Fiserv has embedded Personetics’ AI platform into Experience Digital (XD). The integration will help banks deliver real-time, personalized financial guidance to consumers and small businesses. The move reflects the shift of AI from a standalone fintech tool to core digital banking infrastructure. Banking and commerce technology provider Fiserv and cognitive banking platform Personetics are joining forces today. Fiserv has embedded Personetics’ platform within its Experience Digital (XD), a tool that gives banks and credit unions a new way to offer more personalized experiences to end users. Embedding Personetics’ AI platform directly into Fiserv’s digital banking experience will allow Fiserv’s bank clients to act on data in real time, offering them the ability to deliver timely prompts, contextual guidance, and relevant offers within XD. The new capabilities will help end consumers manage their cash flow, build their savings, and make more informed financial decisions. It will offer small business users the ability to better manage working capital, anticipate needs, and respond more quickly to changes in their business. “Financial institutions have no shortage of data, but many still struggle to translate that information into timely, relevant action,” said Personetics CEO Udi Ziv. “By embedding Personetics within Experience Digital, Fiserv is helping banks and credit unions deliver more human, personalized digital experiences that can improve money management for consumers and help small businesses operate with greater confidence.” Personetics was founded in 2010 to bring cognitive banking tools to banks. The company sets itself apart with its AI-driven insights that help banks become a trusted advisor to their customers by bringing them personalized financial guidance. Personetics, a long-standing pioneer in AI-powered financial wellness, serves 150 million bank customers across 24 global markets each month. Fiserv launched its XD platform in 2023 as the evolution of its digital banking offerings, bringing together account opening, money management, payments, small business banking, and fintech integrations in a unified digital experience. Natively embedding Personetics’ tools into XD will enable banks to create a more intuitive and relevant digital banking experience. The move comes at a time when consumers are increasingly turning to AI-powered tools for financial guidance. Increasingly, fintechs and banks are adding AI-powered financial guidance as a built-in capability rather than an optional add-on. Embedding Personetics directly into XD will allow Fiserv to lower implementation barriers for clients, enabling banks to bring AI-driven money management tools to market more quickly. “Consumers and small businesses increasingly expect digital banking experiences that are intuitive and responsive,” said Fiserv Chief Product Officer Vishal Dalal. “With this collaboration, our clients can use the data they already have to deliver timely guidance and personalized engagement that creates meaningful value for the consumers and businesses they serve.” The announcement illustrates how AI is shifting from a standalone feature to core digital banking infrastructure. Rather than asking banks to select and integrate their own AI tools, platform providers like Fiserv are increasingly embedding those capabilities directly into their products, making advanced financial guidance accessible to a broader range of institutions. Photo by Marek Piwnicki The post Fiserv Embeds Personetics’ AI Platform into its Digital Banking Suite appeared first on Finovate.       

It’s a holiday shortened week in the US, with Independence Day (also known as the Fourth of July) just days away. With that in mind, we’ll keep you posted with all the fireworks in the fintech headlines this week here on the Fintech Rundown! Payments Philippines-based fintech Mynt readies for a $1.5 billion IPO for its mobile payments platform and mobile wallet GCash. Maldives Premier Bank (MPB) partners with Finastra for its Financial Messaging API, enabling resilient, secure, always-on payment connectivity. Paysafe joins Primer platform to streamline card payments for online merchants. Investing Education Community Alliance partners with InvestiFi for in-platform investing. Financial wellness Family technology company Greenlight launches its smart home display—Family Hub—to help families manage finances, chores, and more. Lending Financial services app Tabby secures a consumer finance license and a SME finance license from the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA.) Identity and authentication AI-native risk intelligence solution provider for financial crime and national security operations Quantifind secures $200 million in funding in a round led by Summit Partners. Post-quantum authentication and digital identity solutions provider Wultra raises $7.75 million in Series A funding. Agentic AI Communication risk management platform for financial services Shield added new AI agents to AmplifAI, its agentic suite for digital communications surveillance and investigations. AI transformation specialist Tavant launches its next-generation platform for agentic software engineering, data modernization, and enterprise AI automation. Business finance Canadian business finance platform Float Financial raises $60 million in Series C funding in a round led by Inovia Capital. Xero introduces industry benchmarking intelligence for small businesses. Fraud and risk Shield introduces the a governed AI agent designed to close compliance alerts autonomously. Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash The post Fintech Rundown: A Rapid Review of Weekly News appeared first on Finovate.       

