This week’s edition of Finovate Global features the latest fintech headlines from Germany.

Berlin-based spend management platform Moss raises capital

Germany has a new fintech unicorn.

Moss, a spend management platform based in Berlin, has raised €30 million ($35 million) in Series C funding. The round was led by Portage and Cherry Ventures. It brings the company’s total funding to more than €200 million ($234 million) and gives the firm a valuation of more than €1 billion. The funding will enable Moss to develop additional AI agents to automate financial processes for small and medium-sized companies.

“This round reflects the trust of customers and partners in shaping the future of finance,” Moss CEO and Co-Founder Ante Spittler said in a LinkedIn post announcing the investment. “It allows us to expand beyond spend management and further build out our Finance AI product suite. Soon, Moss will allow customers to configure agents for every finance job while maintaining full control over every step and decision taken. This is Finance AI, shaped by you.”

Founded in 2019 by Spittler, Anton Rummel, Ferdinand Meyer, and Stephan Haslebacher, Moss was among the first fintechs to offer corporate credit cards to German startups. Today, the company combines corporate cards, invoice management, reimbursements, real-time budgeting, and automated accounting in a single platform. Moss leverages agentic AI to automatically categorize and reconcile transactions and reports that its AI agents process more than two million transactions a month.

The investment also paves the way for Moss’ development of what the company and investor Cherry Ventures refer to as Finance AI: “AI that prepares the work, shows its reasoning down to the ledger account, and takes no consequential action without the team’s sign-off,” Cherry Ventures noted in a LinkedIn post. “Moss asked its customers what they wanted from AI and built exactly that, control at every step.” Cherry Ventures was referring to a Moss survey that indicated that 48% of financial leaders identified “control” as their top priority when it came to deploying AI, with only 6% wanting AI to have “full autonomy.”

Moss serves more than 5,000 businesses and generates more than €70 million in annual revenue. In addition to its Berlin headquarters, the company has offices in Tallinn and Amsterdam.

YouLend partners with comrce on embedded capital

Embedded finance platform YouLend and e-commerce software platform for German SMEs comrce have forged a strategic partnership to help small businesses access working capital directly from within their current e-commerce operations. The partnership will combine comrce’s e-commerce platform with YouLend’s embedded finance technology to enable Germany’s 24,000 merchants to explore potential financing options.

“With YouLend, we are expanding our e-commerce offering with a service that can support merchants as they take their next steps towards growth,” comrce Head of Partner Management Amirah Hadry said.

YouLend and comrce have been partners since May, but are just now formally announcing their alliance. The partnership will make information about YouLend financing options available alongside the software and communications channels used by merchants to manage orders, inventory, accounting, and customer service. comrce will direct merchant financing queries to YouLend, which manages the financing process via its digital platform.

“comrce is part of the day-to-day operations of around 24,000 merchants,” YouLend General Manager Europe Leonard Strigel said. “Now, we are bringing them flexible financing options to give them greater access to growth capital. Our partnership demonstrates how embedded financing is incredibly vital to the day-to-day success of small businesses.”

Founded in 2015 and headquartered in the UK, YouLend offers an embedded financing platform that powers e-commerce, payments, and technology firms ranging from Amazon to SumUp. The company operates in more than 11 markets across the UK, EU, and US.

A leading e-commerce software hub, comrce offers specialized e-commerce solutions such as Billbee (automated order processing), Amainvoice (accounting software), Replyco (e-commerce helpdesk), and VentoryOne (inventory management) from a single location. Headquartered in Twistetal, Germany, and founded in 2023, comrce gives retailers an integrated ecosystem for automation, multichannel management, and revenue optimization.

N26 integrates with Instant Payments System Wero

Berlin-based neobank N26 has unveiled its support for Wero, the new pan-European instant payment system, via its mobile app. The launch makes the payment service available to eligible customers in Germany and France, with a gradual rollout to other markets planned for the future.

N26 joined the payment system in December 2025, entering into a strategic collaboration that has culminated in the August launch. Embedding Wero into the N26 app’s native transfer flow will enable users to benefit from a single European payment standard for daily digital transactions. The integration will allow users to send and receive funds instantly with individuals who do not hold an N26 account without requiring bank details or an additional app. Transfers are powered by SEPA Instant and the Wero network and arrive in the recipient’s account in less than 10 seconds.

“Instant payments without an IBAN have been a core N26 feature since our inception,” N26 Chief Product and Business Officer Daniel Lappas said. “With Wero, we’re extending this seamless experience to the broader European banking ecosystem, bringing the simplicity N26 customers already know to even more people.”

A European digital bank with a German banking license, N26 offers secure, digital-native banking to millions of customers across 24 markets. Founded in 2013, N26 offers bank accounts, debit cards, international transfers, savings and investments, and insurance products. Today, the bank holds more than €10.5 billion in customer deposits and reported annual revenue of more than €500 million in 2025, marking the firm’s first full year of net profitability. N26 started the year with the launch of its N26 for under 18s solution, a debit card designed for children aged 7 to 17 and managed via their parent’s N26 app.

Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.

Central and Southern Asia

• India-based digital financial services firm Navi secured an investment of $100 million from Dutch asset manager Prosus.
• India’s RazorPay unveiled Vulcan, its AI payments foundational model, powered by NVIDIA and AWS.
• IBS Intelligence looked at how wealthtech is driving growth in India’s fintech sector.

