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N26 Leadership Reset: Ex-Bundesbank Heavyweight Steps In As Chair Amid BaFin Heat
Germany’s most-valuable digital banking fintech is rewriting its org chart in real time, and it’s probably not for the right reasons. N26 has nominated former Bundesbank executive Andreas Dombret to chair its supervisory board and moved current chair Marcus W. Mosen into the co-CEO seat, changes designed to calm investors and address persistent regulatory pressure…
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Open Finance vs. Data Gatekeeping: Who Really Controls Consumer Data Portability in the U.S.?
For a decade, “open finance” in America has been a handshake, not a law. Banks, aggregators, and apps have stitched together thousands of bilateral agreements that mostly work. In 2025, the détente is fraying. Major banks are moving to charge aggregators for API access, payments networks are pulling back from U.S. open finance bets, and…
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RBI Approves Axio Lenders: A Guide to How Amazon Lending works in India
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Amazon has long flirted with financial services in India. From wallet integrations on Amazon Pay to co-branded credit cards, the e-commerce giant has steadily embedded finance into its retail ecosystem. But this month marks a new chapter. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has granted direct lending approval to Axio, a fintech acquired by Amazon…
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Fintech Financials Hit Maturity: Revenues Up 21%, Profitability Skyrockets to 69%
Fintech has spent much of the past decade in its adolescence, characterized by hypergrowth, lofty promises, and equally outsized losses – which meant that fintech profitability was low. But 2025 marks a turning point. According to a new report from Boston Consulting Group, global fintech revenues rose 21% in 2024, and the proportion of profitable…
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Ripple to Acquire Rail: What This Means for Ripple’s Stablecoin Payments
Ripple has long positioned itself as a bridge-builder between two very different financial universes: the fast-moving, experimental world of blockchain and the highly regulated, entrenched world of banks and payment networks. For over a decade, its pitch has been that blockchain can move money across borders more efficiently than legacy rails. But if there was…
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CFPB Relaunches Open Banking Rules – What’s Next for U.S. Fintech?
In a move that could reshape the competitive dynamics of American finance, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has relaunched its long-anticipated open banking rulemaking process. The effort, announced in August, aims to give U.S. consumers greater control over their financial data and the freedom to share it with fintechs and third-party providers without friction.…
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Fed Axes ‘Novel Activities’ Program: What This Means for Crypto and Fintech Oversight
A Strategic Pivot from Specialty to Standard On August 15, 2025, the Federal Reserve (Fed) announced it will sunset its Novel Activities Supervision Program (NASP), which was created in 2023 specifically to oversee banks’ involvement in crypto and fintech ventures. Going forward, oversight of those activities will be folded into the Fed’s routine supervisory process.…
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Visa Teams Up with Yellow Card to Expand Stablecoin Rails in Africa
When Visa said in 2023 that “every institution that moves money will need a stablecoin strategy,” it sounded like a futurist’s sound-bite. Eighteen months later the card giant is doing more than talking. On 18 June 2025, Visa announced a partnership with Lagos-born payments fintech Yellow Card to pilot USDC-denominated settlement across the 20 African…
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Instant Euro Deadline Looms: Will PSPs Be Ready by 9 Oct?
Europe’s payments clock is ticking louder by the day. Under the EU’s new Instant Payments Regulation, formally Regulation (EU) 2024/886, every payment-service provider that already offers ordinary euro credit transfers must also receive instant euro payments by 9 January 2025 and send them by 9 October 2025. Miss the cutoff, and supervisors can levy “effective,…
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AI vs. AI Fraud: Plaid’s Next Battle
The financial services industry has always been locked in an arms race between fraudsters and security providers. For decades, stronger passwords begat phishing attacks, and biometric authentication sparked a wave of synthetic identities. Today, the next phase of this battle has arrived: artificial intelligence versus artificial intelligence – AI Fraud on a massive scale. Deepfakes…
