Hey, fintech fam 💜

Two weeks out from my wedding, and I am still taking meetings, still doing interviews, still writing Forbes columns, and apparently still sending newsletters on time.

Someone said it best on a call this week: "I love an entrepreneur bride who is still taking meetings within days of her wedding."

Honestly? Same. This is just who I am. The work doesn't stop — it just gets more interesting when you're also trying to figure out what to do with your mother and mother-in-law in the same house.

But in all seriousness, this week's newsletter is one I'm genuinely proud of.

This Forbes piece has been six months in the making — a collection of interviews I've gathered across the first half of this year with some of the most consequential leaders in financial services. I've been covering the AI race in fintech from every angle, and this piece is where it all comes together.

Plus, we’re discussing international expansion from all angles, including the stablecoin of it all.

I also want to say — to every person who has shown up in my inbox over the last few weeks with wedding advice, kind words, and encouragement — thank you. This community means everything to me. Anton and I are so excited.

Okay. Two weeks out. 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.

"The winners of the AI revolution? Those companies haven't been determined yet," said Jose Rasco, Chief Investment Officer at HSBC, at a press event in New York this week. "Remember, Google didn't go public until 1998. We're still at the beginning."

He's right. And in fintech, that makes the race more urgent — not less.

I've spent the first half of this year sitting down with leaders across every layer of financial services — core banking infrastructure, wealth management, corporate finance, and consumer fintech. And what I kept finding, from every direction, was the same conclusion:

The more AI advances, the more human relationships matter.

Here's where the data starts.

HSBC released new research this week from a survey of nearly 10,000 affluent and high-net-worth investors across 10 markets. Fifty-seven percent of U.S. investors use AI for financial tasks. But only 7% say AI was the most influential factor in their last investment decision. When asked where their last investment idea came from, 59% said a financial professional — versus 19% who said AI.

"AI has democratized access to information," said Racquel Oden, Head of International Wealth Management and Private Banking U.S. at HSBC. "But information isn't advice. That's the distinction."

That distinction is reshaping how every major player in financial services is building right now.

Dhivya Suryadevara, Co-President of Fiserv, is asking whether existing bank processes should exist at all before applying AI to them.

Sherry Baker, Head of Global Wealth Products and Services at FIS, runs a regulated trust company where a billion-dollar trade stops for human review before execution.

Eran Agrios, SVP and GM of Financial Services at Salesforce, has a father-son experiment at RBC Wealth Management that proves advisors can trust AI — and a vision for what goal-based agents look like next.

Erica Dorfman, Chief Financial Officer of Brex, has compressed an eight-day month-end close to three days.

Laurel Taylor, Founder and CEO of Candidly, has spent a decade watching the gap between financial information and financial advice widen — and argues the entire industry is finally being forced to close it.

And Janelle Sallenave, Chief Operating Officer of Chime, has automated 70% of customer support end-to-end. NPS went up.

Every source, from every layer of the financial system, arrives at the same place.

This is my most reported Forbes column of the year — six months of interviews, three layers of the financial system, and one through line I think will define the next decade of fintech. I close it with Jose Rasco's advice about flying for a client dinner that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since he told it.

[Read the full piece on Forbes here]

When Denise Leonhard, GM of Zelle, took the stage at FTW: NYC in April, she told us about a restaurant owner on the Jersey Shore who tips out his entire staff through Zelle at the end of every shift. 

He doesn’t do this because Zelle is the coolest new payments app that everyone is using.

It just works, and the people who worked that night go home with tip money already in their account instead of waiting for the restaurant to process it and deliver it weeks later. 

That’s rent paid right away. The babysitter leaves after being paid on time. That’s an after-work dinner with friends covered immediately.

So when Zelle announced it was expanding outside of the U.S. for the first time and choosing India as its first international market, this story of “tech that just works” came to my mind again. 

This move makes total sense. 

Roughly a third of all remittances sent to India each year originates in the United States, making it one of the largest and most active corridors in global payments. 

That's millions of people sending money home every month to parents, siblings, kids… a transfer that has historically been slower, more expensive, and more complicated than it has any right to be. 

Wire transfers with fees, apps that require the person on the other end to sign up for something new, and delays measured in days, not seconds.

Zelle’s logic is pretty straightforward: the same network that lets a restaurant owner in New Jersey tip out his staff on a Tuesday night can do the same thing across a border. 

Zelle processed $1.2 trillion in total payment volume in 2025, with 100 million accounts making a transaction in December alone. 

This represents just how many (and up to this point, U.S. only) consumers rely on Zelle as a critical part of their tech stack.

There are probably tens of thousands of restaurant owners using this platform who we don’t even know about, just like the story we heard from Denise.

The CEO of Early Warning (Zelle’s parent company), Cameron Fowler, put it plainly about the choice to expand internationally: "We believe international payments are at a similar inflection point."

Alongside the India announcement, the company also unveiled ZelleUSD — a proprietary U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin that will support expansion into additional markets beyond India. 

This is something that the company hinted at in October of 2025, without specifying that they were creating their own stablecoin. 

The details around ZelleUSD are still coming, but it’s clear India is the first move in something bigger, and that we should expect to see more international expansion announcements from Zelle very soon. 