Latin America and the Caribbean

• Brazilian digital bank PicPay introduced an integration with ChatGPT, enabling customers to access financial data via generative AI.
• Banco Plata, a Mexican neobank, announced its expansion into Colombia.
• Uber invested in Chilean fintech Galgo to support the firm’s motorcycle financing business.

Asia-Pacific

• Ant International and the Bank of China (Hong Kong) forge strategic partnership to enhance cross-border payments.
• Nexo Australia secured approval to launch crypto-backed credit lines.
• Korea’s Jeonbuk Bank announced a partnership with Ripple to deploy Ripple Payments for cross-border remittances.

Sub-Saharan Africa

• South African payment gateway Onafriq partnered with Dubai-based credit infrastructure company _able and Visa to expand credit access in Africa.
• Nigerian fintech Pouchers raised $500,000 in pre-seed funding to scale its stablecoin-powered cross border payments business.
• Mastercard and Flash teamed up to expand access to digital payments in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Central and Eastern Europe

• The European Investment Fund (EIF) has partnered with Polish national development bank, Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego (BGK), to launch a €30 million venture capital fintech fund.
• Berlin-based AI-powered spend management platform Moss raised €35 million in Series C funding, earning a valuation of €1 billion.
• PPRO teamed up with Blik to develop agentic commerce capabilities for local payments in Poland.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• Digitally native bank Yomo secured preliminary approval from the Central Bank of Egypt.
• UAE-based payment gateway Telr teamed up with Jordanian commerce platform Jet Application.
• Oman-based bank Sohar International launched its innovation hub to support the country’s fintech ecosystem.

art credit

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There may be no clearer use case for AI than leveraging the technology to transform manual processes and boost operational efficiency. From cross-border payments to document management to fraud investigation to underwriting, fintech innovators have embraced AI to empower banks, credit unions, lenders, and other financial institutions to become more efficient, analyze data better, cut costs, meet compliance obligations, and provide more personalized service to their customers and members.

Beyond simply deploying AI, these fintechs in many cases represent an emerging generation of infrastructure providers that facilitate bank and credit union modernization without requiring them to “rip and replace” their existing core systems. By helping banks and credit unions meet emerging regulatory mandates, boost efficiency, and compete with rivals within and outside of financial services while keeping the cost of modernization low, these innovators are key partners for financial services firms that are eager to deploy new technologies but are wary of the risks of making too many wholesale changes at once.

In this final installment of our look at the demoing companies of FinovateFall 2026, we showcase a diverse group of fintech innovators automating processes and modernizing operations in areas such as payments infrastructure, regtech, lending, fraud prevention, wealth management, and more.

3 Degrees

3 Degrees provides community banks and credit unions with technology to launch modern, embedded cross-border payments that enhance the customer experience and generate new revenue. The solution is available for any country, currency, rail, or payout method.

Donevia

Donevia helps credit unions acquire, convert, and retain members by combining a member onboarding platform with an AI-powered backend performance layer. The solution provides a KPI dashboard to track and improve team performance and delivers AI-powered cross-sell recommendations and call transcription.

FinQub

FinQub offers a no-code orchestration layer for fintech workflows and compliance, replacing disconnected vendor dashboards with a single defensible decision graph. The solution delivers decisions in seconds rather than days and makes every decision examiner-defensible for seven years.

Finzly

Finzly offers a cloud-based payments platform for banks, enabling them to offer modern global transaction banking via Finzly’s real-time operating system Finzly BankOS. Easily integrated into banks’ core systems, Finzly’s technology can be used to centrally process ACH, FedWire, RTP, SWIFT, and FedNow payments.

Glide

Designed especially for credit unions, Glide is a digital account opening, lending, and onboarding platform that leverages AI for document collection and member intelligence. The solution offers embedded identity verification, fraud detection, and instant funding.

Go Abacus

Go Abacus’ Go.AI is an on-prem AI platform for financial institutions that delivers private large language models, secure data indexing, and auditable AI assistants built for regulatory environments. The solution offers permission-aware outputs with full response control over what the AI is saying, with all outputs aligned to regulatory requirements.

Kato

Kato offers compliance-first automation that helps lenders scale, reduce servicing costs by up to 80%, increase recoveries, and free up agents so they can focus on higher-value issues. Lenders use Kato to automate thousands of calls, producing a 15x ROI on recoveries and an 80% reduction in cost per call.

MHC Automation

MHC specializes in providing AI-powered SaaS solutions for document and payment automation in highly regulated industries. The company offers end-to-end customer communications workflows that integrate with any system, as well as low-code/no-code software that empowers business users.

Mobena

Mobena is an integrated income tax, estate planning, and wealth management platform built for complex families. The technology models income tax for an entire family over any period of time, calculates income tax at a CPA level, and accurately models grantor and non-grantor trusts.

Naehas

Financial institutions leverage Naehas’ platform to manage offers, automate disclosures, and review marketing content at enterprise scale to ensure regulatory compliance. The platform creates governed campaigns in minutes rather than months, binds each offer to approved disclosures at creation, and tracks every customer action with real-time fulfillment.

Neural Payments

Neural Payments’ Payments Hub connects banks and credit unions to every major payment rail and wallet in the US via a single, fully branded integration. The solution delivers adaptive routing and fraud controls and offers branded P2P and FedNow functionality in-app. Institutions can go live with the technology in 90 days.

On Time Harvest

On Time Harvest is a SaaS financial management platform and mobile app that helps individuals, families, and small businesses secure real-time cash-flow visibility, forecast discretionary income, manage shared finances, and make smarter financial decisions. The platform provides lending readiness, shared dashboards, and responsible BNPL planning.

