Hey, fintech fam 💜

Dropping into your inbox twice today — and I'll be honest, I kind of love any excuse to see you two times in one day.

Earlier, I shared a little more about why we're bringing FTW: San Francisco to the West Coast this September 29 – October 1.

If you missed it, go check that one out here! And let me know if you agree with my thoughts on the intersection between fintech and big tech.

For this one — today's newsletter — I've got an exclusive interview with Salesforce's head of financial services on a major AI announcement dropping today, a former Microsoft UK executive making a move into fintech worth paying attention to, and a new Humans of Fintech episode with the VP of Product at Bread Financial.

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.

At RBC Wealth Management, a father and son decided to run an experiment.

Same client meeting. Same preparation task. The son did it the old way — manually stitching together client history, portfolio context, relationship notes, the full picture an advisor needs to walk into a room with confidence. It took him roughly 90 minutes.

The father used Salesforce's AI meeting preparation. It took seconds.

When they compared results, the outputs were essentially the same.

"What it showed was that you could trust the process with AI," Eran Agrios, SVP and GM of Financial Services at Salesforce, told me. "Those advisor teams are super confident. They've had to do this by hand for many, many years. And we got to the same result."

That story — quiet, unglamorous, and completely real — is the one I keep coming back to after Salesforce announced Agentic Advisor today. Not because it's a dramatic proof point. But because it captures the exact tension the wealth management industry has been sitting with for years: the technology is here, the need is undeniable, and the question is whether advisors will actually trust it enough to let it work.

Today, Salesforce is making that bet formal. On Thursday, the company announced Agentic Advisor — a purpose-built agentic AI suite for financial advisors, designed to fundamentally shift how wealth management firms operate in the age of AI.

Agentic Advisor, built natively in Agentforce for Financial Services, launches at a moment when the wealth management industry is facing a convergence of pressures that no single product announcement can fully solve — but that the right infrastructure might help absorb.

Nearly 40% of financial advisors are expected to retire over the next decade, creating a capacity deficit that firms are not remotely prepared for.

The $124 trillion great wealth transfer is actively reshaping who wealth management clients are, what they expect, and how loyal they'll be — 44% of wealth management clients worldwide plan to change providers in the next three years. And the advisors still in their seats are losing roughly half their working day to manual administrative work that has nothing to do with the thing they're actually paid to do: build relationships and give advice.

"You need more than AI that assists," Agrios said. "You need one that acts."

That's the thesis Agentic Advisor is built around. Not a copilot. Not another tool that requires constant prompting. An autonomous system that operates in the background — preparing for meetings, monitoring portfolios, tracking tasks, updating records — while the advisor stays focused on the client in front of them.

Agrios has been at Salesforce for over 18 years. She started on the customer success side — sitting with financial institutions after they'd already bought the platform, watching what made them succeed or fail — and has led the financial services business through every major technology shift since.

That vantage point shapes how she talks about this moment. She's not describing a new product. She's describing the payoff of a longer arc.

"The problems that we've been trying to solve for financial advisors have just gotten better as the technology evolves," she told me. "We can solve these problems so much more efficiently now. It's been an incredible evolution."

When Salesforce launched Financial Services Cloud 12 years ago, the great wealth transfer was already a topic of conversation — but the tools to act on it were entirely manual. Advisors knew their clients were aging, their households were complex, and the next generation was coming. They just had no efficient way to map it, anticipate it, or act on it at scale.

Agentic Advisor is Agrios's answer to that problem — finally. And the timing is not accidental.

I've been reporting on this race all year. FIS built its Financial Crimes AI agent with Anthropic, already deployed at BMO and Amalgamated Bank, and CEO Stephanie Ferris has been explicit about FIS's positioning as the compliance and governance layer between frontier AI and the banking system.

Fiserv's Co-President Dhivya Suryadevara told me just last week that AI transformation in banking requires going back to first principles — not optimizing existing processes, but asking whether those processes should exist at all.

Salesforce is coming at the same race from the relationship layer. Different entry point. Same fundamental bet: the future of financial services runs on AI infrastructure that keeps humans at the center.

