Fintech Highlights - 9/29/2026

Here's what we've been reading this week....

Pinned to the Top

Half of BNY employees are now building their own AI agents. BNY is encouraging employees to create agentic systems — effectively “digital employees” — that can perform tasks alongside human workers and provide decision support. Product relevance: This may be one of the clearest signs yet that agentic AI is moving beyond centralized pilots and into the operating model of a major financial institution. The interesting part isn't simply that BNY is deploying agents; employees themselves are becoming builders. Read more

In addition....

• The SEC opens a path for tokenized stocks to trade onchain. The SEC granted a temporary five-year exemption allowing certain tokenized U.S.-listed stocks to trade through a new class of Tokenized Securities Venues, subject to conditions around access, transparency, shareholder rights and trading limits. Product relevance: This moves tokenization closer to actual U.S. market infrastructure. Brokerages, investment platforms and wealth providers may eventually have to think about tokenized equities not as a new asset class, but as another way familiar investment products are delivered and traded. Read more
• Grab completes its $1.49 billion acquisition of Atome. Grab agreed to acquire a majority stake in the buy-now-pay-later provider for $1.49 billion in cash. Product relevance: Payments, commerce and consumer lending continue to collapse into the same product ecosystem. Grab can potentially embed Atome's credit capabilities throughout its existing consumer and merchant experiences. Read more
• Finastra could be changing hands. Vista Equity Partners reportedly hired Morgan Stanley to explore a sale of Finastra, one of the major software providers serving banks and financial institutions. Product relevance: Finastra sits deep inside bank infrastructure. A change of ownership could eventually influence investment priorities, modernization strategy, partnerships and product roadmaps across a large financial-institution customer base. Read more

AI Moves Into the Financial-Services Stack

• Go.AI raises $85 million to put AI hardware inside banks. The company sells AI appliances specifically to financial institutions, offering an interesting counterpoint to cloud-first AI strategies. Product relevance: For institutions concerned about data residency, security, latency and control, some AI workloads may ultimately run much closer to the bank's own infrastructure. Read more
• Footprint raises $25 million to build AI agents for financial-crime investigations. QED Investors led the Series B, with MUFG, Commerce Ventures and others participating. Product relevance: This is AI moving into a labor-intensive, highly regulated banking workflow where institutions spend enormous resources. Financial crime may prove to be one of the strongest use cases for specialized financial-services agents. Read more
• Kastle raises $24 million for an AI workforce built specifically for consumer lending. Insight Partners led the Series A. Product relevance: Another example of agents becoming vertical rather than generic. Underwriting, servicing and lending operations offer structured workflows where specialized agents could potentially take on meaningful portions of the work rather than simply assist employees. Read more
• TD commits up to $25 million to Cohere to accelerate AI adoption. The three-year strategic relationship is intended to expand AI development and deployment across the bank. Product relevance: We're moving beyond banks experimenting with foundation models. Strategic AI partnerships are becoming longer-term technology commitments that could influence how institutions build, govern and deploy AI across products and operations. Read more

Payments + Banking

• Ipid raises $16 million to verify who actually owns a recipient bank account. Citi, HSBC, QED Investors and others participated in the Series A. Product relevance: It's a wonderfully unglamorous financial-services problem: making sure money is being sent to the right person. Better account-owner verification can reduce fraud and misdirected payments while removing friction from bank-transfer and treasury experiences. Read more
• Hifi raises $28 million to connect traditional bank accounts with stablecoins. The company helps businesses move money between bank accounts and stablecoins. Product relevance: The interesting part isn't crypto speculation; it's interoperability. Stablecoins are increasingly being positioned as payment and treasury infrastructure that needs to connect cleanly with existing banking rails. Read more
• Priority Technology agrees to go private in a $1.6 billion deal. The payments and banking-technology company will be taken private by an investor group led by CEO Thomas Priore with backing from Searchlight Capital Partners. Product relevance: Priority operates across merchant acquiring, payments and banking infrastructure. Private ownership could provide more room for longer-term platform investment and modernization away from quarterly public-market pressure. Read more

Insurance

• Applied Systems could be sold for as much as $10 billion. Hellman & Friedman hired JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs to explore a sale of the insurance-software provider. Product relevance: Like Finastra in banking, Applied sits deep inside its industry's technology stack. A change of ownership could eventually affect platform investment, integrations, modernization and product roadmaps across agencies and carriers. Read more
• Penelope Health raises $100 million for payer policy intelligence. The company provides technology designed to interpret complex health-care payer policies. Product relevance: Insurance AI doesn't have to mean a chatbot. Coverage rules, reimbursement and policy interpretation are complex, data-heavy workflows where better intelligence can directly affect operations and customer experiences. Read more
• Adlib Software acquires agentic-AI insurance platform Paperbox. Paperbox is designed around agentic workflows for insurance. Product relevance: Insurers are beginning to move from copilots that help employees perform work toward agents capable of executing portions of insurance workflows themselves. That's a much more consequential product shift. Read more

Mortgage + Property Tech

• Sela raises $21 million for AI voice agents that sell mortgages. The company's agents are designed to automate mortgage sales calls. Product relevance: This takes generative AI directly into mortgage origination and customer acquisition rather than keeping it behind the scenes as an employee productivity tool. For banks and mortgage providers, that starts raising interesting questions about where the human relationship remains essential — and where it doesn't. Read more
• Adaptive raises $30 million for construction accounting software. The company builds financial software specifically for construction contractors. Product relevance: This sits nicely at the intersection of fintech and proptech. Job costing, payments, cash flow, subcontractor management and accounting remain highly specialized financial workflows where vertical software can outperform generic systems. Read more

One More Thing: Who Banks the AI Agent?

Solid is building financial infrastructure for autonomous AI agents. Its agents can provision computers, create accounts, subscribe to services and spend allocated budgets without stopping for human approval at every step.

This one is early. Very early. But the idea is worth paying attention to.

Product relevance: If autonomous agents are eventually going to transact on behalf of people and companies, they'll need many of the same things humans and businesses need today: identities, accounts, payment credentials, spending limits, permissions, transaction monitoring and audit trails.

That raises a fascinating financial-services product question:

Who builds the bank account — or wallet, card and controls — for a customer that isn't human?

Read more

That's it for this week. See you next Tuesday.