Hey, fintech fam 💜

Hope you’re having an incredible week!

Tomorrow is THE BIG DAY! 💒

My entire family (and Anton’s too!) is in New York right now. We rarely get to all be together, so it’s been so much fun. Some friends are in town, too!

So tonight, I only have 2 stories for you.

And we’re diving into the C-suite. What are fintech’s top C-suite leaders thinking about right now in an AI world, and what are the things they’re looking at beyond AI?

If you haven’t grabbed your tickets for FTW:SF yet, you can get them now before early bird pricing goes away. I hope I’ll see you there!

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.

Macrina Kgil, CFO of Figure, has a simple way of explaining blockchain to anyone who asks.

"Think of it as the accounting ledger," she told me. "A public accounting ledger."

For someone who started at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) doing audits in Korea, that framing makes perfect sense.

What's remarkable is that it took Kgil (a five-time CFO, a blockchain veteran since 2018, and the woman who led Figure's IPO on the NASDAQ in September 2025) to make it sound that simple.

Her team calls her the Blockchain OG.

After spending six years as CFO of Blockchain.com through every cycle the industry has seen — the hype, the winter, the institutional awakening — she joined Figure in December 2024 with one goal: take it public.

She did it in nine months.

I've been covering this space for a decade.

I left traditional media specifically to tell stories like this one. These stories don't make headlines because they're not crashing, they're just building quietly at scale.

And then suddenly, they're processing $1 billion a month.

While the entire fintech industry has had its eyes on AI this year — and rightfully so — Figure has been doing something that doesn't get nearly enough attention:

Proving that blockchain infrastructure actually works at scale, inside real capital markets, with real institutional buyers on the other side.

Figure Connect, the company's blockchain-native capital marketplace, passed $1 billion in monthly volume in March 2026.

By May, it had reached $1.4 billion.

In 2025, $3.8 billion in volume moved through the platform… just a year after it launched in mid-2024.

"I really think fintech has underestimated how mature blockchain technology has become," Kgil told me in an interview.

"Tokenization is something that's more real than just a science fiction people were talking about 15 years ago."

Figure holds 75% market share in tokenized assets.

It has more than 380 white-label origination partners. Its Q1 2026 revenue hit $167 million (92% year-over-year growth) with margins of 49.6%.

These aren’t the numbers of a company still proving a thesis. This is a company that has already proven it.

Figure's evolution tells you everything about how blockchain actually matures inside capital markets.

Not through a single dramatic moment, but through compounding execution over time.

Phase one, 2018 to 2021: Figure was an originator that tokenized its own assets. Proof of concept.

Phase two, 2021 to 2024: it became a white-label partner for banks, credit unions, and fintechs — part originator, part facilitator.

Phase three, where it sits today: a fully two-sided marketplace connecting loan originators on one side to institutional buyers on the other.

From a CFO's seat, managing investor confidence through that kind of transformation is an art form in itself.

"When I started, we were at zero percent marketplace volume," Kgil said. "When I first went to see investors, we were at 20%. Six weeks later, we were at 30%. “

“Every time I sat across the table from them, they could see the momentum." She paused. "Many of our investors actually told us during the roadshow: your say-to-do ratio is really high. That's the trust you're building."

I've used that phrase, say-to-do ratio, in my own community and with my own team for years.

Hearing it come back from institutional investors on a roadshow told me everything about why Figure's IPO worked.

The most recent signal of where Figure is heading is its announced acquisition of Kiavi, the nation's top fix-and-flip lender.

It was structured as a three-party deal with Sixth Street taking the loan book while Figure takes the technology, the platform, and Kiavi's established network.

The logic is deliberately asset-light. Figure didn't want Kiavi's loans.

It wanted Kiavi's AI-driven underwriting technology, its valuation models, and its loyal customer base of real estate investors who come back deal after deal.

When the acquisition closes in late 2026, it will add $7 billion in annual volume to Figure Connect.

"We wanted to be asset-light and technology-focused," Kgil said. "This could be a blueprint for future deals."

The expansion isn't just about volume.

Figure is already in auto loans and SMB assets. Fix and flip and DSCR loans are next.

The thesis (that all financial assets should eventually live on blockchain rails) is being executed one asset class at a time.

