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• DriveWealth will integrate Kalshi’s regulated prediction markets into its brokerage-as-a-service platform, enabling fintechs to offer event contracts alongside stocks and ETFs.
• Kalshi, which processes over $100 billion in annualized volume, is expanding distribution through DriveWealth’s brokerage infrastructure.
• As prediction markets move into the financial mainstream, event contracts are emerging as a new tradable asset class that could follow the adoption path of options and crypto.

Digital trading and brokerage company DriveWealth is teaming up with prediction market platform Kalshi in a move to capitalize on the growing interest in events contracts. The New Jersey-based company plans to integrate Kalshi’s event contracts into its brokerage platform.

The integration allows clients using DriveWealth’s brokerage-as-a-service platform to offer event-driven markets alongside more traditional equities, ETFs, and other traditional asset classes within the same interface.

Kalshi allows users to trade on the outcome of real-world events such as elections, economic indicators, weather, sports, and more in a fully regulated environment. Because it offers investment opportunities based on highly publicized events such as sporting and political events, Kalshi brings an approachable new asset class that has quickly become mainstream. Kalshi currently attracts over $100 billion in annualized volume.

Rather than operating purely as a standalone trading venue, Kalshi has increasingly positioned itself as infrastructure for fintech platforms seeking to add regulated event contracts to their product mix. “DriveWealth’s global reach and embedded brokerage infrastructure make them an ideal partner to Kalshi,” said Kalshi Co-founder and CEO Tarek Mansour. “Our goal is to provide leading fintech platforms with more access to regulated prediction markets.”

The new integration also places DriveWealth in the footsteps of Robinhood, which began integrating Kalshi’s prediction market platform into its investing app in August of last year. Other investment platforms leveraging Kalshi include WeBull and PrizePicks.

Offering an increasingly popular asset class like prediction markets enables DriveWealth clients to attract new users while deepening engagement with existing investors who may currently trade on external platforms. For end users, consolidating multiple investment opportunities within a single platform simplifies portfolio tracking and performance monitoring across markets. For DriveWealth clients, the addition modernizes their product offering while strengthening customer retention and growth.

As prediction markets gain regulatory clarity and mainstream traction, DriveWealth sees the Kalshi integration as a way to future-proof its brokerage infrastructure. “Our integration with Kalshi strengthens our ability to deliver cutting-edge market opportunities to our partners,” said DriveWealth CEO Naureen Hassan. “DriveWealth was built to power the future of global investing through scalable, API-driven technology, and Kalshi’s forward-thinking approach to market design makes for a natural fit. Together, we’re uniquely positioned to equip our partners with the latest financial innovations and next-generation market access for their clients.”

Overall, prediction markets are on a major growth trajectory this year. Prediction markets have evolved from niche academic tools and offshore betting platforms into regulated investing tools with growing institutional backing.

As retail investors increasingly seek alternative ways to grow their funds, prediction markets create a new category of tradable risk exposure. If distribution partnerships like those with Robinhood and DriveWealth continue to scale, event contracts could follow a trajectory similar to options or crypto that were once fringe, but are now embedded into modern product stacks.

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What is the state of community banking in the US today? How are community banks evolving and transforming at a time of both potential opportunity and unprecedented challenge and competition?

Success stories about how community banks across the country are taking advantage of new technologies like generative AI and embedded finance will be a major part of the conversation later this year at FinovateSpring, May 5 through May 7, in San Diego.

With that in mind, today we’re taking a look at the findings from the 2025 CSBS Annual Survey of Community Banks that was unveiled at the Community Banking Research Conference last fall.

Rising competition from within and without the community

The competitive challenge from nonbanks remains a major concern for community banks throughout the US. Especially in areas such as payment services and wealth management, these fintech competitors have effectively leveraged enabling technologies like AI and embedded finance to create digital platforms able to attract customers, especially younger customers who are digitally native and have fewer ties to the traditional banking system. Nonbanks without a physical presence, for example, produced a 7% year-over-year change in competitiveness in payment services, according to the community bankers surveyed.

That said, nonbanks still trail other community banks as the biggest competition in seven out of nine product and service categories. Community banks identified local regional banks as their main competitors in payment services and nonbanks as their primary rivals in wealth management and retirement services.

The battle over deposits continues to be a significant challenge for most banks and financial institutions, and community banks are no different. While transaction deposit levels have stabilized in recent years, competition from nonbank institutions has grown, especially among those nonbanks that are out-of-market. This has compelled community bankers to adjust their pricing strategies based on local market rates; the survey noted that the number of community bankers that said that they “always” responded to rate changes increased by more than 38% to represent a quarter of all survey participants.

Fraud and financial crime remain paramount concerns

In terms of internal risks, community bankers cited cybercrime as a top issue by far all others. Both credit and debit card fraud are the most common types of fraud reported in terms of dollar losses, with check fraud, identity theft, and account takeover also among the chief challenges. The survey noted that these financial crimes—card fraud, check fraud, and identity theft with account takeover—represent the lion’s share of both total fraud cases and dollar losses.

