Fintech Nexus Newsletter

Caitlin Long, the CEO and founder of Custodia Bank, has been fighting for access to the Fed payments system for many years. Custodia first applied for a Fed master account in October 2020. After her application was endlessly delayed, she sued the Fed to review her application. They eventually did and ruled against her. So, she sued the Federal Reserve again.

We haven't written about Silicon Valley Bank in almost a year, but the saga of the third-largest bank collapse continues. SVB's parent company, SVB Financial Group, had $2 billion on deposit at its bank subsidiary. When the FDIC made it clear that all depositors would be made whole, one would assume that included the $2 billion of the parent company's money.

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, Klarna announced an interesting new global partnership with Uber. Klarna is now a payment option for Uber users in the U.S., Germany and Sweden. Interestingly, Klarna is not offering its typical Pay-in-4 payment method. Instead, this is for the Pay Now option that allows users to pay in full with their Klarna account in one click.

One has kept a low profile since Walmart announced the creation of its new fintech startup in January 2021. We have seen an occasional announcement, but the fintech startup has largely remained under the radar.

Late Friday, we learned that Synapse has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and that its assets will be acquired by payments infrastructure company TabaPay. This will not come as a surprise to anyone who has been following the slow-moving Synapse saga for the last 12+ months. The company had done multiple rounds of layoffs and had an ongoing dispute with Mercury.

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

More positive signs for fintech as spend management unicorn Ramp closed another large funding round. The $150 million was officially called a Series D extension, but it comes at a $7.65 billion valuation, a significant improvement over the $300 million raised for the initial Series D, which was at $5.8 billion.

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.

While check usage has been in decline for years, for many businesses it is still a primary method of payment. According to the Federal Reserve we processed over three billion commercial checks in 2023 valued at over $8 trillion.