Hello Fintech Friends,

Welcome to the 1,306 new readers who’ve joined us since last week. You’re joining 189,000+ other subscribers. Today's newsletter is brought to you by our friends at Cross River.

I hope all our American readers had a chance to enjoy Juneteenth yesterday. 🇺🇸 The holiday is always an important reminder of our greatest strengths as a country.

I recently came across an opinion from someone at the FCC and NYYRC –

Of course, anyone who's worked in tech in the United States knows how much of Silicon Valley's leadership can be attributed to poaching the smartest engineers and entrepreneurs from other countries.

But I was curious to get past the anecdata and understand exactly how represented immigrants are in American tech. The data showed the quote to be comically wrong:

Around 25% to 55% of U.S. tech startups are founded by immigrants, depending on the stage and scale of the company.

More specifically:

• 55% of U.S. startups valued at $1 billion or more were founded or co-founded by immigrants, according to a 2022 report by the National Foundation for American Policy.
• 25% of all new U.S. businesses were immigrant-founded, according to the 2023 Kauffman Foundation data.
• Immigrants were responsible for nearly 2x the rate of entrepreneurship compared to native-born Americans in recent years.

In the startup-heavy tech sector:

• In Silicon Valley, over 50% of startups have at least one immigrant founder.
• Immigrants also account for nearly 70% of the U.S. tech workforce in some engineering and computer science fields.

But what about fintech specifically?

While there aren't any overview studies of fintech, looking at some of the largest unicorns in the space:

• Robinhood was co-founded by Vlad Tenev (born in Bulgaria) and Baiju Bhatt (son of Indian immigrants).
• Credit Karma was founded by Kenneth Lin, who emigrated from China at age four.
• Brex was launched by Brazilian nationals Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi.
• Stripe – one of the world’s most valuable fintech companies at $90B+ – as founded by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison.

Even thinking about the history of American national security, a cursory read on The Manhattan Project or the origins of DARPA illustrate how many great scientists the US was able to attract away from the repressive regimes that persecuted them.

I hope Silicon Valley will continue to be the global beacon of entrepreneurship that it has been for the last 50 years.

Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below.

(👍👎 Have feedback for us? Let us know. Find me at @nikmilanovic, @twifintech, and @ndm)

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🏦 Financial Services & Banking

🚀 Product Launches

BlackRock is launching an AI analyst named Asimov to automatically review regulatory filings and identify investment insights for portfolio managers.

Mercurity Fintech partnered with Franklin Templeton to advance the use of real-world asset tokenization with funds managed by FT.

JPMorgan announced a pilot for its deposit token (JPMD) on Base, the public blockchain associated with Coinbase in order to start testing programmable payments for institutional clients.

📰 Other News

This week's biggest news is that the GENIUS Act passed in the US Senate. A few key provisions:

• The Act specifies that (in the US) only permitted issuers — subsidiaries of insured depository institutions, federally qualified nonbank issuers, or state‑regulated issuers — can issue payment stablecoins.
• Issuers can choose federal or state regulation, with state oversight available for smaller entities.
• Issuers have to maintain 1:1 reserve backing using U.S. dollars or liquid equivalents like Treasuries and publish monthly reserve disclosures.
• The Act guarantees that stablecoin holders (ie: depositors) received priority in insolvency proceedings, ahead of other creditors.
• The OCC is the primary regulator for nonbank issuers; the Fed can intervene for state-regulated issuers.
• The Act takes effect either 18 months post-enactment or 120 days after regulators finalize implementing rules.

Interestingly, JP Morgan is specifically working on a deposit token and not a stablecoin. This may mean that it does not plan to provide users with yield, and that it plans to restrict transfers.

Will every large exchange and bank now begin to register stablecoin banking subsidiaries? The OCC received a charter from Fidelity for a bank specific to its digital assets group. The regulator also received a registration request for a de novo stablecoin bank called Erebor, filed by the team at Atticus (Erebor is the Lonely Mountain in Tolkein's Lord of the Rings series, in-keeping with Atticus investor Palmer Luckey's Anduril naming convention.)

UBS suffered a data breach after a cyberattack on vendor Chain IQ exposed personal details of thousands of employees.

💬 Quote of the Week

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

Stablecoin infrastructure provider Paxos launched a new division called Paxos Labs to explore tokenization and stablecoin development outside of its regulated trust entity.

PingPong launched InvestXB, an infrastructure solution in Luxembourg designed to help alternative investment managers streamline fund operations.

Frich launched a tool that estimates individuals’ salaries by analyzing their Instagram posts using AI-powered social cues.

Klarna introduced mobile phone plans for users in Sweden, offering bundled financial and telecom services through its app.

Sidekick launched a wealth platform tailored to six-figure earners, offering personalized financial advice and portfolio management.

Bloomberg introduced an AI-powered research tool to help investors streamline the discovery and generation of alpha-producing investment insights.

StraitsX unveiled a new institutional-grade settlement infrastructure for fiat-backed stablecoins to support cross-border B2B payments.

Pix added support for recurring payments, expanding Brazil’s popular instant payment system to enable automated billing.

Fintechs don’t just need a bank. They need a partner built for hyper-growth, from first payment to full stack.

Cross River delivers API-first infrastructure, a proprietary core (no legacy drag), and automated subledger management for real-time reconciliation.

Next up:  Request for Payment (RFP) over RTP®. Payer-authorized inflows hit instantly –  with finality, transparency and zero delay so you can stop overfunding accounts and start optimizing liquidity.

Want to sponsor a newsletter? See our sponsorship information here.

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📰 Other News

PayPal announced plans to bring its PYUSD stablecoin to the Stellar blockchain, expanding beyond Ethereum to increase global payment reach.

Walmart and Amazon are exploring the use of stablecoins for payments, considering partnerships and internal development to cut costs and improve transaction speed.

Apple updated iOS 26 to allow users to store and verify passports and IDs in the Wallet app, expanding its digital identity functionality.

JD.com revealed plans to launch a global stablecoin initiative to modernize and accelerate cross-border payments and settlements.

🤝 Partnership Corner

Matera partnered with Circle to push stablecoin payments into more markets in Latin America.

👎 The Bad News

Paddle agreed to pay $5 million to settle FTC allegations that it supported deceptive tech support scams through its payment services.