FinovateFall 2026: What Fintech Leaders Are Seeing Now

Well, hello out there. This is Sam Kilmer, your host of the Fintech Hustle podcast, managing director at Cornerstone Advisors and contributor to GonzoBanker. I am here at FinovateFall in New York City, in Times Square at the Marriott Marquis. We are in the hall in real time between sessions, and I am very, very grateful to have a rock-star cast of characters joining me today—all leaders in the industry.

Let me take a moment to introduce these folks, and then we’ll jump right in. First, we have Mitch Rutledge, CEO and co-founder of Vertice AI. Welcome. We have Shanthi Shanmugam, CEO and co-founder of Casap. And we have Chris Sibila, chief strategy and experience officer at Purdue Federal Credit Union. Welcome, guys.

We’re having fun here at Finovate. We like to talk about what’s going on in the industry and keep it real. We haven’t scripted this or anything. These are busy folks, so we need to move this episode along at a rapid pace.

I thought I’d start by asking each of you a little bit about what it’s like to be you. Shanthi, if you want to start, tell us about a day in your life.

Thanks, Sam. A day in my life has changed a lot over the last few months. We grew from 26 people to 75 people in the last five months, so it’s safe to say I spend a lot of my time talking to people about being people—and maybe being my people. That’s the first time I’ve said that. It kind of flowed.

Honestly, I also travel a lot. I was just telling these gentlemen that next week I’ll be in three different states, speaking at three different conferences. So that is probably a day in my life.

That’s a lot. Three different states and three different conferences. Wow.

The dispute management space is hot. That’s the space you’re in, and you’ve got a tiger by the tail right now with what you guys are doing. Pretty busy, right?

Fraud is the gift that keeps on giving, and I mean that very facetiously. We don’t like fraud.

What I will say is that first-party fraud—the specific type of fraud I obsess over—is this world where your members and customers are exactly who they say they are, but they just don’t feel like being nice people this fine morning. That’s the kind of fraud we deal with.

I think it has been a lot of fun, honestly, educating the industry and learning from my customers about what they’re seeing.

Very interesting. Never a dull moment in fraud, for sure.

Mitch, you’ve also been on a wild ride. Tell us a little bit about what a day in the life of Mitch Rutledge at Vertice AI is like.

Thank you, Sam. Thank you for having me.

A day in the life of a fellow founder is busy. On the personal side, it’s slightly different. You were saying you have a young one. I have one who just went off to college, so my life is changing with this sort of empty-nest world we have.

We’re going straight into the busy conference season. As a founder bringing new products to market, we launched a new solution here at Finovate this week. We’re just trying to keep innovating, bring value to community financial institutions and grow the team.

We just hit 27 people, so I can’t imagine going from 26 to 75 in five months. As you say on Fintech Hustle, we’re just trying to grind and hustle every day, make great products and keep our clients as happy as they can be.

The hustle and grind are never dull.

Chris, I think you and I have probably known each other the longest. One of the things I love about Fintech Hustle is that, in addition to people who are hustling and grinding in the tech world, we like to have people who have been on both sides.

You’ve worked at fintech companies, credit unions and banks. You’ve been around both sides of the table. When I saw that you were going to be at this event, I thought, who better to contribute to the soup of fintech we have here than Chris Sibila?

Tell us a little bit about a day in the life of Chris.

Yeah, that’s right. Thanks, Sam.

I’m a veteran of almost two months at Purdue Federal. I was really intrigued by the role. It’s a role they haven’t had there before: chief strategy and experience officer.

It’s a blend. We have a three-year strategic plan that our board has approved and that we’re working toward, but that means there are a lot of initiatives. There’s a lot of prioritization around what we’re going to do.

Part of my job is to have the project management team that’s going to execute and get those things implemented. It also means coming to events like this, meeting folks, learning about the opportunities out there and finding the partners we can bring into the fold.

On the experience side, our CEO kind of jokes and says, “You’re the chief friction officer. But don’t create it—solve it.”

It’s about finding things in both our member and staff experiences that need to be fixed. I also have all the branches, the contact center, our virtual branch and our ITM tellers—pretty much anything consumer-facing is in my organization.

