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Most big banks can't serve as neutral infrastructure for fintechs because they're also competitors. Fifth Third Bank is the exception, and its Newline platform has the clients to prove it.
What makes Fifth Third so appealing to partners is that it doesn't offer rival products that can complicate a fintech's partnership with a bigger bank. "For example, the JPMorgans, the Bank of Americas, the Citis, U.S. Bankcorps — they've got competing value propositions with the clients in the ecosystem," said Tom Bianco, senior vice president and general manager. "Fifth Third does not." At the same time, its $213 billion in assets give the bank scale it needs to handle the transaction volume.
"Newline is a platform that goes directly from our clients to the core of the bank," said Bianco. "There's no middleware, no intermediaries. It's fully scaled to connect these huge fintechs to the ninth-largest bank in the United States."
One big Newline customer is Stripe, a fintech that processes 1.6% of the world's GDP through its platform and uses Newline's infrastructure to issue payment cards.
Newline also powers parts of the U.S. payment infrastructure for Trustly, which counts PayPal, eBay, FanDuel and T-Mobile as clients.
ADP, one of the nation's largest payroll processors, is another large client. Fifth Third powers ADP's prepaid payroll card, Wisely, which allows workers to receive wages on a card rather than via direct deposit.
The Newline business launched in December of 2021, but it's been rolling out new capabilities ever since. It's now the fastest growing segment in Fifth Third's commercial payments business, which generated more than $1 billion in fee revenue in 2025. The division expects to process more than $25 trillion in payment volume in 2026, compared with the $9 trillion it processed in 2016.
Newline's key product launch in 2025 was agentic commerce infrastructure – the plumbing for a future in which AI agents, not humans, initiate and approve payments.
Agentic commerce is attracting considerable attention, mostly because it's attracted so much venture capital, said Bianco. "Now all the VCs need to figure out how they're going to make a return on it."
Fifth Third and Newline are focused on business-to-business and commercial use cases. That could mean an agent approving invoices, an agent reconciling payments or an agent initiating payments.
"We're trying to stay out of the definition of what agentic commerce will be and build broader capabilities to support a variety of agentic use cases," Bianco explained. "We have to take a more flexible approach."
Newline is betting on being the infrastructure layer underneath whatever agentic commerce turns out to be.
"It's all still very early days. I wouldn't look at it as a fee income line item yet. I think the agentic tooling will become a must-have 18 to 24 months down the road," Bianco said.
"For us right now, it's more of a differentiator from a reputational and innovation standpoint. The market still needs to coalesce around what price point people will pay for it. But we want to be a part of forming the industry," he added.
Newline's success is a reminder that even the most powerful fintechs still need a bank.
