Hello Fintech Friends,

Fintech founders are getting more creative and ambitious with their product launches.

Generative AI dominated the new product launch announcements this week from One Zero Bank and Bankwell Bank, GenAI banking tool Rogo raised a round, and new data that shows that JP Morgan's is doing a lot of AI research as well. Also this week, Revolut launched an eSIM for UK customers as part of its premium membership. What other non-fintech products will founders launch this year?

Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below. (👍👎 Have feedback for us? Let us know!)

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💬 Quote of the Week

🏦 Financial Services & Banking

🚀 Product Launches

Visa is teaming up with payments fintech Conferma Pay to enable financial institutions to add virtual corporate cards into employees’ digital wallets.

Bankwell Bank in Connecticut is trialing a generative AI assistant for small business lending, in partnership with fintech Cascading AI.

📰 Other News

Citi partnered with Wellington Management and WisdomTree to explore tokenizing private markets on blockchain smart contracts. India, meanwhile, is moving to the next phase of its of its central bank digital currency tests, adding programmability and offline payment capability.

Standard Chartered is evaluating breaking up its corporate and investment banks in order to boost the bank's returns.

About two dozen banks in the US have piled into commercial property loans, at a level which may trigger regulator scrutiny. Meanwhile, late mortgage are piling up for $13 billion mortgage lender Arbor.

The SEC will now require high-speed traders and hedge funds to face new capital requirements, register their activities and report more information on their transactions, as the Treasury's FinCEN department will require investment advisers to start detecting and reporting suspected money laundering.

Following news that JP Morgan is adding 500 new branches this year, PNC Bank plans to spend $1 billion building out its branch network. Meanwhile, JP Morgan is getting sued by the CEO of Viva Wallet, a fintech that it owns, for reportedly "blocking its entry into the US and new European markets."

Germany's BaFin told Deutsche Bank that it must fix its money-laundering controls again.

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

Pan-European neobank Revolut is launching phone plans in the UK with travel eSIMs, a rare move for a fintech. Customers who have the app on their phones and pay for the £55 monthly premium plan will get 3GB of data to use globally, so that they don't lose service when moving internationally. Revolut also launched an AI anti-push payment fraud feature.

Just in time for Valentine's Day, Neon Money Club* launched Score, a dating app for people with good to excellent credit.

One Zero Bank, an Israeli private digital bank, launched its GenAI-based service platform, a digital assistant named Ella 2.0.

Digital mortgage provider Better launched a veterans' loan program.

Klarna rolled out a new service to autofill customer data with merchants, making checkout easier.

Digital investing platform Wealthify is launching a savings account using embedded banking technology from ClearBank.

Financial markets software provider Genesis launched a multi-asset class service automates trade matching, allocation, commissions and confirmation.

Yellow Card, a crypto platform and on/off-ramp in Africa, will introduce support for financial transactions using USD Coin.

Travel fintech Jawnt launched the Jawnt Pass, a commuter debit card made available to riders through an employer.

Mitek launched MiControl, a tool to quickly detect check fraud, reduce losses and further increase consumers’ online security.

Aghanim launched a mobile game developer platform that provides Merchant of Record-level commerce support so that back-office financial tasks related to fraud, taxes, regulatory compliance, currency exchanges, and other aspects of accepting international payments are handled for them.

Crypto wallet app Coca rolled out virtual cards.

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📰 Other News

UK neobank Monzo passed 9 million customers, making it now the 7th-largest bank in the UK by number of customers (with 300,000 business accounts as well).

PayPal is working on a new consumer app in Europe for mobile customers to take advantage of the Digital Markets App by enabling in-person, offline NFC payments via the PayPal wallet.

An Indian parliamentary panel is urging the country to support more domestic fintech digital payments providers, as PhonePe and Google Pay command over 83% of the country's market.

Coinbase integrated its payment functionality into the Ledger live app, to let users by and sell crypto with Coinbase.

🤝 Partnership Corner

Self-custodial crypto wallet MetaMask will now let users buy cryptocurrencies through online trading platform Robinhood.

AtoB, a fintech building a modernized payments system for the trucking industry, announced a new partnership with Mastercard to power their commercial credit card program.

Banking and payment processor i2c added 15 new bank and financial customers across Latin America and the Caribbean.

Abu Dhabi Global Market signed an MOU with the Solana Foundation to advance the development of distributed ledger technology.

Financial conglomerate FIS entered a partnership with Banked, an open banking provider, to drive new pay-by-bank offerings for both businesses and consumers.

Capital markets software provider Blue Ocean partnered with embedded brokerage provider Drivewealth to expand real-time access and connectivity for global brokers.

👎 The Bad News

Temenos: Major Accounting Irregularities, Failed Products And An Illusive Turnaround – Hindenburg Research

Hindenburg ResearchRobert DeVore

Employees at Bolt, once valued by investors at $11 billion, are buying stakes back from investors at a $300 million valuation – a 97% decline in price.

Swedish venture capital firm Kinnevek wrote off its investment in troubled EU money transfer app Monese.

UK family finance app Nosso will wind down.

CEO Rod Ashley will be stepping down from neobank Alba Bank after six years.

The New York Attorney General filed an amended lawsuit against crypto firms Gemini and DCG, alleging that almost 250,000 investors were defrauded out of more than $3 billion, rather than the $1 billion claimed in the initial suit.

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