I’m taking all of that in, and I’ve spent the past two months doing listening tours. I have 17 pages of notes and feedback from 50 people I’ve talked to. That’s a lot of what I’m doing right now.

That’s a lot. Chief friction officer. This is like the new CFO role that nobody saw coming.

That’s right.

This is probably inappropriate, but you should be the chief lubrication officer—the opposite of friction, right? We need to make this as smooth as possible.

I don’t know. You can cut that from the show, Sam, if you think it’s inappropriate.

No cuts here. I’m going to go on the record and say that if chief friction officer is the new CFO, chief lubrication officer is the new CLO. Now we’ve got the two prima donnas in the boardroom who have new titles. Let’s see how the lubrication guy or gal puts up with that title.

I think there’s going to be an HR call immediately on this one.

I think the CHRO, whose title is not changing, would get involved in that one. But I like what you’re thinking. It will not be cut. That’s my demand as the prima donna co-producer, I hope, of this soirée.

Listen, Finovate is done tomorrow. We’ve had a pretty full day today, and we had yesterday as well. I’m curious: Has anything from this event popped out at you or grabbed your attention?

I’m not trying to put anybody on the spot, but who would like to go first? Feel free to grab the mic. Has anything grabbed your attention here at Finovate this year—or FinovateFall?

Yeah, I’ll start. I come to this event because I feel like you do see the future. You see the present, but you also see where people have looked at all kinds of different problems and solved all different kinds of things.

What has been amazing to me is looking at where I came from most recently and where I am now. There’s this idea that we’re smart and can figure things out, but this event reaffirms for me the value of partnerships with people who are investing their lives in the solutions they’re trying to provide.

Everybody says AI. I wish I had a dollar for every time someone said AI in the past couple of days. But it’s actually about the expectations of consumers.

I think every day about how we remain relevant as a credit union in an ever-expanding ecosystem of providers of all types. Consumer expectations are always ahead of where we are, and we need to find ways to get there.

That’s what this event has done. It has reaffirmed a lot of the way I think. It’s fantastic to see the brainpower and how much everybody is investing in what’s going on.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but you also won Best of Show last year, right?

Yeah.

Both of us won Best of Show last year. Subtle flex.

Honestly, seeing all the AI companies, I was really excited about them. I’m really excited about what we can do in this age of AI. But if all we’ve done at the end of this age of AI is become more efficient, I think we’ve kind of lost the plot.

What I’m really excited about—and I remember this from your pitch, and I also shared it a little bit in mine last year—is the stories these platforms enable.

If I had a crystal ball and could say, “This is the future of a credit union or bank enabled by AI,” I’d want to see a world where, for example, an employer has laid off 10% of its workforce and happens to be in your community. What if, the moment a member’s direct deposit stops, you could reach out and say, “Hey, I know this is tough. Why don’t we pause your car payment for 90 days? And by the way, here are some other jobs you can check out.”

How do we enable those 11-star experiences on the back of all these efficiencies? I think that’s going to be the bow around this whole gift of AI.

Yeah. A couple of things I’ve seen: One is that there are more companies than ever here. I think there are something like 72 this year. There’s just so much innovation happening.

Hats off to Greg for finding amazing companies. They don’t let everybody in, right? He’s vetting them. But every year, there are so many great companies coming. I think it’s a great opportunity to see what smart people are trying to put together.

I think the acceptance of “AI” is here now. It’s everywhere, so we don’t really want to talk about it. I say it’s the new electricity. It’s just part of everything. We’re rewiring everything so that it’s part of everything. That is the reality.

Our joke yesterday was that if, last year, you had to take a drink every time somebody said “agent,” the whole show would have been on the floor by noon. There seems to be less agent talk this year, but AI is embedded in everything that’s out there.

Your point about how we make this more than just an efficiency play is really important. That was a little bit of our story yesterday. It is about efficiency, but what are we doing with that time?

Your team at the credit union has so many fires to put out. How do we put out those fires so we can focus on what this started with—serving the community, financial empowerment and financial education? Let’s put out the fires so we can serve the communities that made you who you are.