SLC Digital

SLC Digital helps organizations prevent account takeover and high-risk digital fraud through the most secure and private communication channel available for digital authentication. The company provides identity theft and fraud prevention and supports continuous regulatory compliance, while lowering operational costs, and increasing customer trust.

Tacnode

Tacnode is a Context Lake: a single database that provides every AI agent and service with the same live, semantic context to ensure the accuracy of real-time financial decisions. The company’s Context Lake platform unifies transactional and analytical workflows in a single system, combining real-time performance, PostgreSQL compatibility, and cloud-native scalability.

Transvision

Transvision Solutions’ STAR AI is an autonomous AML investigation engine that runs 150+ intelligent checks to provide a complete, auditable investigation in less than five minutes. The solution delivers end-to-end autonomous investigations across KYC, sanctions, transactions, UBO, as well as ML risk scoring with explainability and LLM-generated SAR narratives.

Valcori Automated Solutions

Valcori Workmate unifies workflows, data, and teams to reduce friction, increase transparency, and unlock efficient, scalable growth for independent wealth management firms. The company offers AI-driven tools that boost efficiency and simplify the daily demands of running a wealth management business via intelligent, collaborative technology.

Vertyx

Vertyx leverages headless AI to enable financial institutions and lenders to remain engaged with homeowners beyond the close of the loan. The company’s platform also automates servicing workflows, lowering service costs and features AI-powered quality control and compliance monitoring that covers the entire portfolio.

Why banks and credit unions should care

For some time, the biggest challenges to bank, credit union, and lender technology modernization were cost, complexity, and risk. These remain reasonable concerns. Major core platform overhauls are expensive, as are enabling new technologies like AI, and trying to integrate AI tools into current operations can seem like an overwhelming task, especially if the right technical talent is not on hand.

Fortunately, fintechs today are capable of responding to these challenges with solutions that automate manual processes to cut costs overall, as well as new, modular AI-enabled tools that do not require major “rip and replace” operations. A number of these innovators also offer professional services on an ongoing basis to ensure that implementations stay on track and new technology deployments do exactly what they are designed to do. Increasingly, for banks, credit unions, lenders, and other financial services providers, the question is not whether to modernize, but how to find the modernization partners that are the best fits for the institution’s goals.

Photo by drmakete lab on Unsplash

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For years, financial institutions have talked about delivering more personalized experiences. But personalization is evolving beyond simply putting a customer’s name in a message or recommending a product based on broad demographic segments. In the last few years, banks and fintechs have been using behavioral and transactional data, AI, incentives, and contextual insights to understand what customers need and deliver relevant experiences at the moments when they are most likely to act.

At FinovateFall 2026, taking place September 9 through 11 in New York, a diverse group of companies will demonstrate new approaches to customer engagement and financial wellness. Their technologies range from hyper-personalized digital banking and transaction intelligence to financial education, community commerce, loan repayment incentives, and investing tools for the next generation. Below, we’ve highlighted nine companies that will take the stage at FinovateFall to illustrate how financial institutions can turn customer data and everyday financial interactions into opportunities to build stronger, more valuable relationships.

BankUniverse

BankUniverse helps financial institutions identify consumers who demonstrate an intent to purchase a financial product and then improve the digital journey that converts those prospects into customers. Its privacy-first platform analyzes digital interactions using GenAI and helps banks optimize product journeys and target relevant audiences without sharing sensitive personal information with third parties. The company says its technology can increase digital sales by more than 20%.

Tapix by Dateio

Tapix turns raw payment data into usable transaction intelligence, enriching transactions with information such as merchant names, logos, locations, and categories. That cleaner data foundation can power everything from clearer transaction histories and subscription identification to personal financial management, customer analytics, and hyper-personalized communications. Tapix can also help reduce disputes and chargebacks by giving customers a clearer understanding of where and how they spent their money.

Doshi

Doshi provides an AI-native engagement layer that combines financial education with gamification to help banks better understand when customers may be ready for additional financial products. As users learn and interact with educational experiences, Doshi turns behavioral signals into product-readiness insights that financial institutions can use to deliver more timely and relevant engagement. The approach gives banks a way to connect financial wellness initiatives with measurable customer growth.

Finalytics.ai

Finalytics.ai helps financial institutions create “segment-of-one” digital experiences using behavioral, transactional, and third-party data. Its AI models continuously analyze available information to determine which content, messages, and offers are most relevant to an individual visitor at a particular moment. The result is a digital banking experience designed around individual intent rather than broad customer segments.

GenAspire

GenAspire helps community financial institutions build relationships with the next generation of customers through a white-labeled teen banking app and financial literacy program. Students learn about saving, budgeting, and spending through lessons, quizzes, rewards, and real-world financial experiences, while parents retain visibility and controls. For credit unions and community banks, GenAspire also serves as an acquisition channel, distributing their branded banking experience through school partnerships and helping institutions establish relationships with young customers before they select their first primary financial institution.

Goodbuy

Goodbuy helps credit unions turn community commerce into a customer engagement and growth channel. Its credit union-branded marketplace connects individual members with local small businesses, giving businesses exposure to new customers while providing members with incentives to shop locally using their financial institution’s cards. The model is designed to drive small business account acquisition and deposits while also generating greater card usage and interchange revenue.

Nextvestment

Nextvestment brings AI-powered self-service to wealth management, allowing clients to explore investment ideas and financial questions on their own while helping advisors identify moments when human intervention may add the most value. The platform is designed to improve engagement without replacing the existing advisory relationship, giving clients greater freedom to explore while helping advisors focus their attention where it is most needed.

