Hey, fintech fam 💜

Conference season is here.

I’ll be at Fintech Meetup recording Humans of Fintech LIVE from the show floor — and hosting our Fintech Penthouse Series inside Mandalay Bay. Come join us at:

✨ Women Who Prove Networking Brunch

🌍 Growing Global Evening Reception

If you’re in Vegas, come find me. Let’s build IRL.

And in bigger news — New York Fintech Week’s conference FTW: NYC is officially underway.

We’ve announced our first wave of sponsors. Major shoutout to Mastercard, CleverTap, Brex, Casap, Highnote, Osborne Clarke, Springboard Enterprises, RevTech Labs, Withum, and Stifel Bank — with Security Summit partners announced next.

Early-bird tickets end on March 31. Grab yours here.

Alright. Let’s get into the top 3 stories. ✨

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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.

Mastercard just made its most aggressive move into digital assets to date.

On Tuesday, the payments giant announced it will acquire London-based stablecoin infrastructure firm BVNK for up to $1.8 billion, including $300 million in contingent performance payments. The deal marks Mastercard’s largest bet yet on the mainstreaming of digital currencies.

The acquisition gives Mastercard the ability to bridge traditional card rails with blockchain-based payment systems — effectively embedding itself into the growing ecosystem of stablecoins and tokenized deposits.

“We expect that most financial institutions and fintechs will in time provide digital currency services,” Mastercard Chief Product Officer Jorn Lambert said in the company’s release.

That line is doing a lot of work.

Because this isn’t Mastercard chasing crypto headlines. It’s Mastercard's positioning for where money movement is headed next.

Stablecoins are quietly shifting from niche crypto instruments into real-time payment infrastructure. And while consumer card payments aren’t likely to be disrupted anytime soon, the real opportunity lies elsewhere.

The biggest impact? B2B payments. Cross-border commerce. Remittances. Wallet funding. Treasury flows.

In other words — the parts of the payments ecosystem where friction still exists.

Cards already “solve” consumer checkout. But they don’t solve global settlement inefficiencies or cross-border liquidity challenges at scale.

That’s where stablecoins come in.

And that’s where BVNK fits.

Rather than build internally, Mastercard is effectively buying speed — acquiring BVNK’s regulatory licenses, compliance stack, multi-chain connectivity, and orchestration layer. It’s plug-and-play infrastructure that would have taken years to replicate.

Notably, Mastercard wasn’t alone in seeing the opportunity. Coinbase had reportedly explored acquiring BVNK earlier this year for roughly $2 billion, underscoring the competitive urgency around stablecoin infrastructure.

This is not about replacing cards.

It’s about owning the rails beneath the rails.

For years, the narrative around crypto and traditional finance has been framed as disruption versus incumbents.

This deal signals something different: integration.

Stablecoins are becoming less about speculation and more about settlement efficiency.

And Mastercard is making a clear calculation — that digital currencies won’t replace traditional payment systems overnight, but they will increasingly sit alongside them.

By acquiring BVNK, Mastercard ensures that when banks and fintechs begin offering digital currency services at scale, it will already be embedded in the flow.

This isn’t a consumer payments story.

It’s a cross-border liquidity story.

It’s a treasury modernization story.

It’s a B2B infrastructure story.

And it signals that stablecoins are no longer an experiment at the edges of finance.

They’re becoming plumbing.

For a deeper dive into how stablecoins are disrupting payments — and quietly becoming core fintech infrastructure — watch my Humans of Fintech episode with Stripe’s Sophie Sakellariadis. It’s required viewing if you want to understand where this is all headed.

Candidly is restructuring its business to focus on what it believes will define the next era of financial services: AI-native infrastructure.

Earlier this month, the fintech, founded by CEO Laurel Taylor, announced it is divesting its College Finance marketplace, which NerdWallet acquired, to double down on multi-agent AI infrastructure.

Customers and partners will retain full access to the marketplace and its student loan products. But strategically, the move signals something much bigger.

Candidly is concentrating its capital and focus on Cait, its conversational AI tool, and the Candidly Intelligence Center (CIC) — the multi-agent system powering it.

“When I founded Candidly, I kept coming back to one uncomfortable truth,” Taylor said. “The financial decisions that shape people’s lives the most are the ones they’re navigating most alone — student loans, college savings, retirement. The math is complicated, the stakes are generational, and for most Americans, there’s no trusted expert in the room to provide holistic, integrated guidance.”

That’s the problem she set out to solve.

And now, she’s accelerating how Candidly gets there.

Financial institutions can now deploy Cait or the CIC under their own brand — either as a turnkey enterprise solution or modular AI agents embedded directly into existing systems.

And early data suggests the bet is working:

That last number matters.