To this point, the community bankers surveyed indicated that they were putting resources to work combatting fraud and financial crime. After safety and soundness practices, money laundering and consumer protection standards maintenance accounted for the second and third largest commitments of total compliance expenses.

“We continue to put more resources into cybersecurity and technology risk,” one respondent noted, “which has grown rapidly as part of our cost structure. We’ve invested heavily in systems and processes and added staff to review outputs to protect customers and prevent fraud. Fraud is not yet a large loss item for us, but it could be.”

E-signatures and remote deposit over AI and BaaS

For all the talk of AI and stablecoins, the technologies that are moving the needle for many community banks are more pedestrian and practical than one might imagine. Technologies viewed as “extremely” or “very” important included such solutions as e-signature, remote deposit capture (RDC), and integrated loan processing systems. At the bottom of the list of priorities? Interactive teller machines (ITMs) and fintech partnerships for Banking-as-Service were deemed “not at all important” by more than 50% and nearly 40% of respondents, respectively.

Asked to look forward over the next five years, the responses from the community bankers are similarly grounded. The top response by far, with more than 75% of respondents in agreement, was that the expansion of mobile banking services will be the most promising opportunity for their bank in the next half decade. Fully integrated loan processing systems came in second at just over 61% with cloud-based core systems at more than 53%. AI? As a tool for enhancing customer interactions, AI technology earned less than half the number of respondents. Partnerships with fintechs? For digital transformation, about a third. For BaaS, about a fifth.

What do community bankers want from fintechs?

The 2025 CSBS Annual Survey is a rich source of information and insight into the thinking of community bankers in the US right now. For fintechs looking to work with these institutions, either as partners or vendors, the survey offers a number of takeaways that can help make those connections fruitful for both fintechs and community banks.

Boosting deposit growth—Fintechs can support community banks in boosting deposit growth by offering tools such as personalized savings plans and competitive interest rate management solutions. Enhanced customer engagement platforms that heavily incentivize deposit loyalty can also be valuable. Fintechs can also provide community banks with analytics to help them identify and respond to deposit trends.

Scalable loan management technology—Making the process of loan origination, underwriting, and servicing easier for community banks is key to helping them win against competition in key financing areas such as small business, agriculture, and commercial real estate. This is also where AI-powered solutions can have a dramatically positive impact. Streamlining processes, improving applicant review, and enhancing the customer experience in lending overall are areas where fintechs have a significant track record of success and can greatly benefit community banks.

Operational efficiency and compliance—It is true for most businesses and community banks are no exception. Enabling technologies are making manual tasks increasingly unnecessary, as automation and agentic AI transform legacy workflows into smooth operational processes free of human error. These technologies are also making it easier for institutions—including community banks—to be more aware of their regulatory responsibilities and to be better able to act quickly and completely to ensure compliance. Fintechs specializing in compliance management tools and services can be key allies for community banks at a time of significant regulatory change and uncertainty.

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• Spreedly is partnering with Paysafe to integrate Paysafe’s merchant acquiring capabilities into its global payments orchestration platform.
• The partnership gives merchants more flexibility by combining Paysafe’s gateway and acquiring tools with Spreedly’s open payments architecture.
• The move will help modernize payment stacks with a modular approach.

Open payments platform Spreedly is partnering with payments processing fintech Paysafe, integrating Paysafe’s merchant acquirer capabilities into its own global payments orchestration platform.

Paysafe will process credit card and debit card payments for Spreedly’s online merchant clients doing business across Europe, North America, and other geographies. Under the agreement, Paysafe is processing card payments for multiple online trading brokers and financial services companies and plans to onboard additional merchants launching before the end of 2026.

From Paysafe’s perspective, the partnership expands the reach of its gateway technology into Spreedly’s global orchestration layer, particularly among online trading brokers and financial services companies operating across multiple markets. “With the Paysafe Gateway, a trusted solution for card payments among forex and financial trading brokers and a wide range of other industries, we look forward to strengthening Spreedly’s Open Payment Platform and streamlining payments for its merchant users and their customers,” said Paysafe Chief Revenue Officer Rob Gatto.

This integration is meaningful for merchants operating across borders, as payments complexity continues to grow with gateway fragmentation and regulatory changes. Combining Paysafe’s tools into Spreedly’s offering brings a modular, open payments stack that allows merchants to adapt without rebuilding their infrastructure.

Spreedly’s Open Payment Platform is a payment orchestration stack that offers merchants more than 140 gateway connections to more than 40 payment methods. Integrating the Paysafe Gateway allows Spreedly to process online card payments for merchants and their customers.

For Spreedly, adding Paysafe reinforces the company’s broader strategy of giving merchants more choice and flexibility across payment providers and geographies without locking them into a single acquirer or gateway. “At Spreedly, we believe open payments drive better outcomes for merchants. Bringing Paysafe onto our Open Payments Platform expands optionality for our customers and reinforces our mission to provide a flexible, future-ready infrastructure for global commerce,” said Spreedly Partner Strategy Director Michael Rokos.

Founded in 1996, UK-based Paysafe has 30 years of experience providing online payments tools for forex and financial trading brokers, as well as merchants in iGaming, ecommerce, travel, and hospitality. The company connects businesses and consumers across 260 payment types in over 48 currencies around the world. Paysafe processes an annualized volume of $152 billion in transactions and is publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker PSFE with a market capitalization of $350 million.