Perqia

Perqia helps lenders improve loan repayment behavior by turning payments into a more engaging customer experience. The platform uses cash-flow-timed incentives and rewards to encourage borrowers to prioritize their loan payments and pay before accounts become delinquent. Borrowers receive a self-service experience with visibility into upcoming payments and incentives, while lenders gain insights that can help improve engagement, reduce delinquencies, and lower collection costs.

Young Early Starters

Young Early Starters (YES) combines financial education with real-world investing to teach children how markets and long-term investing work. Designed for children ages eight to 18, the platform allows young users to learn about companies and investing before putting real money into stocks and ETFs. Parents set budgets and limits and approve individual trades, pairing hands-on investing experience with more than 300 educational lessons. For banks and other financial institutions, the model offers another avenue for establishing financial relationships earlier in a customer’s life.

Why banks should care

Personalization has historically been treated largely as a marketing challenge. Banks would determine which customers fit a segment, identify the product most likely to appeal to that segment, and deliver a targeted message. But the companies above demonstrate a broader opportunity built on better transaction data, behavioral signals, rewards, financial education, and AI. These tools can indicate when a customer is ready for a new financial product, encourage positive repayment behavior, create engagement long before a customer needs a financial product, and help banks determine what an individual customer needs in real time.

In 2026, customer engagement is more than clicks, logins, and open rates. Banks and credit unions need to give customers reasons to deepen their relationships and keep coming back. The companies coming to the FinovateFall 2026 demo stage show how financial institutions can use technology to make those interactions more relevant, timely, and useful.

Photo by Gustavo Fring

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OmniAI, an agentic AI firm that made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2025 last year in New York, has rebranded as Monumint.

“This is more than a new name. It’s the next chapter of our company,” the firm began its LinkedIn post discussing the rebranding. “As financial services enters the era of AI, every customer should still receive a personal, high-touch experience,” the post continued. “We believe conversational AI is the foundation that makes that possible. That’s why we’re becoming Monumint.” The new name of the firm was inspired by the strength and endurance of monuments, “structures that have been built to last … just like the relationships financial institutions build with their customers.”

Monumint offers a conversational AI platform for financial institutions. The company’s technology leverages agentic AI to manage the entire borrower lifecycle across email, SMS, and voice. Monumint’s AI agents support account opening, loan origination, servicing, and collections, verifying and pre-qualifying applicants, collecting documents, responding instantly to balance, payment, and account queries, and, when necessary, providing empathetic, policy-guided outreach to enhance the collections process. This includes routing hardship signals directly to human agents.

The company’s rebrand comes at a time when a growing number of banks and credit unions that have built their businesses around relationship banking are facing challenges from technology-enabled rivals who are making it easier for customers to open accounts, secure the assistance and advice they need, and move money quickly without requiring a branch visit or dealing with a call center. The instant access that consumers increasingly expect in other aspects of life is quickly becoming an expectation among consumers of banking and financial services. Enabling community banks, credit unions, and lenders to deliver this access through innovative technologies like agentic AI will empower these firms to compete more effectively for the engagement—and deposits—of the financial services consumers in their communities and beyond.

“The next generation of financial services will be built around personal relationships at massive scale,” the company noted in a rebrand announcement on its website. “The winners will not be the institutions with the biggest balance sheets, but the ones that can give every customer a banker in their pocket, available across every channel, with the context to help and the judgment to know when a human should step in.”

As OmniAI, Monumint made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2025 in New York. The company showed how its AI agents for lending accelerate borrower onboarding, delivering faster responses and fewer delays for borrowers, as well as fewer drop-offs and cleaner data to enable lenders to make faster, smarter credit decisions. Each agent is trained on the financial institution’s workflow, guiding applicants from intake through to underwriting-readiness, gathering documents, verifying data in real time, asking contextual questions, and escalating issues as needed to human professionals.

Monumint is a Y Combinator alum, joining the accelerator as a member of the Winter 2024 cohort. Tyler Maran (CEO) and Anna Pojawais (CTO) are the company’s co-founders.

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

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• APL Federal Credit Union has teamed up with digital banking engagement firm Spiral to give its members new, seamless ways to save and donate to their favorite charitable causes.
• The credit union, which uses the Alkami Digital Banking Platform, will embed Spiral’s Roundup Center and Giving Center, innovations demoed last year at FinovateFall 2025 in New York.
• Spiral’s partnership with APL FCU comes just a few weeks after the fintech announced a similar partnership with California-based Foothill Credit Union.

APL Federal Credit Union, a Maryland-based credit union, has partnered with Spiral to give its members new ways to save for their financial goals through everyday purchases while seamlessly supporting local and national charities.

“Credit unions have a unique opportunity to drive deposits and primary relationships by helping people make financial progress every day,” Spiral Founder and CEO Shawn Melamed said. “APL FCU is showing how digital banking can help members save more, give back to the causes they care about, and strengthen the communities they serve.”

APL FCU will embed Spiral’s Roundup Center into the Alkami Digital Banking Platform it uses, enabling members to automatically round up debit card purchases and direct the spare change toward their savings goals or their favorite charitable causes. The credit union will also deploy Spiral’s Giving Center, which allows members to seamlessly donate to their preferred charities directly from their digital accounts. The Giving Center also lets members create a portfolio of favorite charities, track the impact of their charitable gifts, and receive a report on their donations for tax purposes.

