Hello Fintech Friends,

As some of the shine comes off fintech this year, know that we’re here with you.

Our colleagues, investors, and journalists may be chasing the next big thing – from crypto to AI – but we’re long-term believers in the massive opportunity of financial technology. Always have been, and always will be. 🙌

Last week, we featured a candid, thoughtful writeup from Daylight's Co-Founder Billie Simmons on where the neobank business model goes from here:

Signals: Where does neobanking go from here?

Building a neobank in 2021 was the wild west. Then, in early 2022, everything changed. What can future neobanks learn from the mistakes of the last cohort?

This Week in FintechBillie Simmons

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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

US Bank launched Avvance, its own point of sale lending solution, competing head-to-head with the buy-now-pay-later providers.

HSBC piloted tokenized deposits in intra-group treasury transactions using blockchain technology provided by China's Ant Group.

📰 Other News

Not everyday you see a regulator partner with a fintech - the CFPB partnered with financial data platform FedFis for actionable data & insights. (Meanwhile, US Senator Richard Durbin of Dodd-Frank fame is asking the CFPB to investigate airlines for devaluing reward programs.)

Singapore is testing out an interoperable QR code payment scheme that will allow merchants to take QR payments from multiple payment rails.

Irish bank AIB apologized for a glitch that affected its online systems.

Deutsche Bank will close between 250 and 550 of its Postbank branches.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore barred DBS from acquiring more companies or shrinking its branch network in order to restore the resilience of its digital banking services following a series of disruptive outages.

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

Money20/20 announced its Startup Network at its Las Vegas show: a chosen a group of companies it believes will revolutionise the world of money, including The Fintech Fund portfolio co's Ansa and Themis.

Neon Money Club* became the first black-owned business to launch an AmEx credit card.

Dwolla, an account-to-account payment services provider, expanded Dwolla Connect, by integrating it with the open finance ecosystem.

Banking-as-a-service provider Unit* launched its white-label app for software companies to embed financial services into their products with one line of code.

Kuwait Finance House launched a Shari’a-compliant digital bank targeting the youth market in Kuwait.

Mortgage provision platform Better launched its own homeowners' insurance product.

In a sign of the times, Drivewealth added support for fixed income and mutual funds.

Tuily launched a business credit card and corporate expense management platform in Colombia.

Oscilar unveiled a generative AI risk decisioning offering that enables companies to manage credit, fraud, and compliance risks.

Cross-border payments firm Nium launched a global competitive FX rate tool.

African neobank and payments firm Eversend introduced money transfers from Europe to 8 African countries.

Forest IQ launched to provide financial institutions with data on how more than 2000 major companies are addressing their links to deforestation.

Global payroll platform Deel announced real-time bank payments for US contractors.

XDA launched a hybrid crypto and bank payment solution purpose-built for video games.

Alongside* launched V2 of their crypto market index, AMKT.

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📰 Other News

Elon Musk has given Twitter / X's team one year to build a better version of a bank account.

Apple rolled out its buy-now-pay-later tool to US customers this week, after a limited release back in March.

UK neobank Monese is moving off of Thought Machine’s core banking solution Vault in favour of its own homegrown XYB platform. Will more fintechs build their own cores?

German regulator BaFin nudged up neobank N26's cap on user growth, from 50k per month to 60k per month.

Card platform Highnote expanded its debit, prepaid, and fleet issuing card platform to enable consumer credit cards.

Modern Treasury enhanced its payment reconciliation engine with AI.

In crypto this week: Taiwan is getting new regulation in-place for crypto, Solana Labs unveiled a new incubator to help grow its ecosystem, and stablecoin market caps have remained steady in the face of bitcoin's growing price.

🤝 Partnership Corner

Plaid partnered with Riskified to enhance risk protection for ACH bank payments and partnered with Adyen to enable pay-by-bank services in North America.

Amazon added Affirm as its first buy-now-pay-later option at the checkout.

Card-to-card and international payments platform Paysend partnered with Western Union on cross-border payments.

LinkedIn partnered with identity provider Persona to identify users in Australia and Brazil.

👎 The Bad News

Intuit is finally winding-down its Mint personal finance app, which still has 3.6 million users, and migrating some functionality to Credit Karma (which is leading to a big influx of users at personal finance app Monarch Money*).

Banking-as-a-service provider Synapse now has two months to find a new banking partner after sponsor bank Evolve discovered a $14 million hole in a Synapse's account.

Swedish buy-now-pay-later giant Klarna faces a union strike at its headquarters next month.

Cloud-native core banking provider Thought Machine is laying off around 8% of its workforce.

UK regulators imposed restrictions on Dzing, an electronic money institution, saying that almost one in five of the payments it received last year were tied to fraud.

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