Hey, fintech fam 💜

I woke up this morning to the news that Gloria Steinem died, and I've been sitting with it all day.

Before she became an icon of the women's movement, Gloria was a journalist. That's the part of her story I've always been drawn to.

She used journalism to ask questions the industry wasn't asking, report stories it didn't consider important, and take the experiences of women seriously when much of the media did not.

Eventually, she built the media company she believed needed to exist. It's the exact playbook I've followed with Fintech Is Femme.

In April 2022, I got to tell her what I was building and why (see pictures here!)

One of the greatest journalists and movement-builders of all time understood exactly what it was. She called it journalism. She thanked me for covering a beat no one else was.

(So to those who may think what I’m doing isn’t journalism, take it up with Gloria 😆)

Women's stories aren't a side beat, a diversity initiative, or something you cover after the "real" business news is finished… they are the story.

Gloria's work gave me permission to imagine journalism differently, as a tool for showing people the world that could exist, and I carry that into this newsletter every single week.

Thank you, Gloria, for the mentorship, even from afar, and for making room for so many more of us to tell our stories.

And on to the newsletter…

Today's edition covers a banking consortium betting big on stablecoins, a fintech proving immigrant communities were never a niche market, and a conversation on why trust, not technology, is what actually closes deals in the AI era.

Let’s get into it. ✨

FTW: SAN FRANCISCO’S LEADERSHIP SUMMIT TAKING SHAPE

Big congratulations to our partners at TabaPay, which just announced $155 million in strategic growth financing led by FTV Capital as the company enters its next phase of growth.

And the timing couldn't be better: TabaPay Co-Founder & CEO Rodney Robinson is joining me onstage at the Fintech Is Femme Leadership Summit on September 30, as part of FTW: San Francisco.

We'll dig into one of the biggest questions running through this newsletter and the industry right now: What does AI actually change about financial services — and what fundamentals still matter no matter how good the technology gets?

Rodney has spent years building the infrastructure underneath fintech. I can't think of a better moment to have him in the room.

Congratulations to Rodney and the entire TabaPay team. See you in San Francisco.

Join us in SF by saving your seat here.

#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.

Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Capital One, PNC and Fidelity are among twenty-one global institutions that committed this week to forming a joint stablecoin company in the second half of 2026. 

The group plans to launch a dollar-denominated stablecoin in the first half of 2027, with a euro offering next in line, backed one-to-one by reserves and built on public blockchains. 

The company's name, token, blockchain partners and governance structure haven't been announced yet, but the ambition has: cross-border payments and digital-asset settlement across wholesale, institutional and eventually retail markets.

Global banks want a shared, institutionally governed stablecoin. Crypto-native issuers like Tether and Circle already have the liquidity and adoption to match. 

Thirty-nine state bankers associations have formed BankChain Alliance, an industry-owned blockchain network that lets community and regional banks offer tokenized deposits, stablecoins, and programmable payments without routing through the largest institutions. 

"This is about banks of all sizes building their own future," said Kathy Kraninger, BankChain Alliance's interim chair and CEO of the Florida Bankers Association. 

Texas Bankers Association CEO, Chris Furlow, called it "a practical path to participate in new financial technologies while keeping the needs of their customers and local communities in focus." 

Card networks and payment companies, meanwhile, are positioning themselves as the acceptance and orchestration layer that connects all three camps together.

Building a compliant token is the easy part. 

Getting customers to actually use it is the test every one of these groups is about to face. 

Société Générale's dollar stablecoin has roughly $12.5 million circulating today. Tether has issued more than $180 billion, yet has none of the regulatory blessings. 

Regulatory approval and bank-grade governance mean nothing if the token sits unused while crypto-native players keep the liquidity they've already built.

This is a story about twenty-one of the largest financial institutions on earth deciding they'd rather build shared infrastructure than let it be built around them. 

Thirty-nine state banking associations make the same bet on a smaller scale to avoid depending entirely on the biggest players. 

The real question is whether either network opens its doors to smaller institutions on fair terms, or whether stablecoin infrastructure just becomes the next place scale advantage compounds. 

Then we ask, does shared ownership actually create interoperability, or does it just build a more sophisticated closed network? 

Want to go deeper on stablecoins? Watch this episode of Humans of Fintech with Stripe on what they mean for the future of fintech.

Co-Founder and CEO of Félix, Manuel Godoy, came to the U.S. and found that getting a small loan took longer and cost more than it should have. 