“Helping our members achieve financial success has always gone hand in hand with supporting our local communities,” APL FCU Chief Strategy & Growth Officer Kevin Marvel said. “With Spiral, members can automatically grow their savings and support the causes they care about through everyday banking, making saving and giving a natural part of their daily lives.”

Serving individuals and families who live, work, attend school, or conduct business in Howard County, Maryland, APL FCU was founded in 1954 by eight employees of The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. The institution was a pioneer in online banking, launching the service in 1996, and secured its community charter in 2000, enabling APL FCU to offer memberships to individuals other than APL employees. Today, the financial institution has more than 31,000 members and total assets of $700+ million.

Founded in 2019 and headquartered in New York, Spiral made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2025. At the conference, the company demonstrated how its Savings Center and Giving Center for banks and credit unions help financial institutions grow deposits, increase engagement, and boost loans. Savings Center leverages personalization, gamification, and automation to help account holders build better financial habits and reach their financial goals. Giving Center enables account holders to manage their charitable giving and easily donate to both local and national charities.

Spiral’s partnership announcement with APL FCU comes just days after the New York-based fintech reported that Foothill Credit Union, a Southern California-based financial institution, will also embed Spiral’s Roundup Center and Giving Center into its digital banking platform. With $660+ million in total assets and approximately 29,300 members, Foothill Credit Union serves employees of specific school districts, hospitals, government municipalities, and Select Employer Groups (SEGs) across the San Gabriel Valley, as well as immediate family members of eligible employees.

Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

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• Onboarding and engagement specialist Swaystack has partnered with Oxford Bank of Michigan and Cascade Federal Credit Union of Washington State.
• Oxford Bank and Cascade FCU will both use Swaystack’s gamified onboarding and engagement solution to enhance and streamline onboarding, account funding, direct deposit switching, and more.
• Headquartered in Miami, Florida, Swaystack made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2026.

Customer onboarding and engagement specialist Swaystack has teamed up with Oxford Bank, the oldest commercial bank in Oakland County, Michigan. Swaystack will bring its gamified onboarding and engagement solution to the bank’s customers within Jack Henry’s Banno digital banking platform, helping customers fund accounts, switch direct deposits, and transfer subscriptions from the first login.

“We’ve always believed that earning a customer’s trust means showing up at every step of their financial life,” Oxford Bank Chief Operating Officer Nancy Rosentrater said. “With Swaystack, we can now do that digitally—walking customers through funding their account, switching their direct deposit, moving their subscriptions—helping them grow with us through new products and referrals. It’s a complete ecosystem that turns a new account into a primary relationship.”

The partnership between Swaystack and Oxford Bank comes as the trend of banking consumers maintaining relationships with multiple financial institutions has accelerated significantly in recent years. A report from J.D. Power noted that in the third quarter of 2025, 52% of newly opened checking accounts were additional accounts rather than replacement accounts. This puts significant pressure on banks, credit unions, and digital banking providers. As consumers continue to divide their financial activity across institutions, the ability of any individual institution to earn customers’ savings deposits, direct deposits, and trust is tested. Unfortunately, as Swaystack CEO and Co-Founder Har Rai Khalsa explained, the traditional solutions to this challenge have often failed to work for many community banks and credit unions.

“Most banks chasing this problem end up buying four or five different tools and spend(ing) years trying to make them work together,” Khalsa said. “We built Swaystack so that community banks like Oxford Bank only need one platform. Everything from the first deposit to the next product moves as a single connected journey, each step setting up the one that follows. For Oxford, that means real growth from customers they already have. We are giving a bank that has earned trust for over a century a modern way to deliver it, while maintaining what makes people trust them in the first place.”

Founded in 2024 and headquartered in Miami, Florida, Swaystack made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2025 in New York. At the conference, the company’s CEO and founder demonstrated Swaystack’s gamified onboarding platform, which enables banks and credit unions to boost engagement with experiences that activate primacy, reduce dormancy, and transform new accounts into lasting relationships.

Swaystack’s partnership with Oxford Bank comes a month after the fintech announced a similar partnership with Washington-based Cascade Federal Credit Union. As with Oxford Bank, Cascade FCU will pair Swaystack’s onboarding technology with the Banno digital banking platform.

“We have always known our strongest growth comes from the members we already serve, but personalizing that outreach at scale was something our team could not do by hand,” Cascade FCU VP of Marketing Ashley Smart said. “Swaystack enables us to guide every member through these first decisions, and it turns the referral instinct we have rewarded for years into something that happens naturally as part of the experience.”

Cascade FCU was founded in 1952, and has more than 10,900 members. The credit union was initially chartered to serve workers of the Great Northern Railway and today is the financial home for more than 100 employer groups throughout Washington State and has $370+ million in assets. Headquartered in Kent, the member-owned, not-for-profit institution offers checking, savings, money market, certificates of deposit, IRAs, and youth savings accounts, as well as a full range of lending options, including auto, home, personal, and student loans, and credit cards.

Interested in companies developing innovative new solutions for credit unions and their members? Check out our latest look at the Credit Union Spotlight, coming to FinovateFall 2026 next month in New York!

Photo by Geansebastian Rodriguez from Pexels

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Growing up in Montana, community banking was the only type of banking I ever knew until I left town for college. My best friend’s mom worked at the bank down the street, and all of the tellers recognized my parents when we walked into the branch. My mom started her own business by obtaining a working line of credit after presenting a business plan and a promise.

As a kid, I thought every town worked this way. Now, decades later, looking back on those experiences offers important insights into banking.

