The Synapse debacle continues.
Former FDIC Chair Jelena McWilliams is the court-appointed trustee managing the bankruptcy process. She was appointed on May 24.
While AI seems to be everywhere these days, one place it is getting real traction is in the compliance space.
There is a lot of manual, repetitive work in the compliance teams at large banks and fintechs. Hummingbird is looking to ease that burden with the launch of a new AI-based compliance tool.
A lack of financial literacy can be devastating to maintaining financial health.
The big problem is that most people find financial literacy programs boring and don't stick to it. Many fintechs and banks have tried to counteract this by creating gamified learning.
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.
Last month, it was Chase, this month, it is PayPal launching a new ad business.
PayPal has hired Uber's former head of advertising to run PayPal Ads, the new division that will be selling targeted ads based on its customer data.
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.
The fintech soap opera that is the Synapse saga took another turn yesterday.
We learned less than three weeks ago that TabaPay was acquiring Synapse out of bankruptcy. Now, that deal appears to have fallen apart as disagreements between Synapse, Evolve Bank and Trust and Mercury remain unresolved.
Today, Google has announced a pilot program with Affirm and Zip to bring BNPL natively into the Google Pay wallet.
Consumers continue to choose BNPL as a payment option and its popularity continues to grow, particularly during the holiday shopping season.
You could say Banking as a Service is under siege.
The number of severe enforcement actions BaaS banks received skyrocketed in 2023 to 13.5% of the total. When you consider there are probably only around 100 banks out of 4,800 that are involved in banking as a service, you can see why this number is disturbing.
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".