Spreedly was founded in 2007 to help merchants build their payments stack on a single platform. The company’s payment orchestration stack processes over $60 billion in gross merchandise value on behalf of more than 400 customers across 100+ countries. Spreedly also offers fraud prevention, payment optimization tools, and more. Among the company’s clients are BMW, CLEAR, HBO Max, Hopper, Lemonade, Getty, Warner, The New York Times, and others.

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This week’s edition of Finovate Global focuses on fintech developments in countries located in and around East Africa.

Digital banking secures investment in Zambia

Zambian digital banking platform Lupiya has raised $11.25 million in Series A funding. The round—nearly two years in the making—was led by IDF Capital’s Alitheia IDF Fund, and featured participation from INOKS Capital and KfW DEG, a German development finance institution. Lupiya will use the capital to bolster the digital bank’s technology infrastructure, grow its product range, and enter southern and east African markets beyond Zambia’s borders.

Founded by Evelyn Chilomo Kaingu (CEO) and Muchu Kaingu (CTO) in 2016, Lupiya serves unbanked and underbanked communities in Zambia with credit products and digital payment services via its Lupiya Pay offering. The company has partnered with Mastercard to access payment rails to enable digital transactions and is part of the card network’s financial inclusion strategy. Previous investors in the firm include Enygma Ventures, which contributed $1 million to the company’s coffers. Lupiya has opened an additional funding round this year—alongside its Series A—dedicated to scaling its lending business, enhancing its embedded finance offerings, and bringing Lupiya Pay to new markets.

Lupiya was one of the first companies to earn approval from the Security Exchange Commission in Zambia to offer investments through peer-to-peer lending. Launching this service in-country in 2022, Lupiya expanded operations to Tanzania the following year. Lupiya offers personal loans including collateral-backed loans and salary advances, as well as business financing, invoice discounting, and agriloans. Customers can use Lupiya to send and receive funds via mobile money, P2P, or bank accounts.

According to the World Bank, Zambia’s financial inclusion rate has improved significantly in recent years, climbing from 59.3% in 2015 to 69.4% in 2020. Regional disparities are significant, however, with Lusaka Province, home to the capital city, Lusaka, having a financial inclusion rate of more than 87%, with more rural areas having inclusion rates of approximately 40%. The landlocked country shares borders with the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, and Tanzania.

Ethiopia goes live with instant payments

Instant payments are sweeping the globe—and now businesses, communities, and banks throughout Ethiopia will be able to leverage the technology to provide centralized automated reconciliation, new card and e-wallet services, and more.

In partnership with the National Bank of Ethiopia, the country’s national switch EthSwitch has launched Ethiopia’s National Instant Payment System. Powered by BPC’s SmartVista platform, the system was officially introduced in December 2025, and now connects 32 banks, 12 MFIs, three PSOs, and three PIIs. The unveiling of EthioPay-IPS will enable EthSwitch to offer banks and other financial institutions modern payment rails capable of delivering faster and more economical payment transactions. These include account-to-account and wallet-to-wallet transfers, payments with interoperable QR codes, as well as requests-to-pay and alias-based payments that allow users to transfer funds using a simple identifier.

BPC’s SmartVista suite is a modular payment processing solution for banks, financial institutions, payment service providers, and fintechs. The technology combines banking, commerce, and mobility platforms to facilitate digital banking, payment processing, ATM and switching, fraud management, financial inclusion, and more. Founded in 1996 and headquartered in Switzerland, BPC has more than 500 customers across 140 countries.

Established in 2011, EthSwitch is a share company owned by Ethiopia’s private and public banks, as well as the National Bank of Ethiopia, MFIs, PIIs, and PSOs. The organization has a mandate to support the modernization of Ethiopia’s payment system and to enhance financial inclusion throughout the country. This includes EthSwitch’s 2016 initiative to enable the interoperability of ATMs and POS terminals operated by the nation’s banks.

“Our goal is to provide simple, affordable, secure, and efficient digital payment infrastructure to every retail payment provider and through them, to every Ethiopian,” EthSwitch Chief Portfolio Officer Abeneazer Wondwossen said. “With SmartVista, we have built an interoperable nationwide ecosystem for instant payments that is locally governed, future-ready, and open to innovation. This launch is a point of pride for Ethiopia and a milestone for our financial sector.”

Kayko Raises $1.2 million to help SMEs in Rwanda

Kayko, which offers a small business financial management platform for companies in Rwanda, has secured $1.2 million in seed funding. Participating in the investment were Burrow Capital, the Luxembourg Development Agency, and Hanga Ignite by BRD and develoPPP Ventures. The company, founded in 2021 by brothers Crepin and Kevin Kayisire, will use the capital to fortify its infrastructure, expand its data capabilities, and build credit scoring and lending tools based on real transaction data.

