Banking & payments · Fraud & risk · Data & AI
We help fintech & payments companies structure sponsor-bank and BaaS programs, choose the right processors, BIN sponsors, and network paths, build the fraud, identity, and risk controls that pass diligence, turn payment data into a new revenue line, and apply AI and agentic decisioning where it genuinely belongs. Senior operators, not slide decks.
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We take a small number of clients and go deep. No junior teams, no boilerplate — just senior judgment on the decisions that make or break a banking and payments business.
The right banks, rails, partners, and economics. We help you structure sponsor-bank and BaaS programs, choose processors, BIN sponsors, and network paths, negotiate the partnership deals, and build payment economics that hold up at scale.
Defenses that pass diligence and survive scale. Deep, hands-on expertise in payment fraud and identity — we design the fraud, KYC/identity, and risk controls sponsor banks and investors actually scrutinize.
Turn the data your payment flows generate into a revenue line. We help you find, package, and monetize payment and transaction data — compliantly — into new products, partnerships, and pricing power.
AI consulting across banking, payments, and fraud & risk. We help you tell the genuine edge from the hype and put AI and agents into production — with the guardrails, governance, and model risk controls sponsor banks and regulators expect.
We work alongside your team on the payment and fraud decisions that matter — close enough to course-correct and lock in the gains.
A focused assessment of where growth is stuck and where the upside is.
A clear, prioritized plan. Sequenced moves, not a 200-page deck.
We work alongside your team to ship the moves that matter.
We stay close enough to course-correct and lock in the gains.
Illustrative of the outcomes our work targets for fintech, banking, and payments teams.
Banking programs, payment stacks, and sponsor-bank deals chosen right the first time.
Fraud and identity defenses that pass sponsor-bank diligence.
Risk controls and operating models that survive 10× volume.
Payment economics that hold up as you scale.
Payment data turned into a new, compliant revenue line.
AI and agentic decisioning are moving into the core of banking and finance — real-time fraud scoring, payment routing, case triage, agents that act on policy. We help you tell the genuine edge from the hype across banking, payments, and fraud & risk, and build it so it survives diligence and scale.
A clear read on where AI and agentic systems genuinely improve a payments, fraud, or risk decision — and where they quietly add risk. No hype, no science projects.
The human-in-the-loop controls, model governance, and audit trail that sponsor banks and regulators expect — designed in from the start, not bolted on after an incident.
A path to put AI and agents into production in the right order — grounded in hands-on experience building risk, fraud, and decisioning systems inside the institutions that run the rails.
A running read on the regulation, diligence, and AI shifts that move payments and fraud decisions. Updated July 2026.
On June 9, 2026 Judge Brian Cogan granted preliminary approval to Visa and Mastercard’s revised $38B settlement with roughly 12 million merchants — a ~10 bp average credit-interchange cut for five years, a 1.25% cap on standard consumer credit for eight years, and weakened Honor-All-Cards rules. Walmart and the NRF are already objecting, and the separate Linney’s Pizza challenge to the Fed’s Reg II debit cap is live again at the Sixth Circuit — so interchange economics stay unsettled into 2027.
Visa/Mastercard $38B settlement details — Optimized PaymentsEffective June 9, 2026, the OCC, FDIC, and Federal Reserve finalized the removal of “reputation risk” from their supervisory guidance, ending the catch-all that fueled debanking debates. For sponsor-bank and BaaS diligence the read is practical: partners can’t lean on vague “reputational” comfort — examiners want documented third-party risk management, BSA/AML results, and settlement and reconciliation controls that stand on their own.
Reputation risk removed from bank supervision — Spencer FaneThe Financial Stability Board’s June 10, 2026 consultation on responsible AI adoption — comments close July 22, final report due October — recommends “human-in-command” boundaries and, for agents moving customer funds, dual authorization above a threshold and per-transaction audit trails. Days later, on June 30, Bank of England Deputy Governor Sarah Breeden signaled bespoke agentic-AI regulation may be needed in payments and trading, floating “kill switches” and circuit breakers. The direction of travel for agentic-payments controls is now on the record.
