Hello Fintech Friends,

I’m excited to release a project that I’ve been working on for the past five months with Jenny Johnston and the Visa Fintech Partnerships team (especially Dan and Tiffany) -

📜 Envisioning the Future of Money Movement.

Over 22 pages, we dive into what it will truly take to move money into the digital era.

In many ways, the money movement of today represents a ‘faster horse’ version of legacy coinage and credit systems. Money has been digitized, but the digitized versions build on analog settlement systems, reliant on multiple intermediaries, many of which are deputized to monitor and enforce financial policy, with pervasive transaction costs, latency, and inconsistent experiences.

But what would the evolution from faster horses to automobiles look like for money? If we were to design payment systems today, for the digital age, what would we change?

👍👎 Have feedback for us? Let us know!

Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below.

💬 Quote of the Week

📖 Read of the Week

📜 Envisioning the Future of Money Movement (shameless self promotion)

📊 Stat of the Week

53% of consumers trust generative AI to help them with financial planning. (Source)

🏦 Financial Services & Banking

🚀 Product Launches

American Express will launch on-demand virtual cards for the digital product of procurement and spend management company PayEm.

📰 Other News

Blackrock and JP Morgan are partnering on a humanitarian effort: setting up a Ukraine reconstruction bank, to attract billions of dollars in private investment to assist rebuilding projects in the war-torn country.

House Republicans in the US introduced a bill to get rid of famously anti-crypto SEC chair Gary Gensler. (And JP Morgan doesn't agree with him that Etherum is a security.)

Will the crypto revolution come from banks?

It certainly looks like it..... Citadel, Fidelity and Charles Schwab banded together to launch EDX Markets, a new cryptocurrency exchange supporting bitcoin, ether, litecoin, and bitcoin cash - but only for institutions. BlackRock filed to launch a bitcoin ETF for retail investors. Asset manager Franklin Templeton connected its onchain $270 million fund to Polygon's blockchain network. German banking giant Deutsche Bank applied for a digital asset license. Mastercard filed a trademark application specifically for crypto and blockchain tools. The Colombian Central Bank partnered with Ripple on a blockchain payments pilot. The Bank for International Settlements and Bank of England completed a central bank digital currency pilot project. Bank of China's investment arm issued tokenized notes on Ethereum.

Fidelity is getting into European corporate lending.

Bank Abilad became the first financial institution in Saudi Arabia to offer open banking services.

Cases of check fraud are escalating dramatically in the US, with Americans warned not to mail checks, while May credit card data shows that delinquencies are trending upwards to 'normal' levels.

The US CFPB plans to (finally!) make open banking regulations focused on personal financial data ownership a reality in October. (Read more here.)

Two more members of the US House of Representatives signed on to efforts to curb Visa and Mastercard's payment network fees.

The Philippines and India signed a fintech MOU.

A gang of pro-Russian hackers claimed credit for a series of attacks on European banks, including the European Investment Bank.

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

Plaid launched Beacon, its own real-time anti-fraud network.

TradingView added premium real-time stock news coverage from Dow Jones.

Cloud payments and financial messaging provider Volante Technologies unveiled embedded preprocessing.

Consumer neobank Revolut launched a new Premium user plan, Ultra, which costs £540 a year and offers up to £4,100 in benefits.

Google Cloud launched AI-powered anti-money laundering tools for financial institutions.

Plum launched new smart investment features for Irish users.

dLocal added cross-border invoice collection to its international paymetns platform.

Australian consumer fintech Douugh added a stockback rewards Mastercard.

📰 Other News

Google Workspace integrated with Stripe to let businesses accept payments directly in Google Calendar.

Transaction data enrichment platform Ntropy partnered with Ocrolus to enable transaction enrichment from any financial document.

Cross-border payments platform Thunes opened up a Beijing office to start China operations.

Payment rails provider BVNK is expanding to APAC.

Remittances platform Wise signed up IndusInd Bank, its first Indian banking client.

Pan-African payments firm Chipper Cash entered Rwanda's payments market.

🤝 Partnership Corner

BlackRock partnered with investment management software provider Avaloq to enhance its Aladdin investor software suite.

Treasury Prime partnered with Checkout to enable new capabilities. (Treasury Prime also joined the Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) Association.)

Australian B2B corporate card provider Cape selected payments platform Thredd as its issuer-processor.

👎 The Bad News

Neobank Money Ave was hit with a cease and desist order for false deposit insurance claims.

Binance left the Netherlands after failing to get a license, is under investigation in France, and de-registered in the UK. (But it did manage to get a settlement to avoid an asset freeze for Binance.us)

Binance is in enough hot water by itself not to need help - it issued a cease and desist to a fake copy calling itself Binance Nigeria Limited last week as well.

Crypto exchange CoinEx was banned in New York for operating an illegal securities exchange.

A Nigerian high court froze 45 of Flutterwave's bank accounts after claims that the service was being used to defraud users.

Tether temporarily lost its peg to the dollar.

Crypto on/off-ramp Wyre shut down, after a late acquisition bid by Bolt fell through, and users were instructed to remove their assets from the platform.

Come meet us in-person at fintechhappyhour.com, and join our angel investing syndicate.