Community banking, especially in a small town, has always depended on trust, reputation, personal connections, and long-term relationships. When I switched to a digital-only bank in 2006, that sense of connection largely disappeared. My relationship with the bank felt less personal and more centered on the transactions I was making.

That disconnect may help explain why so many fintechs now invest heavily in recreating digitally what community banks have spent generations building in person. Personalization, customer engagement, financial wellness, AI assistants, and customer relationship management may sound modern, but the underlying ideas are not. Community banks have long relied on knowing their customers, understanding their needs, and building loyalty over time. In 2026, those same goals remain priorities across the financial services industry.

Because community banks already understand many of the qualities customers value most, they do not need to imitate megabanks. They do, however, need technology that helps them extend those strengths. With the right partners, community banks can serve customers faster, automate manual work, strengthen fraud detection, and give employees more time to focus on meaningful customer interactions. The opportunity will help strengthen the relationship-driven model by supporting it with digital tools and workflows that meet rising customer expectations.

This technology gap is exactly what the Community Bank Spotlight at FinovateFall seeks to bridge. On September 11, we’re hosting a special breakfast session open only to community banks and a few selected fintechs, that will provide executives a place to share best practices, talk through common challenges, and discover innovative solutions.

If you’re interested in attending the Community Bank Spotlight at FinovateFall, reach out to billy.smith@informa.com to get yourself on the guest list. Keep in mind that space is limited, and only community bank employees are eligible to attend.

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Will World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture linked to President Donald Trump, secure a bank charter? Will PayPal sell itself to Stripe? There’s a lot to mull over in the fintech headlines as the week begins. Be sure to check back here at Finovate’s Fintech Rundown all week long for the latest in news and announcements.

Digital banking

Regional financial institution Flagstar Bank ($87.7 billion in assets) partners with Fiserv to support its core modernization strategy.

Oman-based BankDhofar introduces youth accounts to promote financial literacy among the country’s young adults.

Agentic AI

Alipay unveils China’s first full-stack agentic commerce platform.

Payments

Payment acceptance solutions company Ingenico raises €150 million from a group of investors led by PIMCO.

TransFi launches JARVIS, a proprietary AI-powered compliance intelligence platform for cross-border payments.

Payfuture and Payouts.com team up to launch local payment rails for India payouts.

Wealth management

Retirement and savings specialist Standard Life launches its AI Coach to help guide customers through the home buying process.

Fraud prevention

Datavault AI announces its acquisition of CyberCatch in an all-cash deal combining data monetization and defensive security.

Equifax UK launches Automatic Watchlist Monitoring (AWM) to help regulated businesses in the UK to automate anti-money laundering (AML) compliance.

Insurtech

Data and AI company SAS teams up with international reinsurance provider Swiss Re to enhance catastrophe risk intelligence.

Photo by Pascal Debrunner on Unsplash

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• Airwallex has partnered with Affirm to enable merchants in 35 countries to offer BNPL options to eligible US customers at checkout.
• Airwallex merchants can add Affirm without an additional integration, giving shoppers access to interest-free and longer-term installment payment options.
• The partnership expands Affirm’s distribution while helping Airwallex merchants offer more competitive checkout experiences and potentially boost conversion and transaction sizes.

Global payments platform Airwallex has teamed up with flexible payments company Affirm to allow merchants in 35 countries to provide flexible payment options at checkout to their eligible US customers.

Without additional integration, merchants can bring Affirm’s buy now, pay later (BNPL) capabilities, allowing shoppers to choose a payment schedule that works best for their cashflow at the point of sale. Among Affirm’s flexible financing options are four interest-free installments or monthly installments of up to 24 months. Affirm will not charge late fees and shows shoppers what they will pay upfront.

In addition to bringing flexibility to end customers, Affirm’s tools also bring benefits to merchants. The relaxed payment terms often support higher conversion and larger transactions. Merchants on Airwallex can offer Affirm payments seamlessly. Airwallex now supports more than 160 payment methods across the world.

“Merchants choose Airwallex to maximize local payment options for shoppers around the world, otherwise, they’re leaving conversion on the table,” said Airwallex VP of Financial and Strategic Partnerships Jason Gottlieb. “We’re thrilled to partner with Affirm and provide its familiar and transparent payment options to help our international merchants drive more US sales.”

Adding Affirm helps merchants compete with other point-of-sale checkout experiences by bringing more payment options into the checkout flow. And because accessing Affirm through Airwallex doesn’t require an additional integration, it reduces the complexity for merchants looking to modernize their payments experience.

For Affirm, the partnership offers another avenue for distribution. Partnerships with platforms like Airwallex allow the BNPL provider to reach large groups of merchants through technology they already use, rather than establishing a standalone relationship with each merchant. Affirm has pursued a similar strategy through partnerships with payment providers including Worldpay and Fiserv, expanding the number of places consumers can encounter its financing options.

Founded in 2015, Airwallex holds 85+ regulatory licenses and permits across 50 markets that enable customers to operate in 200+ countries and regions and support multi-currency checkout at scale. The Singapore-based company helps more than 676,000 businesses worldwide manage their financial operations and build and monetize their own financial products.

Photo by Kindel Media

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FinovateFall is just three weeks away! This year’s event features three industry stages: AI and Innovation, The Future of Money, and Customer Experience and Trust. Each stage is designed to offer banking and fintech leaders insight into what’s working in practice, what’s breaking under the pressure of new technology and regulations, and what institutions need to rethink about their current operations.

