At this year’s Fintech is Femme Leadership Summit in San Francisco, one message came through loud and clear: trust is no longer a soft skill — it’s infrastructure.
As AI reshapes how fintechs build, scale, and safeguard their products, trust has become the new KPI. The companies pulling ahead aren’t just optimizing for speed or compliance — they’re building systems that make trust measurable, transferable, and durable.
Building systems that scale trust
In the session Bringing EQ back into B2B relationships, our Head of Marketing, Jackie Wylie, reframed what “trust infrastructure” really means in the age of AI.
“Trust isn’t a checkbox,” she shared. “It’s a system that scales something as human as confidence. With the rise of AI and increasingly believable fraud, trust can’t be a gut feeling anymore.”
It’s a perspective that mirrors how we think about trust at Middesk — turning something inherently human into something operational. For us, that starts with identity. We layer submitted information, authoritative records, and web-scale signals to confirm who’s on the other side of every interaction. That’s how trust moves from instinct to infrastructure — powering faster onboarding, better underwriting, and stronger long-term relationships.
Trust as the new KPI
Nicole Casperson, founder of Fintech is Femme, said it best: what gets measured gets done. Trust isn’t abstract anymore — it’s a performance metric that reflects the health of relationships, both with customers and within teams.
Jackie grounded that idea in real experience. She shared how we turned a QBR into a moment of shared storytelling, learning directly from our customers’ customers. That kind of context turns transactions into relationships — or as Jackie put it, “Trust amounts to explaining the why without having to explain it.”
When asked what a single KPI for trust might look like, the room aligned around long-term health metrics: NRR, retention, expansion. Indicators that show not just whether customers sign on, but whether they stay — and grow — because they trust you.
The fraud frontier
The conversation shifted to what trust means in the face of AI-generated fraud, where legitimacy can be faked as easily as a photo. Leaders from Unit21, Brex, and Academy of Fintech each shared how they’re adapting.
From Unit21: KYC is dead. When verification is that easy to forge, we need broader context — behavioral signals, transaction patterns, and real-time data.
From Brex: friction and fraud exist on the same axis. Add too much friction, and you lose good customers. The key is using AI for prescreening and thoughtful escalation, maintaining oversight that keeps safety and speed aligned instead of at odds.
And from Academy of Fintech: trust starts with people. Teams need to be trained not just on tools, but on judgment. “If something feels off, call someone,” one speaker said. “Share stories. Help people remember.”
Ground truth over hype
Another theme that surfaced: AI is only as good as the data it’s built on. Unit21 shared how two early AI product launches failed because they lacked ground truth. Without reliable labeled data, even the smartest models fall apart.
Brex leaders also emphasized AI literacy as a foundation for responsible innovation. They treat it like financial literacy, complete with learning modules on prompting, governance, and what good looks like. Education and enablement are just as critical as the tools themselves.
Meeting regulators where they are
One of the most refreshing takeaways came from how leaders talked about working with regulators. Every meeting is an opportunity for mutual education — a chance to build credibility, empathy, and alignment. The message was clear: regulation isn’t the enemy of innovation; it’s an essential partner in trust.
Why it matters
The Fintech is Femme summit stood out because it didn’t chase the hype, it got real. With Nicole Casperson curating the discourse, the event delivered density of value, not volume of buzzwords. Roughly 200 operators filled the room — founders, product and risk leaders, platform builders, and investors, 70% of them women — all connected by a shared conviction that trust and EQ are the real competitive edges in fintech.
If trust is infrastructure, identity is the foundation. The fintechs pulling ahead are the ones who know every business deeply, trust their decisions through real-time context, and grow with confidence by measuring long-term signals of trust — not just short-term conversion rates.
Huge thanks to Nicole and the Fintech is Femme team for building a space where operators could share what’s actually working and what still needs work.
