Fintech Nexus Newsletter

The fintech space, and the tech space more broadly, is enamored with company valuations. The term unicorn arose out of that fascination.

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.

There are big changes coming to the world of interchange. Today, in a historic settlement, Visa and Mastercard have agreed to cap card interchange fees as they seek to end a legal fight that has spanned almost two decades.

This deal was first rumored to be happening in mid-March.  Yesterday, it became official. Private equity firm Advent International has agreed to acquire Nuvei in an all-cash deal valued at $6.3 billion.

It was almost a year ago when FIS acquired embedded finance startup Bond. CEO Roy Ng and much of the team stayed on at FIS. Today, we learned about the fruits of this integration. FIS has announced the launch of Atelio by FIS, its new embedded finance platform.

Until now, if you wanted to use the myriad of Stripe's product offerings, you had to process payments through Stripe. But that is no longer the case. At the company's annual conference in San Francisco yesterday, Stripe Chief Product Officer Will Gaybrick announced that the company is "extending our modularity to the very core of Stripe: payments processing."

European core banking provider Temenos is the latest victim of a Hindenburg Short Report. The detailed report cites interviews with 25 former employees that allegedly uncovered manipulated earnings and accounting regularities.

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.

HSBC has announced Zing, a new retail-focused service offering inexpensive foreign exchange. The large banks. particularly in Europe, have mainly looked on with envy as startups like Wise and Revolut have built large businesses on the back of offering cheap foreign exchange to tens of millions of retail customers.

This week marks one year since many fintechs thought their world was ending. Almost every venture-backed fintech company banked with Silicon Valley Bank and for three harrowing days last March, many wondered if all their non-FDIC-insured money sitting at Silicon Valley Bank would be safe.