This week’s edition of Finovate Global looks at recent fintech headlines from India. CRED raises $900 million in round led by Meta CRED, a membership-based, credit rewards platform that offers solutions across payments, lending, insurance, wealth, and lifestyle, has secured $900 million in Series H funding. The round was led by Meta, and will be structured through a combination of primary and secondary share purchases. Meta will join the CRED cap table as a minority investor; CRED will earn a post-money valuation of $4.5 billion. With 1.7 million members engaging with its platform every month, CRED processes more than 40% of credit card bill payments in India, and has seen its lending business grow to more than $2.5 billion in managed assets. The investment will enable the company to accelerate growth, build “institutional muscle,” and extend its leadership across verticals. The company announced that its founder, Kunal Shah, will transition from his operating role as CEO to head WhatsApp internationally. India is WhatsApp’s largest market, with more than 500 million users. Miten Sampat, who has led strategy and finance for CRED since 2020, will take the helm as interim CEO. “I started CRED in 2018 with a belief that creditworthiness deserves to be rewarded,” Shah said. “In under eight years, that belief has turned into a new category: millions of members, $325 million in revenue, profitability, a full stack of licenses, and a strong brand. On this foundation, with additional capital and an extraordinarily talented team, CRED is poised to become an enduring institution for decades to come.” CRED is headquartered in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India. The company’s investment announcement comes as the firm launches a new AI-powered credit coaching solution for CRED members. The AI credit coach provides personalized, real-time guidance based on the user’s credit profile to help them better understand their credit status and improve their credit health. Navi UPI enhances fraud protection capabilities Navi UPI, a popular UPI app, has unveiled Navi Secure, a new unified framework that combines the platform’s existing fraud prevention, risk monitoring, and user protection capabilities. The offering is designed to help merchants and users deal with the proliferation of increasingly sophisticated fraud attacks that leverage social engineering, compromised devices, false merchants, and more. With intelligent risk signals, contextual alerts, and preventive safeguards embedded in the customer journey, Navi Secure helps firms reduce risk across a range of fraud scenarios, including scam-driven payments and manipulation-based fraud; compromised devices and apps; unsafe networks and environments; and high-risk entities and transaction behavior. “Given digital payments have become central to everyday life, fraud prevention needs to be real time and contextual. Navi Secure reflects our commitment to building trust-first financial infrastructure, where safety is embedded into every transaction, not added as an afterthought,” Navi Limited MD and CEO Rajiv Naresh said. “By combining advanced risk intelligence with user-friendly safeguards, we are ensuring that customers can use UPI with confidence, knowing that Navi is actively working in the background to protect their money.” Navi UPI is among the fastest growing financial services companies in India. The company’s UPI transaction volumes grew from more than 709 million to more than 824 million between January and May 2026. The company currently has 3.6% of India’s UPI market share; a market dominated by PhonePe (46.2%) and Google Pay (32.7%). Bengaluru-based Navi is a financial services company that provides personal and home loans, insurance, mutual funds, and gold investing, as well as UPI, India’s flagship instant real-time payments system (Unified Payments Interface). Navi UPI is the company’s money transfer solution, which leverages UPI to deliver money transfers anytime, anywhere. Navi was founded in 2018. Indian paytech Skydo expands to Canada Payments platform Skydo has won its first regulatory approval outside of its native India. The Bengaluru-based company has secured an international payment license in Canada that will enable the company to offer two-way payment flows, including local collections and payouts, between India and Canada. “Securing our first international license marks Skydo’s evolution from an India-focused cross-border payments platform to a multi-country payments operator,” Skydo CEO and Co-Founder Srivatsan Sridhar said. “With Canada, we are expanding beyond collections to enable seamless two-way payment flows and support growing India-Canada commerce.” Founded in 2022, Skydo is a cross-border B2B payments specialist, reducing foreign exchange charges for businesses by more than 50%. The company partners with leading banks around the world, providing businesses with their own foreign virtual accounts to enable them to receive payments without tax or compliance complications. Supporting more than 150 countries, Skydo’s platform processes more than 200,000 payments a year and is used by 40,000+ Indian exporters. Skydo has referred to Canada as a strategic market, given the scale of trade activity between India and Canada. In 2025, India and Canada reached $10.9 billion in bilateral merchandise trade. Both countries have indicated that they would like to more than double two-way trade, currently at just over $30 billion annually, to $70 billion by 2030. “Our ambition is to build for the world, from India,” Skydo Co-Founder Movin Jain said. “Canada strengthens our global footprint, enables local collections and payouts, and creates a strong foundation for future expansion across North America.” Skydo’s regulatory win in Canada comes just a month after the company received in-principle approval to operate as a Payment Service Provider (PSP) in the International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) at Gujarat International Finance Tec-City. Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world. Asia-Pacific Japanese financial giant SBI Holdings agreed to acquire crypto exchange Bitbank for $298 million. Singapore-based fintech platform Airwallex earned a valuation of $11 billion after securing $320 million in Series H funding. Mynt, the parent company Philippine mobile payments and finance superapp GCash, has filed for an $1.5 billion IPO on the Philippine Stock Exchange. Sub-Saharan Africa Nigerian fintech Daya secured $2.4 million in pre-seed funding to expand its stablecoin payments technology for African businesses. Kenya-based fintech WapiPay received a Money Services Business license from Canada’s Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Center (FINTRAC). Pan-African fintech DigiPay and French fintech Belmoney launched DigiTransfer, a mobile app that enables money transfers between France, Belgium, the Republic of the Congo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Central and Eastern Europe Albania launched its first fully digital bank, Jet Bank. Mastercard and PrivatBank announced completion of Ukraine’s first payment executed by AI agent. Austrian-Swiss global payout infrastructure startup Talentir raised €4 million in seed funding in a round led by Redstone. Middle East and Northern Africa Egyptian fintech MNT-Halan announced plans for an IPO that could give the company a valuation of $1 billion. Lean Technologies and Ziina teamed up to launch the UAE’s first One-Tap Pay by Bank experience. Israeli fintech Payoneer agreed to be sold to Canadian firm Nuvei for $2.7 billion. Central and Southern Asia Indian fintech Cred secured $900 million in Series H funding in a round led by Meta. Karachi-based easypaisa digital bank inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Binance to “explore innovative opportunities” in fintech, digital savings, and investment solutions. Indian UPI app Navi UPI, unveiled a new unified safety framework, Navi Secure. Latin American and the Caribbean CSU Digital, the largest independent card processor in Latin America, has embarked upon its US expansion. Iupana looked at how new governments in Colombia and Peru are seeking to bolster the fintech sectors of their respective countries. Payward, financial infrastructure platform and parent company of Kraken, secured a Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) registrations from the British Virgin Islands Financial Services Commission (BVI FSC). Photo by Shiv Prasad on Unsplash The post Finovate Global India: Raising Capital, Fighting Fraud, and Innovating in Payments appeared first on Finovate.       

How is innovation in blockchain technology, specifically the growing interest in stablecoins and tokenized deposits, creating ways for banks and financial services companies to offer new services, engage current customers better, and introduce new potential revenue sources? Steven Ramirez, CEO of Beyond the Ark, caught up with Chris Nichols, President of Institutional Banking at SouthState Bank, earlier this year at FinovateSpring 2026 in San Diego. At the conference, Nichols gave a keynote address on the emergence of agentic AI as a new frontier in financial services and discussed ways that agentic commerce will reshape the retail landscape. More specifically, Nichols explained how the combination of tokenization and agentic AI could create major opportunities for banks and financial institutions, enabling 24/7 settlement, smart contracts, programmable money, and more. In this conversation, Ramirez and Nichols discuss SouthState Bank’s dual token strategy that embraces both deposit tokens and stablecoins, payment orchestration and the future of treasury management, as well as how AI and tokenization are shortening development times from months to days. What’s really interesting to us, and our number one use case, is the store of value internationally. The customers—specifically the non-US customers of our customers—have subsidiaries in places like Australia or Mexico. These subsidiaries have expenses in dollars that must be converted into local currency, such as Mexican pesos. They then generate revenue and have to convert it back to dollars to repatriate that money. It’s much more efficient to hold some of that capital in a US dollar stablecoin. As President of Institutional Banking for SouthState Bank, Nichols supports innovation, artificial intelligence, digital assets, loan pricing, asset-liability management, open banking, payments, and fintech investing for the bank, in addition to capital market activities. He produces the Banker-to-Banker blog and is a frequent host of The Community Bank Podcast. Headquartered in Winter Haven, Florida, SouthState Bank is a $67 billion, publicly traded regional bank with a network of more than 379 branches throughout the southeastern and south-central US. The institution has grown significantly via merger and acquisition in the past few years, most recently acquiring Texas-based Independent Bank Group in 2025. Photo by Freddy G on Unsplash The post Chris Nichols on Transforming Payments with Stablecoins and Tokenized Deposits appeared first on Finovate.       

TransUnion UK announced the availability of its Modelled Income Assessment solution this week. The new offering sits inside the company’s Affordability Report and helps lenders make income estimates to guide affordability decisions. TransUnion’s new solution comes at a time of greater volatility in consumer incomes, making it more challenging for lenders who require accurate income data. A new solution from TransUnion UK will help lenders make affordability decisions with greater confidence. Sitting inside the company’s Affordability Report, TransUnion’s Modelled Income Assessment solution estimates monthly income at configurable confidence thresholds. This enables proportional affordability checks and an income estimate consistent with client-agreed custom thresholds, allowing lenders to tailor outputs to their own risk appetites. “The way people earn and manage money has fundamentally shifted,” TransUnion UK Chief Product Officer Kelli Fielding said. “Incomes are more volatile, data gaps are more common, and lenders are under growing pressure to evidence affordability decisions. Modelled Income provides lenders with a dependable, data-driven proxy that fills critical gaps in affordability strategies, without adding friction for consumers or compliance risk for lenders.” TransUnion’s new offering comes as research indicates that more than a third of adults in the UK saw income changes over the previous three months. TransUnion’s Consumer Pulse Q1 2026 Survey reflects consumer income patterns and household finances that are increasingly volatile and under pressure. This has created challenges for lenders who require reliable income data and insights, especially when access to traditional salary information is inconsistent or difficult to access. With Modelled Income Assessment, lenders no longer have to try to generate a precise pound-value prediction. The new offering from TransUnion UK provides an estimate of an individual’s net monthly income and leverages advanced machine learning technology to deliver proportional affordability assessments in real time. The solution also addresses client demand for frictionless alternatives to manual verification such as open banking. “Expectations around affordability assessments continue to rise as regulation, such as Consumer Duty, demands richer affordability data, clear evidence of fair outcomes, earlier identification of vulnerability, and support for customers showing signs of financial stress,” TransUnion UK Director of Credit Clare Hollis said. “Modelled Income is designed to sit within strong model risk management frameworks and address regulatory pressure for fairness and appropriate consumer outcomes, while helping lenders streamline onboarding and reduce unnecessary friction in the customer journey.” An international information and insights company with more than 12,000 associates operating in 30+ countries, TransUnion most recently demonstrated its technology at FinovateSpring 2024 in San Diego. At the conference, the company demonstrated its Enhanced BreachIQ solution, which replaces one-size-fits-all resources with modern, gamified consumer identity protection. The offering generates an Identity Safety Score based on a user’s individual data breach history, Breach Risk Scores that measure the severity of an incident in which their data was exposed, and a Personalized Action Plan to provide practical, effective mitigation steps to reduce risk. TransUnion UK’s launch announcement comes at the same time that the company inked a multi-year partnership agreement involving Marshmallow Insurance and data specialist Percayso Inform. The partnership is an extension of Marshmallow’s and Percayso’s relationship, but marks the first time Percayso will deliver TransUnion data across the insurance and auto finance sectors for Marshmallow via Percayso’s platform. Photo by Aron Van de Pol on Unsplash The post TransUnion UK Launches Modelled Income Assessment appeared first on Finovate.       