Keeping tabs on all things stablecoin? You can’t miss FTW: SF! Get your tickets before prices go up.

I'll be honest, this story landed a little personally for me. I'm the daughter of an immigrant, and so are several people on our team at Fintech Is Femme. 

(You can read more about how being Asian American and the daughter of an immigrant influences how I build my company here!)

Sending money home is never just a transaction. It's a monthly obligation, a form of care, a responsibility that doesn't pause for slow rails or high fees. 

When Denise talked about Zelle's mission around financial access on stage in April, serving not just the big banks but the 2,400 credit unions and community institutions throughout the country, I heard someone who understands that the people most dependent on these systems are often the ones who've had the fewest good options.

That's the through line between the Jersey Shore restaurant story and the India expansion. It's the same user, the same need, just a different border.

Remittances are the entry point, but they're not the whole story. India isn't just the world's largest remittance recipient; it's one of the most sophisticated fintech ecosystems on the planet, with an 87% fintech adoption rate and 26 unicorns valued at $90 billion.

The families receiving transfers from the U.S. are living inside a digital payments infrastructure that, in many ways, has outpaced the West. Getting the India relationship right (the regulatory relationships, the banking partnerships, the consumer trust) is less about one corridor and more about proving the model works internationally for Zelle. 

If it does, every market that comes after gets easier.

The assumption that global expansion is mostly a replication exercise (find a market that looks familiar, adapt the product slightly, and sort out the local details later) is where the real cost of going global tends to live.

Rina Jariwala, Katy Ryan, and Sergio Cordoba sat down with me at the Fintech Penthouse during Fintech Meetup in March to talk through what getting global expansion right actually requires. Watch the full conversation here!

Three people, three different functions (product, legal, workforce infrastructure), but they have the same core argument: going global isn't a replication exercise. It's a ground-up read of a new context, every time.

It's worth holding that next to what we covered in the last story. Zelle's India expansion is notable for the same reason; they didn't act like international expansion was like flipping a light switch and everything works. 

They're building local banking partnerships, a new stablecoin infrastructure, and a regulatory strategy for a market with its own sophisticated fintech ecosystem. 

The Fintech Penthouse panel explained why that approach is the only one that works.

Fundbox recently expanded into Australia, and Rina Jariwala, COO, joined us to talk about what that actually looked like. 

Australia appeared stable on paper: strong GDP, a sophisticated financial system, consumers who are comfortable with digital products. 

What they found was a small business lending gap that mirrored the one in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. almost exactly. 

The product needed to be rebuilt around local payments data and local partnerships (Stripe among them) before it could actually function in the market. 

Katy Ryan, a partner at Orrick, reminded us that compliance documentation from one jurisdiction doesn't transfer to another. Something that many founders end up learning the hard way. 

Every market has its own definitions, its own gray areas, its own interpretation of what's permissible. And the cost of discovering that late leads to process debt, structural fixes, and more. Investors now expect founders to walk in with a proactive regulatory risk strategy. 

Ontop builds infrastructure for global workforce payments, and Sergio Cordoba, Chief Acquisition Officer, joined us to talk about where he sees companies fall short on payments infrastructure.

According to Cordoba, most companies think the payment problem is solved once the contract is signed and the transfer goes through, but it isn't. 

If the worker on the other end can't build credit, access a local bank account, or move money in ways that actually support their life, the payments infrastructure has failed them regardless of whether the compliance box got checked. 

Paying someone on time and building something that works for them financially are not the same thing, and the gap between the two is where a lot of global workforce strategies are breaking down. 

The copy-paste instinct, whether applied to product, legal, or workforce, produces the same outcome: a structure that looks right from the outside and breaks under local pressure. 

This sentiment actually reminds me of Tuesday’s story, where Jyoti Menon shared her concern that critical thinking skills will diminish as the workforce continues to rely on AI. She says AI’s output looks right, but there is no strategy behind the prompting. People aren’t asking the right questions. 

Going global well means asking the right questions. Asking what this market actually needs, not what worked somewhere else. 

If more fintech companies build that question into the process from day one, the ones that come after them will have an easier time proving it's possible.

🎙️ New episode of Humans of Fintech (Growing Global Series): International expansion isn’t a copy-paste exercise. Listen here.

Claude or Gemini? OpenAI or Anthropic? GPT-7 before year-end or not? If you read tech newsletters, you've already formed opinions on all of it.

Kalshi has real-money markets on which AI model leads benchmarks this week, which lab ships AGI first, when Anthropic releases Mythos, whether OpenAI raises ChatGPT pricing, and which company has the best coding model at year-end. These aren't abstract questions — they're live markets with real money on both sides, moving as labs ship, benchmarks drop, and announcements land.

The edge belongs to whoever actually follows this space. Not the casual observer — the person who reads model cards, tracks evals, and notices when a new release outperforms the field before the mainstream press catches up.

That person has a genuine edge. If that's you, Kalshi lets you act on it.

Trade the model race

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

Early bird tickets are here and won’t last long. Join us in San Francisco this fall!

Still have this new album on repeat and will likely stay that way for the foreseeable future.

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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 💜