Fintech Nexus Newsletter

Back in the go-go days of 2021 the two biggest names in crypto were known just by their initials: SBF (Sam Bankman-Fried) and CZ (Changpeng Zhao). They often took to Twitter arguing with each other about where the market was going and whether certain tokens were overvalued. But there were no bigger names than SBF and CZ. They controlled the biggest crypto exchanges, outside of Coinbase: FTX and Binance.

When we covered the BlackRock announcement last week of their new tokenized treasuries fund I thought it was a big deal. One week in, this new investment vehicle (ticker symbol BUIDL) is proving to be quite popular. On-chain data shows that $245 million worth of BUIDL shares are now held in seven different wallets. That is the beauty of blockchain data, everything is transparent.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Patrick McHenry (R-NC) announced yesterday that he will not be seeking reelection to the North Carolina seat he has held for almost 20 years. Over the years whether serving as the Committee Chairman or as the Ranking Member, he has been a tireless champion for financial innovation on the House Financial Services Committee.

The buy-now-pay-later industry continues to grow in popularity. And part of the reason is consumers are starting to understand that most of BNPL stands outside the traditional credit scoring system.

Yesterday, Apple shared details on Apple Card usage for the first time. The card was introduced in 2019 and since then it has acquired 12 million users, not a bad effort in less than five years. Users earn Daily Cash rewards when they use the card and Apple reported that the total for 2023 was over $1 billion.

Greenlight has been a leader in helping young children and teenagers develop financial skills. Its app is used today by more than six million parents and children. While the company was traditionally focused on a direct-to-consumer model, it is increasingly developing partnerships with large banks to accelerate its growth.

Today, Visa announced a new suite of payments capabilities called Visa Commercial Pay. This is a suite of B2B payments tools targeted at corporations.

It was only Thursday of last week when our lead story was about the challenges banks were facing in the Banking-as-a-Service space. Then Friday we learned that Blue Ridge Bank was hit with its second regulatory action in less than 18 months and is now deemed to be in a "troubled condition".

In lieu of a solution that stops the crimes from happening in the first place, bank reimbursement is the only source of protection.

In June of last year, Robinhood announced it was acquiring the credit card startup X1. Today, we learned about the fruits of that transaction: a new Gold Card from Robinhood.