Entrust has unveiled its Entrust Biometric Authentication solution to help organizations defend, high-risk, “moments of truth” in the customer lifecycle, such as account onboarding and device transfer, from fraud and financial crime. These high-risk moments are increasingly the targets of choice by AI-powered fraud threats including presentation, injection, and deepfake attacks. Headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Entrust is an alum of Finovate’s developer conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley. Tony Ball is CEO. As high-risk security moments like account recovery, device changes, and large transactions are increasingly targeted by fraudsters, developing strategies to defend consumers against these threats has grown in demand. This makes the latest announcement from Entrust, the launch of the company’s Entrust Biometric Authentication solution, all the more noteworthy. “Too many organizations are treating authentication as a login problem, but attackers have already moved beyond access,” Entrust Chief Technology & Product Officer Mike Baxter said. “Preventing account takeover in the age of AI requires confirming the person behind every interaction. Entrust helps organizations apply the right level of assurance at the right moments while delivering secure, low-friction experiences.” The Entrust Biometric Authentication solution introduces identity-centric assurance to high-risk processes by combining biometric identity verification with adaptive risk-based authentication. This approach helps defend against presentation, injection, and deepfake attacks by requiring identity assurance checks during key, high-risk moments. Entrust’s new offering leverages the verified identity that was established at enrollment and extends it across every access point and interaction. This anchors a biometric check to that trusted identity, making it easier for companies to consistently make authentication decisions with a high degree of confidence. Entrust’s new solution uses three different authentication strategies, based on varying risk levels. These include a biometric passkey that provides biometric authentication at high-risk moments by linking authentication to a verified human identity; face authentication that accelerates everyday verification and step-up authentication, and motion authentication that leverages advanced liveness detection to combat deepfake, replay, and injection attacks in high-assurance use cases. The new technology from Entrust comes at a time when AI-powered fraud attacks are resulting in significant increases in fraud and financial crime. According to research from TransUnion in its H2 2025 Update to the Top Fraud Trends Report, global businesses lost an average of 7.7% of annual revenue to fraud, with account takeover representing nearly one-third of those losses. Entrust’s own 2026 Identity Fraud Report noted that one in five biometric fraud attacks use AI-generated deepfakes. The statistics on fraud attacks during what Entrust called “moments of truth” in the customer lifecycle—the high-risk moments mentioned above—are stark. According to Entrust, 55% of fraud in digital banks is related to account takeover (ATO), 67% of fraud in cryptocurrency operations occurs during the onboarding process, and 81% of fraud targeting payments takes place at authentication. In response, Entrust Biometric Authentication enables companies to deploy identity assurance to fight account takeover, reduce unnecessary account lockouts from password and passcode failures, minimize manual review and support calls, and improve the user experience with intuitive biometric experiences that save time and avoid friction. Headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Entrust was formed when Datacard Corporation acquired digital security company Entrust in 2013. The combined entity operated as Entrust Datacard when it made its Finovate debut at our developers conferences FinDEVrSiliconValley 2015 and 2016, and rebranded to Entrust in 2020. The company’s new product announcement follows the appointment of Adam Dimopoulos as Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). Dimopoulos previously led enterprise-wide identity security and Zero Trust transformations as VP of Information Security at Synchrony. Earlier this year, Entrust announced that it was collaborating with IBM Consulting, combining the firm’s quantum-safe transformation experience with Entrust’s expertise in cryptographic security and PKI. Photo by weston m on Unsplash The post Entrust Solution Stops Fraud Attacks Against “Moments of Truth” in Customer Lifecycle appeared first on Finovate.       

For our latest installment of Finovate First-Timers, a new series profiling companies that recently made their debuts on the Finovate stage, we catch up with Marco Ma, Co-Founder and CEO of Ventus AI. Ventus AI helps banks personalize every touchpoint across the customer journey, boosting engagement, lifetime value, and assets under management. The company’s technology transforms raw transaction data into a cross-categorized behavioral intelligence layer that spans more than 3,000 spending subcategories to surface life events, dynamic personas, and real-time intent signals. Founded in 2025 and headquartered in New York, Ventus AI demoed its technology at FinovateSpring 2026 in San Diego, California. In this week’s conversation, Ma talks about the challenges banks and credit unions face when it comes to leveraging data to create better, more personalized experiences for customers and members. He explains how Ventus AI plugs into existing stacks to provide a new analytics layer that delivers answers to questions about customer preferences and pain points without building anything new. What problem does Ventus AI solve and who does it solve it for? Marco Ma: Banks sit on enormous volumes of transaction data, but most of it stays trapped as raw, messy records their teams can’t actually read. The result is a lose-lose: customers get served demoralizing generic experiences which leads to lost relationships and deteriorated customer economics. We solve this for banks and credit unions that want to understand and serve their customers more deeply. How does Ventus AI solve this problem better than other companies? Ma: We built a proprietary customer intelligence and personalization engine. It works across every account and payment rail and detects the full picture: lifestyle patterns, life-event triggers, financial vulnerability signals, and semantic budgeting. Where most tools stop at cleaning up a merchant name, we surface what’s actually happening in a customer’s life, and we deliver it into the tools banks already use rather than asking them to rip anything out. Who are Ventus AI’s primary customers, and how do you reach them? Ma: US financial institutions, with our initial focus on banks and credit unions in the $1 billion to $50 billion asset range, alongside an active enterprise pipeline. We reach them through industry programs and conferences like Finovate and the Fintech Sandbox network, direct relationships built by the founding team, and warm introductions through our advisors and ecosystem partners. Can you tell us about a favorite implementation or partnership experience? Ma: Our favorite work is on rewards and deals. The insight that makes it special is that the same offer can mean completely different things to different people. People don’t wake up one day and say “I want to shop at Crate & Barrel.” Some people want a new coffee machine, some people want a new side table. Because we understand the behavior behind the spend, the bank can present the same deal in the way that actually resonates with each person, turning a generic coupon book experience into something that feels personal. What in your background gave you the confidence to respond to this challenge? Ma: We have a strong founding team with backgrounds spanning Visa, McKinsey, AWS, and Credit Suisse, along with prominent advisors from the banking world. That mix of payments, data, and institutional banking experience meant we understood both the technical problem and the way banks actually buy and adopt technology. You demoed at FinovateSpring in May. How was the experience? Ma: It was a great moment for us. Banking is deeply personal. It touches the most important moments in people’s lives, and our hero demo follows an expecting-parent spending pattern across rails to show we can extract major life event signals and orchestrate the existing tech stack—rewards, product, relationship—to be personalized to help this customer through this journey. Demoing that live on the main stage reminded us why this matters: done right, this technology lets a bank show up for someone at exactly the moment it counts. We’re returning for the Fall show. You were accepted into the Fintech Sandbox Data Access Residency. What is it, and why does it matter? Ma: Fintech Sandbox gives early-stage fintech companies access to high-quality financial data and infrastructure to build and refine their products. For us, it’s meaningful because behavioral intelligence is only as good as the data it learns from. The residency accelerates our ability to develop and validate our engine against real, rich datasets, which directly strengthens what we deliver to banks. What are your goals for the rest of 2026 and into next year? Ma: Grow our pipeline through business development, move active conversations into live deployments, return to the Finovate main stage in the Fall, and close our current funding round. Beyond that, we’re heads-down building, deepening the behavioral signal we deliver and expanding what banks can do with it. Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash The post Marco Ma of Ventus AI on Transforming Data into Behavioral Intelligence appeared first on Finovate.       

