Bukie Adebo Umeano - Anthemis Group

The next wave of fintech may not look like fintech at all. Bukie Adebo Umeano, early-stage investor at Anthemis Group, has spent four years building an investment thesis around that idea. The firm calls it invisible finance: financial services so well-built that nobody notices they are there. No app to open, no form to fill out. Just a business owner making decisions while the banking, lending, and payments infrastructure adjusts automatically in the background.In this episode, Bukie breaks down financial services innovation in three waves. Wave one was digitization, moving from branches and phone calls to mobile interfaces. Wave two was embedded finance, putting financial products at the point of need inside existing business tools. Wave three, where Anthemis is writing checks now, is the version where financial services simply run in the background. "We don't think about our electricity, do we?" Bukie said. "You just walk into a room, you turn on the lights, you never think twice about the fact that the lights work."Before she was an investor, Bukie was a founder. That operator experience reshaped how she thinks about the VC-founder relationship. She explains why a VC who loved your pitch still passed, why go-to-market questions come earlier than founders expect, and why portfolio construction means great companies get turned down all the time. "There are so many great companies that we have not invested in, knowing they were great companies," she said.Bukie also gets into what actually qualifies as a moat, and why most claims to defensibility are overstated. The one she takes seriously is genuine network effects: "Why does having company A make it easier, better, or more likely for company B to also be part of this network?" She looks for reinforcing data loops and deep workflow integration, where a product embeds itself in the place users already work.At Anthemis, the early-stage fund focuses on pre-seed and seed companies in "high assurance" industries: financial services, healthcare, energy, and other heavily regulated categories. The infrastructure plays Bukie finds most compelling right now include core banking rebuilt with AI, data orchestration platforms, and coordination layer businesses that unify the growing stack of AI agents companies are already using.Bukie also shares how growing up as the second of four sisters shaped her thinking. "Be open to being incorrect," she said. "I learned that at a very young age."Her framework keeps returning to a counterintuitive place: the less visible the technology, the more interesting the investment. The question she keeps asking is not where the flashiest opportunity is, but where the work will still need to happen regardless of what the technology does next, and who is building the invisible infrastructure to support it.This season is supported by SVB. Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank. Member FDIC. SVB is a trusted collaborator for the founders pushing boundaries and the investors who back them. We're proud to have them as our sponsor.Please note, this podcast is for informational purposes and is not investment, financial, or legal advice. The views expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of SVB.