To your point, Shanthi, that’s what we’re trying to get to. It’s not about fewer people. It’s about more time to serve the communities.

Really interesting. I’ll have to remember after the fact and maybe put it in the show notes, but there was a presentation earlier today that I thought was interesting.

A gentleman was talking about his company, and if I can characterize it, they were basically an AI auditor making sure that AI solutions weren’t hallucinating. It was like an anti-hallucination drug for the hallucinators.

I thought, “Okay, well, maybe that’s a sign of the times. Now we’re AI-ing the AI.” That has to mean something, I think. That was kind of interesting to me, anyway.

I’m curious, as entrepreneurs and veterans of the industry, is there a problem in banking or fintech right now that, even among all these entrepreneurs Greg and the team at Finovate are vetting, is still broken and needs an entrepreneur to fix it?

Is there a category or something else out there that still isn’t great and could be better? I always like to ask because entrepreneurs are always interested in finding problems and finding ways to fix what’s broken.

Do you see anything?

I would love to hear what you think, for sure.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot right now is what I call Casap Labs. It lets me do things without my team requiring me to have the same idea tomorrow.

Under Casap Labs, I’ve been asking all our credit union and bank clients three questions: Where do you feel like you have to keep scaling headcount as you grow?

Many have said, “No, we’re not going to scale headcount.”

I’m like, “Well, then where are you bursting at the seams?” Clearly, it’s hard to handle everything day to day. Where are you seeing a lot of friction in the member experience, and where are you writing off a lot of losses?

What’s interesting is that we’re incubating four different proofs of concept right now, all leveraging our agentic platform. Every single thing we’re working on touches all three buckets.

Disputes are a great example. They’re the number one reason someone would leave Chime as their primary bank, as my co-founder found when he worked there. That’s why we started with disputes.

But disputes are also such a big driver of losses, and the entire process takes so much time and money to manage. There are loads of examples like that.

What I would challenge us to think about goes back to what I said before. If we automate what we’re doing today and it can be cheaper and faster, cool. But how do we make it an 11-star experience? That requires some new thinking about how we haven’t done it before.

I think there are a lot of processes like that. Some examples of things we’re working on are overall fraud investigations, collections, claims, complaints and credit washing. That’s my whole roadmap, everyone.

The whole idea is that there’s a lot to go after. But I’m curious what you see, especially after your listening tour, while it’s fresh.

What’s interesting in summarizing what I’ve heard so far is that we still have a general communication problem within our organization. It’s not massive. The positivity of everybody at Purdue Federal is 11 stars. I love that. The mindset and culture are fantastic. Everybody seems to have positive intent in everything they’re doing.

But there’s still this underlying issue of, “How did something happen that I wasn’t expecting? I didn’t know this happened, and all of a sudden it affected me. Now I’m kind of embarrassed in front of a member because I wasn’t aware.”

There’s some basic work to do around how we better communicate changes and things like that.

I don’t remember which presenter it was, but I loved the idea of building actual training videos and different things that can help with the change management aspect. You could share them with people in different ways because everybody learns and accepts information differently.

It is a two-way street. I can communicate to you all day long, but if you’re not listening, hearing or willing to listen, that’s a different thing.

It seems simple, and I don’t know if AI or technology can solve it, but something that helps facilitate and make it easier would be a game changer for us.

Real quick, what I’ve realized is that as we use AI agents to do things, we also use AI agents to teach people things. It’s actually very similar technology.

I’m curious whether you see that too. When our AI agent is trying to decision a dispute or something, sometimes we have it in training mode. It tells the employee—even someone who has never done this before—how to think about it. The employee can then ask it questions. It’s almost like having a personal training guide right next to them. It’s truly conversational.

Yeah, and it’s in the moment. I don’t know how many times you guys have done those training videos that you have to complete every year and thought, “Yeah, sure, I paid attention.” But that one time you need the answer, you’re like, “I really wish I knew.”

I just wanted to mention that.

I think one of the things we’re trying to help with through CUltivate, the CUSO we launched, is that there needs to be more sharing on this AI journey.

