NY Fintech Week brought thousands of operators, founders and investors across New York City for a week of conversations that covered everything from payments infrastructure to the future of financial leadership. Throughout the discussions, a few themes kept surfacing, regardless of the room.
Fraud has become a systemic problem
The “scamdemic” framing circulated throughout the week. Financial crime has scaled alongside the industry itself, and the pressure is landing across every layer of financial operations. Identity, access controls, transaction monitoring and settlement integrity are all part of the same conversation. Firms that have historically treated security as a separate workstream are finding that separation increasingly difficult to maintain.
The great wealth transfer is rewriting the brief
The scale of intergenerational wealth moving over the next decade kept coming up as a forcing function for modernization. New client expectations, new asset types, new complexity and volumes that legacy systems were simply not built for. The firms thinking seriously about this are asking whether their operational infrastructure can handle what is coming, well before it arrives.
Stablecoins and new payment rails are moving from conversation to reality
Stablecoins, embedded finance and blockchain-based settlement were a main thread this week as well, particularly in the builder-led sessions focused on payments infrastructure. The foundations required to work at scale are an operational challenge. New reconciliation demands, new data formats and new points of failure have to be managed in real time.
Agentic AI: the question underneath everything
The conversation that generated the most energy, and the most honest debate, was agentic AI.
The industry has spent the better part of a decade automating repetitive tasks like rules-based automation, workflow tools and straight-through processing. That work has delivered real gains, but agentic AI is a different proposition. These systems interpret context, make judgments and take action, across multiple systems and often without a human in the loop for each step.
For payments and financial operations, the potential is substantial. An AI agent authorized to reconcile positions, identify exceptions, trigger settlements and escalate anomalies can compress multi-day processes into minutes. The efficiency case is straightforward and known.
What also resonated was the honest conversation about what happens when those systems operate on data that is fragmented, inconsistent or ungoverned. In financial operations, AI acting on bad data at speed and at scale creates the kind of exposure that is difficult to unwind.
This is the part of the agentic AI story that does not get enough airtime. Firms racing to deploy agents on top of existing infrastructure are, in many cases, racing to amplify the problems already embedded in that infrastructure.
The firms that will extract genuine value from agentic AI are the ones making a less glamorous set of investments right now. That is the real infrastructure conversation, and it was the one worth having this week.
What the data already tells us
These conversations did not emerge from nowhere. The tensions being debated across New York this week are well documented. Our 2026 Payments Report found that 96% of firms are using AI in some form, yet 69% cite manual processes as their primary barrier to scale. Meanwhile, 80% report operational disruption from fragmented data and only 33% feel ready for upcoming safeguarding and client money deadlines.
The disparity between ambition and operational readiness is a data and infrastructure problem. The conversations happening at events like Fintech Week are making that clearer every year.
For a deeper look at what the research found and what leading firms are doing about it, the full report is available here.
We are looking forward to continuing these conversations at Money 20/20 later this year.