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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
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IMF’s Offline CBDC Blueprint: What It Actually Asks Central Banks to Build
The International Monetary Fund just published its most practical guidance yet for running a central bank digital currency when connectivity is flaky, or indeed gone entirely. The Fintech Note, “Technology Solutions to Support Central Bank Digital Currency with Limited Connectivity” (2025/005), maps the option space for “offline CBDC,” grades trade-offs, and sets out a procurement
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Wallet Interoperability: PayPal World and the Race to Link UPI, PayNow, FPS, & Co.
The dream of paying a Thai street vendor with your Indian UPI app, or sending money from a U.S. PayPal wallet straight into a Chinese WeChat Pay balance, has always collided with the reality of walled-garden schemes, foreign-exchange tolls and clunky integrations. That started to change on July 23rd, when PayPal unveiled PayPal World, a