Accounting software provider FreeAgent launched a new AI-powered tool to enable landlords to capture and categorize rental statements. The new offering helps bookkeepers and accounting firms better serve their customers in property management as the Making Tax Digital initiative comes into effect throughout the UK. Headquartered in Scotland and founded in 2007, FreeAgent made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2013 in London. Scotland-based fintech FreeAgent unveiled a new feature for its FreeAgent for Landlords accountholders. The new AI-powered tool enables rental statement capture and categorization, transforming letting agent statements into entries that are structured, categorized, and reconciled automatically. “If you work with landlord clients, you’ll know exactly what we mean,” FreeAgent noted in a blog post announcing the new offering. “Every month, letting agents send out rental statements. On paper, they look straightforward enough. But a single statement can be a jumble of rental income, management fees, repair costs, contingency balances, and a net payout.” The challenge for accountants is recording all of this information accurately, especially for tax purposes. With data as diverse as this, separate categories for rent invoices, bills for fees and repairs, and more will have to be created and eventually reconciled against a final bank payment. For accountants managing a large number of landlord clients, this work can become overwhelming. “Our new feature captures and categorizes rental statements using AI to lighten the load,” FreeAgent explained. “All you need to do is upload the letting agents’ statement. Then FreeAgent will extract rental income and fee data, match line items to the correct property, assign the right accounting categories, and reconcile the final net bank payment in seconds.” Platforms like FreeAgent have become valuable resources for companies looking to comply with the Making Tax Digital (MTD) initiative launched by the UK’s HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) office. MTD is designed to modernize the country’s tax system by fully digitizing all aspects of tax administration. The goal is a more effective, efficient, and transparent process for taxpayers by reducing errors, delivering real-time information about tax liabilities, and simplifying tax compliance via digital record-keeping and reporting. “We know that the real challenge of MTD isn’t just about hitting submission deadlines,” FreeAgent Director of Product Craig Clarke noted. “Overcoming the manual, disjointed bookkeeping that makes managing property finances a headache is going to be just as tall a hurdle. That’s exactly why we built FreeAgent for Landlords—a product specifically designed to make accounting for rental income as simple as possible.” A Finovate alum since 2013, FreeAgent offers accounting software and support for small businesses and their accountants and bookkeepers. The company has more than 200,000 users who rely on FreeAgent’s software to manage finances from daily administration to big-picture, financial planning. Photo by Adam Wilson on Unsplash The post FreeAgent Unveils New AI Tool for Landlords appeared first on Finovate.       

Kentucky’s UK Credit Union is deploying IllumaSHIELD to strengthen fraud prevention and member authentication across its contact center and self-service channels. IllumaSHIELD shifts away from security questions and passwords as banks and credit unions adopt voice biometrics to combat AI-powered fraud, including voice cloning and social engineering attacks. Illuma’s technology continuously authenticates members as they speak, helping financial institutions reduce friction, shorten call times, and improve security without disrupting the customer experience. Voice authentication solutions provider Illuma announced its latest partnership this month. The Texas-based company is teaming up with Kentucky-based UK Credit Union to help the credit union reduce fraud. Specifically, UK Credit Union will implement IllumaSHIELD to bring authentication and fraud prevention capabilities to its contact center and self-service channels. IllumaSHIELD, which was unveiled at FinovateFall 2020, is the company’s voice security platform that leverages real-time voice authentication technology that passively verifies members as they speak, which reduces reliance on security questions and ultimately minimizes call handle time. Because the platform continuously evaluates risk throughout the interaction, it allows the credit union to step up authentication only when needed. “AI-driven fraud is forcing financial institutions to rethink how they secure the voice channel,” said Illuma Founder and CEO Milind Borkar. “UK Credit Union is taking a forward-looking approach by adopting voice security that continuously verifies identity, blocks threats in real time, and improves both the member and agent experience—while eliminating friction from every interaction.” As advances in generative AI have made it easier for fraudsters to clone voices, automate social engineering attacks, and bypass traditional knowledge-based authentication methods, financial institutions are having to secure voice interactions beyond asking for security questions and passwords. By providing continuous, biometric forms of identity verification, Illuma is authenticating users based on how they speak rather than what they know. Crucially, platforms like IllumaSHIELD aim to help banks and credit unions deliver this authentication without friction. UK Credit Union anticipates that IllumaSHIELD will help it move beyond traditional knowledge-based authentication. “At UK Credit Union, protecting our members while delivering a seamless experience remains a top priority,” said UK Credit Union President and CEO Ryan Ross. “Partnering with Illuma allows us to modernize how we approach authentication and fraud prevention while creating a faster, more natural experience across our service channels.” Headquartered in Plano, Texas, and founded in 2016, Illuma specializes in voice authentication solutions for credit unions and community banks. In addition to IllumaSHIELD, the company also offers advanced fraud prevention, adaptive multi-factor authentication (MFA), deepfake detection, and human-AI collaborative intelligence. The company most recently demoed at FinovateSpring 2025, where it won Best of Show for its deep fake detection technology. The post UK Credit Union Selects Illuma to Protect from Voice Fraud appeared first on Finovate.       

For years, Finovate has helped fintechs connect with banks and other customers. This September, we’re launching a new event designed to help fintechs connect with the people who fund them. Taking place on September 11 alongside FinovateFall in New York, IMPACT: Funders & Founders Forum brings together fintech startups, scaleups, and investors for a full day of networking, content, meetings, and startup pitches. While FinovateFall is built around helping fintech companies meet potential customers, IMPACT is designed to help fintech founders build relationships with investors. Who Should Attend? IMPACT is for both fintech founders and investors. On the startup side, the event is geared toward fintech startups and scaleups, particularly companies that have raised up to a Series A round. On the investor side, we’re bringing together venture capital firms, angel investors, private equity investors, family offices, and limited partners. Whether a company is actively fundraising or simply looking to build relationships for the future, IMPACT offers an opportunity to connect with investors who understand the fintech landscape. Why Are We Creating IMPACT? While investors have long attended Finovate events, we’ve seen growing demand for a dedicated forum focused specifically on fundraising, investing, and startup growth. IMPACT creates structured opportunities for founders and investors to connect through pre-arranged, one-on-one meetings, networking sessions, roundtable discussions, and live startup pitches featuring investor feedback and Q&A. The goal is to create an event where meaningful conversations and connections can happen more efficiently than through traditional networking alone. What Can Attendees Expect? The event features two dedicated content tracks. The Investor Stage will explore topics such as AI in investment operations, emerging fund structures, venture capital trends, and the future of fintech investing. The Founder & Startup Stage will focus on fundraising strategy, go-to-market planning, scaling a fintech company, building industry connections, and leveraging AI for growth. In addition to attending content sessions, eligible startups can participate in the IMPACT Zone, a dedicated showcase area where companies can meet investors and fellow founders throughout the day. Startups raising pre-seed through Series A funding can also apply to deliver a four-minute pitch in front of investors. How Is IMPACT Different from FinovateFall? While IMPACT takes place alongside FinovateFall, the two events serve different purposes. FinovateFall helps fintechs connect with buyers and partners through live demos and networking. IMPACT helps fintechs connect with investors and advisors who can help fuel their next stage of growth. Together, the events support fintech companies throughout their journey in everything from raising capital to winning customers. Whether you’re a founder seeking your next investor, a startup executive looking to expand your network, or an investor searching for the next breakout fintech company, IMPACT offers a new way to connect with the people shaping the future of financial services. If you’d like to register or learn more, check out our website to learn about opportunities that best fit your needs. The post Introducing IMPACT: A New Event for Fintech Founders and Investors appeared first on Finovate.       