Kayko serves more than 8,500 Rwandan SMEs with bookkeeping, inventory, and tax support. The fintech helps boost SME access to credit in a country in which many businesses have incomplete or informal financial records that make it difficult to secure financing or to scale operations. For these and other small businesses, Kayko provides a point-of-sale and business management system that helps them process sales, track expenses, and accept payments, while turning everyday business activity into structured financial data for analysis and insights.

Kayko’s funding news coincides with the Kigali-based fintech securing an Electronic Money Issuer (EMI) license from the National Bank of Rwanda (NBR). “With this license, we move from planning to execution,” Crepin Kayisire said in a statement on the company’s LinkedIn page. “We can now operate regulated payments, merchant wallets, and data-driven financial services that improve access to financing for small businesses.”

Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.

Sub-Saharan Africa

• South African crypto platform Luno introduced crypto and tokenized stock bundle.
• Blockchain infrastructure provider Binance and African mobile network operator Africell announced a collaboration to boost blockchain education and digital asset literacy across Africa.
• Ethiopia’s national switch, EthSwitch, launched the country’s National Instant Payment System, in partnership with the National Bank of Ethiopia and powered by BPC’s SmartVista platform.

Central and Eastern Europe

• The Bank of Lithuania supplemented the electronic money institution (EMI) license for TransferGo Lithuania, enabling the fintech to expand beyond money transfers and payment account services.
• Open banking solutions provider Salt Edge and financial management platform NoCFO teamed up to bring Pay by Bank to SMEs in Germany and Finland.
• UK-based fintech Unlimit opened a new global research and development center in Belgrade, Serbia.

Middle East and Northern Africa

Central and Southern Asia

Latin America and the Caribbean

• Uruguayan fintech dLocal partnered with online English-language platform Open English to introduce a new payment method, Bre-B, for students in Colombia
• Visa inked a deal to acquire Argentinian payment companies Prisma Medios de Pago and Newpay from private equity firm Advent International.
• Peru’s Banco de la Microempresa selected Temenos SaaS to modernize its core banking infrastructure.

Asia-Pacific

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• Metropolitan Commercial Bank has partnered with Finzly for its cloud-native, API-first payment platform.
• The deployment will consolidate all payment rails—ACH, wires, and real-time payments—on a single system via a modular approach that will enable the bank to phase out legacy operations over time.
• Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, Finzly is a two-time Finovate Best of Show winner.

New York City-based Metropolitan Commercial Bank has called it quits. The full-service commercial bank has retired its legacy ACH mainframe in favor of a new cloud-native, API-first payment platform courtesy of two-time Finovate Best of Show winner Finzly.

“ACH is the most complex of all payment rails, having evolved over more than 50 years,” Finzly Founder and CEO Booshan Rengachari said. “With this, MCB has completed one of the most comprehensive cloud-native payment modernizations in the US today—spanning ACH, wires, instant payments, and international payments on a single platform. It’s a testament to the team at MCB and their achievement in accomplishing what is a bellwether moment for ACH and the industry.”

Digital modernization continues to be a challenge for many institutions still relying on legacy infrastructure. In an effort to avoid the complexity of full ACH cloud modernization, many banks have elected to run a modern ACH platform alongside their legacy systems. The partnership between MCB and Finzly is unique because the bank is the first financial institution to adopt Finzly’s platform as its primary system, completely decommissioning its legacy ACH infrastructure.

Leveraging Finzly’s unified platform will consolidate all payment rails for MCB onto a single system, including ACH, wires, and real-time payments. The platform uses a modular approach that will allow the bank to phase out all legacy operations over time, simplifying operations, boosting resilience, and enabling MCB to provide efficient payment experiences for its corporate commercial clients.

MCB’s partnership with Finzly is part of the institution’s “Modern Banking in Motion” initiative, an infrastructure modernization project that reflects an industry-wide effort to find alternatives to aging payment infrastructures. Regulatory pressures such as new fraud monitoring requirements from Nacha coming into effect this spring—to say nothing of growing public demand for faster payments and real-time visibility—are bringing new urgency to the conversation on digital transformation in banking and payments. In their partnership statement, Finzly and MCB noted an American Banker webinar poll that indicated that 84% of financial institutions believe that the resilience of their current Fedwire and ACH infrastructure should be re-evaluated.

“Finzly has been a strong technology partner for Metropolitan Commercial Bank,” MCB Founder, President, and CEO Mark R. DeFazio said. “Their unified payment platform and modular transformation approach allowed us to retire legacy ACH and wire systems safely, launch real-time payments, and deliver a seamless experience to our clients. This migration has strengthened our operational resilience, improved straight-through processing, and positioned MCB to scale efficiently while continuing to innovate. This new platform will enable MCB to expand its payment business which will meaningfully add to NII and lower cost of deposits.”

Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, Finzly won Best of Show at FinovateWest 2020 and again at FinovateFall later that year. The company offers a digital, real-time, cloud-native operating system that features a payment hub that allows banks to centrally process ACH, FedWire, RTP, SWIFT, and FedNow payments. Last fall, Finzly unveiled its Agentic Galaxy offering, an intelligent fabric of deployable AI agents that helps banks and credit unions innovate faster and create more engaging customer experiences.

