Hey, fintech fam 💜

It's a fun time to be in New York right now. The Knicks are in the finals — and look, I grew up playing sports and enjoy going to games, but I'll be honest, I'm not really a sports person. Either way, I'm always up for a reason to rally and celebrate this city. The energy picking back up again feels good.

The same is true here at Fintech Is Femme. I can feel new eras, changes, and growth ahead of us — and I mean that in the most exciting, intentional way. More on that soon.

Also — I'm three weeks away from my wedding. Three weeks. Someone, please tell me it all comes together because I am deep in it right now.

Let's get into it. ✨

There's a restaurant on the Jersey Shore that Denise Leonhard visits regularly. She knows the owner — not well, the way you know someone you see often but don't really know — and one evening he asked what she did for a living.

She told him she leads the team at Zelle.

His eyes lit up.

Every single night, at the end of a shift, he tips out his staff through Zelle. Which means the people who worked that night go home with money already in their bank account — enough to pay the babysitter, send rent, handle whatever comes next.

It doesn't sound like a big deal until you realize that Zelle processed $1.2 trillion in total payment volume in 2025 alone. That it has 160 million accounts on the network. That in December, 100 million of those accounts made a transaction.

And that behind every single one of those transactions is a version of that restaurant story.

"When you think about 1.2 trillion, or 100 million active accounts, those numbers get a little bit too big to actually be able to wrap your head around," Leonhard told the audience at the Fintech Is Femme Leadership Summit during FTW: NYC. "So we always go back to the customer."

That instinct — to collapse scale back down to the individual — was the defining thread of one of the most candid conversations I curated at our Leadership Summit.

Alongside Leonhard, I brought together Stephanie Guild, Chief Investment Officer at Robinhood, and Laurel Taylor, Founder and CEO of Candidly, for a session called Inside the Operating Room: How Fintech Leaders Are Scaling the Future of Financial Services.

Three operators with real scale, real accountability, and real conviction about what it actually takes to build financial products that people trust with their money.

Robinhood has 27 million accounts and $300 billion in assets under custody. Through Robinhood Strategies, Guild's team is now managing money directly for 265,000 people — picking investments on their behalf, not just facilitating trades.

That distinction matters to her.

"There's not one account that's too small for me not to think about," Guild said. "When you see the customers' names and the account numbers, it's these people. They could be your mom. They could be your kid."

What strikes me about that framing is how deliberately it resists the abstraction that scale usually produces.

Most companies of Robinhood's size have long since stopped thinking in terms of individual accounts. Guild hasn't. And she's built that resistance into how the entire team operates — user research videos shared company-wide, Hood Summit bringing employees face-to-face with the people they serve, a mission statement repeated aloud every Friday at all-hands.

"Democratize finance for all," she said. "I think people feel that in those moments. It's kind of like, without being religious, religion."

Taylor, whose company Candidly has spent a decade helping Americans navigate student debt and build toward retirement, framed the stakes of that mission in terms that landed hard in the room.

"Wealth is not just for the wealthy," she said. "We can all create wealth-creating moments."

At Candidly, it's an operational thesis — the belief that the product decisions you make about who you serve and how you serve them are inseparable from the financial outcomes of the people who use them.

The most underrated insight from this conversation wasn't about AI, agentic commerce, or the next wave of fintech infrastructure. It was about listening.

Zelle has approximately 8 million small businesses on its platform. When Leonhard's team went out and spoke with them directly, they heard a recurring source of friction: small business owners didn't want to share their personal phone number or email address to receive payments. It felt too exposed. Too personal for a business context.

The solution was small-business tags — a handle like "Denise's dog walker" or "Denise's ice cream shop" that lets businesses accept payments without sharing personal contact information. It's also, as it turned out, a branding moment. Adoption has been strong.

"We wouldn't have gotten there without going out and talking to our customers," Leonhard said.

Guild described the same discipline from a different angle. When Robinhood Strategies launched, clients were bringing over portfolios from other robo-advisors — portfolios with embedded gains that would trigger significant tax consequences if liquidated too quickly. The right answer was obvious technically. But technically, right wasn't enough.

Guild started writing personal letters.

Not templated communications. Actual letters — stopping the account, explaining what she was seeing, laying out what she thought the right move was for that specific client, and giving them room to respond. Client after client wrote back saying they were shocked. That a service at this scale had actually seen them as an individual.

"That's what I mean by the little moments," Guild said. "They matter more than the big grand thing."

Taylor named that dynamic precisely: "Doing things that don't scale on the way to scaling."

It's a principle every founder knows in theory. What was striking about this conversation was hearing it from operators running platforms at nine and ten-figure scale — and realizing they haven't let go of it.

The conversation shifted naturally toward what comes next — and two announcements from Guild illustrated exactly how Robinhood is thinking about that question.

The first: custodial accounts, letting parents invest on behalf of their children. The second: Robinhood's role as one of two selected partners — alongside BNY Mellon — to build the app for Trump savings accounts, the new government-backed individual retirement accounts for children under 18, funded initially with $1,000 from the US Treasury.

Five and a half million people have already signed up.

"I just think it's a step change in getting people — children — invested in understanding the value of growing your money over time early," Guild said.

The financial literacy angle runs deep here. As Taylor noted, it is genuinely bizarre that financial education isn't embedded in the American classroom. Robinhood is building that education directly into the Trump accounts app — bite-sized lessons on what a stock is, how the account works, what compounding means — in the hope that it reaches not just the children, but their parents too.

Guild's instinct about where Robinhood's customer base is heading informed this move as well. The average age of a Robinhood user has shifted from 30 to 36 in the years since she joined. Those six years represent a lot of life — partners, children, mortgages, retirement planning. The platform that only served traders can't grow with them.

So Robinhood has been deliberately expanding: joint accounts, retirement accounts, managed strategies, and ………………………..custodial accounts. The product roadmap is a mirror of the customer's life trajectory.

"How do we grow with them?" Guild said. "But also, how do we stay cool?"

When Taylor asked both leaders what founders and operators in the room absolutely had to get right — one thing, above all else — the answers converged on the same place they'd been circling all afternoon.

"It's all about answering a specific customer need," Leonhard said. "If you can crack it, that's what's going to make people use you again and again. Understanding your customer almost diabolically — pinpointing the need and coming to a solution. That's how you become a verb."

Guild's answer was about anticipation. "Before they even say it, sense the vibe and say what needs to be said so they don't have to. If you can do that through technology — anticipate the need, anticipate the problem — that's when you build real trust."

And on the harder days — the ones that look invisible from the outside but feel impossible from the inside — Guild offered something that landed quietly and stayed.

"You've gotten past 100% of your hard days," she said. "When you're in the moment and stressed, you're like: I'm going to get through it. I just haven't found the right path yet. And you always do."

I curated this conversation because I believe the operational layer of fintech is where the real story lives right now. Not the announcements. Not the funding rounds.

The people who actually run the systems that millions of Americans use to move, save, and invest their money — and who haven't lost sight of the restaurant owner on the Jersey Shore tipping his staff at the end of a long shift.

That's the standard.

And it's the only one that scales.

We're taking everything we built at New York Fintech Week — the summits, the executive-level community, the intentional programming — and bringing it to the West Coast.

More details are coming soon, but if you want to be in the room, be first to know, or bring your brand to the table — reply to this email or reach out directly.

See you there. 💜

It may be sunny in NYC but im in the business of making it rain. Anyway, thank you for letting me have that joke - enjoying this in my rotation to hype me up.

📰 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.

Thanks for spending time with me today.

Love,

Nicole 💜