Fraud and financial crime prevention platform DataVisor has partnered with Tru Cooperative Bank (formerly First West Credit Union). Via a pre-integrated deployment with VeriPark’s digital banking platform, Tru Cooperative Bank will leverage DataVisor’s technology to enable real-time fraud detection across the full digital banking journey. Headquartered in Mountain View, California, and founded in 2013, DataVisor made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2023 in New York. AI-powered fraud and AML platform DataVisor will put its fraud prevention technology to use protecting the members of Tru Cooperative Bank (formerly First West Credit Union). The offering will be delivered via DataVisor’s pre-integrated deployment with VeriPark’s VeriChannel digital banking platform, and will provide Tru Cooperative Bank with seamless, out-of-the-box fraud protection. VeriPark is a London-based fintech, founded in 1998, that helps financial institutions embed real-time decisioning into every customer interaction, from omnichannel delivery and customer engagement to branch automation and loan origination. The company made its Finovate debut at FinovateMiddleEast 2019 in Dubai. Ozkan Erener is CEO. DataVisor’s platform provides real-time fraud detection across the full digital banking journey, covering onboarding, login, profile changes, Interac e-Transfer, and billpay. The solution offers future-proof defense against a growing range of sophisticated financial crimes, replacing traditional solutions and enabling growth without introducing additional friction for members. “As we build on our transition to a federally regulated cooperative bank, protecting our members is fundamental in everything we do—especially as we continue to evolve our digital banking experience,” Tru Cooperative Bank Chief Transformation & Information Officer Darrell Jaggers said. “DataVisor strengthens our ability to prevent fraud earlier across the digital journey, supporting a secure, seamless experience our members can trust.” Formerly First West Credit Union, the financial institution transitioned to Tru Cooperative Bank in April 2026. The credit union’s members voted with 84% approval to apply for the right to operate under federal regulation rather than simply provincial jurisdiction, enabling the firm to serve members outside of British Columbia and to operate nationally across Canada. The name “Tru Cooperative Bank” was adopted with 87% approval from the institution’s members. While still operating its four regional brands in British Columbia: Envision Financial, Island Savings, Valley First, and Enderby & District Financial, Tru Cooperative Bank is the fourth federally regulated credit union in Canada since 2012. The financial institution has more than $20 billion in assets, nearly 300,000 members, and 45 branch locations. “As financial crime grows more sophisticated, credit unions need a modern, AI-driven defense that prevents fraud in real time—not one that catches up after the fact,” DataVisor Co-Founder and President of Technology and AI Yinglian Xie said. “We’re proud to support Tru’s digital banking journey through our partnership with VeriPark, and to continue expanding DataVisor’s leadership in fraud prevention across the Canadian market and the credit union community.” Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Mountain View, California, DataVisor made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2023 in New York. At the conference, the company demonstrated how its fraud and risk platform integrates any data source, including third-party data, and combines a rules engine, device intelligence, a decision engine, and case management to increase detection and minimize fraud losses. DataVisor’s platform processes 30 billion events a year, boasts of more than 15,000 queries per second in live production, and delivers real-time scoring latency of less than 100 milliseconds. DataVisor’s partnership news with Tru Cooperative Bank follows the company’s launch of Vera, a suite of conversational AI agents designed for financial crime prevention. Vera is built into DataVisor’s platform to help teams with fraud detection, strategy optimization, investigation, and reporting, while ensuring that human oversight, auditability, and control remain part of the process. “With Vera, for the first time, financial institutions can outpace AI-driven attackers,” Xie explained when Vera was unveiled in April. “By unlocking unparalleled speed and intelligence, we are redefining the playing field and enabling a more proactive defense against AI-driven fraud.” Photo by Aditya Chinchure on Unsplash The post Tru Cooperative Bank Partners with DataVisor for Fraud Prevention appeared first on Finovate.       

We have officially entered the final week of June, which marks the ending of the first half of 2026. As we close out the first six months of this year, here’s a look at the top news headlines for this week. We’ll continue to add more announcements as the week progresses. Payments Nuvion teams with Visa Direct to strengthen real-time global payout capabilities for businesses operating across borders. Investing BitDelta Pro selects Iress to power multi-asset trading platform. Banking Lloyds targets more than 1,000 new AI roles as it expands agentic AI capability. Santander empowers employees with AI in order to generate €1 billion in business value. Debt markets 9fin appoints Amit Lalwani as Chief Revenue Officer to lead next phase of global growth. Photo by Luis Quintero The post Fintech Rundown: A Rapid Review of Weekly News appeared first on Finovate.       

Wise has acquired expat resource Expatica, gaining access to a website that attracted more than 7 million visits in 2025 from people researching and navigating life abroad. The deal gives Wise an earlier touchpoint with prospective customers, allowing it to build brand awareness and trust before consumers choose a bank, payments provider, or money transfer service. Wise plans to expand Expatica’s content and geographic reach, strengthening its position among the growing global population of expats and internationally mobile consumers. Cross-border payments fintech Wise announced this week that it has acquired Expatica, an online resource for people living and working abroad. The move places Wise front and center among one of its most important customer groups, expats. Expatica was founded in 2000 to provide local guidance for people living internationally. The company’s website serves as a directory that covers topics such as relocation, housing, finance, lifestyle, healthcare, and immigration. The website reached more than 7 million visits in 2025, with its largest audiences coming from France, Germany, Portugal, and Spain. According to the UN, 304 million people (3.7% of the world’s population) were international migrants in 2024. With Expatica serving as a long-standing expert in the field, the acquisition will help Wise reach prospective expats earlier in their relocation journey, increasing the company’s visibility among a broader international audience. By acquiring Expatica, Wise gains access to consumers when they are researching a move abroad—often before they have selected a bank, payments provider, or money transfer service. That early engagement could help Wise build brand awareness and trust long before a customer needs to move money internationally. “Expatica has spent years helping people make sense of life abroad with practical, locally relevant guidance. That makes it a strong fit for Wise, because we already support millions of people whose lives span borders,” said Wise Head of Owned Sites Danny Butler. “When people are planning, moving and settling into life abroad, money is a big part of that experience—from getting paid to sending, spending and managing money across borders. Wise is built for those moments.” Wise plans to maintain and augment Expatica’s website, with investments planned to expand the company’s content, local coverage, markets, and languages over time. As Expatica’s users leverage its resources to navigate life in a new country, Wise wants to become a familiar and relevant choice for expats who need to manage money across borders. Wise was founded in 2011 under the name TransferWise to facilitate cross-border payments while bringing transparency to the fees involved. The company serves 19 million active customers worldwide, processing over $240 billion in cross-border transactions. Photo by Gustavo Fring The post Wise Acquires International Living Guidance Expert Expatica appeared first on Finovate.       

