Hello Fintech Friends,

📢 I'm beyond excited to share that we've hired our new Chief Operating Officer at This Week in Fintech, Dennis Owusu-Sem 🚀

Dennis joins TWIF with a long background in fintech and finserv, as a current Advisory Board member at NatWest, former banker at Goldman Sachs and partnerships lead at payments startup NALA, and founder of the Success Talks conference series and a 1 million+ download podcast. (You can hear Dennis talk about scaling these businesses in his interview on the Limitless Podcast.)

Have some great ideas for TWIF? Suggestions? Complaints? Compliments? You can now reach Dennis at dennis [at] thisweekinfintech.

We'll continue to grow our team this year, and are always looking for more great fintech people to join.

📈 We also published our latest public fintechs overview this week, written by Jevgenijs Kazanins, and have some good news: the TWIF Index is up against its comps!

Signals: Public fintechs are becoming affirmatively profitable

Hello, Fintech Friends! Central bankers from all over the world met at the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium, and jointly concluded that the fight against the inflation is going according to the plan, so it is time to cut rates. “The time has come for policy to adjust”, said Jerome

This Week in FintechJevgenijs Kazanins

🍻 Lastly, thank you to everyone who joined us this Tuesday in NYC :) Matt at Codat captured the experience.

Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below. (👍👎 Have feedback for us? Let us know! Enjoying TWIF? Tips are always appreciated 🙏)

As fraudsters become more sophisticated, managing risk gets more difficult. To protect your business, you may be tempted to ask users for more information. But every additional step adds friction, which can easily lead users to drop off.

How do you balance conversions with the need to keep your business safe? Turns out there is a simple solution: progressive risk segmentation. Get this free ebook from Persona to find out more about progressive risk segmentation, to learn how to define and assess risk to your business, and see how to configure your identity verification methods accordingly.

Download now: The strategic guide to identity verification

Want to sponsor a newsletter? See our sponsorship information here.

💼 Fintech Job of the Week

Share your job with 2,000+ fintech people in our Slack #hiring-and-jobs channel.

💬 Quote of the Week

🏦 Financial Services & Banking

🚀 Product Launches

Global e-commerce giant Alibaba partnered with Mastercard in the US to launch co-branded business credit cards – powered by Cardless – to reward businesses for cross-border and domestic sourcing purchases through Alibaba.

Visa launched a feature to simplify direct account-to-account bank payments for users, bypassing direct debit transactions and integrating open banking options into its payment network. The feature will launch in the UK in 2025, followed by the Nordics and remainder of Europe.

Multi-national bank Standard Chartered is wading into digital currencies with its launch of a digital asset custody service in the UAE.

📰 Other News

The FDIC, OCC, and Federal Reserve issued a rare joint statement to begin accepting comments and looking into rulemaking to improve reconciliation of accounts between banks and their fintech partners, in the wake of BaaS provider Synapse's failure and loss of over $100 million in customer funds.

Japanese banks are piloting stablecoin-based cross-border payments.

CBOE, owner of a few stock exchanges, is looking into piloting a new exchange for shares in privately-held companies with UK partner Globacap; meanwhile, the UK government reaffirmed its commitment to Pisces, a regulated market for private company shares.

The UK laid out a roadmap for the development of open banking in the country (the European Payments Initiative anticipates that open banking payments will unseat card payments in Europe by 2027), while Google, Visa and Nubank were among the big names selected for the second round of central bank digital currency testing in Brazil.

Siemens issued a €300 million digital bond on the blockchain.

Goldman Sachs is having difficulty selling off its GM credit card business to Barclays due to the bank's lax lending standards in picking up customers.

Bank and auto lender Ally's stock hit turbulence as it revealed that more auto borrowers are struggling to repay loans.

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

Business neobank Mercury*, which recently hit 200,000 customers, launched working capital loans for its e-commerce customers.

Global (Dutch-HQ'ed) payments giant Adyen launched intelligent payment routing for debit payments in the US, which it reports helped customers achieve an average 26% in cost savings with a 0.22% uplift in authorization rates against earlier debit performance.

Branded payments platform Ansa*, co-founded by an Adyen alum, launched its Ansa Everywhere product to let merchants each launch their own digital cards and wallet programs.

Chinese payments giant Ant Financial launched an AI life assistant, Zhixiaobao, which connects users to agents trained for everything from shopping to fitness to language learning.

Crypto financial platform Uphold launched its own fiat-based FDIC-insured high-yield accounts with an APY up to 5%, provided by Atomic.*

Online split payments provider Kasheesh* launched a tap-to-pay digital card that allows users to split online transactions between up to 5 cards.

Mortgage platform Better.com launched a product to streamline the process for Federal Housing Administration loan recipients to refinance.

Earned wage acccess provider DailyPay rebranded and relaunched its Visa prepaid card.

Aibit launched an AI for financial services people to... pick better projects?

As fraudsters become more sophisticated, managing risk gets more difficult. To protect your business, you may be tempted to ask users for more information. But every additional step adds friction, which can easily lead users to drop off.

How do you balance conversions with the need to keep your business safe? Turns out there is a simple solution: progressive risk segmentation. Get this free ebook from Persona to find out more about progressive risk segmentation, to learn how to define and assess risk to your business, and see how to configure your identity verification methods accordingly.

Download now: The strategic guide to identity verification

Want to sponsor a newsletter? See our sponsorship information here.

📰 Other News

DeFi platform Uniswap hit record transaction volume for the year, despite the crypto winter (source):

UK banking-as-a-service platform Griffin* finished its early access program and opened up its platform broadly to UK fintechs.

Finnish card issuer / processor Enfuce is bringing its two-in-one debit and credit card to the UK, France and Germany.

PayJoy, a provider of financial services to underbanked consumers, expanded into Asia.

Global crypto exchange Binance was granted a full regulatory license in Kazakhstan.

🤝 Partnership Corner

Prism Data*, a provider of embedded cash flow underwriting infrastructure and analytics to help lenders expand approvals and lower losses, partnered with national credit bureau Equifax to better integrate consumer bank deposit data into its credit-scoring. 

Customer experience software provider Alorica partnered with LoanPro to integrate the latter's lending and credit platform to introduce an all-in-one-solution that allows for more efficient and personalized lending and credit servicing. 

Travel and corporate expense platform Navan partnered with Citizens Bank to create a co-branded travel and expense platform.

DocuPhase, a provider of financial automation, partnered with Center, a company modernizing travel and expense management.

👎 The Bad News

The CFPB filed a proposed order against student loan servicer Navient for deceptive practices in making student loans. The order would bar Navient from making new loans, and require them to pay a $20 million penalty and provide $100 million in redress for harmed borrowers.

Brazilian neobank Nubank, now the largest bank in Brazil, is seeing its non-performing loans tick up; 90-day NPLs ticked up to 7% (above the 5.5% average).

The Bank of London was handed a winding-up order by UK tax authorities, which may force them to sell off their assets, due to unpaid tax bills.

Disgraced (and indicted) congressman George Santos' campaign was reportedly banking with Evolve Bank & Trust.

Investors have taken out a restraining order against Bolt founder Ryan Breslow in order to prevent his proposed cram-down investment round from going through.

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