The suite launches with six purpose-built capabilities. Meeting Concierge is available now — it automatically prepares advisors with full client context before every meeting, captures what happens during it, and automates follow-through the moment it ends.

Run My Day and the Enhanced Client Details Page follow in July and August, giving advisors an intelligent daily command center and a living, holistic view of every client and household. A Connector Library, Book of Business Insights, and Anywhere Advisor are coming later in the year.

Together they're designed to eliminate what Agrios called "the 27-click problem" — the reality that advisors in most firms have to navigate enormous manual complexity just to get to the information they need to do their job.

"Imagine you could open up your advisor hub and the information is just there," she said. "You've got your army of agents operating behind the scenes — summarizing the client profile, creating the meeting agenda, potentially reaching out to collect documents ahead of time. When they log in, they're focused on what they know best: providing financial advice."

The human-in-the-loop framework is built into the architecture, not bolted on afterward. Agents act, but advisors approve. Every action is logged and auditable. Compliance controls are embedded at the system level, which Agrios argued is the only way to actually get advisor adoption in a regulated industry.

"Compliance has traditionally been brought to the table late, positioned as the naysayer," she said. "There's a tremendous opportunity now to bring those compliance and risk teams right up front — to show them the prototypes, have them around the table. Because they are part of accelerating how quickly this is going to make an impact."

That's a point I've heard from every major player in this race. Fiserv's Suryadevara said the same thing about agentOS. FIS's Ferris built it into the Anthropic partnership from day one. Compliance-first isn't a marketing phrase anymore. It's the actual architecture decision that determines whether banks and advisors will trust the system enough to use it.

I asked Agrios the question I've been asking everyone this year: when does the agentic advisor need to get out of the way and let human instinct take over?

Her answer was more forward-looking than I expected.

Right now, she said, the system is very human-assisted — agents operating close to the advisor, with humans triggering most actions.

The next step, already in prototyping, is goal-based agents. Give an agent a specific objective — find me prospective clients in a certain demographic in a certain geography — and let it go work autonomously toward that goal, the way you'd brief a highly capable intern. The advisor becomes, as Agrios put it, "human in the helm" rather than human in the loop.

Further out — and she was careful about the timeline — agents will communicate directly with clients. Place calls. Collect documentation. Handle the operational layer of a relationship almost entirely.

"The advisor will always have a place when we're talking about multi-generational financial plans and the advice clients need in terms of where to move their money," she said. "Clients will show up much more educated. The advisor will be able to service more clients, probably better, because they're going to be brought in for the areas where clients really need that hand-holding."

I've been writing about this exact tension all year — from my conversation with Ida Liu, CEO of HSBC Private Bank, who told me that in private banking, the relationship becomes an extension of the family, and that EQ is irreplaceable. Liu's point and Agrios's point are actually the same: AI doesn't replace the relationship. It clears the path to it.

The RBC father-son experiment ended with both of them getting to the same result. But the father had 90 more minutes to use however he wanted. More client calls. Deeper preparation on the next case. Time back for the work that actually requires a human.

That's the whole thesis.

"Advisors aren't just going to jump and take the newest thing," Agrios said. "They're like: is this going to actually work? Showing is believing."

Salesforce is betting that the answer, once they see it, will be yes.

Dame Clare Barclay spent years at the top of Microsoft (yes, she’s a Dame! She was recognized for her contributions to business and technology last June — too cool!)

Most recently, as CEO of Microsoft UK, one of the most consequential technology leadership roles in Europe. But she recently joined the board of the UK-based BNPL platform, Zilch.

Considered a “double unicorn”, Zilch boasts a $2B valuation.

This move matters because of who Barclay is (her credentials speak for themselves) and because of what it signals about where serious talent is placing its bets right now.

Aka.. just another angle in the future-of-work conversation we talked about on Tuesday.

Despite its double unicorn status, Zilch isn't a household name in New York, but it should be.

