Articles
Tracking Fintech Insights and Trends That Shape Money & Markets
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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…
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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…
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What Circle’s USDC Launch in Japan Really Means
Tokyo has finally opened its doors to a foreign-issued stablecoin—and Circle walked through first. On 4 March 2025, SBI VC Trade became the inaugural exchange licensed to list USD Coin (USDC) under Japan’s revamped Payment Services Act, making USDC the first non-yen, non-bank stablecoin legally cleared for domestic use. Two weeks later, Circle announced that…
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Payment Connect Goes Live: How a Single Switch Is Re-Wiring Mainland–Hong Kong Payments
On the 22nd of June, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) flicked the “Payment Connect” switch, linking the mainland’s Internet Banking Payment System (IBPS) with Hong Kong’s Faster Payment System (FPS) in real time. In practical terms, anyone with a mobile number on either side of the boundary…
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Climate Metrics Without Mandates: Will Banks Disclose If They Don’t Have To?
The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision finally published its blueprint for climate-risk disclosure on 13 June 2025, then stamped it voluntary. National regulators are “invited to consider” the climate metrics framework, not obliged to enforce it. The climb-down followed months of lobbying from Washington, where the Trump administration’s Treasury argued that mandatory rules would “outsource…
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UK’s BNPL Clampdown: FCA’s CP25/23 Explained
Buy Now Pay Later exploded by trading soft credit checks for softer regulation: lenders advanced £60 million in 2017 and more than £13 billion in 2024, almost entirely outside the Financial Conduct Authority’s rule-book. That run-way just shortened. On 18 July 2025, the FCA published its 112-page “CP25/23 – Deferred Payment Credit” consultation, the first…
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Agentic Banking: The Rise of a Single-Brain Fintech
For decades, banks have tried to stitch together siloed channels, product systems, and data marts into something that feels like a single institution. In 2025, the ambition is finally getting a name—and a blueprint: agentic banking’s “single brain”. Think of a fabric of specialised AI agents (risk-scoring, treasury-optimising, fraud-hunting, portfolio-rebalancing) all plugged into one shared…
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FedNow Instant-Payment Fraud Lands on Washington’s Agenda: Why the OCC Is Crowdsourcing Fixes for FedNow and RTP
America loves its fast money. Two years after launch, the FedNow Service counts more than 1,000 participating financial institutions and now clears over a million payments a day, thanks in part to a February rules change that lifted the single-transaction ceiling to US$10 million. Yet the same rail that lets wages settle in seconds is…
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Anti-CBDC Act: Could a Privacy Backlash Derail America’s Digital Dollar Ambitions?
As part of “Crypto Week,” the US House of Representatives just passed the “Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act” (H.R. 1919), a measure that would bar the Federal Reserve from issuing, pilot-testing or even researching a retail central-bank digital currency (CBDC) digital dollar capable of being held by the public. Speaker Mike Johnson says the vote will…
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Basel’s Climate Climb-Down: Voluntary, Not Binding, Disclosures Signal the End of Capital Harmony
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The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) spent three years promising a global template for climate-risk disclosure that would anchor prudential rules just as Basel III anchors capital. On the 13th June 2025, it blinked. The final text, published as a “voluntary framework”, invites jurisdictions merely to “consider” adopting its metrics. In one stroke, the…