Merve Isler, Ecosystem Director of AI Insiders and Founder and CEO of Marvelous, opens AI Insiders: Fintech and Payments at Visa's Mission Rock HQ in San Francisco.
Cuy Sheffield, VP of Growth Products at Visa, in a fireside conversation with moderator Merve Isler, CEO of Marvelous, at AI Insiders: Fintech and Payments inside Visa's Mission Rock HQ during Fintech Week SF.
Founders, payments operators, and investors among the 150 curated guests at AI Insiders: Fintech and Payments inside Visa's Mission Rock HQ during Fintech Week SF.
150 founders, payments operators, and investors map AI-native finance inside Visa's Mission Rock HQ during Fintech Week SF (120 characters)
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, UNITED STATES, June 19, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- San Francisco, California, May 28, 2026. The financial system is being rewritten in real time, and on Thursday night many of the people doing the rewriting were in one room inside
Visa's Mission Rock headquarters. Hosted by Visa and powered by Marvelous, AI Insiders: Fintech and Payments was a sold-out, invite-only salon for 150 founders, payments operators, and investors, held during Fintech Week SF and built around a single idea: the money is moving.Stablecoins are going mainstream. Agentic wallets can transact on their own. AI is underwriting loans and catching fraud as it happens, and cross-border payments that once took days now settle in seconds. Those shifts set the agenda, and the room pushed on what sits underneath them. Which regulatory frameworks actually hold as stablecoins scale. Who carries the liability when an autonomous wallet makes a payment it should not have. What AI-native underwriting does to the century-old risk models behind credit and insurance. What the banking stack becomes once settlement is instant and programmable.
Merve Isler, Ecosystem Director of AI Insiders and Founder and CEO of Marvelous, opened the night and moderated the firesides that followed. First up was Cuy Sheffield, VP of Growth Products at Visa and one of the most influential voices in crypto and payments, who previously led Visa's global crypto product team and its stablecoin settlement work.
The evening's panel, The Money Is Moving, brought together three people steering where money goes next: Luba Goldberg, SVP and Global Head of Product at Visa Direct; David Hefter, a Director at BlackRock and the firm's AI Champion for Private Markets Investing; and Sandeep Patil, Partner and Head of Asia-Pacific at QED Investors. Dasha Shunina, a Venture Capital Contributor at Forbes who leads GTM at Puzzle, moderated, pressing on where capital, regulation, and AI-native infrastructure collide.
The closing fireside belonged to Sasha Orloff, the three-time founder and CEO of Puzzle and host of the a16z Tech Finance Podcast, on building the finance stack for AI-native startups. Orloff, whose earlier company LendUp raised more than one billion dollars in venture capital and debt, walked the room through fundraising, regulatory approvals, and the realities of scaling in fintech.
Five AI-native fintech companies closed the program with rapid-fire demos, five minutes each, chosen by AI Insiders from across the sector. RAVIQ, turning compliance into revenue, was founded by Ravi Gunda. Snaplii, giving AI agents the power to buy, by Spencer Xu. MetaComp, building cross-border financial infrastructure, by Dr. Bo Bai. NexDiscovery, a proactive AI intelligence platform, by Jeremy Vince. And BlueCash.ai, frictionless payments for tips, donations, and micro-commerce, by Arthur Mrozowski.
The guest list carried as much weight as the stage. Founders and CEOs from 129 companies that included Visa, Coinbase, Adyen, BlackRock, JP Morgan, PayPal, Amazon, HSBC Innovation Banking, and Snowflake. Fintech investors and a small group of ecosystem and media leaders rounded out the rest. As at every AI Insiders night, most of the conversation stayed off the record.
"Use AI to create value, rather than trying to use AI to save time," said Cuy Sheffield, VP of Growth Products at Visa.
Visa hosted the evening at Mission Rock and Marvelous powered it, in partnership with Citizens Private Bank, Puzzle, and Snaplii. The night ended the way these rooms tend to, with drinks, live music, and high-trust networking inside Visa HQ. Fintech and Payments is one of six AI Insiders verticals, and the series continues through the year across cybersecurity, healthcare, media, government, and robotics, with partner-hosted dinners in between.
About Marvelous
Marvelous helps B2B teams turn in-person events into their highest-converting GTM motion, automating everything from guest curation to follow-up to attribution so teams can build pipeline and capture offline revenue from the rooms they are already in. Learn more at themarvelo.us.
About AI Insiders
AI Insiders is building the most trusted AI ecosystem in the country, starting from San Francisco: ruthlessly curated, high-signal, and home to the leaders defining how AI gets deployed. The network spans six verticals: cybersecurity, fintech & payments, robotics & space, healthcare & biotech, media & content, and government & policy. Request access at aiinsiders.us.
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