The products in front of him were built for someone else's life, someone else's income pattern, and someone else's family structure. 

"Traditional financial institutions often start with the product they want you to use," he said. "We want to start with the person."

This week, Félix closed $200 million, an $87 million equity round led by Andreessen Horowitz with QED Investors, Castle Island Ventures, Switch Ventures, Contour Venture Partners and Endeavor Catalyst, plus a $113 million commitment from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund. 

The company has processed more than $8 billion in transactions since launch and grown revenue 2.5x in the past year, connecting customers in the U.S. with their families across eleven Latin American markets through a conversational platform built on WhatsApp.

Félix cites the U.S. Latino population's $4.4 trillion in annual economic output and Nielsen data showing Hispanic consumers are 29% more likely than the general population to adopt AI platforms. 

Félix's raise is one data point in a pattern I've watched play out across the founders I cover. 

For example, Nina Mohanty built Bloom Money by digitizing the ROSCA lending model widely used in immigrant communities, betting that today's underserved customers are tomorrow's prime ones. 

"I hope that the incumbents are paying attention," she told me. "We're coming for their immigrant customers." 

Sofiat Abdulrazaaq built Goodfynd's payment infrastructure around the specific operational reality of immigrant-run food trucks, businesses she understood firsthand as the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. 

Félix's $200 million round is just another example of how much opportunity there is to serve immigrants and their families. 

Traditional banks have spent decades building products and waiting for immigrant customers to adapt to them. 

Félix built for the customer first, and that approach was just backed with $200 million. 

Let this sink in: a conversational interface (what Félix is calling its Cognitive Financial Companion) on an app people already use daily just moved $8 billion in transactions without a single branch. 

The lesson isn't simply that immigrant communities are an underserved market. It's that “underserved” and “small” were never synonyms.

Félix built around how its customers actually communicate, move money and support their families — and has now processed $8 billion doing it.

The fintechs that understand culturally specific behavior as a product advantage, rather than a niche constraint, are going to build very big businesses.

Congratulations to the Félix team! 🎉

Angelique Strauss, Founder and CEO of ScaleX and one of my co-hosts for FTW:SF, joined me on Humans of Fintech to talk about why storytelling has become fintech's real competitive advantage in the AI era. 

Her perspective comes from lived experience.

As an immigrant navigating credit and home-buying in the U.S., she saw firsthand how opaque and intimidating financial systems feel to the people trying to use them, and that experience shaped her mission to make them more human-centric.

Angelique and I agree on this: fintech and big tech aren't racing toward the same finish line. They're evolving in parallel.

And fintech's moat is its deep, specialized financial data, something no general-purpose AI model can replicate from scratch.

(I talked more about data being fintech’s differentiator in my recent podcast episode with Drew Glover, too! Listen here if you haven’t.)

As AI commoditizes features across the industry, Angelique argues that trust becomes the differentiator that's left, a point I’ve been shouting from the rooftops to founders for years. 

Founders now have to show up as the face of their brand, proving to customers and partners that there's a human behind the product, not just an automated agent.

That's part of why business relationships are moving back into physical rooms, and why we bet so big on events like FTW:SF. 

Handshakes and in-person meetings are providing a kind of validation that AI-driven interactions can't replicate yet.

Angelique and I talked about why massive, sponsor-heavy conferences often fail to deliver real value, and why we designed FTW:SF around smaller, curated rooms for operators and investors who actually want to close something.

Angelique's read on the next five years centers on capital access for small businesses, and she sees stablecoins as one of the clearest paths to faster, cheaper global money movement and remittances. 

That's a capability layer, not a trust layer, but the two have to be built together. 

The fintechs that figure out how to combine both, better rails and a founder customers actually believe, are the ones set up to win the next stage of this industry, not just the ones with the best technology.

It’s time fintechs lead the AI conversation.

We have datasets richer than most. We touch every industry on the planet. And AI is about to revolutionize finance as we know it.

Take your seat at the table and join us for FTW:SF.

Our friends at the American Fintech Council are hosting their 2026 AFC Policy Summit, which brings together industry leaders and policymakers to exchange ideas, explore emerging trends, and shape the future of financial technology.

They’re giving our readers a special discount code to join! Use code: FintechIsFemme25 for 25% off any ticket type.

Olivia Rodrigo has been in the news recently for her first-ever Daisy Chain Fields festival, a music festival with all profits supporting women and girls and Melinda Gates matched dollar-for-dollar the $10M raised so far!

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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 💜