Hey, fintech fam 💜

Next week, I’ll be in Las Vegas for Fintech Meetup, where I’ll be live on the show floor at the first-ever Humans of Fintech podcast booth, taping six interviews, producing two events, and one New York Fintech Week promo shoot across two days.

If you’re there, come find me, say hi, and stop by the booth or our Fintech Penthouse breakfast or evening reception.

Before we all head west, a quick New York moment: early bird tickets are almost sold out for New York Fintech Week and the Fintech Is Femme Leadership Summit.

And I’m excited to start sharing who will be joining us on stage.

We’ll be headlined by Ida Liu, Chief Executive Officer of HSBC Private Bank, and Erica Dorfman, Chief Financial Officer of Brex, who is leading one of the most closely watched deals in fintech right now with Capital One.

More speakers from our lineup to come soon — but if you’re planning to join us in New York, now is the time. Save your seat here.

Now, back to Vegas.

One of the clearest ways I’ve learned to spot where fintech is headed is by listening closely to the people building it. And looking at the conversations I have lined up next week, the pattern is already coming into view.

That's the AI paradox hiding in your CX stack. Tickets close. Customers leave. And most teams don't see it coming because they're measuring the wrong things.

Efficiency metrics look great on paper. Handle time down. Containment rate up. But customer loyalty? That's a different story — and it's one your current dashboards probably aren't telling you.

Gladly's 2026 Customer Expectations Report surveyed thousands of real consumers to find out exactly where AI-powered service breaks trust, and what separates the platforms that drive retention from the ones that quietly erode it.

If you're architecting the CX stack, this is the data you need to build it right. Not just fast. Not just cheap. Built to last.

See the data

One of the clearest ways I’ve learned to recognize patterns in fintech is by listening closely to the people building it.

Interviews have always been more than content for me. They’re how I track where the industry is moving before the headlines fully catch up. A founder’s language. An operator’s priorities. A regulator’s shift in tone. Put enough of those conversations together, and you start to see the outline of the next cycle.

That’s why I’m especially excited for next week at Fintech Meetup in Las Vegas.

For the first time, I’ll be live on the show floor with the Humans of Fintech podcast booth, taping six interviews across two days, plus one main-stage keynote. And looking at the lineup, the signal is already clear.

The conversations I have queued up point to an industry at an inflection point: toward AI, yes, but not AI in the abstract. Toward applied intelligence. Toward global expansion. Toward regulation as a springboard, not a blocker. Toward a more mature fintech industry that is less obsessed with novelty and more focused on building systems that actually work at scale.

That’s the real signal I’m seeing.

Take Shanthi Shanmugam, founder and CEO of Casap, who recently raised a $25 million Series A to build in one of the most painful and underappreciated parts of financial services: fraud disputes. 

After leading customer support infrastructure at Robinhood, she saw what happens when trust breaks — not just for the customer, but for the teams and platforms trying to repair it. 

Casap is addressing that problem through agentic AI, with disputes resolved in 27 days instead of the industry-standard 90 days and costs cut by as much as 90%, according to the company.

That’s not just a workflow improvement. That’s infrastructure for trust.

And that’s a pattern.

Whether I’m talking to founders about disputes, ​Alyse Belavic, Head of Strategic Initiatives, Prove about identity and fraud, or sitting down with Ryan Breslow, founder and CEO of Bolt, on the main stage to unpack the next wave of “super app” ambitions, the same underlying question keeps surfacing:

How do you make financial experiences better without asking users to give up trust, control, or clarity?

Convenience is accelerating.

Confidence isn’t always keeping pace.

Then there’s the operator reality.

When I sit down to interview Jyoti Menon, VP of Product at Bread Financial, I’m not just talking to someone with a product title. I’m talking to someone who has been in fintech long enough to remember when we didn’t even call it fintech yet. 

Her career arc — from Goldman Sachs to American Express to Citi, where she helped launch Apple Pay, to Bread Financial now — tracks the evolution of the industry itself.

One thing she told me on our prep call that stuck out: AI may be the next great platform shift, but the core problem remains the same. 

