Welcome to this week’s edition, where we explore the bold ideas and transformative infrastructure shaping the future of global finance. In this issue, Samarth Shekhar breaks down how B2B fintech powerhouses—including Benivo, Vertical Insure, and Yellow Card—are unlocking entirely new customer segments and rethinking cross-border value chains. Alongside these insights, Frank Schwab challenges traditional digital strategies, examining why moving beyond API-First toward governed, autonomous systems is becoming the new imperative for modern banking.
We also sit down for an exclusive Q&A with Emmanuel Umoh, Founder & CEO of KrillPay, to unpack how his team is building borderless infrastructure to bridge legacy financial gaps for globally connected communities. Finally, we highlight an extraordinary wave of venture funding—featuring milestone rounds from Ambrook and Faye—that proves experience-led, deeply embedded platforms are redefining the industry. Dive in and explore the insights driving the next evolution of fintech.
A Q&A with Emmanuel Umoh from KrillPay on Building Borderless Banking Infrastructure
Every founder story has an origin point, but few are as personal as Emmanuel Umoh‘s. As an immigrant balancing two financial systems, he watched sending money home get easier over the years — yet noticed his own family still had no real access to modern banking. That gap between “easier remittances” and “true financial inclusion” became the seed for KrillPay, the Borderless Banking Infrastructure he now leads as Founder & CEO.
Based in Birmingham, Alabama, and built to serve the millions of migrants, mobile professionals, and underbanked families whose financial lives stretch across borders, KrillPay is tackling a problem most fintechs sidestep: not the transaction itself, but the fragmentation that forces people to rebuild their financial identity every time they cross one.
We sat down with Emmanuel Umoh to talk about connecting financial systems into a single ecosystem, why banks are missing an entire customer segment, and what it takes to build banking that travels with the customer instead of stopping at the border.
1. Tell us about yourself / your co-founder(s).
I’m Emmanuel Umoh, Founder and CEO of KrillPay. My journey began as an immigrant navigating two very different financial systems. While sending money home became easier over the years, I realized my family still lacked access to modern banking. That experience inspired KrillPay. Together with our team, we’re building the Borderless Banking Infrastructure that connects financial institutions with the next generation of globally connected customers.
Read more from the interview: Borderless Banking Infrastructure for Global Inclusion
B2B FinTech @Scale Deal Highlights: Benivo, Vertical Insure & Yellow Card.
Samarth Shekhar highlights startups that can help scale financial services by unlocking new customer segments or product offerings via B2B partnerships.
Benivo: large enterprises running international hiring or relocation or recruitment agencies feeding migration can use Benivo to advance relocation funds and manage payments to employees and vendors on their behalf. This turns relocation from a reimbursement headache into a managed, pre-funded benefit, reducing attrition in high-turnover workforces, and giving the employer a single compliant payments rail across 100+ countries. For banks working with Benivo, they can finance relocation advances against employer contracts to a customer segment that they would otherwise not see.
Vertical Insure: a carrier or MGA can use Vertical Insure as a distribution engine to reach end-customers at the precise moment they take on risk, inside the SaaS platforms those customers already use for sports registration, travel booking, construction management, or events. This offers a high-conversion, low-CAC distribution channel that bypasses brokers entirely, letting an insurer place tailored products in front of millions of transactions across 100+ platforms without building the integrations itself. The same embedded footprint generates granular, vertical-specific underwriting data that sharpens pricing over time.
Yellow Card can enable commercial banks to offer clients faster, cheaper cross-border dollar movement without having to build stablecoin infrastructure or navigate 50 local-currency corridors. They can plug into Yellow Card‘s rails to connect directly to stablecoin settlement, sidestepping correspondent banking. In particular, they can access emerging-market corridors – which are slow and expensive if accessed through Swift – and offer Global USD Accounts, treasury, and local-currency disbursement to corporate clients as a new fee-generating product.
Read on for more on the founders and investors in the news last week. If you are building or backing “what’s next in finance” and want to spread the word with our network of 20K+, reach out to Samarth Shekhar or Frank Schwab.
APIs expose functions. Autonomous systems require governed capabilities.
by Frank Schwab
For more than a decade, API-First has been a defining principle of digital transformation. It helped organizations decouple systems, accelerate innovation and build the foundations of Open Banking, embedded finance and modern cloud architectures.
That principle has not become wrong. But it should no longer operate as an automatic management rule.
Read more: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/frankschwab_the-end-of-api-first-activity-7492455958581800961-dXdN
VENTURE FINANCING
$7M in Growth Financing for Benivo
Benivo secures $7m in growth financing led by Salica Investments to scale relocation funding and payment capabilities. The financing will provide dedicated working capital to expand Benivo’s Relocation Services funding capabilities. Benivo advances approved relocation funds and manages payments to employees and service providers on behalf of enterprise clients. The additional capacity will allow the company to support larger relocation programmes and higher transaction volumes without diverting operating capital from investment in its technology platform, AI capabilities and customer service. The financing follows a record revenue year for Benivo; the company’s revenue has grown nearly tenfold over the past five years, driven by new enterprise customer wins and expansion within its existing customer base. Benivo has maintained a customer Net Promoter Score above 50 for five consecutive years and achieved EBITDA profitability in 2026. Benivo leverages its proprietary Mobility Intelligence (MI) technology to help clients reduce costs, improve employee experience and move from reactive administration to greater strategic value, delivering relocation services in more than 100 countries with on-the-ground support.
