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A weekly digest of news, opinions, and all things financial technology.

This Week in FintechMatthew Goldman

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

Taxes. Love 'em or hate 'em - your customers all have to do 'em. Every year.

It's no secret that the largest neobanks in the US are offering free tax filing to their members this season. Wonder why? Could it be a 97% tax refund deposit rate? Or a boost in NPS from customers who get their refund deposited up to 6 days sooner?

Get in on the action with april. Find out how embedding tax can grow your business.

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💼 Fintech Job of the Week

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💬 Quote of the Week

🏦 Financial Services & Banking

🚀 Product Launches

JP Morgan is rolling out biometric payments – palm and face scanning – with many major retailers next year.

📰 Other News

CBW Bank, a partner bank to fintechs and banking-as-a-service providers like BankSimple, Moven, Ripple, Bond, Solid, and TabaPay, is reportedly up for sale. If you ever want a fun read on how an ex-Google engineer and Wall Street banker husband and wife team bought the bank in 2008, check out this Fortune article from 2016.

Italian banking group Cassa Centrale is in exclusive negotiations with Worldline to provide payment acceptance and merchant acquiring for Cassa Centrale's 66 bank affiliates.

Central banks are beginning to use LLMs to extract climate risk data from corporate reports.

HSBC adding 50 more bankers to its team that lends to tech and healthcare startups, as it looks to compete for business lines that other banks are winding down.

Commercial Bank of Ethiopia lost over £31 million after a technical glitch let customers withdraw and transfer money that was not in their accounts.

Deutsche Bank cut bonuses by €1.95 million over significant failures in Postbank IT's migration of 12 million customers and 50 billion data sets last year.

Sweden wants to save cash.

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

Everything is fintech: SAP launched an open payments framework for merchants to connect with Stripe, Adyen, WorldPay and Airwallex.

Revolut launched a point-of-sale iPad application for businesses in the hospitality industry.

German brokerage-as-a-service platform lemon.markets launched this week in partnership with Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, and Tradegate.

Mexican financial infrastructure provider Prometeo launched account-to-account payments.

Mortgage solutions platform Maxwell rolled out a point-of-sale system that allows lending teams to connect with other pieces of their workflow, from credit and verifications to pricing and disclosures.

TransUnion launched an AI-powered data analytics platform for financial institutions.

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📰 Other News

Paytm received a crucial lifeline: the National Payments Corporation of India (the builder of UPI), approved Paytm’s third-party payments provider application, so that it can provide payments similarly to Walmart’s PhonePe and Alphabet’s Google Pay. Even so, Paytm’s parent firm One97 Communications’ banking unit, Paytm Payments Bank, will still close down.

Fintech companies Repay, Facebank and Pana joined Green Dot’s cash transaction enablement network.

Thredd, the UK payment processor, entered the US market with a new credit and debit card issuing product to compete against domestic rivals like Marqeta.

Digital asset manager Grayscale filed to spin-off its spot bitcoin ETF.

Investing app Robinhood went live in the UK and marked the occasion with an eight-foot-tall Robin Hood statue firing an arrow in the direction of the Bank of England.

🤝 Partnership Corner

Hosted one-click checkout provider Bolt signed an agreemeent with Checkout.com to become the payment processor's exclusive one-click checkout partner.

👎 The Bad News

Onyx Private, a US neobank that launched to cater to high-earning millennials and Gen Z'ers, is shutting down customer accounts and pivoting to a "B2B white-label platform-as-a-service model for community banks, regional banks, and credit unions."

Only two years after announcing it, Starbucks is shutting down its NFT rewards program.

Silverbird, a digital payments platform for international trade, was put into bankruptcy proceedings.

Finra fined M1 Finance $850,000 over its social media influencers' posts.

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