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Following up on tokenized stocks, the topic of a few weeks ago following Robinhood's announcement, I found SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce’s comments on tokenization this week pretty interesting: "As powerful as blockchain technology is, it does not have magical abilities to transform the nature of the underlying asset. Tokenized securities are still securities."

Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below.

(👍👎 Have feedback for us? Let us know. Find me at @nikmilanovic, @twifintech, and @ndm)

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🏦 Financial Services & Banking

🚀 Product Launches

Citi is planning to launch a premium Strata Elite credit card in Q3 2025 to rival Amex Platinum. The card seeks to “round out our family of proprietary rewards cards,” though Citi hasn’t disclosed fees or rewards details yet.

Deutsche Bank went live with Swift’s API-driven Instant Cash Reporting (ICR) tool, enabling corporate clients to access real-time account and balance information via a single ISO 20022-compliant JSON API.

Standard Chartered launched spot-trading services for Bitcoin and Ether to institutional clients through its UK branch, becoming the first globally systemically important bank to offer deliverable spot crypto trading.

📰 Other News

Just about every bank beat earnings this week: Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America... to celebrate, JPMorgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon announced that the bank plans to deepen its stablecoin involvement. Citi CEO Jane Fraser also said that the bank is evaluating issuing a proprietary stablecoin, aiming to smooth payments and tap into tokenized deposits and crypto custody services.

Nasdaq updated its listing rules on July 11 to include additional criteria for crypto-backed Exchange Traded Products (ETPs).

BlackRock set a new record with $12.5 trillion in assets under management during the second quarter, despite headwinds from tariff volatility.

A U.S. judge dismissed the antitrust lawsuit against Apple, Visa, and Mastercard, which had accused them of suppressing point-of-sale competition. The court ruled that the plaintiffs lacked sufficient evidence of wrongdoing.

Barclays paid a £42 million fine over failures in managing money laundering risks.

💬 Quote of the Week

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

Anthropic launched Claude for Financial Services, an enterprise AI platform tailored for analysts, portfolio managers, and underwriters.

Coinbase launched a stablecoin-powered "everything app" to move beyond crypto trading. The "Base App," which replaces Coinbase Wallet, will combine wallet, trading and payment functions as well as social media, messaging and support for mini apps.

OpenAI developed a payment checkout system integrated within ChatGPT, that will allow users to purchase items directly in OpenAI chat.

Highnote expanded its unified embedded‑finance platform in the U.S. by launching Instant Payments.

Socure launched its Workforce Verification solution to combat rising hiring fraud.

Fingerprint announced new Smart Signals and platform enhancements designed to combat fraud in the era of agentic AI.

OpenAI announced this morning that it’s rolling out native checkout inside ChatGPT. | Samantha Klingelhofer

OpenAI announced this morning that it’s rolling out native checkout inside ChatGPT. Instead of relying on Google to tell me what shirt will make me seem friendlier and for Amazon to fulfill it, ChatGPT could collapse the entire funnel into a single conversational flow. The idea is we’re moving beyond affiliate links into a world where discovery, recommendation, and purchase all happen in one place. The holy grail is intent-rich queries + persistent memory + purchase rails = an end-to-end commerce surface without search or display ads. This could be disruptive to the traditional eComm stack including: - Google’s search + ads business - Amazon’s dominance as the default product destination - Retailers relying on paid acquisition for traffic - Agencies built around SEO and SEM But let’s not be dramatic…. this won’t upend the entire eComm landscape overnight. The share of total commerce that flows through ChatGPT-native checkout will likely stay small, at least for now. For most shoppers, ChatGPT will become a new surface in the journey, not the only one. People like shopping – otherwise, all the malls would really have gone away by now, right? I want to put 5 different sweaters in my cart over the course of 30 minutes just to choose 1 in the end. For large brands like Levi’s, there is value in being early to this trend as these folks are the ones likely to be surfaced by models when you search for jeans, but again, this is more additive than cannibalistic. Traditional channels aren’t disappearing but they’re being flanked. The bigger shift is where influence happens. IMO the interface (ChatGPT) and the rails (Shopify, Stripe) will capture the most margin and data-rich incumbents have a head start in training and targeting, So, how do startups capture a piece of the pie? Can they? There is one major gap that stands out: Retailers and eComm platforms don’t have a standardized, model-readable data layer. LLMs can’t optimize for what they can’t interpret, and today’s product catalogs, metadata, and inventory systems were built for humans and search engines, not machines that think in tokens and embeddings. Startups that help structure, enrich, and standardize product data for LLMs have a real opportunity. It isn’t about reinventing the storefront but rather about making products interpretable and rankable in a model-native environment. 👀 Thoughts? Where else are startups better positioned than incumbents and later-stage cos? 👀 | 70 comments on LinkedIn

LinkedInSamantha Klingelhofer

Fintech is evolving fast — are you keeping up? HSBC’s 2025 Fintech Report delivers critical insights into the trends shaping financial technology worldwide.

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💼 Job of the Week

Coinflow Labs hiring Business Development Manager in New York, NY | LinkedIn

Posted 9:33:41 PM. About Coinflow: Coinflow, a Chicago-based fintech startup, is poised to disrupt the payment…See this and similar jobs on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn

Coinflow Labs hiring Risk Operations Analyst in Chicago, IL | LinkedIn

Posted 7:30:22 PM. Company Overview:Coinflow is a well-funded, high-growth startup headquartered in Chicago, dedicated…See this and similar jobs on LinkedIn.

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📰 Other News

Checkout.com launched operations in Canada and appointed Zack Levine as Head of Revenue for North America.

🤝 Partnership Corner

Revolut chose the French protocol Morpho to power its new DeFi yield offering, which will provide users with stablecoin-based returns via Morpho’s liquidity pools.