You still have to make your product discoverable, useful, and relevant to how people actually live. That is such an important corrective to the current hype cycle. 

The winners won’t just be the loudest or even most funded voices in AI. They’ll be the ones who translate it into better products, better servicing, and better outcomes.

AI doesn’t change the job. It changes how well you can do it.

That same practicality shows up in Danny Friday’s work at Sail.

As Founder and CEO, he’s tackling healthcare affordability through a fintech lens, specifically by focusing on HSA and FSA expense tracking and reimbursement. 

And honestly, this is exactly the kind of issue our industry still doesn’t put on enough stages. Healthcare is a financial system. It is a workflow problem, an access problem, an education problem, and a family finance problem all at once.

As Friday put it to me, the healthcare ecosystem is “really, really, really big and complicated.” 

What he’s building is a reminder that some of fintech’s biggest opportunities still lie in places that were made overly complicated for everyday people.

Then zoom out internationally, and a second pattern gets even clearer: fintech’s next maturity phase is global.

That’s where my conversations with Rina Jariwala, Chief Operating Officer of Fundbox, and Sergio Cordoba, Chief Acquisition Officer of Ontop, come in.

Both point in that direction, but from different angles.

Fundbox recently announced its expansion into Australia, with Canada and the U.K. next, because its partners want a single platform that can scale with them across markets. 

But as Jariwala made clear, global expansion isn’t plug-and-play. It requires local knowledge, local hiring, and a deep understanding of regulatory nuance.

Scale, but with added layers of precision.

Cordoba framed it differently, but in a way that gets at the same point. Ontop exists to help companies hire and pay talent across borders compliantly, while also building a financial ecosystem for workers who have historically been excluded from global opportunity. 

One line from him stayed with me: there is “amazing talent that doesn’t get a chance or gets left behind” because the infrastructure is too fragmented to reach them.

That, too, is a fintech problem. And a fintech opportunity.

And then there’s regulation.

My conversation with Katy Ryan, Partner of Orrick, will bring that into focus — not as a constraint, but as a differentiator. The companies that treat compliance as core to their product, not an afterthought, are the ones that will scale sustainably in this next phase.

That shift matters.

Because fintech isn’t in its experimental phase anymore.

It’s in its accountability phase.

So when I look at this interview slate heading into Las Vegas, I don’t just see a lineup.

I see a map.

AI is becoming more operational and less theoretical. Global expansion is becoming more nuanced and less naive. Regulation is becoming a growth enabler for companies willing to do the hard work. And fintech itself is growing up — from apps and interfaces into deeper systems of trust, compliance, capital, and access.

That’s where the industry is heading.

And next week, I’ll be on the show floor, microphone in hand, seeing how many more dots connect.

Come find me at the Humans of Fintech podcast booth at Fintech Meetup.

We’ve got a lot to talk about.

Reminder: early bird tickets for New York Fintech Week and the Fintech Is Femme Leadership Summit are live now.

Join us in New York with leaders like Ida Liu, Chief Executive Officer of HSBC Private Bank, and Erica Dorfman, Chief Financial Officer of Brex, and many more to come.

See you in Vegas — and then in New York.

🙌🏼 A HUGE thank you to our partners for helping us make this event possible, including: Mastercard, CleverTap, Highnote, Brex, Casap, Osborne Clarke, Withum, RevTech Labs, Springboard Enterprises, Candidly, iProov, Jumio, Zenity, Prove, and Charm Security.

📰 Share this newsletter with a friend and start growing your network.

🔗 Connect with me on LinkedIn for daily insights on leadership.

🤝 Grow your business through content & community by partnering with me.

📣 Promote yourself to 50,000 subscribers by sponsoring this newsletter or the Humans of Fintech podcast.

🎤 Host an epic event by booking me as a speaker, moderator, or emcee.

📚 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.

And one more reminder: early bird tickets for New York Fintech Week and the Fintech Is Femme Leadership Summit are live now.

Join us in New York with leaders like Ida Liu and Erica Dorfman — and many more to come.

See you in Vegas — and then in New York.

Love,

Nicole 💜