Sound practices for AI adoption — Financial Stability BoardWatching one of these closely? Book a working call — we’ll tell you what we’d do.
fi-nex is a boutique banking and payments advisory for fintech. We're operators — we built and scaled banking, payment, fraud, risk, and data products inside the institutions that run the rails, with backgrounds spanning Fiserv, FICO, Oracle, Citi, and Wells Fargo.
That means deep, hands-on knowledge across a banking and payments business: how sponsor-bank and BaaS programs, stacks, and partnerships actually get done; how payment and identity fraud really work; how to turn payment data into real revenue; and where AI and agentic decisioning genuinely belong in the stack. We bring that to founders directly. We take a small number of clients and go deep. No junior teams, no boilerplate.
Bring us the hard one — the processor, the sponsor bank, the fraud model. We'll tell you straight what we'd do and why.
Straight answers on what fi-nex does and how we work.
fi-nex is a boutique banking and payments advisory for fintech. We focus on the things we know cold: getting your banking and payments stack right — sponsor-bank and BaaS programs, processors, BIN sponsors, network paths, money movement, and payment economics; building the fraud, identity, and risk controls that pass sponsor-bank diligence and survive scale; and commercializing the payment and transaction data your business generates into a new revenue line. We work directly with founders: senior operators only, a few clients at a time.
A BIN sponsor (or sponsor bank) is the regulated bank that lets a fintech issue cards or move money on the card networks. Choosing the wrong one creates cost, compliance, and scaling problems that are expensive to unwind. We help you shortlist and select sponsor banks, structure and negotiate the deal, and prepare the risk and compliance posture sponsor banks actually scrutinize during diligence.
We bring deep, hands-on expertise in payment fraud and identity. We design fraud strategy and detection models, build identity, KYC/KYB and onboarding risk controls, and shape the overall risk and compliance posture that sponsor banks and investors examine. The goal: defenses that pass diligence and still perform as transaction volume grows 10×.
Payment data commercialization is turning the data your payment and transaction flows generate into a revenue line — through new data products, partnerships, insights, and pricing power. Drawing on deep data-commercialization experience from the institutions that run the rails, we help you identify what data is valuable, package it into products and partnerships, build the revenue and pricing model, and do it compliantly with the right privacy, consent, and governance in place.
AI and agentic decisioning are now moving into the core of payments, fraud, and risk — from real-time fraud scoring to agents that route payments, triage cases, and act on policy. We help fintechs apply this credibly: where AI and agentic systems genuinely improve a payments or fraud decision versus where they add risk, how to design the guardrails, human-in-the-loop controls, and model governance that sponsor banks and regulators expect, and how to sequence adoption so it survives diligence and scale. We draw on hands-on experience building risk, fraud, and decisioning systems inside the institutions that run the rails — so the advice is grounded in what actually works in production, not hype.
Fintech and payments startups and scaleups, typically from seed through Series C. We're a fit for founders facing a high-stakes payments or fraud decision — selecting a processor or sponsor bank, designing a fraud and identity program, or preparing risk controls for diligence — who want senior operator judgment rather than a junior team and a 200-page deck.
We're operators who built and scaled payment, fraud, risk, and data products inside the institutions that run the rails — backgrounds spanning Fiserv, FICO, Oracle, Citi, and Wells Fargo. You work directly with senior people, not junior analysts. We take a small number of clients, go deep, and deliver sequenced moves you can execute — not boilerplate slideware.
Book a 30-minute working call. Bring the payments or fraud decision you're stuck on and we'll spend the time on it. If we're the right fit, we move into a focused engagement: diagnose where growth is stuck, decide on a prioritized plan, execute alongside your team, and stay close enough to course-correct and lock in the gains.
Send a few lines below and a senior operator replies within one business day — usually with a first read on your situation, not a calendar link. Bring the payments or fraud decision you're facing and we'll spend the call on it, not on small talk.