The new M&A logic of owning the workflow before AI does

The recent wave of fintech deals suggests companies are buying the operational layers that sit underneath transactions, approvals, servicing, and money movement before AI systems begin running more of those processes themselves.

That is the thread connecting the recent acquisition moves by firms like NMI, Anthropic, Coupa, and SoFi. These firms serve different sectors, customers, and business models, but they are all moving in a similar direction: gaining control over the infrastructure layer where future AI-driven commerce will operate.

Payments are moving closer to the bank rail

NMI, which provides embedded payments infrastructure for software platforms, ISOs, and banks, recently acquired Dwolla, an account-to-account payments company specializing in ACH and real-time bank-transfer infrastructure.

The deal expands NMI beyond payment acceptance and deeper into direct money movement. Dwolla’s API-based infrastructure gives businesses direct access to account-to-account payment rails, enabling money movement across ACH and real-time networks for payouts, supplier payments, lending flows, and other bank-based transactions without relying entirely on card networks.

NMI CEO Steve Pinado said the deal strengthens his firm’s position in “the next generation of money movement,” including agentic payments and stablecoin-enabled settlement. That suggests NMI sees a future in which payments increasingly occur through software systems acting on behalf of users and businesses.

In that environment, controlling the infrastructure layer that connects bank rails, workflows, and embedded finance platforms is valuable, with global account-to-account payment volumes projected to reach $195 trillion by 2030.

Embedded finance is shifting away from just embedding checkout toward embedding transaction logic itself. And it also helps explain why infrastructure players increasingly want tighter control over onboarding, orchestration, payouts, reconciliation, and settlement rather than simply processing transactions.

AI companies are starting to buy distribution infrastructure

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, acquired Fractional AI, a San Francisco-based startup that helps enterprises build and deploy generative AI applications inside business workflows, particularly for midsize and private equity-backed firms.

The acquisition aligns with Anthropic’s broader push into enterprise AI consulting and implementation. The company is also building an enterprise consulting venture backed by firms including Blackstone, Apollo, and General Atlantic to accelerate Claude adoption across midsize businesses. Fractional AI becomes the implementation layer.

The move reflects a growing realization across the AI industry. OpenAI, Anthropic, and others increasingly appear to be rediscovering what cloud software firms learned years ago: having a powerful model alone is not enough. Enterprise adoption depends as much on implementation, integration, and operational support as it does on the underlying technology itself. Companies increasingly need deployment and workflow expertise to embed AI systems deeply into day-to-day business operations.

Anthropic’s financial trajectory gives the strategy additional weight. The company reportedly expects revenue to surge from $4.8 billion in Q1 2026 to $10.9 billion in Q2 2026, while compute costs decline materially as a percentage of revenue. That combination gives Anthropic room to aggressively expand enterprise adoption while competitors are still absorbing heavy infrastructure costs.

Coupa and SoFi are building operating systems

Coupa, a cloud-based spend management and procurement software company, acquired Tonkean, an AI-native workflow orchestration platform focused on procurement, legal and internal operations teams.

Tonkean’s technology lets employees submit requests in natural language while AI agents coordinate approvals, workflows and back-office processes across existing enterprise systems without requiring companies to fully replace their infrastructure.

The acquisition gives Coupa workflow orchestration capabilities that are becoming increasingly important in enterprise AI.

Over the last two years, Coupa has assembled different layers of what it calls an “agentic trade network” through acquisitions like Cirtuo, Scoutbee and Rossum. Tonkean adds workflow coordination and multi-agent execution, pushing Coupa beyond analytics and recommendations into operational automation itself.

That’s a prudent move because enterprise AI is increasingly moving from assisting workflows to running parts of them. Tonkean says its platform helped customers reduce procurement workflow cycle times by 50% and increase process adoption by 2.2 times, suggesting companies are becoming more comfortable allowing AI systems to coordinate procurement operations directly. That also raises the stakes around governance, permissions, and data integrity. Once workflows become autonomous, infrastructure reliability becomes the product.

A similar pattern can be seen in SoFi’s recent acquisition of Peach Finance, a SaaS lending infrastructure platform that provides a full loan servicing and management stack for lenders.

While SoFi is still often viewed through its consumer-finance roots, its acquisition strategy increasingly resembles that of a financial infrastructure company. The company is steadily expanding its enterprise technology footprint: Galileo added payments infrastructure, Technisys added core banking capabilities, and Peach Finance fills a key gap in loan servicing infrastructure.

The strategy increasingly resembles a vertical consolidation of the financial stack.

That broader ecosystem logic also helps explain SoFi’s growth metrics. The company says 43% of new product adoption now comes from existing users. That signals ecosystem density, which is more durable than customer acquisition momentum. And dense ecosystems tend to become harder to displace because each additional operational layer increases dependency.

Across all four deals, the key shift is the growing recognition that as software begins to make decisions, route workflows, and initiate transactions autonomously, value increasingly accrues to the companies that control the underlying infrastructure it runs on.