DeltaBlock, Embat, and Hawkish Capital are using AI, APIs, and blockchain to eliminate financial inefficiencies worldwide.
Rather than competing solely on consumer-facing products, a new generation of fintech companies is tackling challenges deep within market infrastructure, treasury operations, and sustainable finance.
From improving liquidity in public markets and delivering real-time financial connectivity to expanding access to climate and alternative assets through tokenization, these firms are modernizing how capital moves and how financial decisions are made.
By combining artificial intelligence, open banking, blockchain, and advanced analytics, the following firms are creating more transparent, efficient, and accessible financial ecosystems for businesses and investors alike.
DeltaBlock
“Most inefficiencies in markets are invisible, but they are far from insignificant,” says Maria Scetta, CEO of DeltaBlock. “DeltaBlock operates in that layer, combining continuous research with real-time market analysis to understand how stocks actually trade beneath the surface.”
Bid-ask spreads for less-liquid names are often wider than they should be, and prices can move disproportionately for relatively small trades. This make for inconsistent trading conditions.
DeltaBlock uses a research-led approach with real-time data and operates within exchange frameworks and regulatory guidelines. By introducing consistency within markets and making trading more efficient, there’s increased participation and more stable prices. DeltaBlock’s models are based on order-book depth, bid-ask spreads, trading activity, and volatility patterns. Based on these, it dynamically places and manages orders throughout the trading day. By maintaining a continuous market presence and dynamically balancing supply and demand, liquidity improves, reducing friction and enhancing execution quality.
“As trading becomes easier and more predictable, more participants enter the market,” says Scetta. “That additional participation further strengthens liquidity, creating a reinforcing cycle.”
DeltaBlock’s impact is not always immediate. On the Singapore Exchange, a midcap industrial company saw its bid-ask spread narrow by over 50% within 90 days, which increased institutional participation. Also, a threefold increase in order-book depth for a small-cap technology company trading on the Hong Kong Exchange.
Embat
Embat is a European-based fintech that champions open banking and API-first infrastructures to democratize enterprise-grade connectivity for the midmarket. To solve the problem of data fragmentation, fintechs like Embat connect thousands of distinct banking portals and corporate enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
The lag with T+1 reporting means that finance teams often make decisions based on old data. Rather than relying on Swift projects or screen scraping to automate data extraction from other systems, Embat provides direct, secure connectivity to over 15,000 global banks and financial institutions.
“This solves the problem of cash-visibility blind spots and high transaction fees,” said Theo Wasserberg, head of UK and Ireland group. “It challenges incumbents by proving that the midmarket does not need to accept 24-hour delays or file uploads.”
Also, Embat has elevated the treasury function, which had limited automation that often broke down when a decimal was in the wrong place, for example. TellMe uses AI to understand and match bank data with ERP entries with 99% accuracy, ultimately transforming the treasury function from manual processes to strategic financial execution.
“TellMe has delivered immediate, measurable [return on investment] by closing the gap between insight and action,” says Wasserberg. “By synchronizing banking and ERP data in real time and automating transactions matching, TellMe reduced the time finance teams spend on manual reconciliation by up to 75%, or about 10 hours per week.”
Hawkish Capital (formerly Climate Kick)
Sustainable financing can be very fragmented and often requires investors to have significant capital to participate. These transactions can be complex, and issuers prefer to manage only a few investors rather than hundreds. To expand the investor base, Hawkish Capital leverages blockchain, AI, smart contracts, and tokenization, helping to democratize this asset and help provide more complete data for investors. Layering AI on the blockchain helps to automate the tokenization process and minimize human intervention.
Asset tokenization and smart contracts can significantly lower the minimum-investment threshold for institutional investors, while smart contracts provide standardization for climate assets in several ways. Hawkish Capital is integrating internet-connected devices into projects to collect data, which are then uploaded to the blockchain to measure progress and combat greenwashing. This data helps investors understand the environmental impact of these projects while maintaining compliance with green taxonomies across jurisdictions. Combining green assets from multiple projects through tokenization can create 100% carbon-neutral assets.
Hawkish Capital participated in both the Columbia Startup Lab and the FinTech Innovation Lab Asia-Pacific 2025 cohort as Climate Kick. Climate Kick rebranded to Hawkish Capital in August 2025 to expand its coverage beyond green assets and apply tokenization to other portfolio types.