Source: https://www.benivo.com/blog/press-release-july-2026
Vertical Insure Secures Investment from Updata Partners to Expand Embedded Insurance Infrastructure for SaaS Platforms
MINNEAPOLIS, MN, August 4, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Vertical Insure, the leader in embedded insurance for vertical SaaS, today announced new financing led by Updata Partners. Vertical Insure partners with vertical SaaS companies to help them embed in-platform, white-label insurance solutions. The company takes a software-first approach, developing coverage products that can be offered at the exact moment end users already take on financial risk. Vertical Insure’s mission is to make coverage accessible with every purchase, helping platforms transform disconnected, complicated insurance processes into a built-in, seamless part of the user experience. This funding will accelerate Vertical Insure’s go-to-market execution and expansion into new markets and verticals. As features become easier to replicate, long-term growth relies less on increasing subscriptions and more on adding customer value within existing experiences — embedded financial products are evolving from optional add-ons into core platform infrastructure. The company partners with more than 100 software platforms across sports, travel, events, construction, education, and more, including market leaders like Blackbaud, LeagueApps, and TogetherWork, with its model proven across millions of transactions.
Ambrook Raises $30M Series B to Expand AI Financial Management Platform for America’s Independent Businesses
DENVER — Ambrook, the AI-native financial management platform built for independent businesses, today announced it has raised a $30 million Series B led by Lachy Groom, with participation from Thomson Reuters Ventures, Thrive Capital, Field Ventures, Cameron Ventures, Akshay Kothari (co-founder of Notion), Tomer London (co-founder of Gusto), Guillermo Rauch (CEO of Vercel) and others. The funding brings Ambrook’s total capital raised to $59 million and will accelerate product development across agriculture, trucking, construction and property management. The businesses that produce, build and move physical assets are the cornerstone of communities across the nation but remain underserved by financial software. Family farms, trucking companies, general contractors and property managers often manage more than a dozen financial accounts across multiple entities and banks, yet lack the finance team or enterprise resources traditional accounting systems assume. The Denver-based company has grown from roughly 2,500 customers in July 2025 to more than 8,000 businesses across all 50 states. Ambrook brings together accounting, payments and cash management within one platform tailored to businesses juggling multiple profit-and-loss statements and asset-heavy balance sheets. Ambrook Visa Commercial cards are powered by Stripe and issued by Celtic Bank.
Yellow Card announces $40 million funding round to expand its stablecoin infrastructure
Yellow Card raised $40 million in strategic equity funding led by SC Ventures, the venture arm of Standard Chartered, with participation from Sony Innovation Fund, Polychain Capital, and Blockchain Capital, lifting its total equity financing above $120 million. The company is working with commercial banks worldwide to use stablecoins and onchain payments to move dollars across borders and compete with legacy systems such as Swift. Yellow Card plans to use the new capital to expand its Global USD Accounts product and add stablecoin and local payment options in Latin America and Asia-Pacific. The accounts allow businesses to hold dollars, hold and swap stablecoins, manage treasury operations and collect or disburse local currencies through domestic payment rails in more than 50 countries. CEO Chris Maurice said the company’s flows have historically been split roughly evenly between corporates and large financial institutions using its treasury-management and payments infrastructure, with bank volumes now growing faster. Since its founding in 2016, Yellow Card has facilitated more than $10 billion in transactions and holds licenses, authorizations or registrations in 22 jurisdictions. “The bigger opportunity now is connecting banks themselves to stablecoin rails.”
Travel insurance platform Faye raises $50 million in Series C funding
Faye, a travel insurance platform, raised $50 million in Series C funding to expand its AI capabilities, partnerships and international presence. Faye reimagines travel insurance as a real-time, app-based product rather than a static policy bought and forgotten: its automated travel rebooking platform offers travel intelligence and real-time assistance, so that when a flight is cancelled or delayed, the app proactively surfaces rebooking options and can reimburse covered expenses in near real time via a digital wallet rather than through a weeks-long claims process. This turns a historically low-engagement, low-trust product into an active companion during the trip. The new capital will fund expansion of Faye’s AI capabilities, new distribution partnerships, and international growth beyond its existing markets. The round reflects investor conviction that embedded, experience-led insurance — priced and delivered around the actual customer journey — represents the next generation of the travel insurance category.
The throughline this week is connection — across borders, across platforms, across systems that were never designed to talk to each other. Whether it’s KrillPay linking financial identities across countries, Benivo turning relocation into a managed benefit, or Yellow Card routing dollars around legacy rails, the founders and funders in this issue are betting that the next wave of fintech value won’t come from building more walls, but from removing them. Thank you for reading B2B FinTech @Scale — see you next week with more of what’s next in finance.