Hey, fintech fam! 💜

I’m so happy to be back. And a huge thank you to our guest contributor, Christina Rea, for holding it down last Tuesday.

If you’re anything like me, you’re drowning in a sea of emails, Slack messages, calendar invites, and a to-do list that grew while you were off having Labor Day fun.

But hey, my mother always said, “It’s better to be busy than bored.” So I guess we’re right on schedule, because fall madness is officially here.

And over at Fintech Is Femme HQ, it is serious business. Late nights, a lot of moving pieces, and thankfully, still a lot of laughs.

This week, I’m deep in the final agenda build for FTW: San Francisco, September 29–October 1, especially the Leadership Summit lineup, while also helping our Security Summit co-host, Frances Zelazny, bring that stage together.

What I’m most proud of is the mix.

We’re bringing AI-native companies, fintechs, financial institutions, infrastructure players, and senior operators into the same rooms, not just to talk about what’s changing, but to build relationships, make decisions, and close deals.

And the timing feels especially interesting because those worlds are converging faster than ever.

Today alone, we’ve seen major news around bank ownership, charters, infrastructure, and control of the financial stack. At the same time, AI is changing how products are built, how decisions get made, and how companies think about what they should own versus partner for.

So for today’s column, I want to get into the connective tissue.

Why are more fintechs moving closer to the banking core just as AI is accelerating everything around them? And what does that tell us about where the industry is headed next?

Let’s get into it. ✨

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I had one of those days today where the news started feeling less like a collection of individual announcements and more like the reinforcement of a pattern.

First, TabaPay announced $155 million in new growth financing alongside plans to acquire Transact Bank. If the deal closes, the bank will be renamed TabaBank, bringing banking and payments capabilities under one roof.

Then Chime announced a $590 million agreement to acquire Stride Bank, its banking partner of more than seven years. Assuming regulatory approval, Stride will eventually become Chime Bank.

And then Block entered the conversation with news that it has applied to establish Builders Bank & Trust, a federally regulated national trust bank.

Three companies with very different businesses, announcing three very different transactions. But I kept coming back to the same question:

How much of the financial stack does a modern fintech actually want to own?

Because for most of the last decade, the answer seemed fairly obvious: as little as necessary.

That was part of fintech's magic.

You didn’t need to become a bank to build a better banking experience.

You didn’t need to own every piece of the infrastructure to rethink payments, lending, investing, or money movement.

APIs and partnerships allowed founders to separate the customer experience from much of the regulated machinery underneath it, pick one painful part of financial services, and build something better around it.

The industry became very good at unbundling.

I wrote about a lot of that evolution in my book Fintech Feminists. So much of fintech's rise was the story of new builders gaining access to parts of financial services that had historically been controlled by a relatively small number of institutions. The result was more competition, better interfaces, new distribution models, and eventually entirely new categories of companies.

But that model always had another side.

No matter how beautiful the app was, somebody still had to hold the charter. Somebody had to sponsor the program. Somebody had to move and settle the money. Somebody had to manage the balance sheet, navigate the regulation, and assume responsibility for what happened underneath the experience.

For a long time, outsourcing those pieces was an advantage because it allowed fintech companies to move faster. During that unbundling era, fintechs built an unbelievable 10:1 cost advantage over traditional institutions, spending just $5 to $35 to acquire a customer compared to a traditional bank’s $150 to $300.

Now I’m wondering whether, at a certain scale, some of those same dependencies start to become a constraint. As a fintech scales to millions of users, that low acquisition cost gets offset by the mounting toll paid to Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) partners.

Outsourcing flips from a cheap accelerator into a ceiling on your operating margins.

And the timing of this shift is what I find particularly interesting, because it’s happening just as AI is making so many other parts of technology easier and faster to build.

We’ve spent the last two years talking about how AI lowers the cost of software creation. Teams can prototype faster. Products can become more personalized. Agents can increasingly make decisions and complete work that previously required people.

But AI does not magically create a bank charter.

It doesn’t manufacture a regulatory relationship overnight. It doesn’t give you access to payment networks, a balance sheet, or decades of institutional trust simply because the model got smarter.

If anything, I think AI makes the distinction between what is abundant and what remains scarce in financial services much easier to see. And that may explain why infrastructure is suddenly looking a lot more attractive to own.

There’s a temptation to look at Chime, TabaPay, Block, and the broader movement toward bank ownership or charters and say, “Well, I guess fintechs are becoming banks now.”

I think that’s too simplistic.

This isn't a retreat to old banking; it is the construction of the ultimate modern financial moat. The new playbook is clear: build hyper-efficient technology and user orchestration first, capture distribution, then acquire or build your own infrastructure underneath it.