Because in financial services, engagement is the moat. If users are staying in conversation long enough to work through complex decisions — liabilities and assets simultaneously — that’s not novelty. That’s behavior change.

Candidly began as a student debt company. But Taylor always saw student debt as the front door to something larger: holistic financial guidance spanning 401(k)s, equity, rollovers, decumulation — the entire arc from debt to wealth.

“Laurel looked at a $1.7 trillion student debt crisis and decided incremental reform wasn’t enough,” I once wrote. “She built rails instead.”

She raised more than $60 million. Influenced legislation. And built distribution through employers and financial institutions that now position Candidly to reach 1 in 2 U.S. workers.

At one point, she told me, “I’m going to write a thank you letter to the people who doubted the idea.”

More founders should have that energy.

She didn’t wait for policy to catch up.

She built the system.

This isn’t just a portfolio reshuffle.

It’s another signal that fintech is moving from single-product apps to AI-native financial operating systems.

Consumer-facing AI in finance has to clear three bars:

Compliance teams must trust it.

Risk teams must approve it.

Institutions must be able to configure it to their own workflows.

Candidly is betting that multi-agent architecture — deterministic where it needs to be, configurable where it must be — is how you clear those bars at scale.

We’re watching the infrastructure layer of fintech evolve in real time.

Mastercard is buying stablecoin rails.

Brex is building agentic finance inside the CFO stack.

Candidly is embedding AI into the debt-to-wealth journey.

Different segments. Same direction.

Less ornamental fintech.

More systems. More rails. More architecture.

And that’s the shift.

Fintech loves trend cycles.

Splashy rounds.

Vision decks.

Founders who narrate the future in a way that makes the present feel obsolete.

Luan Cox has no interest in any of that.

The Founder & CEO of FinMkt has spent more than 25 years building financial infrastructure — often years before the market was ready for it. Her work has led to multiple successful exits and, most recently, earned her Innovator of the Year at The FEMMY Awards by The Academy of Fintech.

But when we sat down, she said something that cut through the noise:

“In my experience, innovation looks a lot more like stubbornness.”

She would know.

Cox was nationally ranked in tennis before burning out at 17 — learning early that when one road ends, you build another one. She sold life insurance to 21-year-olds in Texas bars. She helped build the systems that brought stock quotes online when brokerage firms insisted no one would ever want that kind of access.

And when she founded FinMkt — a multi-lender, point-of-sale lending platform — she heard it again:

“Nobody wants this.”

She smiled when she said it. I couldn’t help but laugh.

Because every builder has heard some version of that sentence.

What separates Cox isn’t just persistence. It’s pattern recognition. She treats resistance as signal. If incumbents fight you that hard, there’s usually something valuable on the other side.

Nine years into building FinMkt, the numbers tell a different story than the early skeptics did:

No hype cycle. Just execution.

“We are forced, as female founders, to be capital efficient,” she told me. “We’re already wired to be better.”

It’s a sharp observation.

Women rarely get to build sloppily. We don’t get handed millions to “find product-market fit” in public. We’re asked for revenue earlier. Proof earlier. Precision earlier.

It’s unjust.

It also produces sharper operators.

And Cox isn’t just building companies — she’s building pipelines.

Through her work with Springboard Enterprises, she’s helping launch a new cohort of female fintech founders designed to accelerate the next generation of category-defining leaders.

Building for where the market is going requires more than vision.

It requires backing.

Fintech is entering another platform-shift moment — AI, embedded finance, stablecoins, and regulatory rewrites.

In moments like this, the loudest voices often get the attention.

But history suggests the durable companies are built by founders who quietly see where infrastructure gaps are forming — and build anyway.

Cox’s career is a case study in that discipline.

Bet on the future you can’t fully see yet.

Stay long enough for the market to catch up.

And never quit.

If you want to hear the full conversation — including her work with Springboard Enterprises and the launch of its first fintech accelerator cohort — tune into my full interview with Luan Cox here.

Interested in getting involved as a strategic partner? Reply to this email. We’re building the next generation of fintech leadership — intentionally.

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

Join us for an exclusive networking breakfast hosted by Women Who Prove x Fintech Is Femme, featuring brunch, mimosas, and a special live taping of Humans of Fintech with Mary Ann Miller — Fraud & Cybercrime Executive Advisor and VP of Client Experience at Prove — inside the private Penthouse at Mandalay Bay during Fintech Meetup.

Small businesses power the global economy — and fintech is rewriting how they access capital. Join us at Fintech Meetup for an exclusive evening reception featuring a live Humans of Fintech conversation on scaling infrastructure for the global SMB economy. Champagne, founders, operators, and the conversations that actually move the industry forward.

Early-bird ticket pricing ends on March 31.

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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 💜