You could say Banking as a Service is under siege. The number of severe enforcement actions BaaS banks received skyrocketed in 2023 to 13.5% of the total. When you consider there are probably only around 100 banks out of 4,800 that are involved in banking as a service, you can see why this number is disturbing.

A $200m equity raise at a valuation double the previous round? No you did not wake up in 2021 this morning, it is (checks watch) definitely January 2024. I was just chatting with someone earlier this week about equity raises and I commented that there seems to be much more activity this month than in January 2023. While we are most definitely not back in 2021, VCs seem to be opening up their checkbooks a little more.

It has been almost two weeks since the SEC approved Bitcoin ETFs and we now have some data on the 10 ETFs that have been trading since then. The two biggest and oldest names in finance are leading the way: BlackRock and Fidelity. Each fund has attracted more than $1 billion in inflows.

This year has not started well for loanDepot. We first heard the news two weeks ago that the mortgage lender had suffered a cyber attack that shut down critical systems.

We had an update from the Federal Reserve on FedNow this week. There are now 400 banks participating in the instant payments network as either a sender or receiver. They launched last July with 35 institutions and have been growing steadily since then. The last public statement that I have heard was when FedNow chief, Mark Gould, spoke at the American Fintech Council's Policy Summit in November when they had 200 banks on the platform.

The SEC has not had a great track record in court cases against crypto firms in the last few months. And another important case is playing out right now in a New York federal courtroom. Back in June of last year the SEC sued Coinbase arguing that it was operating illegally and that it should register as an exchange and be overseen by the SEC.