Happy 4th of July weekend to everyone in the US 🎆

🧺 Fintech Picnic is coming back to NYC! Come join us in Central Park on July 22nd for a break form the hustle to catch up and see your fintech friends.

This year, we’ll be partnering with our friends on the AWS Fintech Team to bring our fintech picnic back to the city. AWS provides specialized guidance for fintech startups with our team of financial services experts, working to meet all of your security and compliance requirements. Learn more here.

🌴 Be on the lookout for a one-time Fintech Hamptons event coming this August as well 👀

👍👎 Have feedback for us? Let us know!

Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below.

AWS will be hosting our second FinTech Executive Forum in London on 10 July, a networking and insights event to talk and debate megatrends. Founders and CXOs from 50+ high growth and emerging FinTechs will be present, along with select investors and financial institutions. The focus of the event will cover three main topics: prioritising GenAI projects and products within FinTech and Financial Serivces, Crypto/Web3 regulation and financial institution use, and the next stage of Banking as a Service and key infrastructure trends.

Apply now by joining the waitlist here.

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💼 Fintech Job of the Week

Earnup is hiring a Senior Infrastructure Engineer.

• 🏙️ San Francisco or Remote
• 🕒 Full-Time
• 📄 Senior
• 💸 $185-205K

💬 Quote of the Week

📖 Read of the Week

The Bain Capital Ventures team put together a great compendium of The State of Generative AI in Financial Services. The field of generative AI is relatively new, but this year many companies are evaluating the best ways to incorporate the tech into their products. This is particularly tricky in financial services, which is extremely regulated to prevent unwanted edge cases (like gen AI’s “hallucinations”). I found the examples of early adopters and advice sections particularly interesting.

Elsewhere, Fintech Fund portfolio founder Joshua Silver of Rainforest* was featured by the Credit Suisse's Payments Innovation Event Series to talk about Competition in Platform Payments (Vertical SaaS).

🏦 Financial Services & Banking

🚀 Product Launches

Mastercard is in the process of launching a blockchain app store for regulated financial apps built on decentralized rails - taking advantage of the crypto winter to advance web3 financial products.

Mexico's Banco Azteca launched a fully digital bank account that only requires an INE (identification number) to sign up.

The Bank of Italy launched its own central bank digital currency pilot.

HSBC in Hong Kong launched support for crypto ETFs.

📰 Other News

US Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell stated point-blank that 'stablecoins are a form of money' that the Fed needs to regulate, rather than security under the purview of the (increasingly anti-crypto) SEC.

The EU, meanwhile, reached a deal to define capital requirements for banks holding crypto, effectively allowing banks to directly hold digital currencies on their balance sheets.

Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, may need a full recapitalization from the European Central Bank to cover losses arising from the ECB's bond-buying scheme.

JP Morgan was fined $4 million by the SEC for accidentally deleting 47 million customer emails.

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

Anti-fraud platform Sardine launched SardineX, an industry-wide, independent consortium to curtail payment fraud by bringing together financial institutions and fintechs to track and report fraud.

Square launched its own new credit card and cash-flow management products (similar to Brex, Ramp, or Mercury) for its small business customers.

International remittances platform Sendwave launched its Sendwave Pay banking product for US customers.

📰 Other News

Fintech industry conference giant Fintech Nexus sold its conference assets to up-and-coming conference organizer Fintech Meetup, which will now operate its flagship events while Fintech Nexus refocuses on digital media.

Software giant SAP is using Circle's USDC stablecoin to test faster cross-border payments.

Clear Street, a fintech prime broker, is working on a new investment banking business with strategic advisory services.

Coris' integrated merchant risk platform expanded to 42 additional countries.

Bucking the global anti-crypto regulatory headwinds, Crypto.com received a license in Spain.

German savings platform SaveBetter rebranded as Raisin.

🤝 Partnership Corner

Expense management and travel corporate card provider Navan partnered with both Mastercard and Visa on its Navan Connect card-linking tech.

Brazilian open finance platform Belvo partnered with FICO to expand credit access in Brazil.

Treasury Prime partnered with Sardine.

👎 The Bad News

Robinhood, which made a $90 million acquisition this week of credit card startup X1, also laid off 7% of its full-time employees.

Despite its insistence that this was not the case, it emerged that Tether's stablecoin was once backed by Chinese securities. 🤨

Peer Street, a platform to give accredited investors access to real estate debt portfolios online, will file for bankruptcy.

Lithuania revoked the license of subsidiary of failed embedded banking platform Railsr for AML failures.

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