AI and Innovation

Artificial intelligence has moved beyond experimentation. The conversations at FinovateFall will focus on what comes next, such as transitioning from AI copilots to semi-autonomous agents, measuring the ROI of AI projects, and examining where investments are still falling short. Sessions will explore enterprise-scale AI development, practical approaches to modernizing legacy technology, the rise of agentic commerce, and the front-office opportunities that promise the greatest competitive advantage. Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of where AI is creating real business value today and where the next wave of innovation is headed.

The Future of Money

Stablecoins, AI agents, and data-driven lending are reshaping how money moves and how financial decisions are made. This stage explores the technologies and strategies that will define the next generation of financial services, from the growing role of stablecoins in banking and payments to AI-powered financial decision-making and precision lending. Industry leaders will also examine how payment strategies are evolving amid increasing competitive and regulatory pressure. Attendees will walk away with practical insight into where financial institutions should focus their investments as the infrastructure of money continues to change.

Customer Experience and Trust

Delivering exceptional customer experiences increasingly depends on earning and maintaining trust. Sessions in this stagea will explore how financial institutions can use personalization and AI to create more relevant customer journeys while strengthening security, reducing fraud, and building lasting customer confidence. The discussions on this industry stage will examine experience transformation, digital identity, financial crime prevention, and how banks can turn trust into a competitive advantage while maintaining growth.

Together, these three industry stages on Friday, September 11 will offer a concentrated look at the moves that will define banking’s next chapter. If you register for FinovateFall before August 21, you can still save up to $400.

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• FinovateFall 2025: AI, Fraud Prevention, and the Art of What’s Possible

 

Most folks in banking and financial services do not enjoy talking about fraud and financial crime. This is not surprising. When it comes to fraud, there is rarely “good news.” Instead, it’s usually a matter of “no news” vs “bad news,” In this world, many can’t help but feel as if the “good news” is that the “bad news” hasn’t happened—yet.

While keynotes and industry stages dedicated to fraud and financial crime will be limited at FinovateFall 2026 next month, the world looks quite different from the demo stage, where a dozen companies will be showcasing their latest innovations to help banks, credit unions, and other organizations monitor their processes in real time, detect fraud before it causes emotional or financial damage, and provide procedures and strategies to help avoid similar attacks in the future. In other words, just because we don’t always hear C-suite executives from banks and financial services companies talking about fraud, do not for a moment believe that fraud and financial crime are anything but top of mind.

Today, in our latest FinovateFall 2026 preview post, we’re introducing you to these 12 fintech innovators that will be demonstrating their fraud prevention solutions live on stage on September 9 and 10.

Coynitt

Coynitt is a remittance and community savings platform built for Canada’s African diaspora that leverages the blockchain to settle international remittances in five seconds or less. Coynitt offers trustless, on-chain ROSCA savings circles with instant smart contract payouts. The platform features AI-routed payments, open-source smart contracts, and on-chain transparency to enable every contribution to be visible to every member.

Darwinium

Darwinium is an AI-powered fraud prevention platform that combines continuous monitoring with real-time decisioning to enable fraud teams to identify and respond to fraud attacks ranging from account takeover and API abuse to scams and mule activity. The company’s technology has delivered a 50% reduction in fraud and a 40% reduction in operational costs. Distinguishing trusted behavior from risky behavior—in both humans and AI agents—Darwinium provides fraud defense from the first interaction through high-risk actions and payments.

Illuma

A leader in voice security solutions for banks and other financial institutions, Illuma offers a voice authentication and fraud prevention solution, IllumaSHIELD, that replaces knowledge-based authentication practices with a seamless and secure, real-time voice authentication solution that enhances the caller experience, improves operational efficiency, and prevents fraud in contact centers.

Kita Technologies

Kita offers an AI-powered lending operations and credit assessment platform that transforms borrower documents into fraud-checked underwriting signals. Kita enables lenders to transition from scattered borrower documents and manual workflows to consistent, decision-ready credit analysis that keeps final decision-making in human hands. The platform’s trio of AI agents—Kita Capture, AI Credit Officer, and AI Underwriter—provides end-to-end underwriting for every kind of lending, from microfinance to SME lending and commercial loans.

Loquat

Loquat provides seamless KYC, KYB, fast onboarding, virtual cards, automated lending, back-office lifecycle management, and CALM Portal for credit unions and community banks. The firm’s Loquat IQ leverages an institution’s data to deliver contextual insights that drive strategic and operational success.

McCarthy Hatch

McCarthy Hatch is a regtech firm that helps financial institutions identify regulatory risks. The company’s FSAi is an AI-powered analytics platform that detects systemic consumer harm patterns in financial services by analyzing customer complaints. FSAi delivers real-time monitoring of risk exposure and enables strategic, proactive measures to significantly reduce compliance spending.

Omnisient

Omnisient offers a privacy-preserving data collaboration platform that enables financial services companies to access consumer behavior data directly from retailers and consumer brands. The company’s solution leverages secure collaboration and AI-driven analytics to empower businesses to build predictive models and data products to help them find and better serve future customers across industries.

Radar

Radar, a location infrastructure and intelligence software development firm, offers solutions to help organizations fight fraud, optimize operations, and engage customers at scale. Radar’s platform consists of three solutions: Protect, to stop fraud and verify user location; Optimize, which tracks pickups, deliveries, and field operations with real-time visibility; and Engage, which helps firms reach the right user at the right moment wherever they are.