When you think about the cooperative nature of credit unions, there isn’t as much sharing of the models and capabilities we’re building together as there could be. Some of the big institutions are building cool things, but there are a lot of small credit unions that aren’t doing anything. We need to figure out how we can support the entire movement together.

We’re trying to solve that with the CUSO we launched called CUltivate. There’s so much opportunity to compete against the big banks. We know it. BofA and JPMorgan are spending billions and billions on this stuff. As a movement on the credit union side, there’s more that can be done.

I don’t know if this is who you’re talking about, but was it John Findlay from a company called LemonadeLXP?

Okay. I was going to say, the only reason I bring it up—and this is not an endorsement; we don’t endorse solutions—is because John has been a guest on the podcast before.

I think it’s interesting. He speaks about gamification and those kinds of things a lot.

I realize your time is valuable, so I need to let you guys get going. But I also wondered: Is there anything about the business right now that really jazzes you?

We found something that’s broken, so let me ask for something that’s working really well right now. Is there anything that pumps you up, makes you want to get out of bed in the morning and grab a coffee?

I always have answers for that. I’m a very bubbly person.

I get goosebumps when I think about how lucky we are to be leaders in this age. I started my company a month after ChatGPT came out. It is the reason I started. But if I had started my company even one or two years earlier, I feel like it would have been much harder to bring about transformation and change.

Now, literally any executive I meet is actively questioning the status quo on everything. When could we have said that? You guys might know. Maybe we’ve done that before multiple times, but right now, it’s just so exciting.

My friends who don’t know the industry sometimes ask me, “The folks you work with, partner with or sell to must be quite risk-averse, right?”

I’m like, “No, they’re risk-appropriate.”

I think there’s this hunger to stay relevant, this hunger to do something different and this hunger to leapfrog a bunch of steps to get to that nirvana, if you will. That’s what gets me really excited.

I agree with that completely. It’s amazing from a technology perspective.

I’ve been through the internet world. I think I’m a little older than you, so I saw some of that early in my career. But where I am now, what we can do and build every day is amazing.

I do believe community FIs are slowly accepting that this is an amazing opportunity, and many of them are taking it. So it’s exciting.

What’s exciting to me is being where I am now at Purdue. It’s a new role and a new opportunity. We’re looking at market expansion and different ways to think about what we’re doing. I’m blessed to be around a group that is willing to change.

I think that’s half the battle. Sometimes people aren’t willing to change. They’re like, “Hey, we’ve always done it that way. We’re just going to keep doing it that way. We think it works.”

Having a culture of always being curious and always asking how we can continuously enhance is exciting.

I agree with all of you. It has been almost four years, right? Look at the capabilities of agents and how they’ve evolved.

I know a person who basically started a company from scratch with six agents and did everything with those agents until he finally had to hire the company’s first employee. He did that for quite a few months.

Even hearing him talk about that makes me think, wow, if he could do that, we have 250 or 300 people. Not all of them would do that, but could we apply it at scale and at a pace where we could keep up with and implement change?

I know there’s a human factor. How much change can you accept? How much change can members absorb at one time? How much can staff absorb? You probably have to meter it for that reason.

But the fact is, we could keep up. It levels the playing field. That’s probably the most exciting thing. We can play with Chase. We can play with Amazon. We can play with anybody using the tools that are available.

That’s great. Chris, Shanthi and Mitch, thanks for joining us today.

I know you guys are busy and have lots of back-to-back meetings, so I try to keep these Finovate episodes of the Fintech Hustle podcast short to give you a chance to do that.

Thanks for everything you’re doing in the industry. I’m with all of you on this. There are a lot of reasons to be positive. Some things are broken out there, but hey, that’s why we have entrepreneurs, right? It would be boring if they weren’t.

Thanks again for joining me today. We’ll see you on the next episode of Fintech Hustle. See you out there on the road.

Hey there. If you really dig this episode of the always-unscripted Fintech Hustle podcast, hit the follow button on Apple, Google, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you jam your podcasts.

And hey, tell your fintech friends. More shop-talk chats with industry leaders are coming from the hall. I look forward to seeing you out there on the road.