As fintech matures, the race is no longer just about innovation—it’s about execution. While banks and financial institutions understand the potential of AI, embedded finance, and crypto-powered transactions, many still struggle to translate these trends into real business impact.

At Fintech Meetup 2025, Steven Ramirez, CEO of Beyond the Arc, Inc., shared how his firm is helping financial institutions move from strategy to implementation, ensuring that AI, automation, and embedded finance don’t just remain boardroom discussions but become core operational drivers.

AI’s Evolution in Fintech: Beyond Hype to Execution

AI’s role in fintech is moving past chatbots and fraud detection, becoming a foundational tool for real-time decision-making and workflow automation. Ramirez highlighted how financial firms are now leveraging AI to absorb and analyze unstructured data sources, including:

🔹 Regulatory filings and financial reports to streamline compliance
🔹 Customer service transcripts to predict churn and optimize engagement
🔹 Market trends and sentiment analysis to enhance product positioning

Beyond the Arc, Inc. is working with fintech firms to integrate AI-powered automation into their existing operations, ensuring AI doesn’t just provide insights but executes decision-making at scale. “The firms that win won’t just use AI for dashboards—they’ll use it for automated decisioning that moves as fast as market conditions change.”

Why Large Financial Institutions Struggle to Innovate

While fintech startups are built for agility, large financial institutions face internal barriers to rapid innovation. Despite having capital, brand trust, and massive customer bases, legacy banks often:

📌 Operate in silos, making cross-functional AI integration difficult
📌 Prioritize regulatory risk mitigation over aggressive innovation
📌 Move at slower adoption cycles, delaying the rollout of AI-driven services

“Many large banks are still running AI pilots in isolated departments, rather than embedding it across their entire tech stack,” Ramirez observed. “The challenge isn’t lack of AI investment—it’s lack of execution.”

Beyond the Arc, Inc. specializes in helping banks streamline AI adoption, ensuring seamless integration across compliance, risk, and customer experience functions—a necessity as financial AI adoption scales.

Crypto & Embedded Finance: The Institutional Green Light

For years, crypto adoption by major financial institutions stalled under regulatory uncertainty and volatile market conditions. However, Ramirez pointed out that 2025 marks a turning point, with:

✔ More structured regulatory frameworks emerging for digital assets
✔ Stablecoin adoption becoming a viable cross-border payment solution
✔ AI optimizing crypto transactions, ensuring real-time risk analysis

“Crypto was set to take off 5–10 years ago, but financial institutions were forced to hold back,” Ramirez noted. “Now, with AI-powered compliance solutions, improved fraud detection, and clearer regulations, banks are re-entering the space—but on their own terms.”

AI’s biggest contribution to crypto? Predictive liquidity management—where AI-driven systems analyze market conditions to determine the best time to execute large-scale transactions while minimizing exposure to volatility.

Beyond the Arc, Inc. is working with financial institutions to integrate AI-powered crypto transaction management, ensuring firms capitalize on the efficiency of digital assets while staying fully compliant.

The Next Fintech Disruptor? No-Code AI Platforms

One of the most significant fintech innovations in 2025 is the emergence of no-code AI-powered fintech development platforms. These tools enable:

✅ Non-technical users to build financial applications using natural language commands
✅ Faster time to market for fintech startups, reducing dependency on engineering teams
✅ Banks to experiment with AI-driven financial products at lower costs

Ramirez highlighted a fintech startup that recently launched a generative AI tool capable of building entire financial applications in minutes, transforming how fintech products are developed.

For Beyond the Arc, Inc., the focus is now on helping financial institutions embed no-code AI platforms into their operations, accelerating product innovation without the traditional development bottlenecks.

Final Thought: Fintech’s New Competitive Edge is Speed to Execution

Ramirez’s takeaway: the firms that win in the next decade won’t be the ones with the best ideas—they’ll be the ones that execute the fastest.

Beyond the Arc, Inc.’s role in fintech’s next era isn’t just to advise on strategy—it’s to ensure firms execute at speed, integrate AI at scale, and future-proof their business models before competitors catch up.

Disclaimer: The above podcast episode was generated using AI based on an interview transcript. While the content remains true to the original conversation, the voices, tone, and delivery were synthesized and do not represent actual recordings of the speakers. This AI-generated format is intended to enhance accessibility and provide an alternative way to engage with the discussion.

We’re thrilled to welcome Liberis as an official Unofficially Fintech sponsor. Embedded finance is a major theme at this year’s event, and Liberis is leading the charge by providing seamless funding solutions directly within platforms that businesses already use. They’ll be attending Fintech Meetup, talking all things embedded finance, so be sure to book some time with them! 👇

Not affiliated with Fintech Meetup Events

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