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Great conferences are defined largely by what does happen: what themes are discussed, what trends generate the most passionate conversations. But great conferences are also defined by what doesn’t happen: by those topics and trends that have become exhausted, failed to live up to the hype in the first place, or simply aren’t ready for prime time.

Having just looked at some of the main topics of discussion at FinovateEurope, today we’re taking a quick tour through the pound to learn more about the dogs that did not bark at FinovateEurope 2026 last week.

Sustaining Sustainability in the Age of AI

Sustainability has been a stronger theme among fintech innovators in the UK and the EU compared to the US—and arguably all the more so given the fusillade of disincentives from the Trump Administration. Past Finovate conferences have showcased fintechs such as Connect Earth (UK), ecolytiq (Germany), and Little Blocks (India) that are helping institutions and individuals calculate their environmental impact; reduce carbon emissions via online marketplaces, and align their investing and banking preferences with their attitudes toward the environment.

While never a large fraction of the demoing companies at any given show, it was notable that no companies focused on sustainability on the demo stage. This likely reflects at least in part the shift in emphasis toward AI and blockchain-related innovations, especially as these innovations are increasingly moving from the experimental to real-world use cases. Even as these enabling technologies appear to be in their earliest stages, the fact that they already are responding to real problems in financial services makes them an especially attractive field for innovation compared to sustainability.

It is important to note that this does not necessarily mean that there has been a decline in interest in sustainability and climate-related fintech innovation. In fact, investment in climate-related fintech—and climatetech in general—increased from 2024 to 2025. Europe represented a significant amount of the $103 billion raised globally at 56%, with US-based funds contributing 16% toward the international total. But sustainability is increasingly being seen less as a standalone solution, and more as a cost-cutting feature to be integrated as in embedded finance or as part of a broader risk and data analytics package. Those looking for sustainability to return to the center stage will likely need to see the rise of stronger regulatory mandates such as those for stricter environmental financial disclosure or other incentives. Technological innovation alone may not do it.

Quantum Computing: Waiting for the Great Leap Forward?

While there was a sole presentation on quantum computing at FinovateEurope, the discussion of this technology still remains limited in most fintech forums. This is despite the conviction by analysts that quantum computing will make a significant impact on all technology—including financial technology—in the years to come. It is also interesting insofar as we are seeing emerging, enabling technologies in AI and the blockchain that continue to surprise detractors and outperform expectations when it comes to practical use cases. Why not quantum computing?

First, credit where credit is due: Day One of FinovateEurope featured Amal Nazar, Head of GTM at Wultra, a firm that provides post-quantum authentication solutions to financial institutions around the world. Nazar’s Special Address emphasized that it was important for banks and other financial institutions to transition to post-quantum cryptography in order to secure long-term digital operations. With regulators urging firms to complete this shift by 2030, it is clear that whatever conversations we are not yet having with regard to quantum computing will likely begin sooner than we think.

But not quite yet. Unlike AI and blockchain-based technologies like stablecoins, quantum computing is still significantly “pre-commercial,” meaning that while there is considerable investment interest, practical commercial applications in financial services have yet to materialize. There are a number of reasons for this, but essentially the issue is developmental (read: hardware) rather than software or regulation-related in the cases of AI and stablecoins, respectively. Arguably, when it comes to quantum computing, this technology as it applies to financial services is about where AI and stablecoins were seven to ten years ago: long on hype and promise, but short on use cases. Those use cases are developing; as Nazar’s presentation suggests, cryptography is one of the primary areas where we should anticipate quantum computing use cases emerging. But compared to AI and stablecoins, quantum computing may experience the “always a bridesmaid, never a bride” syndrome for a few more seasons, at least.

“Nobody Here But Us Cloud Companies …”

If you suspected that the inclusion of “cloud” as a theme that was underrepresented at FinovateEurope was little more than a ruse to talk about AI, then I confess to being guilty as charged. But the comparison between the “cloud revolution” and the “AI revolution” was one I heard from Finovate delegates and on-stage experts alike, and an interesting notion to add to this conversation on fintech trends.

No company demoing declared themselves a cloud company this year. That’s because, in a sense, they are all “cloud companies.” The ubiquity of cloud technology in fintech has rendered the descriptor almost obsolete. And increasingly something similar is happening with AI. While we did go through the obligatory period when companies felt the need to append “ai” to their names, we are nevertheless seeing an impressive urgency with which companies are seeking to leverage AI to improve efficiency for both their own workers as well as for their customers. Perhaps not since the early days of digital banking has as much attention been paid and innovation devoted to both sides of the customer experience at the same time.

What this means, as Senior Finovate analyst Julie Muhn remarked to me in the run-up to FinovateEurope this year, is that there is less and less a conversation about “AI,” and more and more a conversation about generative AI, or explainable AI, or agentic AI, or ethical AI … You get the point. The evolution in our way of talking about AI reflects nothing more than our growing understanding of the diverse ways AI technology can be deployed, as well as the myriad responsibilities involved in deploying it. So while we won’t stop hearing about “AI” anytime soon, we should be prepared for a new way of talking about the technology as our relationship to it evolves.

