Remy Blaire: Aside from all the day-to-day headlines, artificial intelligence is having a growing impact on the business world. And as agentic AI takes over autonomous decision-making in everything from loan underwriting to real-time transactions, banks, fintechs and regulators are facing a new imperative, and that is one across the entire ecosystem or risk getting left behind.
Meanwhile, the fintech role continues to grow as deals increase with financial institutions. In just the first half of this year, investments in U.S. fintechs were up 85% from the back half of last year, and that metric was also 43% higher globally.
Well, joining me to expand on the booming global landscape for AI usage as well as fintech integration is Fintech Sandbox Co-Founder Sarah Biller. So great to have you here. Thank you so much for joining me.
Sarah Biller: Oh, Remy, nice to be here. Thanks.
Remy Blaire: Well, as we head into the final months of 2026, it's about saying that institutional adoption for AI has continued to expand. So tell us about this impact here when it comes to the evolution.
Sarah Biller: Yeah, I mean, I think it's such an important question.
At Fintech Sandbox, we have a rarefied position to sit in the middle, not just with the entrepreneurs or the global innovation economy, but also the incumbents. We work with investors, we work with academics, and we even work with regulators to a certain capacity.
And I think what you're seeing is that each of those communities, each of those constituents, is looking at the same AI technical stack, but they're seeing something different in it.
And I think this is this moment where we recognize that AI itself is a change in the way the global financial services system will work, and it's our role to knit together those different perspectives, those different challenges.
And we do it. We think about it around the data discussion, but we can dive into any of those constituents.
Remy Blaire: So I think it would be helpful for our viewers if we talk about collaborative AI and the evolution of this. So first and foremost, for viewers who may not be as familiar, what is collaborative AI?
Sarah Biller: Yeah, well, collaborative AI, of course, really has taken us from a probabilistic use of AI. I'm sorry, deterministic use of AI.
The ability to look and define rules and enable the technology itself to then work its way through the system and offer suggestions.
We now have moved into a world of agentic AI and the application of it. It really means, of course, that we have a new intelligence layer, one that we're enabling in the financial markets to make decisions, in the banking world to help advise, in credit, how you and I will buy and sell.
That collaboration, or that moment of collaborative AI, means that all of those activities need to work together.
We are currently in probably the foremost experimentation of uncertainty that we've ever seen in the markets because of the release of AI in this work. And it brings us back to this question of collaboration.
Remy Blaire: Yeah. And of course, Sarah, you and I are talking about a very highly regulated industry here. So where does governance come into play?
Sarah Biller: Yeah, governance is very important. We do think about it in terms of systemic risk and the safety guardrails that go around it.
But governance begins, the first line of defense starts at the earliest stages. What data elements, what types of information are we using to train the frontier models that we're applying?
Because frankly, AI is not neutral, right? It deploys or it makes decisions based on what is embedded in it, with a layer now, if you will, of creative thinking, of freedom, degrees of freedom.
And in an industry that is inherently rule-based, that relies on trust for its well-functioning, this is a whole new area where risk and regulation and governance is opening up opportunities, but of course, risk.
Remy Blaire: Well, as someone who talks to many stakeholders and someone in this space, what do you think needs to happen when it comes to legislation?
Sarah Biller: Yeah, legislation is a really important actor here because it has to bridge the gap between advancing competitiveness, reminding us that we in the United States have always been market leaders because innovation has been enabled, but also balancing the safety and guardrails.
If we go back to really what we have historically been challenged with in the financial markets, it's not been serving the, you know, the quartile of individuals who are active participants, who have a savings account, and the small businesses. It's those unseen, those firms and those businesses that are smaller, historically not as profitable, across the entire continuum, whether it's payments, again, lending, investing, offering them insurance.
And, you know, policymakers need to really probably take a step back and help us think about how you create observability in these models, how you don't lose the individuals who already participate in the shadow, where the data sets are not as neat and not as tied up.
And that, to me, is where the policymakers can really help us accelerate.
Remy Blaire: Yeah. And Sarah, you mentioned innovation. And I do want to expand on American innovation, in particular what we're seeing in regional hubs. So give us your perspective.
Sarah Biller: Yeah. You know, I think we have a perspective that really innovation happens all over the country. What doesn't happen is equal access to opportunity to advance that innovation, to lift it up.
What we're seeing, frankly, in the next generation of fintech innovation, of those entrepreneurs, is that we have migrated past the, you know, the usefulness of a customer experience and into the plumbing, if you will, of the financial services sector.
Consequently, the innovation in these regional hubs are individuals who are closest to the problem set, closest to the needs of the small business owner, if you will, to really rethink how they enter into this digitally, you know, AI-enabled, AI-native financial market.
And that's where you're going to see the lifting up. And it's nothing against my hometown of Boston. Here we're sitting at the New York Stock Exchange, where we have had such immense leapfrogging in the way that the capital markets work and be the global engine of growth.
But I see what we're seeing is the next generation of regional expertise. Payments in Atlanta, you know, small-town, sort of small-business lending innovation in Columbus, Ohio.
It's an exciting time to really think about the growth and the change that can happen.
Remember, AI is a tool of productivity for sure, but it also enables these innovators, no matter where they are, to have access to the same institutional might that is now present in our largest incumbents.
This is a really powerful inflection moment for America to embrace those entrepreneurs who are outside of our traditional ecosystems and help them kind of solve the problems that we know are pressing and can help really harden our economy.
Remy Blaire: Well, Sarah, we will have to leave it there for today. But thank you so much for joining us, and thank you so much for your insights and your perspective today.
Sarah Biller: Thank you for everything you do.
