto that through this NYC rain this weekend.

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📚 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 wraps up today’s edition—thanks for reading! Until next week, keep innovating and challenging the status quo.

See you Tuesday!

Love,

Nicole 💜