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• B2B payments platform TreviPay is introducing a new solution to help suppliers keep customers engaged and spot dormant buyers.
• The new offering, TreviPay Growth Center, leverages transactional data, behavioral insights, and predictive insights to help businesses identify early signs of buyer dormancy, enabling teams to intervene with targeted outreach and new incentives.
• Based in Kansas, TreviPay made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2022 in New York.

A new offering from B2B payments platform TreviPay will help companies identify buyer needs and trends, respond to buyer dormancy, and optimize critical steps in the order-to-cash (O2C) process. TreviPay’s Growth Center, located within the TreviPay Client Portal, features a range of customizable add-ons designed to help companies deepen buyer relationships and enhance engagement.

Many suppliers face challenges not just in acquiring new buyers, but in keeping current buyers engaged. The TreviPay Growth Center combines transactional data, behavioral insights, and predictive intelligence to enable customers to identify early signs of customer dormancy, allowing sales, operations, and finance teams to engage these buyers before any impact on revenue occurs.

“TreviPay’s network was built to help businesses grow,” TreviPay Chief Product and Technology Officer Dan Zimmerman said. “The Growth Center helps clients use predictive insights to spot changes in buyer behavior, re-engage customers, and measure the impact of incentives, without adding work for other teams. It’s part of how we deliver value clients can’t easily replicate and help protect long-term program performance.”

TreviPay’s Growth Center is the latest example of how AI is being used as an intelligence layer, anticipating risk, preventing revenue leakage, and fortifying buyer-supplier relationships. Growth Center offers buyer insights to help sellers understand purchasing trends and engagement signals. It provides predictive insights to help spot buyers that may be at risk of going dormant so that companies can engage them with targeted outreach and fresh incentives. The new offering also includes tools to support testing and iteration, empowering teams to improve campaign performance over time. It also features rebate management with easy-to-configure incentives and automated tracking and reporting.

TreviPay Growth Center is expected to be generally available in Q2 2026. The company noted that it is continuing to develop the technology, highlighting a recent pilot test with a US-based retailer during which TreviPay’s AI and machine learning models accurately predicted which buyers would go dormant. TreviPay reported that all of the tests resulted in new spending increases, including nearly 60 previously dormant buyers that made a combined $103,946 in purchases within eight days of outreach triggered by TreviPay’s predictive signals.

Founded in 1980 and headquartered in Overland Park, Kansas, TreviPay made its debut at FinovateFall 2022. At the conference, the company demonstrated its Small Business Supplier Payments Network (SBSN), which enables banks to offer new products to their small business clients by leveraging the B2B trade credit market for small businesses.

TreviPay began 2026 with the launch of its Pay by Invoice solution that enables Visa issuers to leverage their Visa credentials for supplier payments. The collaboration combines TreviPay’s order-to-cash automation technology with Visa’s commercial payment capabilities to help issuers transition from disconnected B2B spending processes to strategic, issuer-financed, invoice-based transactions.

“For years, banks have been looking for a scalable way to capture the significant share of B2B payments still happening off-card,” TreviPay CEO Brandon Spear said. “TreviPay Pay by Invoice unlocks that opportunity. By integrating our order-to-cash automation with Visa’s network capabilities, issuing banks can now offer their commercial clients a modern credit solution that automates invoicing and delivers the flexibility we know business buyers expect.”

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This article is brought to you in collaboration with Gregory.

AI is rapidly reshaping the competitive landscape in banking, and for many institutions, the real challenge lies not in experimentation, but in implementation. Richard Davies, CEO of Allica Bank, has been focused on exactly that: how to successfully deploy AI across an organization and drive meaningful adoption at scale.

Founded in 2020, Allica is a digital bank focused on established small and medium-sized businesses. To date, it has lent over £3 billion and been twice named by Deloitte as the UK’s fastest growing technology company. In 2025 the Financial Times identified it as the second fastest growing company in Europe.

Richard delivered a fascinating keynote address at FinovateEurope, titled: “Successfully Implementing AI & Scaling Adoption: What Are the Challenges Around Rolling Out to Production?”. Afterwards, we sat down with him to talk about what it really takes to embed AI into a bank’s operating model.

Tell us a little more about your role as CEO of Allica Bank and what you’re focused on at the moment?

Richard Davies: Allica is a fintech bank focused on established small and medium-sized businesses. We typically define that as businesses with five or more employees or at least £500,000 in revenue. So we’re not talking about the very smallest microbusinesses, but those that are at a point where things start to get more complex and there are multiple staff to support.

We find these businesses fall into a gap between the corporate banking divisions and retail banking divisions of the major banks. That’s the space we focus on.

We have been building Allica for five or six years now and provide a full stack of services, including current accounts, cards and all types of lending. Increasingly, we are moving into financial operations areas such as spend management and cash flow forecasting. Alongside that, we have been thinking hard about how we can apply AI to power many elements of what we do across the organisation.

In your keynote, you spoke about successfully implementing AI and scaling adoption. What do you see as the biggest challenges for banks when it comes to rolling AI out in practice?

Davies: I would group it into three main areas:

First, ensuring that AI adoption happens across the whole company, rather than sitting in an innovation lab or small specialist team. A big focus for us has been getting people bought in, upskilled and confident, and encouraging teams to create their own simple, agentic use cases. I am a big believer that bottom-up adoption tends to win over purely top-down mandates.

