Behind Betterment’s partnership with Zenefits to give SMBs access to retirement planning

Business of Fintech, Member Exclusive, Numbers with Narrative

Capital is flowing again, just not where the consensus says

• US fintech funding jumped 47% in Q1 2026, led by a surge in early-stage capital as investors shift focus to AI infrastructure.
• Massive influxes in Parallel Web and Rogo underline a flow of capital into agentic solutions.

Member Exclusive, Podcasts, SMB Finance

The bank account is the product: Slash’s bet on vertical SMB banking

• Victor Cardenas is the co-founder and CEO of Slash, a $1.4 billion business banking platform built on one thesis: the company holding your bank account should also own all your financial software.
• Slash serves niche verticals like performance marketing agencies, import-export businesses, and more, with workflows no legacy bank has ever built for them.

BNPL, Building a platform, Embedded Finance, Member Exclusive

Affirm bets on banks, bots, and Shopify to reach $100 billion in GMV

• Affirm has unveiled three major growth bets, embedding BNPL into bank apps via Affirm Edge, deepening its exclusive global Shopify partnership, and early positioning in AI-driven agentic commerce, all targeting $100 billion in annual GMV.
• The thesis is that three years of compounding revenue growth give Affirm the credibility to pursue these longer-horizon plays, while its core merchant and card businesses carry the near-term load.

10-Q, Member Exclusive

BNPL moves into the conversation layer of commerce

• Affirm and Klarna are embedding installment payments into Google Search and the Gemini app through Google Pay.
• Agentic commerce is growing rapidly, affecting consumption habits with each improvement. The tools assisting this consumption need to transform alongside these developments.

AI Innovation, Artificial Intelligence, Banking, Member Exclusive

What Citi Sky says about the reinvention of client relationship models in wealth management

• Citi Wealth has launched Citi Sky, an AI teammate built with Google Cloud and Google DeepMind that responds and surfaces insights in real time.
• For Google DeepMind, the biggest challenge was making a non-deterministic generative AI system behave predictably.