For our latest installment of Finovate First-Timers, a new series profiling companies that recently made their debuts on the Finovate stage, we catch up with Marco Ma, Co-Founder and CEO of Ventus AI. Ventus AI helps banks personalize every touchpoint across the customer journey, boosting engagement, lifetime value, and assets under management.
The company’s technology transforms raw transaction data into a cross-categorized behavioral intelligence layer that spans more than 3,000 spending subcategories to surface life events, dynamic personas, and real-time intent signals. Founded in 2025 and headquartered in New York, Ventus AI demoed its technology at FinovateSpring 2026 in San Diego, California.
In this week’s conversation, Ma talks about the challenges banks and credit unions face when it comes to leveraging data to create better, more personalized experiences for customers and members. He explains how Ventus AI plugs into existing stacks to provide a new analytics layer that delivers answers to questions about customer preferences and pain points without building anything new.
What problem does Ventus AI solve and who does it solve it for?
Marco Ma: Banks sit on enormous volumes of transaction data, but most of it stays trapped as raw, messy records their teams can’t actually read. The result is a lose-lose: customers get served demoralizing generic experiences which leads to lost relationships and deteriorated customer economics. We solve this for banks and credit unions that want to understand and serve their customers more deeply.
How does Ventus AI solve this problem better than other companies?
Ma: We built a proprietary customer intelligence and personalization engine. It works across every account and payment rail and detects the full picture: lifestyle patterns, life-event triggers, financial vulnerability signals, and semantic budgeting. Where most tools stop at cleaning up a merchant name, we surface what’s actually happening in a customer’s life, and we deliver it into the tools banks already use rather than asking them to rip anything out.
Who are Ventus AI’s primary customers, and how do you reach them?
Ma: US financial institutions, with our initial focus on banks and credit unions in the $1 billion to $50 billion asset range, alongside an active enterprise pipeline. We reach them through industry programs and conferences like Finovate and the Fintech Sandbox network, direct relationships built by the founding team, and warm introductions through our advisors and ecosystem partners.
Can you tell us about a favorite implementation or partnership experience?
Ma: Our favorite work is on rewards and deals. The insight that makes it special is that the same offer can mean completely different things to different people. People don’t wake up one day and say “I want to shop at Crate & Barrel.” Some people want a new coffee machine, some people want a new side table. Because we understand the behavior behind the spend, the bank can present the same deal in the way that actually resonates with each person, turning a generic coupon book experience into something that feels personal.
What in your background gave you the confidence to respond to this challenge?
Ma: We have a strong founding team with backgrounds spanning Visa, McKinsey, AWS, and Credit Suisse, along with prominent advisors from the banking world. That mix of payments, data, and institutional banking experience meant we understood both the technical problem and the way banks actually buy and adopt technology.
You demoed at FinovateSpring in May. How was the experience?
Ma: It was a great moment for us. Banking is deeply personal. It touches the most important moments in people’s lives, and our hero demo follows an expecting-parent spending pattern across rails to show we can extract major life event signals and orchestrate the existing tech stack—rewards, product, relationship—to be personalized to help this customer through this journey. Demoing that live on the main stage reminded us why this matters: done right, this technology lets a bank show up for someone at exactly the moment it counts. We’re returning for the Fall show.
You were accepted into the Fintech Sandbox Data Access Residency. What is it, and why does it matter?
Ma: Fintech Sandbox gives early-stage fintech companies access to high-quality financial data and infrastructure to build and refine their products. For us, it’s meaningful because behavioral intelligence is only as good as the data it learns from. The residency accelerates our ability to develop and validate our engine against real, rich datasets, which directly strengthens what we deliver to banks.
What are your goals for the rest of 2026 and into next year?
Ma: Grow our pipeline through business development, move active conversations into live deployments, return to the Finovate main stage in the Fall, and close our current funding round. Beyond that, we’re heads-down building, deepening the behavioral signal we deliver and expanding what banks can do with it.
Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash
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