Second is software engineering and product development. Around a third of our staff are in engineering, and that is probably the area that has seen the greatest progress in AI tooling. We have focused on helping people move towards more T shaped or full stack roles, and ensuring our tech stack is AI enabled to unlock significant productivity gains. Depending on what you measure, we are seeing productivity improvements of two to ten times.

Finally, there are more complex agentic use cases. We have specialized teams working on these, and we have been learning a lot over the past two years about what it takes to get them live in production. It’s exciting because beyond engineering, you start solving real world problems that consume a lot of human time and can be inconsistent when done manually.

A lot of banks are investing in AI at the moment. How should they decide where it makes the most sense to focus first?

Davies: My view is that you should not overly narrow your focus. If you pick two areas, you are neglecting ten others, and those areas will fall behind.

Perhaps I have the luxury of leading a fintech organization that is naturally inclined towards this, but I think AI needs to be embraced across the company. Where you do need focus is on infrastructure, including data quality, enabling access to different AI models and ensuring that is done company wide.

If I had to pick one area with immediate and certain benefit, it would be engineering. The productivity unlock in software development is huge. If teams are still working in traditional ways, they need to move quickly, not just for the company’s benefit, but for their own careers. The industry is shifting rapidly, and people need the skills and experience to keep up.

Beyond the technology itself, what changes do banks need to make internally for AI to really become part of how they operate?

Davies: Culture is a big part of it. People need to lean into it. You need the infrastructure in place, as well as training and upskilling so people feel confident using AI.

At the same time, organizations need to remain risk aware. Different AI use cases carry different risks, and teams need to understand those.

In many ways, it’s similar to previous organizational transformations, such as moving from traditional waterfall practices to agile. The enablers are not conceptually different, but it does require deliberate leadership and a clear view of how you enable the organization to change.

From what you’ve seen at FinovateEurope so far, what themes or conversations around AI in banking have stood out to you the most?

Davies: Some of the most interesting conversations have been happening off stage. Recently, we have seen software company valuations come under pressure following major AI model releases, with the view that people can now build their own software more easily.

At the same time, traditional banks have re-rated quite significantly over the past year. In the UK, share prices are up roughly 80 percent. It creates an interesting dynamic.

Fintech has at times in the past been viewed by investors as a poor relation to software, but in reality, building a fintech is much harder than building a pure software company. You have complex regulatory requirements and balance sheet considerations that software firms do not.

It feels like there may be a shift happening in the relative valuation of where companies with real assets versus asset light software companies. For many fintechs, particularly those with strong fundamentals, that could ultimately be a net positive.

Photo by Google DeepMind

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London called—and our FinovateEurope 2026 demoing companies answered!

After a full day of live fintech demonstrations showcasing solutions for challenges in lending, payments, wealth management, and more, the attendees of FinovateEurope have made their decision as to which companies will receive Finovate’s highest honor: Best of Show.

As Finovate VP and Master of Ceremonies Greg Palmer noted, this year’s competition was as tough as it has ever been—which reflects well not just on the winners, but also on all the companies that demoed their latest innovations before our audience of fintech and financial services professionals from around the world. Nevertheless, as the saying goes, there can only be one (or, in this case, three)—and here they are: the winners of Best of Show for FinovateEurope 2026!

R34DY for its ABLEMENTS solution that enables rapid AI transformation, allowing banks to achieve faster delivery, lower IT costs and comprehensive differentiation via context-aware modernization.

Serene for its technology that transforms a compliance burden into sustainable growth, with insights that optimize collections, reduce arrears, empower front-line teams, and safely expand lending to underserved markets.

Tweezr for its solution that helps organizations transform and grow by accelerating TTM and increasing developer productivity for both legacy system maintenance and modernization (or even obviating modernization all together).

A hearty congratulations to our trio of Best of Show winners and a profound thanks to all of the companies that demoed their latest fintech innovations on the Finovate stage this week. It seems as if each year the competition just gets tougher, and we salute those companies—from scholarship-winning startups to veteran incumbents—whose innovations bring greater personalization, security, and value to individuals, businesses, and communities.

Next up for Finovate is our event in sunny San Diego—FinovateSpring 2026—scheduled for May 5 through 7. We hope to see you there!

Notes on methodology:

1. Only audience members NOT associated with demoing companies were eligible to vote. Finovate employees did not vote.

2. Attendees were encouraged to note their favorites during each day. At the end of the last demo, they chose their three favorites.

3. The exact written instructions given to attendees: “Please rate (the companies) on the basis of demo quality and potential impact of the innovation demoed.”

