Fintech Nexus Newsletter

We learned back in February that Klarna's AI chatbot was doing the work of 700 people. Today, Klarna is reporting about its employee's internal use of AI. It's internal AI assistant, named Kiki, is answering 2,000 employee questions a day and over 87% of its employees are now using it.

Late yesterday, we heard the news that Onfido, a pioneer in ID verification used by banks and fintechs all over the world, is going to be acquired by Entrust, a diversified security and verification company.

Global fintech behemoth FIS has signed a new partnership with Banked to expand pay-by-bank options for consumers and small businesses. Banked has created an alternative payment rail based on account-to-account (A2A) connectivity and powers real-time payments through this technology.

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.

Yesterday, the CFPB proposed supervision of “larger nonbank companies that offer services like digital wallets and payment apps.” 

After they famously imploded in March 2023, you could be forgiven for thinking that Silicon Valley Bank's fintech business was done. Not so. This time last year SVB was still the go-to bank for fintech companies, with the vast majority of venture-backed firms as clients. That changed in March.

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.

The UK has published a number of proposals for stablecoin regulation and how to bring the digital asset into the economy.

The Israel-Palestine conflict rages on, and for many fintech workers in Tel Aviv, life has had to continue through the chaos.

The impact of AI in financial services will gain a renewed focus on Capitol Hill. There has been an AI task force on the House Financial Services Committee for some time but we learned late last week that a new bipartisan working group on AI has been formed.