This sequencing solves a fundamental problem of the past. Traditional legacy institutions fail at cross-selling because their mortgage, checking, and investing divisions live on entirely different, siloed mainframe systems that can't communicate fast enough for the speed customers expect today. A traditional bank's tech stack is a collection of walls.

By contrast, when a tech-first company buys the rails, they create a single, unified cloud architecture where data flows instantly.

Take Chime. The company has been very clear about the economics behind its Stride acquisition. Chime expects owning the bank to reduce the fees it currently pays banking partners, lower its funding costs, give it greater control over product development, and eventually create more than $100 million in net synergies.

Traditional banks have watched their Net Interest Margins (NIM) hover stagnantly around 2.5% to 3.5%. By eliminating the middleman and moving deposits smoothly into high-yield, high-margin products, a rebundled fintech can optimize its margins with software-like speed.

That’s not a philosophical embrace of traditional banking. That’s a scaled technology company looking at its cost structure and realizing that owning the infrastructure is how you unlock a "Financial Services Productivity Loop"—where the marginal cost to cross-sell a user a second or third product drops to virtually zero.

TabaPay is coming at the question from another direction.

The company expects to process more than $100 billion in payments this year and already works with roughly 20 partner banks across the U.S. and Canada. Rodney Robinson, its co-founder and CEO, has said that the planned creation of TabaBank would allow the company to bring payments and banking capabilities under one roof while continuing to work alongside those bank partners.

Owning more infrastructure does not necessarily mean abandoning the ecosystem. It may mean having more optionality inside it.

And maybe that’s the more interesting evolution happening here.

Fintech spent years proving that you could build enormous businesses without owning the entire financial stack. Now some of the companies that reached scale using that model have enough volume, capital, and distribution to reconsider which pieces are simply too strategically important to leave entirely in someone else’s hands.

Then AI makes the question even more complicated

This is the part I keep thinking about as we build the agenda for FTW: San Francisco.

So much of the current AI conversation happens at the interface layer. What will the agent do? What decisions can it make? What can we automate? How personalized can the product become?

All important questions. But financial services have this annoying habit of eventually forcing us back into the real world.

An agent can decide that money should move. Someone still has to move it. An AI system can make a credit recommendation. Someone still owns the risk. A model can personalize a financial product in real time. Someone still has to make sure the product is compliant, secure, explainable, and actually works when a customer needs it.

As intelligence becomes cheaper, flawless execution becomes everything.

And that is where the fintech story starts becoming inseparable from the AI story. AI cannot bridge a broken legacy bank silo. But if you have spent the last decade building a modern tech stack and now own the underlying regulated infrastructure, you have built a frictionless sandbox where AI can execute financial decisions in real time.

The technology companies are getting closer to financial decisions. Fintech companies are getting deeper into banking infrastructure. Banks, meanwhile, are trying to figure out how to take advantage of AI without sacrificing the trust and regulatory permission that make their institutions valuable in the first place.

Those three forces are beginning to collide. I don't know that we fully understand what the resulting financial system looks like yet, which, frankly, is what makes this such an interesting time to be reporting on it.

Conveniently, I get to ask the people making these decisions.

This is also one of those moments when the news cycle and the FTW agenda I’ve been obsessing over suddenly snap together.

When I program our Leadership Summit, I’m always looking for the executives who can show us where the industry is headed before the answer feels obvious. I want the people making big calls, placing big bets, and living with the consequences of those decisions.

In three weeks, TabaPay Co-Founder and CEO Rodney Robinson will be sitting across from me at the FTW: San Francisco Leadership Summit, fresh off a $155 million financing and a proposed bank acquisition that could fundamentally expand what TabaPay owns.

Needless to say, I have questions.

When does partnership become a constraint? Why own the bank now? What becomes possible with banking and payments under the same roof? And in a world increasingly obsessed with AI, which parts of the financial stack does Rodney believe still matter exactly as much as they did before?

The next day, I’ll open our Fintech Security Summit with Janelle Sallenave, COO of Chime, just weeks after the company announced one of the most consequential moves in its history.

That conversation suddenly has an entirely new layer too. What changes operationally when the fintech owns the regulated institution underneath its product?

We're about to find out if putting the bank back together finally solves the problems of the past—or if it creates something entirely new. See you in San Francisco.

P.S. Since you made it to the end of today’s column — as a thank you for coming on this journey with me — here’s a major discount code to grab your ticket to FTW: San Francisco.

We’re hosting an exclusive dinner after Day 1 of FTW: San Francisco with Tabapay’s CEO and Co-Founder, Rodney Robinson. No presentations or formal agenda—just thoughtful dialogue with people helping shape what’s next in fintech.

​Space is limited, so we encourage you to reserve your seat early.

​On October 1, Growth Stage: Candidly brings three leaders into the spotlight for an invite-only evening of storytelling, connection, and shared insight.

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Thanks for spending time with me today!

Love,

Nicole 💜