At Innovate Finance's Fintech for Good Forum, Visa highlighted the opportunity of recommerce in the creation of a circular economy.
Cambridge announced a joint research effort between the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance and 16 private sector leaders.
Coinbase and Mastercard announced a partnership to offer users more "payment choices" on the upcoming Coinbase NFT platform.
In this analysis, we want to update the discussion of card networks, money movement, and the potential existential threat — or perhaps evolution — to existing infrastructure. It continues the thread on articles like Is Plaid cheap at $5.3 billion for $500 billion Visa? and Marqeta's $300MM of revenue & Ethereum's $20B in ann. transaction fees highlight opportunity and industry structure, and Who are the customers of Embedded Finance, and what do they reveal about Stripe, Affirm, DriveWealth, and Green Dot?, and more generally in this research section. We map Plaid’s progress in building out a payments ecosystem, and highlight Affirm’s debit card product powered in a novel manner through open banking. The analysis visualizes a likely evolution of the space with the introduction of Web3, and highlights a couple of early symptoms.
Square upgrades Cash App into a payment processing powerhouse, completing the loop between the consumer and merchant side of the house. Goldman Sachs acquires GreenSky, adding a lending business at the point of intent. This analysis connects these symptoms into a framework explaining the increasing integration between commerce and finance, and the increasing role that demand generation plays. That in turn explains how the attention and creator economies interconnect with financial services.
The popularity of crypto is rising. Stablecoins have presented a significant opportunity for settlement, but how should banks respond? This, and more were discussed at Fintech Nexus 2022.
The firm is calling it the Plaid Portal and not explicitly tying the launch with a privacy settlement the firm reached on Friday, but the timing is close enough to call.
Meet Islands of Cool, a blockchain-based carbon removal project out of New Zealand that wants to make carbon offsets cool.
Instead of joining a major payments provider, Plaid aims to disrupt the Visa, Mastercard, and Amex payment empire. Partners like Square, Dwolla, and new arrivals to the Plaid ecosystem Checkout.com and Marqeta are members of the new program, building payment capabilities for the new age of fintech.
The principle behind Mastercard’s CipherTrace acquisition, L1 growth, and IRS getting your bank data
Paying attention is the path to seeing and doing. Mastercard has bought CipherTrace to see blockchain-based finance, to launch new businesses, and to plug in more networks into its nexus. The crypto networks proliferate at every layer, creating more computation on Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Fantom, and Solana. The US executive seeks to see more too, asking the banks for their records of financial transactions to enforce taxation compliance.