Fintech Nexus Newsletter

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.

Yesterday, Apple held its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), during which it made several interesting announcements. The most relevant to fintech is the new "Tap to Cash" feature that will be built into iOS18. As it sounds, this will allow users to send and receive Apple Cash simply by holding two iPhones together.

When I first chatted with Mike Cagney back in 2011, when he was CEO of SoFi, it was clear he had big goals. His second act in fintech, Figure, quickly became a leader in home equity lending with all loans originated and processed through blockchain technology.

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.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple has indeed decided to move on from Goldman in roughly 12 to 15 months. This will mean both the Apple Card and the savings account (that was rolled out just a few months ago) will need a new banking partn

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.

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

No, you did not wake up back in 2021 but there is news this morning of a €285 Million (over $300m) fintech funding round. Germany-founded but London-based SumUp has closed the massive funding round that is "mostly equity" which tempers our initial enthusiasm somewhat. But even a nine-figure equity round is enough to make the news these days.

Yesterday, the SEC announced that it is suing Kraken for operating as an unregistered securities exchange. This follows similar actions in June against the two largest crypto exchanges, Coinbase and Binance.

By Isabelle Castro Margaroli McHenry’s “ugly baby” of a stablecoin bill is making some steps forward…albeit at a snail’s pace....