For years, bank-fintech relationships often followed a predictable path. Banks identified promising startups, tested their technology, and viewed acquisition as the ultimate endgame. Today, that dynamic is changing. At FinovateSpring 2026, I sat down with Deepa Chatterjee, SVP of Business Development and Go-to-Market for Small Business Banking at U.S. Bank, to discuss how bank-fintech partnerships are evolving, where banks are competing with digital-first challengers, and what the future of small business banking looks like. One of the most interesting takeaways from our conversation was how dramatically the relationship between banks and fintechs has changed. While banks once viewed fintech partnerships as potential acquisition opportunities, many are now embracing deeper, longer-term collaborations. “The way that we worked with fintechs was primarily thinking of potentially acquiring them,” said Deepa. “Now that tha markets have changed we are far more likely to work and partner with fintechs in a much deeper way, and so ownership is not necessarily on the table.” Deepa Chatterjee is SVP of Business Development and Go-to-Market for Small Business Banking at U.S. Bank. She leads business development, partnerships, sales enablement, product marketing, data insights, and automation initiatives for the bank’s small business segment. Before joining U.S. Bank, Chatterjee held leadership roles at Dayforce and Oportun and spent more than a decade at American Express in strategy, marketing, and business development positions. She holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Barnard College at Columbia University and an MBA from the Yale School of Management. U.S. Bancorp, the parent company of U.S. Bank, is one of the largest banking institutions in the United States, serving millions of consumer, business, commercial, and institutional clients. The bank offers a broad range of financial services, including business banking, payments, treasury management, merchant acquiring through Elavon, lending, and wealth management solutions. U.S. Bank has increasingly expanded its digital capabilities through fintech partnerships and embedded financial services designed to help small businesses streamline their financial operations. Photo by Vitaly Gariev The post U.S. Bank’s Deepa Chatterjee: The Future of SMB Banking Is Personalization, Not More Products appeared first on Finovate.       

Coinbase is evolving beyond crypto into an “everything exchange,” adding AI-powered advice, agentic trading, tokenized stocks, and expanded credit offerings in a bid to become consumers’ primary financial platform. The new launches highlight two major fintech trends: AI moving from financial guidance to autonomous action, and the continued blurring of lines between banks, brokerages, fintechs, and crypto platforms. By combining investing, lending, payments, wealth management, and AI tools into a single experience, Coinbase is betting that convenience and integration will define the next generation of financial services. Crypto exchange platform Coinbase wants users to think of it as much more than a cryptocurrency exchange. This week, the company unveiled a series of new products as part of its effort to become a primary financial platform for consumers. Since it was founded in 2012, the company has been slowly building out a comprehensive banking platform. What started as a crypto wallet has evolved into a full service financial platform with debit and credit cards, prediction markets, derivatives, crypto-backed lending, and more. “Coinbase is building the future of finance, where you can manage your money with just one interface, and one login,” the company said in its blog post announcement. “We’re saying “no” to financial fragmentation, and the new products we’re introducing today take us several steps closer to that future.” Here’s a rundown of the top five new tools and features Coinbase is unveiling this week and why each matters: Coinbase advisor Coinbase has launched an AI financial advisor to provide personalized financial guidance based on a customer’s holdings and financial situation. While many fintechs are hesitant to give financial advice because of the regulatory requirements, Coinbase registered with the SEC as a Registered Investment Advisor and with the CFTC and NFA as a Commodity Trading Advisor. Why it matters: The move places pressure on both traditional financial institutions and fintechs offering robo-advisory technology to offer more sophisticated, real-time financial guidance at a lower cost. Offering AI-powered financial advice caters to consumers of all levels because it allows them to communicate using natural language, comes at a lower cost, and does not require the consumer to change their existing habits or switch apps. When compared to traditional wealth management, which has historically been reserved for affluent customers, the advisor tools will have a wider reach and be a valuable tool for customer retention. Agentic trading Customers can deploy AI agents to execute personalized trading strategies on their behalf while maintaining ultimate control over the account. Investors can confine their agent to an isolated sub-account and set limits around capital allocation, asset permissions, and trade sizes. Coinbase joins Robinhood, which launched agentic trading earlier this month, in pioneering this feature. Why it matters: With agentic tools, AI implementation makes the leap from informing decisions to taking action. Having an agent move funds on an investor’s behalf can help with treasury management, cash flow management, and micro-investing decisions that would be too tedious for human investors. Expanded stock and options trading In a move that continues to expand Coinbase beyond crypto, the company announced broader access to stock trading and options trading. The company first unveiled stock trading in December 2025 and expanded it to all US users in February of this year. This week’s announcement highlights the next phase of Coinbase’s strategy that will focus on transforming it into a full-service financial platform. Why it matters: Even though stock trading is not new for Coinbase, it highlights the company’s new position as a universal investment platform. Similar to how Robinhood expanded into banking and SoFi branched out into investing, Coinbase’s move to broaden its offerings will make the company a more holistic banking platform. The move is also an example of how lines across financial services are beginning to blur. The distinction between crypto platforms, brokerages, and banks is increasingly disappearing. Tokenized US stocks Coinbase plans to enable non-US customers to trade tokenized US equities around the clock. Tokenized stocks are backed 1:1 by the underlying asset, representing true equity ownership, including dividend payouts and complete shareholder rights. Additionally, investors will be able to lend their shares to earn yield, use them as collateral for a loan, or even gift them directly to someone else. Why it matters: Tokenized trading offers 24/7 trading, potentially faster settlement, and broader global access to US markets. This changes the traditional models of limited trading hours, clearinghouses, and custodians that have dictated the legacy stock market since its inception. Expanded access to Coinbase One Card The company expanded USDC-backed access to the Coinbase One Card, a card built for users who are generally overlooked by traditional credit bureaus. The update allows users who aren’t approved for a traditional line of credit to secure a Coinbase One Card using USDC as collateral. The card offers Bitcoin rewards on everyday purchases while paying rewards on the underlying USDC deposit every week. Why it matters: Offering a credit builder card allows Coinbase to tap into a new set of users who have historically been ignored by traditional financial institutions. And because Coinbase’s credit builder card still pays out rewards and offers additional benefits like the new Travel Portal that provides cardholders access to all of the same travel protections and benefits offered through the American Express Network. From the looks of these new products and tools, it appears that Coinbase is making a bid to become a full-service financial institution without calling itself a bank. Combining investing, lending, payments, wealth management, and AI-powered tools into a single experience will allow Coinbase to provide a more unified experience to customers that care less about traditional financial categories and more about convenience. As the lines between banks, brokerages, fintechs, and crypto platforms continue to blur, Coinbase’s latest moves offer a glimpse into what the next generation of financial services may look like. The post Coinbase Wants to Become Your Primary Financial Platform appeared first on Finovate.       

