- Fiat Growth
- Posts
- Speed, Signal, and New York Fintech Week
Speed, Signal, and New York Fintech Week
Drew Glover & Fiat Growth
March 24, 2026
Hey, it's Drew, Alex + the Fiat team 😄
This issue takes 7 minutes to read, but if you only have one, here’s the quick rundown:
Fiat is Taking Over NY Fintech Week (April 27–30): The highest-signal rooms. The right people. The next 12–24 months of fintech - compressed into one week. The FinTech Summit is April 28. Lock your spot, and be in the room.
Speed is the New Moat: In an AI-powered world, execution velocity is separating winners from everyone else. The teams moving fastest - with precision—are pulling ahead.
CMO Uncovered is Live: The modern CMO isn’t running ads - they’re architecting growth systems. Dive into the newsletter, listen to the podcast, and learn from the operators actually building what’s next.
Fintech Meetup: We’ll be across Fintech Meetup next week. Please reach out and let’s connect.
Let’s get into it.
🗽 Fiat Growth is Taking Over New York Fintech Week
Signal > Noise. Always.
New York Fintech Week has always been a signal, not a spectacle.
For one week, the entire fintech ecosystem compresses into a few square blocks in Manhattan. Capital, operators, regulators, and media all in motion at the same time. The density matters. It’s one of the few moments each year where you can observe - not just participate in - how the market is actually forming.
If you’re paying attention, you can see it.
Who people gravitate toward.
Which conversations keep repeating.
Where time is being spent - and where it isn’t.
That’s the real data layer of fintech.
We’ve been studying that layer for years. Early on, we showed up without an agenda. We listened, mapped, and built a point of view around how distribution actually works in fintech - not how it’s talked about, but how it behaves in real life.
That became the foundation for Fiat Growth and Fiat Ventures.
Because fintech has never been about novel technology alone. The best companies rarely invent something entirely new. They win because they understand distribution - how money moves, how trust is built, and where decision-making actually happens inside complex systems.
New York is uniquely suited for that.
It’s where financial infrastructure, institutional capital, and operating talent coexist in close proximity. You can’t replicate that density in a remote-first world. You can’t simulate it in a Slack channel. The proximity accelerates learning. It accelerates conviction. It accelerates outcomes.
In 2026, we’re leaning into that reality.
Not by adding more events - but by increasing the signal within them.
Anchored by:
Thrilled to partner with some of the best fintech brands to bring NY Fintech Week to life with CleverTap, Mastercard, Withum, Highnote, and many more industry leading brands.
The design principle is simple: curate the room, and the outcomes take care of themselves.
We’re optimizing for:
Density of high-context operators
Proximity to capital allocators
Conversations that convert into action
Not panels for the sake of panels.
Not scale for the sake of optics.
Smaller rooms tend to produce better decisions.
When you compress the right 200–600 people into a high-trust environment, you create a different type of interaction surface. The conversations go deeper. The feedback loops tighten. The time to alignment shortens.
That’s where partnerships actually start.
That’s where deal flow accelerates.
That’s where new categories quietly emerge.
Fintech itself is entering another phase.
AI is accelerating workflows, but it’s also compressing advantages. Distribution is shifting again. Capital is becoming more selective. And the companies that win will likely be the ones that understand how to operate inside these constraints - efficiently, precisely, and with a clear point of view.
New York remains the proving ground for that.
If you’re building in fintech, this week isn’t just another stop on the conference circuit. It’s one of the few moments where you can calibrate your thinking against the market in real time.
That’s why we’re investing here.
If you care about where fintech is going - not where it’s been -
be in the room.
Get your tickets now → fintech-week.co
🏎️ Speed is the New Moat
F1 Founders Only
We’re starting to believe something pretty simple:
speed is the new moat.
For the last 18 months, we’ve been obsessed with what actually creates unfair advantage:
distribution, data, brand, and team.
But now, in an agentic workforce, something else is emerging - execution speed.
The best teams are operating at 200mph+
Fast decisions
Tight feedback loops
Precision execution
Compounding output across every team member
In a world of infinite optionality, hesitation isn’t neutral - it’s a tax.
The bar is no longer “move fast.”
It’s: move at F1 speeds - responsibly.
At Fiat Venturers we’re investing in founders who think like that. build like that. Operate like that.
At Fiat Growth we’re here to help founders reach those speeds through systematized strategy, execution and growth.
🎯 CMO Uncovered Has Officially Launched
Marketing Didn’t Get Easier. It Got Deeper.
At Fiat we talk to 60+ founders a week. And almost all of them think they’re a CMO now.
Spin up some AI copy. Launch a few ads. Wait for leads.
AI made marketing faster, but it didn’t make it easier.
The best CMOs today aren’t just buying clicks.
They’re building the acquisition + retention engine underneath the business.
They’re balancing:
Fragmented channels
Product signals
Lifecycle data
Customer behavior
Brand + performance
All at once.
And AI is becoming the operating system powering all of it.
The winners won’t be the ones who prompt the best ads.
They’ll be the ones who design the systems behind them.
That’s why we partnered with Mrinal Parekh and CleverTap to launch
CMO Uncovered - the newest publication from Uncovered Media.
Behind every lasting brand is a CMO carrying a weight no one sees.
CMO Uncovered exists to unpack that weight - in detail.
If you know a CMO in your network who is a leader, an executor and a visionary growth mind that the world could learn from. Please intro them to Nick Madrid. [email protected].
Also, we’ve already dropped a few pieces, and today we’re excited to share our first podcast episode featuring.
If you’re loving our Uncovered Media content dive into out additional newsletters and podcast publisctions:
VC Uncovered: Spotlighting the best up and coming VC’s - powered by SVB
Thesis Uncovered: Thesis deep dives from iconic VC’s - powered by Stripe
CMO Uncovered: Growth blueprint’s from the top CMO’s - powered by Clevertap
→ Dive in. This is just the beginning — See it all at cmouncovered.com
🧠 Final Thought
The market isn’t slowing down - it’s compressing.
The best teams right now are doing three things differently:
They show up where signal is highest (the right rooms, not the biggest rooms)
They move faster than their competitors - but with precision
They build systems that compound, not tactics that reset every quarter
If you’re looking for a simple way to apply this:
Pick one high-signal event this quarter (NY Fintech Week is a good place to start) and over-index on it
Identify one workflow you can automate or compress by 10x using AI
Build one system (not campaign) that turns a single touchpoint into 3–5 follow-ups
That’s how you win right now.
Not by doing more.
By doing the right things - faster, and with intention.
- Drew, Alex + the team Fiat 🚀