Hello Fintech Friends,

It’s hard to believe it’s almost June - one more month and we roll into 2024 planning 💀

For anyone who will be out at Money2020 Europe in a couple weeks, TWIF and the AWS fintech team would love to see you at our Amsterdam Fintech Happy Hour.

We also had a great time connecting with the community in Bogotá and Delhi this week!

If you’re not yet subscribed, what are you waiting for? Subscribe here to join 60,000+ other fintech enthusiasts!

👍👎 Have feedback for us? Let us know!

Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below.

Life looks a lot different when you stop interrupting the power of compounding. Discover how.

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

📖 Read of the Week

I’m a big believer that decentralized payment systems will, over time, come to replace some of the rails that we’ve grown accustomed to. Today, there are issues with speed, security, and bandwidth on many decentralized rails, but we are only a decade into their development. Ironically, one of the biggest vectors of crypto development today is banks (more on that in the news below), who are quietly at work testing blockchains for everything from cross-border settlement to programmatic lending.

That’s why I enjoyed this read from Placeholder’s Chris Burniske this week, Internet Financial System: Infinity Exchange And Beyond. A few good quotes:

“That said, for blockchains to reach their full potential, we need more and better front-ends that are approachable not only by those at the frontier of innovation, but that surpass the user experience, safety, and compliance standards demanded by the largest institutions in the world.”

“In order for yield curves to be taken seriously and used by pools of global capital, the spread between the APY a borrower pays, and the APY a lender receives, needs to be massively compressed from what’s currently available in DeFi.”

📊 Stat of the Week

“The UK an 8% reduction in financial fraud losses in 2022, down to £1.2 billion, driven by a 17% fall in authorized push payment losses.” (Source)

🏦 Financial Services & Banking

🚀 Product Launches

The banks are innovating this week!

Mastercard launched an open banking application to provider account owner verification and identity insights for users opening new digital financial services accounts.

Citi launched an embedded payments suite for online merchants to collect payments, with lines of credit and installment loans at the point of sale.

A group of Australian banks launched the Fraud Reporting Exchange, a digital platform to report fraudulent transactions en route to other banks.

📰 Other News

Mastercard, PayPal, and Robinhood are all bucking the trend and launching new crypto functionality - Mastercard released Crypto Credential to certify blockchain interactions, and Robinhood launched Robinhood Connect to let users fund wallets without dApps.

Meanwhile, US bank executives including the former CEO of Silicon Valley Bank were grilled by Congress over risk management practices and bank failures in the last few months. Blackstone is in conversation with many of the same banks about stepping in as a private credit provider.

Bangladesh and India plan to trade in their own currencies rather than the US dollar, due to Bangladesh’s lack of foreign reserves. Meanwhile, the BRICS countries are discussing their own common currency to challenge the US dollar.

The UK’s Treasury Committee has advocated regulating crypto like gambling.

And more banks are partnering with fintechs!

Bank of America opened up a new fintech accelerator and Visa added seven new startups to its Asia Pacific accelerator.

Experian launched a new fintech-focused data sharing network to help tackle fraud.

Westpac integrated with Apple’s tap to pay on mobile phones.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore is imposing stricter capital requirements on bank DBS following a wave of digital banking outages.

The CFPB warned banks against creating fake accounts to harvest fees.

Ethiopia’s central bank issued the country’s first-ever mobile money license. The Payments Choice Alliance in the UK is pushing back against the country’s drive to create a cashless economy.

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

Worldcoin, the (deservedly) controversial project from Sam Altman that looks to trade universal basic income for a registered database of everyone’s biometric information globally, launched its digital wallet for identity.

Vault* launched its Canadian corporate spend management, accounting, and banking solution to small businesses out of stealth.

Paysend rolled out a cross-border payment solution to US small businesses and Axis launched a digital payments platform for small businesses.

ComplyAdvantage launched an AI-powered anti-fraud solution.

Coris AI launched SiteRating to help underwrite small businesses.

Revenue-based financing platform Capchase launched a buy-now-pay-later service for SaaS companies, and buy-now-pay-later solution Zip launched an Intake-to-Pay platform.

Bloc launched Bloc Transfers to instantly send money between accounts in Nigeria.

📰 Other News

It emerged that Brex tried to acquire some of Silicon Valley Bank’s business when it was seized by the FDIC in March.

Revolut started offering loans in France. Peach Finance opened up in Canada.

Maker opened up a new custom lending market for its DAI stablecoin.

Crypto exchange BitPanda will invest $10 million in AI, because why not?

🤝 Partnership Corner

Stearns Bank and Sardine partnered on a new risk management system.

Prism Data* and Plaid partnered on credit decisioning using open finance data.

Plaid also expanded its financial data sharing network to new bank partners.

Cape partnered with Mastercard to bring new corporate travel benefits to customers.

👎 The Bad News

The Bank of England rejected Revolut’s application for a banking license due to multiple accounting irregularities.

Lender SoLo Funds settled with the states of California, Connecticut, and Washington DC over the effective APRs of its fee-based revenue. (You can see SoLo's press releases on the DC settlement here, the California settlement here, and the Connecticut settlement here).

The founders of India’s ZestMoney have resigned weeks after a planned acquisition by PhonePe fell through.

It was revealed that Jump Trading did a secret deal to prop up the value of Terra’s failed USD stablecoin.

Binance withdrew from Canada due to new crypto regulations.

Zepz is laying off 26% of its team, Stash laid off 10% of its workforce, and N26 is cutting 71 jobs.

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