A newly announced, multi-year partnership between HSBC and Google Cloud will enable the financial institution to work with engineering teams from Google Cloud and DeepMind to develop new AI-powered tools and capabilities. The partnership will allow HSBC to benefit from access to Google’s latest agentic AI capabilities including Gemini and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. The agreement will enable more than 200 new AI use cases for HSBC over the next two years, with a focus on the highest value initiatives for investment and delivery. HSBC estimates each of these could return more than $100 million in either direct revenue gains or broader efficiency improvements. “AI is becoming one of the defining technologies of our time, allowing us to create a personalized experience for each customer, delivered in real time and at scale, while keeping human judgment, decision-making, and accountability at the core,” HSBC Group CEO Georges Elhedery said. “A partnership like this one with Google Cloud helps us empower our colleagues with the tools they need to be future-ready, and supports our work in building a simple, agile, faster, and more personal HSBC.” These new opportunities fall into three main categories: wealth management, fraud and financial crime, and support for frontline/relationship manager client service. Here is a closer look at each element of the new partnership and its implications for AI in banking and financial services. Hyper-personalized wealth management The partnership will enable HSBC to combine smarter, AI-driven insights with the expertise of relationship managers. This will transform the way the bank serves its wealth management clients and empower thousands of relationship managers to provide proactive, customized financial support and real-time advice to customers at every stage of the client journey. What this says about AI: The ability to achieve hyper-personalization is increasingly regarded as the Holy Grail of customer engagement. AI enables banks and other financial institutions to leverage their data to better understand the unique needs of individual customers, businesses, and enterprises. This allows them to not only develop customized solutions and services that directly respond to each client, but also to respond quickly to shifting preferences and even anticipate emerging trends and circumstances that customers might not immediately recognize. What this says about banks: More and more banks are realizing the opportunities in delivering wealth management services. This is driven by a number of factors, from the so-called Great Wealth Transfer and the growing number of high-net-worth households to the democratization of wealth management brought about by fintechs and robo-advisors. Wealth management is also an area where more banks and financial institutions can provide greater value, especially for mid-tier and non-HNW customers for whom bespoke, concierge-level wealth management services are typically out of reach. AI plays a key role here, helping translate client data—from financial records to conversations with advisors—into actionable insights that lead to better and more accurate financial guidance. The fact that AI is able to provide this at a competitive cost means that these higher-value, higher-margin services can be offered to a wider range of customers. Stronger financial crime risk management HSBC will leverage its relationship with Google Cloud to deploy both generative and agentic AI to build a financial crime architecture that identifies fraud risk as early as possible. The bank’s goal is to detect and intervene twice as quickly once risk is detected across the nearly one billion transactions monitored by the bank every month for financial crime and fraud. What this says about AI: Helping financial institutions detect fraud faster, including real-time monitoring, is one of the most broadly accepted use cases for AI technology. AI is able to analyze vast amounts of data in real time to detect suspicious patterns and activities that traditional, rules-based systems can miss, while also providing predictive analytics that can enable institutions to anticipate potential financial crime risks before they materialize. What this says about banks: For banks and other financial institutions, financial crime risks have only grown larger in recent years. The Nasdaq Verafin 2026 Global Financial Crime report indicated that the economic impact of financial crime internationally has grown by $1.3 trillion in the past two years from 2023 to 2025. With regard to fraud-specific losses, fraud scams were the fastest-growing category costing $62 billion in 2025 alone. In the face of this, moves like HSBC’s to embrace AI-powered solutions for fighting fraud have become increasingly common. The 2026 Global Financial Crime report noted that 75% of financial institutions said they planned to boost their use of AI for financial crime detection. Enhanced client service for frontline and relationship managers Courtesy of the partnership, HSBC’s frontline staff and relationship managers will have expanded access to an AI-powered decision assistant that has already proven capable of reducing administrative and client meeting prep times from hours to minutes for thousands of users. HSBC will also codify regulatory procedures into an AI structure to give bankers consistently structured options and analysis to enhance decision-making and provide faster insights without losing human judgment and oversight. What this says about AI: One of the great promises of automation and AI is freeing human labor and talent from mundane, often tedious, and inefficient manual processes. The fact that so much of AI innovation is being designed for in-house use by frontline workers and employees to enable them to better serve their clients underscores that AI, in its best light, actually creates space for more human connections between customers and service providers. What this says about banks: Empowering frontline workers and relationship managers with AI-powered tools is helping a growing number of banks boost efficiency and reduce costs. From enhancing underwriting analysis to streamlining workflows, financial institutions are increasingly comfortable with AI-powered tools. This is especially the case when institutions deploy these solutions as complements to existing systems rather than as replacements for them. Photo by Kit Suman on Unsplash The post Three Top Takeaways from the HSBC, Google Cloud Partnership appeared first on Finovate.       

Ripple participated in Flutterwave’s Series E round, helping push the African payments company’s total funding above $500 million and valuing it at $3.2 billion. The partnership will embed Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin and XRP Ledger into Flutterwave’s payment infrastructure to support faster settlement, liquidity management, remittances, and cross-border payments. The deal highlights the growing race to control stablecoin infrastructure, with Ripple seeking to establish RLUSD and XRPL as foundational components of a major payments network rather than simply offering a standalone digital asset. African payments infrastructure company Flutterwave revealed that it has received an undisclosed amount of funding from digital asset company Ripple, which contributed to its Series E Round this week. The funds boost Flutterwave’s total raised to more than $500 million. Notably, the new round values Flutterwave at $3.2 billion as the company moves into the next phrase of its stablecoin strategy that integrates stablecoin-powered settlement, liquidity, and remittance rails. The company hopes this new infrastructure will empower African businesses to bypass frictions associated with legacy payment systems. Ripple is coming on as a strategic investor, and as such will embed Ripple’s stablecoin, RLUSD, into its payment rails and Send App to create a stablecoin-first payment architecture that eliminates traditional bottlenecks. Flutterwave will also leverage the XRP Ledger (XRPL) for faster transaction clearing and will deploy an API to bridge its domestic network with Ripple’s global payments network. “Flutterwave has built one of the most advanced payments networks in Africa, and as its infrastructure evolves, stablecoins are becoming central to that story,” said Ripple Managing Director MEA Reece Merrick. “Our investment will establish RLUSD within that infrastructure, with Flutterwave driving stablecoin flows over the XRPL and deepening its role as a settlement layer for real-world payments across the continent. Together, we also plan to bring Ripple Payments’ speed and efficiency to cross-border transactions in the region, opening up faster, lower-cost financial services to businesses and consumers at scale.” Flutterwave will use the funds to bridge traditional financial systems with next-generation digital asset infrastructure. Since it was founded in 2016, Flutterwave has processed over a billion transactions worth over $50 billion. The company accepts payments in more than 30 currencies, processing an average of 500,000 payments each day. In addition to its payments technology, Flutterwave also offers invoicing technology, business loans, and analytics tools. Adding to these capabilities, the company agreed to acquire Mono, an open banking technology company, earlier this year. This funding announcement and strategic partnership are both reminders of the race for ownership and control in the new stablecoin economy. While Ripple is investing in Flutterwave’s growth, it is also bidding to establish RLUSD and XRPL as foundational components of a major payments network, controling how stablecoins move through the global financial system. Photo by Damilare Adeyemi The post Ripple Contributes to Flutterwave’s Series E Round appeared first on Finovate.       