The London-based fintech has built one of the most resilient consumer credit platforms in Europe, recently acquired Lithuanian-based Fjord Bank, and is doing something meaningfully different from many of the BNPL companies that dominate the category's reputation.

Most buy-now-pay-later providers are built around the retailer. Merchant partnerships, checkout integrations, point-of-sale borrowing. The retailer is the customer.

Zilch flipped that model. Their customer is the person.

Borrowing limits are set before a purchase decision is made, based on what someone can actually afford.

They partnered with Experian early on, secured a consumer credit license from the FCA at inception, and built a Visa virtual card that works anywhere Visa is accepted, not just where a merchant deal exists.

It's a financial health model wearing a fintech product's clothes, and that distinction matters as regulatory pressure on consumer credit tightens across every major market.

Barclay also chairs the UK government's Industrial Strategy Advisory Council.

She understands regulatory infrastructure at a depth most board members don't.

For a company positioning itself toward an IPO and actively eyeing acquisitions, that expertise isn't incidental; it's the whole point of her appointment.

Fintech now accounts for roughly 1 in 5 unicorns globally.

423 companies valued at $1 billion or more, up from 329 at the end of 2022, according to FintechLabs. The category isn't emerging anymore. It's compounding.

That's the context for why a board appointment at a British BNPL company is worth your attention.

When executives of Barclay's caliber start moving toward fintech, not as a career pivot, but as a deliberate bet on where the next decade of meaningful work happens, it confirms something the numbers have been saying for a while.

Fintech has the scale, the complexity, and the stakes to attract the same talent that once considered Big Tech the only game worth playing.

Jyoti Menon has been building at the intersection of finance and payments longer than the industry had a name for it.

By the time "fintech" became the term everyone started using, she was already deep in the work.

Today, she's VP of Product at Bread Financial, and she joined the Humans of Fintech podcast with a perspective shaped by one of the hardest lessons in financial services: getting consumers to actually change how they behave is a different problem than building good technology.

Menon launched Apple Pay at Citi.

If any product should have moved fast — major brand, seamless UX, genuine utility — it was that one.

What she learned instead was that habit change is stubborn, even with every advantage. Adoption isn't a technology problem, but an ecosystem problem. Issuers, networks, and merchants all have to move together, or the behavior never shifts.

That insight shapes everything about how she approaches product now.

Menon's product philosophy starts with rejecting the idea of a perfect, universal user.

Bread Financial's customer base runs the full spectrum. People who want "set it and forget it" automation on one end, and people who need granular, hands-on control during high-stress moments like fraud disputes on the other.

Building for one means failing the other.

Her "test and learn" approach is less a methodology than a mindset: stay close to how people actually behave, not how you assume they will.

Menon is bullish on AI but direct about where teams go wrong.

Taking AI outputs at face value, without the critical thinking to interrogate what's coming back, is how you build on unstable ground.

In financial services, where data privacy and exposure to fraud are live risks, that instinct toward verification isn't optional.

She encourages leaders to experiment with AI alongside their teams rather than above them, staying close enough to the work to know what's actually being built.

The hardest problem in fintech has never been the technology.

It's changing how people use it. Menon has been working on that problem long enough to know there are no shortcuts — only ecosystems built carefully, products tested honestly, and a clear-eyed read of what customers actually need.

That's the work, and she's been doing it longer than most.

🎙️ New episode of Humans of Fintech: Bread Financial’s Jyoti Menon is Building Product to Change Consumer Habits. Listen here.

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

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

FTW: San Francisco is coming September 29 – October 1 — and we are deep in it. The most iconic names in fintech are already locking in as core partners, and inventory is moving faster than I expected.

If NYC showed us anything, it's that this industry is craving real community again. Not panels and pitch stages — actual conversations between the operators, builders, banks, fintechs, and infrastructure leaders who are deciding what comes next. That's what we're building in San Francisco.

If you want to be in the room — or bring your brand into it — now is the time. Early-bird passes are live, and partner inventory won't last long.

Big energy today in the city with the Knicks parade! So much love and joy to celebrate.

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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 💜