One of the threads I've been pulling all year in my reporting is the evolution of the CFO role. From accounting function to strategic capital allocator to storyteller.

Kgil described it as a metamorphosis that happens twice.

Pre-IPO: the CFO is the chief accounting officer and finance operator. Then comes the IPO, and suddenly the CFO has to become a storyteller. Making numbers come alive for investors who are deciding whether to bet on a vision they can't yet fully see. 

Then, post-IPO, the role evolves again into a strategic partner: capital allocation, five-year vision, investment decisions.

"This is my second time taking a company public," she said.

"The first time, you don't know what's hitting you left and right. This time I can actually say: I know what's coming. I can enjoy it more."

That combination — hard-won experience, blockchain conviction, and a CFO who thinks like an accountant and communicates like a storyteller — is exactly what Figure needed for this moment.

The plot of blockchain's story got lost for a while.

The crypto cycles, the volatility, the headlines that made it feel like speculation rather than infrastructure.

What Figure has done (and what Kgil has helped articulate to the market) is strip all of that away and show what blockchain actually is underneath. 

Erica Dorfman's path to the Chief Financial Officer seat at Brex isn't a straight line, and that's precisely what makes her perspective valuable.

She started in research, moved through banking and private equity, and then made a deliberate choice to stop advising companies and start building inside them.

"Consistently within my career, I've tried to get closer and closer to what it means to actually move those metrics," she told me.

"Versus 'hey, let me tell you about an investment you can make.'"

That instinct — to be in the weeds rather than above them — shaped everything about how she defines the CFO role today.

And her definition is worth paying attention to, because it's different from the traditional one.

"A successful CFO to me is a really good allocator of capital and investor," she said.

"You need to understand how to allocate capital, what to guide the business towards — the products, the industry, how we work as a successful organization."

At Brex, the CFO remit is unusually wide: FP&A, corporate finance, procurement, accounting, data, business systems, and payment operations all fall under Dorfman's purview.

But that breadth isn't accidental. It reflects a core belief that finance only works when it's embedded in the business, not sitting alongside it.

For the founders and operators in our community building their finance functions right now: the best finance leaders aren't just keeping score. They're helping determine where the game is played.

The CFO role is changing faster than most people realize, and Brex is living that change from the inside out.

Dorfman described how her team has spent the last four months overhauling core finance operations through agentic AI workflows.

Two examples stood out.

The first: month-end close. Her accounting team used to spend 8 days reconciling transactions, chasing down exceptions, and going back and forth with employees and managers to verify whether a charge was compliant and properly documented. Now Brex's audit agent handles that back-and-forth automatically — validating transactions against policy, flagging exceptions, and surfacing only the decisions that genuinely require human judgment.

"We take out only the most important decisions for the human to make," Dorfman said. "All that back and forth — monitoring an inbox, checking context, switching — all that stuff goes away."

The result: a path from an eight-day close to a three-day close. Not by cutting corners, but by removing the manual coordination work that was never a good use of a human's time in the first place.

The second: FP&A budget management. Her team built a workflow that lets operating partners — say, an engineering team managing a quarterly budget — get real-time visibility into spending without manual back-and-forth with a finance partner. The agent handles the routine check-ins. The finance team handles the strategic questions.

"It doesn't mean you don't have to have people on the finance team," Dorfman said. "It means you get to audit 100% of transactions instead of some small sample."

That last line is important.

This isn't a cost-cutting story. It's a quality-of-work story. Agentic workflows aren't replacing finance judgment — they're clearing the path so that judgment can actually be applied where it matters.

And when you compound that across a whole organization, what you get isn't a leaner team. You get a more strategic one.

I produce a lot of content about the future of fintech — the infrastructure, the deals, the AI agents, the capital flows.

But conversations like this one with Erica remind me why the human layer matters just as much as the technology layer.

The best decisions in fintech aren't made by models or market conditions alone.

They're made by leaders who have spent years getting close enough to the decision to trust their own judgment when the moment arrives — even when it arrives 40 days before anyone expected it.

The CFO who built clean books from day one.

Who knew which doors were one-way and which were two-way. Who hired great people and then got out of their way. Who saw a once-in-a-generation opportunity and ran toward it — not because the timing was perfect, but because the foundation was.

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

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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 💜