The AI revolution in banking isn’t coming, it’s here. But if you talk to the AI companies actually selling into financial institutions, you will discover that widespread adoption is moving slower than the headlines suggest. Not because the technology doesn’t work, and certainly not because banks don’t need it. The roadblocks are more nuanced, more […]
For years, the Federal Reserve was a lockbox when it came to communications; longtime Chair Alan Greenspan’s strategy was FedSpeak, pioneered to be purposefully obfuscating and ambiguous, driven by a vision that the less markets planned for how the Fed would conduct policy, the freer and fairer they would be. The goal of course was […]
Tech leaders debated how to bake responsibility into AI not just as a compliance afterthought but as a fundamental competitive edge. Artificial intelligence is breathing new life into San Francisco, drawing comparisons to the dot-com days of Silicon Valley. Investment is pouring into startups, founders are scrambling like it’s 1999, and beneath it all, AI […]
The consumer data question is one that long plagued finance. Who owns your data, and how much should institutions be allowed to use it? Over the course of decades, the financial industry pieced together some hard-earned answers, beginning with the 1999 Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLBA) mandating financial firms disclose data sharing practices and offer customers “opt-out” […]
“We see stablecoin not as a token at rest. We see it as a token on the move. So our entire commercial model is about facilitating use cases where stablecoins are an exchange of value, not a store of value.” In the weeks leading up to the passage of the GENIUS Act, which explicitly legalizes […]
A flurry of fintech CEO departures might have one wondering what’s gotten into the water the last few weeks. At Berlin-based digital bank N26, co-founder Valentin Stalf announced he will step down as co-CEO and transition to the supervisory board; the decision followed calls from investors, reported by Bloomberg, for a change at the top […]
Hi there and welcome to Funded, where we spotlight early-stage bets on the future of tech. This week, we’re looking at Sola, which just emerged from stealth with an AI-native platform built to automate the operational grunt work most companies still outsource. Sola just raised a $17.5 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with […]
“It’s not enough to have a 1-800 number that people call, and the person still says it’ll take 90 days. It’s truly about that first touch resolution.” Co-founder and CEO Shanthi Shanmugam’s vision for Casap is to become the FICO of first-party fraud scoring. Casap is quickly achieving that goal by viewing dispute resolution as […]
Peek at the metrics of startup success, and a founder may never get started. In the words of Gimli the Dwarf in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy: “Certainty of death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for?” But a blockbuster new report out from banking services fintech Mercury should be heartening […]
There was a time when building an app, be it to sell something or provide a specific service (like cab-booking), meant pulling all-nighters and constant back and forth with developers. Even if the product was ready to be deployed, you could never ship it without a team of devs standing by to troubleshoot in case […]