- Key insights: Newline, Fifth Third's embedded payments platform, generated year-over-year fee revenue growth north of 50% last year, making it the fastest growing segment of the bank's commercial payments segment.
- What's at stake: The year was marked by the addition of key partners, such as Stripe, Trustly, ADP and Corepay.
- Forward look: Cross-selling capabilities to Comerica's clients post-acquisition is a large opportunity for Newline, according to JPMorganChase analysts.
New partnerships in 2025 with some of the hottest names in payments helped solidify Fifth Third's embedded payments platform Newline as the fastest growing segment in the bank's commercial payments business. It hopes to replicate this success this year as it looks to capitalize on new technologies and fresh opportunities to cross-sell its products.
Fee revenue at Newline – the bank's technology platform that allows fintechs and third-party clients to build payment and banking products on Fifth Third's infrastructure – grew 53% year over year in 2025.
That growth was the product of work that Newline has been doing since it spun up the team in 2021, Tom Bianco, general manager of Newline, told American Banker.
"One of the things that we've been on the offensive about is defining what embedded banking, what embedded finance, means to us," Bianco said. "If you need a payment capability directly to power your product, that's embedded payments. If you need to store funds on top of that, that's embedded banking. And if you need credit on top of that, that's embedded finance."
The team then went out and had conversations with fintechs and payment processors to find like-minded companies that saw the world in a similar vein, he said. "Those two things allowed us to have the growth numbers we've had."
Newline's success comes as an important proof point of the role that banks play in an increasingly digital age, where payments are becoming more intertwined within marketplaces and platforms and fintechs are
Some of those like-minded clients include Stripe, which uses Newline to power its treasury platform for fund storage, ACH and wire transfers; Trustly, which relies on Newline for its digital payment infrastructure such as ACH and real-time payments; Corepay, which gets BIN sponsorship and card and spend program services from the bank; Rippling, which also uses Newline for BIN sponsorship; and Circle Internet Group, to which Newline provides stablecoin custody infrastructure.
"When you start to add those names, those logos, those opportunities, on top of your core infrastructure, that's where you really start to see the embedded growth narrative and curve start to play out," Bianco said.
Broadly, Fifth Third's commercial payments division generated more than $1 billion in fee revenue in 2025, and expects to process more than $25 trillion in payment volume in 2026, more than all the U.S. banks between $50 billion and $500 billion in total assets combined, Fifth Third CEO Tim Spence wrote last month in the bank's annual letter to shareholders. By comparison, the bank's commercial payments division processed $9 trillion in total client volumes in 2016, just 10 years prior.
This year, Newline is continuing to invest in its processing capabilities to make sure that its platform can scale in tandem with the growth its marquee clients bring to its tech stack. The company has also found itself playing an advisory role to its clients to help them understand the changes that are coming to the industry.
"We're continuing to invest in processing capabilities – making sure we have the most performant platforms out there," Bianco said. "I'm also excited about what we're doing on the fund storage or the deposit side. There's an opportunity to kind of contemporize some of those offerings and bring a more API-first design to how our clients build deposit programs."
New technologies, such as
"Now we have the ability for somebody to hit the Newline infrastructure, approve an invoice via their agent, and we can actually release payment and reconcile it," Bianco said.
Cross-selling to Comerica clients is one of the largest opportunities for Newline to grow in the near term, according to a JPMorganChase research note.
"Fifth Third plans to build on Comerica's strength in innovation banking including the AI sector with its Newline (embedded payments) product. It is focused on selling to fintech firms within Venture Capital funds and it has already had 25 referrals of Newline," according to JPMorganChase analysts.
"Cross-selling Fifth Third's capabilities into Comerica's clients is a large opportunity. Comerica had a very good client base and very attractive geographies, but due to capital constraints it was unable to grow its business. Fifth Third can now build these back up," the analysts said.
Specifically, Newline will be targeting Comerica's Tech and Life Sciences business, a collection of fintechs and life science companies that are in the early stages of their lifecycle and potentially pre-profit or cash flow negative.
"We're excited to see how we can partner up with tech and life sciences across the innovation economy, more broadly speaking," Bianco said.
