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.

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."

By Peter Renton Yesterday, Atomic released an interesting new open banking tool called PayLink. One of the pain points for switching bank accounts...

On Friday, the CFPB announced it was suing mobile peer-to-peer lending platform SoLo Funds for multiple issues. SoLo Funds targets minority and other underserved borrowers with short-term loans of up to $575. This is a challenging population to serve and a difficult niche to profit from.

During the height of the 2021-22 fintech VC boom, no sector was hotter than spend management. Companies like Brex, Ramp and Navan all raised massive rounds at multi-billion dollar valuations. While the category has cooled off, like most areas of fintech, it is still attracting capital from some big names in venture capital.

Goldman's push into consumer finance continues to be a disaster. While CEO David Solomon had grand plans, the entire move has proven to be an unmitigated disaster.

It was three ago last week when LendingClub closed its acquisition of Radius Bank. At that time LendingClub entered into an operating agreement with the OCC that imposed capital restraints and growth limits on the fintech pioneer.

In the new Apple iOS 17.4 update there is a little something for fintech enthusiasts: a new API called FinanceKit. This is another example of Apple edging its way into open banking after last November the company allowed UK users to connect outside accounts.

Marqeta, having already made their mark as a debit card issuing partner, has launched a credit card issuing platform.

UK digital banking pioneer Monzo reported its financial results for the 2023-24 fiscal year today. The numbers are impressive. Total revenue was £880 million for the year, more than 2x the £356 million from the previous year.