More positive signs for fintech as spend management unicorn Ramp closed another large funding round. The $150 million was officially called a Series D extension, but it comes at a $7.65 billion valuation, a significant improvement over the $300 million raised for the initial Series D, which was at $5.8 billion.

There have been quite a few fintech startups in recent months that have pivoted to B2B from B2C (Tally, HMBradley, Onyx Private for example), but we haven't seen any fintechs go in the other direction until Mercury announced their personal banking product today.

While check usage has been in decline for years, for many businesses it is still a primary method of payment. According to the Federal Reserve we processed over three billion commercial checks in 2023 valued at over $8 trillion.

Those of you following along closely will know that Fintech Nexus sold its event business to Fintech Meetup in June of last year. We have been focused on digital media since then.

Earnings season for financial services officially kicked off this morning, with three of the top four banks reporting earnings. Let's look at JPMorgan first. By most measures, they crushed it. The country's largest bank reported $13.42 billion in profit on $41.93 billion in revenue - that is for the first quarter folks, not a year.

We learned a couple of weeks back that the former head of Marcus, Swati Bhatia, had taken a job at Santander to lead U.S. consumer and business banking. Yesterday, we learned more details about what this new job is going to entail.

We learned a couple of weeks back that the former head of Marcus, Swati Bhatia, had taken a job at Santander to lead U.S. consumer and business banking. Yesterday, we learned more details about what this new job is going to entail.