4. The three companies appearing on the highest percentage of submitted ballots were named “Best of Show.”

5. Go here for a list of previous Best of Show winners through 2014. Best of Show winners from our 2015 through 2025 conferences are below:

FinovateEurope 2015

FinovateSpring 2015

FinovateFall 2015

FinovateEurope 2016

FinovateSpring 2016

FinovateFall 2016

FinovateAsia 2016

FinovateEurope 2017

FinovateSpring 2017

FinovateFall 2017

FinovateAsia 2017

FinovateMiddleEast 2018

FinovateEurope 2018

FinovateSpring 2018

FinovateFall 2018

FinovateAsia 2018

FinovateAfrica 2018

FinovateEurope 2019

FinovateSpring 2019

FinovateFall 2019

FinovateAsia 2019

FinovateMiddleEast 2019

FinovateEurope 2020

FinovateFall 2020

FinovateWest 2020

FinovateEurope 2021

FinovateSpring 2021

FinovateFall 2021

FinovateEurope 2022

FinovateSpring 2022

FinovateFall 2022

FinovateEurope 2023

FinovateSpring 2023

FinovateFall 2023

FinovateEurope 2024

FinovateSpring 2024

FinovateFall 2024

FinovateEurope 2025

FinovateSpring 2025

FinovateFall 2025

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FinovateEurope 2026 is only days away!

With its home in London, it is no surprise that FinvoateEurope often showcases the highest number of demoing companies headquartered outside of the United States. What’s especially interesting about this year’s cohort of FinovateEurope demoing companies, however, is the percentage of non-US companies compared to the total: more than 77% of this year’s demoers hail from countries other than the US. Check them out below and then join us next week for FinovateEurope 2026!

FinovateEurope 2026 kicks off at London’s Intercontinental 02—February 10 and 11. Tickets are still available. Visit our FinovateEurope 2026 hub to register and save your spot!

AAZZUR—Berlin, Germany

Founded in 2019, AAZZUR empowers brands to launch embedded finance solutions with a single integration, unlocking new revenue streams and enhancing customer engagement.

Candour Identity—Oulu, Finland

Founded in 2021, Candour Identity boosts onboarding conversions, reduces fraud losses, enables daily biometric use, and supports regulatory complaince to help instituions scale their digital offerings.

FINTRAC—London, England

Founded in 2024, FINTRAC automates workflows to deliver stronger controls, richer analytics, and lower costs across the model lifecycle. The company’s Model Ops platform helps banks and other financial institutions manage their most complex models and calculations.

Francis—London, England

Founded in 2025, Francis empowers financial institutions and fintechs to make the most of open finance by leveraging AI. The company’s technology turns fragmented financial data into actionable wealth insights.

Hagbad—United Kingdom

Founded in 2025, Hagbad digitizes trust-based savings, enabling compliant engagement, expanding customer reach and driving financial inclusion via regulated, culturally aligned financial infrastructure.

Intuitech—Budapest, Hungary

From simple workflows to complex cases such as commercial loans and mortgages, Intuitech delivers AI agents capable of automating over 90% of manual tasks, shortening approval times and lowering costs. The company was founded in 2018.

Keyless—London, England

Keyless replaces outdated multi-factor authentication (MFA) with biometrics, improving the user experience and saving millions. Founded in 2019, Keyless was acquired by fellow Finovate alum Ping Identity.

Maisa—Valencia, Spain

Maisa boosts business efficiency by automating end-to-end processes with traceability, hallucination-resistance, and governance, in regulated industries such as banking and financial services. Maisa was founded in 2024.

Mifundo—Tallinn, Estonia

Mifundo enables banks and other financial institutions to grow their business volume by up to 15% by enabling them to better serve foreign and cross-border customers throughout Europe. The company was founded in 2022.

MyPocketSkill—London, England

Founded in 2020, MyPocketSkill is a digital technology company at the nexus of fintech and edtech that offers solutions to help Gen Z to save, invest, and become more money savvy.

Neuralk AI—Paris, France

Founded in 2024, Neuralk AI makes predictive capability a viable option at every point where tabular data is available. The company’s technology delivers superior performance compared to traditional machine learning and large-language models.

Opentech—Rome, Italy

Founded in 2023, Opentech partners with banks and card issuers, supporting digital transformation with secure, compliant, and scalable payment solutions. The company combines UX design with software engineering via a co-design model that accelerates delivery while ensuring equality and reliability.

R34DY—Budapest, Hungary

Founded in 2019, R34DY offers an automated system, ABLEMENTS, that enables rapid AI transformation for banks, enabling them to deliver new products faster, lower IT costs, and differentiate themselves via context-aware modernization.

Sea.dev—London, England

Sea.dev provides embeddable AI for business lending. The company’s technology automates underwriting workflows, to enable credit analysts to focus on higher-value analysis, faster decision-making, and growth. Sea.dev was founded in 2024.

Serene—London, England

Founded in 2023, Serene combines behavioral insights, predictive intelligence, and financial data to enable institutions to identify and understand early signs of fraud, vulnerability, and financial stress.

Skill Studio AI—Dublin, Ireland

Founded in 2025, Skill Studio AI transforms training documents into engaging, AI-powered learning experiences. The company’s platform reduces training costs, accelerates compliance readiness, and scales globally.

Tweezr—Tel Avi, Israel and Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Tweezr empowers institutions to transform and grow by accelerating time-to-market and boosting developer productivity for both maintaining legacy systems as well as for modernization initiatives. The company was founded in 2024.

Photo by Lucas George Wendt on Unsplash

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