It was only Thursday of last week when our lead story was about the challenges banks were facing in the Banking-as-a-Service space. Then Friday we learned that Blue Ridge Bank was hit with its second regulatory action in less than 18 months and is now deemed to be in a "troubled condition".

It is a bold or naïve CEO that prefaces a major announcement with the words, "This will shock the world". New PayPal CEO Alex Chriss said exactly that in his first public interview since becoming CEO. That was a week ago and he was referring to major announcements that would happen at the company's Innovation Day that it conducted yesterday.

It is a bold or naïve CEO that prefaces a major announcement with the words, "This will shock the world". New PayPal CEO Alex Chriss said exactly that in his first public interview since becoming CEO. That was a week ago and he was referring to major announcements that would happen at the company's Innovation Day that it conducted yesterday.

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.