AI platform for financial services Zocks has launched its Zocks Client Queries solution. Zocks Client Queries enables financial advisors to uncover potential growth opportunities and respond to unmet client needs by querying data using plain language. Founded in 2022 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Zocks made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2026. Mark Gilbert is Co-Founder and CEO. AI platform for financial services Zocks unveiled its Zocks Client Queries solution this week. The new offering is an agentic AI product that enables financial advisors and enterprises to uncover organic growth opportunities and unmet client needs in seconds, using plain language. Advisors can use Client Queries to ask questions such as “which clients have a 401(k) with a previous employer that we could consolidate” or “which clients have a review due this quarter with over $500,000 in held-away assets,” and Client Queries will deliver a list of clients who fit those parameters. The solution then presents advisors with a set of automated next steps, including sending a personalized email, creating opportunities in a CRM system, or scheduling a meeting. Zocks Client Queries also helps advisors address potential service gaps. Advisors, for example, can inquire, “which clients have a significant age milestone in the next 90 days, and we haven’t spoken with them in the past 12 months?” or “which clients mentioned a major life change but haven’t updated their estate plan?” allowing advisors to deliver proactive service to all clients regardless of account size. “Every advisor-client relationship and conversation contains signals that point to the next opportunity, whether that’s a life change, a servicing need, or a held-away asset,” Zocks CEO Mark Gilbert said. “With Client Queries, firms can query across personal and financial information to operationalize those signals for every advisor, and deliver on the scale and consistency that manual processes can’t. What once required hours of research can now happen in minutes, at a fraction of the cost.” Zocks leverages AI-powered intelligence to continuously build and maintain a comprehensive profile for all clients, drawing from CRM records, financial plans, tax, portfolio, estate, and insurance data, as well as conversations, meetings, emails, and documents shared with advisors. Zocks Client Queries analyzes these profiles in real time to deliver actionable lists and automated workflows in seconds. This gives advisors the opportunity for deeper insights and greater personalization compared to traditional lead generation and prospecting strategies. “For our advisors, Client Queries removes the friction between having an idea to engage clients and quickly acting on it,” RFG Advisor VP of Technology and Operations Jordan Hutchison said. “For the enterprise, it gives us a way to operationalize growth across every advisor’s book simultaneously.” Founded in 2022 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Zocks made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2026. At the conference, the company demonstrated how its AI assistant for financial advisors automates administrative tasks including meeting prep, account opening, document processing, and more. Zocks’ technology transforms client conversations into structured insights that bolster relationships and support business growth. Zocks’ AI assistant saves advisors more than 10 hours a week, enabling them to build plans and onboard clients faster, discover new growth opportunities, anticipate client needs, and scale their business. Zocks counts more than 5,000 firms as its customers, including six of the nine Barron’s Top Mega RIAs and two of the top three life insurance carriers. Photo by Shen Pan on Unsplash The post Zocks Launches Client Queries to Transform Advisor Conversations into Actionable Insights appeared first on Finovate.       

ACI Worldwide has joined the European Payments Initiative (EPI) and will integrate EPI’s Wero wallet into its Payments Orchestration Platform. The integration will enable merchants and financial intermediaries across Europe to offer Wero as a payment option at a time when instant payments are growing in popularity. Founded in 1975 and headquartered in Nebraska, ACI Worldwide has been a Finovate alum since 2011. Thomas Warsop is CEO. International paytech ACI Worldwide has joined the European Payments Initiative (EPI) as a technical service provider. As part of the strategic collaboration, ACI Worldwide will integrate EPI’s Wero wallet solution into its Payments Orchestration Platform, enabling merchants and financial intermediaries throughout Europe to offer Wero as a payment option. “We are excited to announce our strategic partnership with EPI to make Wero a success across Europe,” ACI Worldwide Head of Europe Nick Craig said. “This collaboration leverages ACI’s advanced instant payment processing capabilities to address the fragmentation of payment methods in Europe, providing a unified solution which enables a seamless, secure, and efficient payment experience for consumers and merchants. Wero will be an important addition to ACI’s best-in-class Payments Orchestration Platform, which has the industry’s widest reach of acquirers and APMs.” Running on SEPA rails, Wero is a new pan-European digital wallet solution. Launched in 2024, the offering is intended to unify and streamline payments throughout Europe, including peer-to-peer transfers, e-commerce and point-of-sale purchases, as well as other value-added services. The solution was launched by a consortium of 16 European banks and financial services companies and currently provides instant, account-to-account payments to consumers in Belgium, France, and Germany. ACI Worldwide’s Wero announcement comes as analysts expect the new payment option to boost consumer adoption of instant payments across Europe. The EU Instant Payments Regulation (IPR) has been in effect since January 2025, mandating banks and payment service providers (PSPs) in the Eurozone to be able to send and receive instant payments. ACI’s own research, collected in its Prime Time for Real-Time report, indicated that instant payment transactions in Europe are expected to climb from 17.2 billion in 2023 to 38.6 billion in 2028. The report suggested that instant payment transactions will account for 13% of all electronic payments in Europe by 2028, an increase of more than 50% from 2023. “Seeing ACI joining EPI members’ ranks is a new step towards massive availability of Wero across our core markets and beyond,” EPI CEO Martina Weimert said. “Through the integration onto ACI’s platform, all their merchants and their customers will be able to integrate Wero as a new payment solution, empowering their business and Europe’s resilience at large. Together, we are helping accelerate the development of a more connected, innovative, and resilient European payments ecosystem.” A Finovate alum since 2011, ACI Worldwide delivers software solutions that provide intelligent payments orchestration, banking, merchant payments, and billing. The company has customers in 94 countries including the top 10 global banks, more than 80,000 merchants, as well as thousands of organizations using its billpay and fraud prevention solutions. ACI Worldwide processes more than 770 billion transactions a year, amounting to trillions of US dollars. Founded in 1975 and headquartered in Elkhorn, Nebraska, ACI Worldwide is a publicly traded company on NASDAQ under the ticker ACIW. The company has a market capitalization of $4.6 billion. Photo by Christian Lue on Unsplash The post ACI Worldwide Integrates Wero, a New Payment Option for Merchants in Europe appeared first on Finovate.       

SumUp has expanded into Canada, its 38th market, bringing its payment acceptance tools to a country where small businesses account for 98% of all businesses. Canadian merchants will gain access to the SumUp Go card reader for in-person payments and Payment Links for accepting online payments without specialized hardware. The launch reflects SumUp’s broader strategy of evolving from a card reader provider into a full commerce platform as competition for small business merchants increasingly centers on ecosystem breadth rather than payment acceptance alone. Payment acceptance company SumUp has officially launched in Canada, marking the UK-based company’s 38th market. The expansion into Canada comes 11 years after SumUp launched in the US and will help further the company’s mission to “make commerce simpler and more accessible for all businesses worldwide.” Adding Canada to SumUp’s global footprint offers the company access to Canada’s 1.1 million businesses, 98% of which are small businesses. In addition to its competitive pricing, intuitive payment tools, and customer care, SumUp will bring these merchants two core products: SumUp Go card reader, which allows merchants to take in-person payments using a pocket-sized reader designed to reduce wait times at checkout. The reader is easy to set up and does not charge monthly fixed costs. Payment Links enable merchants to accept online payments without hardware at all, giving merchants a fast way to collect payments from anywhere by simply creating and sending a secure link that can be shared via text, email, or social. “Launching in Canada is a natural next step in SumUp’s growth across North America,” said SumUp North America CEO Andrew Helms. “Canada has an incredibly vibrant small business community and we see a huge opportunity to give these merchants the tools they need to thrive, without the complexity or hidden costs they have come to expect from legacy providers. At SumUp, we’re in it for the merchant. When they succeed, we succeed.” Founded in 2012, SumUp serves four million small merchants across the globe. In April, the company expanded its small business product suite, adding new business management tools and card readers. The company’s move into Canada comes as competition for small business merchants is intensifying, with providers increasingly competing on the breadth of their ecosystems rather than payment acceptance alone. By expanding into a market where small businesses account for nearly all registered companies, SumUp gains access to a large merchant base while continuing its evolution from a card reader provider into a broader commerce platform. Photo by Andre Furtado The post SumUp Launches in Canada, its 38th Market appeared first on Finovate.