RangersAI

RangersAI leverages real-time guidance, in-context education, and trusted digital interactions to help consumers avoid scams. The company’s ScamRanger solution is a customer-facing scam education platform that provides alerts and guidance for suspicious messages, helping stop scams before the emotional manipulation—and financial damage—begins.

Saris AI

Saris AI builds and launches AI agents to automate back-office workflows for credit unions and banks. The company’s technology automates 90% of lending, compliance, and operations tasks, and enables banks and credit unions to scale without adding headcount. Saris AI’s solution can be integrated directly into existing cores and LOS platforms, and requires no change management.

Veritus

An AI communications platform for financial services, Veritus deploys voice and text agents that manage loan servicing and collections at scale. The company’s technology drives application conversions, re-engaging abandoned applications via intelligent outbound calls, SMS, and chat, and boosts collections with proactive outreach to borrowers in early arrears with empathetic, compliant, contextual conversations.

Winnow

Winnow is a regtech platform that provides regulatory compliance solutions for legal and financial services firms. The company integrates modern AI technologies with practical compliance tools to offer prompt-driven compliance survey creation, intelligent chat-based legal research, and on-demand reference chart and compliance checklist generation.

Why Banks Should Care

Bank executives do not need to be reminded—much less informed—about the challenges of fraud and the costs of financial crime. In survey after survey, fraud, especially AI-powered fraud, is among the most frequently cited concerns by not only those who run and manage financial institutions, but also their customers and members. And it’s worth noting that the challenges to effective fraud fighting are not exclusively technical; as more than one financial crime expert has said, the human being, not the technology, is often the weakest link in the chain of defense.

That said, there are many challenges facing bank and credit union executives when it comes to enhancing their financial crime prevention efforts: from data management and legacy technology issues to budgetary constraints and limited availability of technical talent and expertise. And these are the problems that fintechs such as the ones showcased here—and coming to the FinovateFall 2026 demo stage in September—have dedicated themselves to solving for banks, credit unions, their customers, and their members.

Photo by Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash

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• AI-powered operating system for wealth management Zeplyn announced a new integration with Schwab Advisor Center to automate account opening and meeting preparation workflows.
• The integration follows the company’s launch of a new platform capability, Advisor Coaching, that gives wealth management advisors actionable feedback on their client interactions.
• Headquartered in New York and founded in 2023, Zeplyn made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2025.

Zeplyn, an AI operating system for wealth management, announced a new integration with Schwab Advisor Center that expands the reach of Zeplyn Agent Nexus into two key workflows for wealth managers: account opening and meeting preparation. The integration enables advisors to open Schwab Advisor Services accounts in seconds, leveraging AI agents to automatically complete Schwab’s digital account-opening workflows while incorporating live Schwab holdings and transactions into Zeplyn’s AI-powered client briefs.

“Schwab Advisor Center is one of the most important platforms in wealth management, and we’re excited to bring the power of Zeplyn Agent Nexus into that ecosystem,” Zeplyn Co-founder and CEO Era Jain said. “This integration is a step toward a new way of working. By combining Schwab data with the intelligence firms already have, we’re enabling AI to complete work that has traditionally remained manual, giving advisors more time to focus on their clients.”

In a statement, Zeplyn noted that account opening and meeting preparation are two of the most time-consuming workflows in wealth management. Advisors are often required to source meeting notes, CRM records, documents, planning software, and custodian platforms to gather the information they need before they can act. In contrast, Zeplyn’s new integration eliminates many of these manual steps. Advisors can direct Zeplyn’s agents to open a Schwab account, gather client data across meetings, emails, CRM records, and documents, initiate the digital account open workflow, automatically complete all relevant data fields, and deliver a finished draft for human review and submission. Early pilots of the integration revealed that Not-In-Good-Order (NIGO) submissions were reduced by approximately 80%.

The integration also boosts Zeplyn’s AI-powered meeting preparation capabilities by incorporating live Schwab holdings and transactions into already-assembled client intelligence. This means that advisors can secure a complete, up-to-date view of every client’s holdings without having to collect the data manually across multiple systems and platforms. Here, early pilots revealed that advisors saved more than 12 hours a week with AI-powered meeting prep.

Zeplyn’s integration with Schwab comes less than a month after the company announced the launch of its Advisor Coaching capability. Advisor Coaching automatically evaluates, scores, and delivers actionable feedback on every client and prospect meeting an advisor has. The goal of the solution is to help wealth management teams deliver a consistent, quality experience for every client. The technology rates each client meeting against the company’s success criteria and provides contextual advice and suggestions to help advisors better serve their clients. As part of the Advisor Coaching capability, firm managers can use Ask Zeplyn to access company-wide performance reports to identify patterns that might be otherwise difficult or time-consuming to find.

“Wealth management firms have always known that consistent advisor performance drives client trust and retention, but they’ve never had a scalable way to measure it,” Jain said. “Advisor Coaching gives firm leaders the same level of visibility into client conversations that top sales organizations have had into their pipelines for years: objective, firm-wide, and available on demand. For an enterprise with hundreds of advisors, that’s the difference between hoping standards are being met and knowing they are.”

Founded in 2023 and headquartered in New York, Zeplyn made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2025. At the conference, the company demonstrated its Zeplyn Meeting Assistant: a compliant and secure agentic AI technology that captures client interactions via video, in-person, and telephone, accurately converting them into structured data in real time. Zeplyn Meeting Assistant also automates data entry into CRMs and powers other operations such as auto-drafting personalized emails, summarizing data into client recaps, and surfacing client and advisory trends and insights.

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