Fintech Nexus Newsletter

Anyway you slice it, we have not been doing a good job in stopping money laundering. It is estimated that we only catch 1-2% of all illicit money flowing through the banking system. Yet as an industry, we spend many billions of dollars in this fight.

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.

We are entering the thick of fintech earnings season and in the last 24 hours, we have seen earnings from two fintech pioneers: PayPal and Adyen. They tell very different stories.

The OpenAI story was eclipsed yesterday by monumental news in the world of crypto. The world's largest crypto exchange, Binance, has agreed to pay $4.3 billion in fines to the U.S. government for violating anti-money-laundering requirements. 

When the CFPB released their long-awaited proposal on open banking rules in October there was cautious optimism from both banking and fintech groups. Fast forward two and a half months, when everyone has had a chance to fully digest the 299-page proposed rulemaking, there are many suggestions for improvement. With the 60-day comment period ending this week, the CFPB has received over 11,000 comments.

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."

Today, a new global report was released from Nasdaq and Oliver Wyman on illicit money flows and the numbers are sobering. The Global Financial Crime Report quantifies the total amount of illicit financial activity and the number is an eye-popping $3.1 trillion. Included in this number is bank fraud covering payments, checks and credit card fraud which is estimated at around $450 billion.

It has been a lean legislative session in Congress for fintech. But this week some progress was made on earned wage access.

Chime is getting into the earned wage access business. The leading digital bank announced yesterday that it is launching MyPay, a new earned wage access service that will allow customers to access up to $500 of their paycheck before payday.

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.