Hello Fintech Friends,

If you hear that rumble off in the distance… that’s the sound of fintech conference season coming right around the corner.

🌴 If you’re in LA and want to collaborate on a fintech happy hour around June 5th, reach out to Tori on our team at tori@thisweekinfintech.com.

🇲🇽 We’re also putting it up to the community: which week should we host this year’s CDMX Fintech Trek? Right now the leading candidates are in October / November.

📢 Excited to announce that next up in our Ask-Me-Anything series, we're hosting Ahmed Siddiqui, author of Anatomy of the Swipe, and Ricky Graziosi, the co-host of their online payments course. Bring your questions on April 6th!

👍👎 Have feedback for us? Let us know!

Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below.

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💬 Quote of the Week

📖 Read of the Week

If there are Big Topics to be discussed in fintech, so too will there be new Ayo Omojola writeups to discuss them. In this month’s JPMorgan Chase doesn’t care about your deposits, Ayo discusses why most US bank deposits are really insured (even if over the FDIC account limit), why deposit flight is faster in the social media age, why regional banks exist in the first place, and how regulators should think about adapting to the new normal.

In another corner of fintech, Charles Birnbaum, Eric Kaplan, and the Bessemer Ventures team wrote about The Five Waves of Fintech. I always find these retrospectives interesting - the current wave, per Bessemer, is API integration and the development of orchestration layers. My theory is that Waves 6 and 7 will be defined by more decentralization (disintermediating brokers), improved applications of ML and LLMs, and a resurgence of consumer fintech with a focus on unit economics over growth.

I also I enjoyed this week's profile of SMB neobank Mercury* in The Generalist: Mercury is Ready for the Moment.

📊 Stat of the Week

“The UK's open banking sector has created 4,800 jobs and is valued at £4.1 billion.” (Source)

🏦 Financial Services & Banking

🚀 Product Launches

Early Warning Services, the same bank consortium builder of Zelle, released its multi-bank digital wallet to compete head-on with providers like PayPal, GPay, and Apple Pay. The marketing committee-approved wallet name? Paze.

📰 Other News

In the end of a long saga, First–Citizens Bank will purchase the deposits, loans, and 17 branches of Silicon Valley Bridge Bank, beginning March 27th (sending First Citizens’ shares soaring 50% from the news). The purchase included about $72 billion of assets at a $16.5 billion discount and will double the bank’s total assets. About $90 billion in securities and other assets were not included in the sale and continue to be in receivership.

JP Morgan is piloting palm and facial biometric payments with brick-and-mortar stores.

Citi expanded its pan-Nordic digital platform for savings and investments to Sweden.

The FDIC has told Signature Bank’s crypto clients to close their accounts by April 5th.

As regulatory headwinds batter crypto startups, institutions are swooping in: Nasdaq plans to launch a crypto custody solution this quarter. Interbank payments network Swift is planning to release a blockchain for corporate actions data.

But it’s not all bad news for crypto: Customers Bank, Fifth Third Bank, JP Morgan, and BNY Mellon are all still doing business with crypto firms.

French and German police raided the offices of Societe Generale , BNP Paribas, Exane, Natixis and HSBC in a $100 billion tax fraud probe.

The majority of Swiss want UBS and Credit Suisse broken up after the shotgun acqusition at the hands of regulators.

Vanguard will close down its China business and exit its Ant Financial joint venture, while French bank Credit Agricole is launching a China M&A and investment banking business.

The Bank for International Settlements opened a new innovation hub in both Paris and Frankfurt.

The Bank of England raised its rates as well, and Barclays added 14 more branches to its target 55 branches to close this year.

Lloyds Banking Group is opening applications for its 'Launch Innovation' program focused on bank-fintech partnerships.

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

Apple finally launched its long-awaited installment payment product, Apple Pay Later, to let customers split purchases into four installments with no fees.

Atomic Invest* launched a treasury and money-market fund API to enable B2C and B2B financial services companies to offer yield and treasury management services to their customers.

Corporate spend and expense management platform Tribal Credit* launched Cash Copilot, an AI-based financial dashboard for businesses.

Challenger credit card Yonder launched a feature to let users share rewards points with each other.

Crypto wallet Metamask launched an interesting product with Consensys that will let financial institutions stake their ETH for a return.

Savings platform Crescent launched a cash management account with $75 million of FDIC insurance; banking-as-a-service platform Unit* said ‘hold my beer’ and announced $150 million of FDIC insurance through its bank partner sweep accounts.

Source: The Thesis Driving M13's Fintech Investment Strategy

📰 Other News

You know who is happy about higher rates? Stablecoin Tether, which its CTO says is on-track for a first-quarter profit of $700 million.

South African open banking platform Stitch* evolved into a full end-to-end payment service provider to enable payments across the continent, while LatAm fintech infrastructure builder Pomelo registered in Brazil as a payment institution and e-money issuer.

Doordash is adding support for cash payments, but only on its web platform.

Klarna is going shopping with ChatGPT.

SMB bank Novo announced that it originated $20 million+ in merchant cash advances to small business owners. itsme, a Belgian digital identity app with 6.7 million users, turned a profit. Ramp reported 4x revenue growth and customer savings of $400 million.

🤝 Partnership Corner

Automated billing platform Regpack partnered with Stripe to expand its support for international currencies.

Consensys and Moonpay partnered to enable Nigerian users with easy crypto on-and-off ramping via Metamask.

Equity planning platform SecFi partnered with charitable giving platform Daffy on donor-advised funds.

👎 The Bad News

Decentralized protocol SushiDAO was hit with an SEC subpoena and Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, is getting sued by the US’ CFTC for selling unregistered derivatives.

Do Kwon, founder of failed stablecoin venture Terra, was arrested in Montenegro trying to fly to Dubai using fake Costa Rican documents, after asserting that he was not on the run.

Embattled UK embedded fintech provider Railsr, once valued at $100 million, was sold to its investors for £414,000.

Climate8, a sustainable investing startup, will shut down after failing to raise more funding.

HR startup Deel is denying that it misclassified employees as independent contractors.

The Kloud e-commerce founder was detained by Nigerian authorities for allegedly misappropriating funds.

Atlantic Money brought its suit against Wise to the EU Directorate-General for Competition, claiming that Wise won’t show its competitor in its price comparison search engine.

As Fintech Business Weekly’s Jason Mikula notes, the Hindenburg short-seller report leaves out some important global context, which is that fraud rates at payment companies have gone up for almost all consumer payments’ products. Here, for instance, is the search history of payment fraud at Cash App, vs. Venmo, vs. Zelle:

And as Patrick McKenzie has argued before, the optimal rate of fraud is not zero.

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