FinovateFall Best of Show winner Goodbuy on their unusual path to success and the future of fintech for small businesses.

The Finovate Podcast returns with host Greg Palmer continuing his series of conversations with the FinovateFall 2026 Best of Show winners. In this episode, Cara Oppenheimer and Cary Telander Fortin, co-founders of Goodbuy, share the unconventional origin story behind their company. The two met in Boise in 2017 while touring a daycare, discovered they were both pregnant with their first children, and went on to become close friends and business partners whose kids now attend the same school. Goodbuy began nearly five years ago as a B Corp marketplace for local businesses, born out of Cara's personal experience watching her parents' small business struggle against Amazon and ultimately close during COVID. The idea for the company and its name reportedly came to Cara in the middle of the night, and within a month and a half the pair had raised their first funding round and left their jobs to build Goodbuy full time.

Goodbuy has since evolved into an FI-branded community commerce platform that connects a bank or credit union's member base directly to small businesses in their community, creating a new marketing and growth channel for those businesses while offering members incentives and education. The founders explained that after running their direct-to-consumer marketplace and onboarding 1,500 businesses in just 10 months, they recognized that community financial institutions already had deep, trusted relationships with both small businesses and everyday customers, which led to a strategic pivot into a QSO model around 2025 and 2026. The platform is designed to grow small business deposits, deepen account relationships, and increase interchange income and engagement across a bank's entire customer base. A pilot with MSU illustrated the impact: among 300 businesses onboarded in one region over three months, 56 percent opened new products or grew deposits. The founders also highlighted a compelling insight from their Finovate conversations: since roughly half of Americans work for or own a small business, individual members and small business owners often overlap, meaning that strengthening engagement with one group can unlock value with the other.

Looking ahead, Cara and Cary outlined plans to use their growing base of first-party and third-party data, combined with artificial intelligence, to help banks and credit unions move beyond simply having data on small business prospects toward actively informing go-to-market and relationship-building strategies. In terms of growth, Goodbuy has expanded from a single proof-of-concept partner a year ago to an expected 10 credit union partners by year's end, with more in the pipeline, and the founders expressed hope of tripling that partner base within the next year. Beyond commercial growth, the co-founders emphasized their identity as a B Corp focused on creating real impact for small businesses and the financial institutions that serve them, with a long-term vision of fostering a more equitable, interconnected commerce ecosystem where small businesses across different regions support and learn from one another.

More info:

Goodbuy: https://www.trygoodbuy.com ; https://www.linkedin.com/company/trygoodbuy/

Cary Fortin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caryfortin/

Cara Oppenheimer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cara-oppenheimer-149b4418/

Greg Palmer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregbpalmer/

Finovate: https://www.finovate.com; https://www.linkedin.com/company/finovate-conference-series/

FinovateFall: https://informaconnect.com/finovatefall/

#Finovate #FinovateFall #Goodbuy #fintech #financialinstitutions #AI #banking #communitybanking #creditunion #cufintech #smallbusiness #modernization #technology #businessbanking #fintechstrategy #data #digitaladoption #podcast #fintechpodcast #financialservices #innovation #digitraltransformation #finserv