Hello Fintech Friends,

Every new industry goes through growing pains as it finds its footing. To butcher an old quote, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then there is a massive coordinated regulatory response to keep you from growing, then you win.”

This week, Coinbase and Binance both fell within the crosshairs of the SEC, which sued them for operating an illegal securities exchange in the US, a verdict that would effectively make digital currencies illegal in the US. Surely that is not the Pareto-optimal solution? The CFPB also attacked digital wallets for not being insured as bank accounts. As a counterpoint, the OCC this week published new guidance on bank-fintech partnerships, a framework which will pave the way for banking-as-a-service companies to offer products without introducing undue risk for their banking partners.

Switching tracks a bit - for all of our fintech friends in Singapore next week, come join Osborne, Vinay, and the team at our Fintech Living Room event!

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

Clutch, a state-of-the-art digital lending solution for Credit Unions, faced inefficient and expensive challenges building the infrastructure to offer, transfer and refinance consumer loan products. They turned to Method for help.

Method’s API allows consumers to link all their outstanding liability accounts using their PII  - no credentials required. End users get access to real-time account data such as balances, bill payment date, APRs and more. By working with Method, Clutch has helped credit unions originate over $300M in funded loan volume across 50k+ members.

Find out how we did it >

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💬 Quote of the Week

📖 Read of the Week

Forbes this week released their eighth annual Fintech 50, "a list of the most innovative private fintech companies" and American Banker released their list of the Best Places to Work in Fintech.

I enjoyed this read on how FedNow is going to unlock new investment opportunities. I agree that real-time payments (mostly TCH RTP) in the US are going to provide an opportunity for new value-added services like recurring billing, chargebacks, refund, installments, split payments, future payments, etc. We just need to see the tipping point in RTP adoption before the wave of new platforms and service providers begins.

FT Partners' monthly fintech market update and analysis.

🏦 Financial Services & Banking

🚀 Product Launches

JP Morgan launched its Payments Partner Network, a B2B marketplace for the bank's merchants and corporate treasury clients to access third party integrations for their end-to-end payments and working capital needs. The bank is also using its Onyx blockchain to settle dollar FX trades in India.

📰 Other News

JP Morgan is also betting on the world’s wealthiest, with its new 23 Wall division for the 700 families worth more than $4.5 trillion and is building a blockchain-based settlement system for Indian financial institutions.

Big banks could face up to a 20% (!) boost to their capital requirements following the failures of SVB, Signature, and Silvergate.

Banque de France and Deutsche Bundesbank have successfully tested a communications channel that is resistant to quantum computer decryption attacks.

Swift, the transaction messaging network, is working with more than a dozen financial institutions on a blockchain solution for its messaging network.

NatWest partnered with the University of Edinburgh on a new Centre for Purpose-Driven Innovation in Banking.

UK lawmakers are calling for a dedicated crypto regulator.

Australia plans to phase out all physical checks by 2030!

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

Open banking provider Plaid launched their Plaid Identity Verification tool - an OAuth for financial identity that lets users bring their banking connections with them through a single sign-on.

Adyen launched payout services for customers to pay out acquired funds in the preferred method of their affiliated users or partners up to three days faster.

One Zero, an Israeli neobank, is debuting a generative AI chatbot for customer inquiries.

Argentinian neobank Ualá launched a new savings account in Mexico.

Wealthfront launched automatic portfolio investing for bonds in response to the surge in interest in fixed income products.

Payments orchestration software provider Spreedly launched a payments vault that optimizes payment methods by combining modern lifecycle features and network tokenization with active management.

Wealthtech Masttro launched Document AI for automated capital calls and distributions.

Veridas launched a solution to automatically detect age.

📰 Other News

UK-based payment facilitator Checkout became the first global payments platform to secure an acquiring license from the United Arab Emirates. Coris expanded its SMB customer data solution to the U.K., Canada, and Australia.

Construction procurement platform Kojo expanded its offering to mechanical contractors.

Coinbase is still planning to launch institutional bitcoin and ethereum futures contracts.

Starling Bank enabled a new feature that allows victims of abuse to turn off potentially abusive transaction messages.

Amazon is testing restaurant dining payments in India.

Tether is mining bitcoin in Uruguay as Brazil contemplates shifting away from the US dollar.

🤝 Partnership Corner

Worldpay partnered with Affirm to make buy-now-pay-later available to Worldpay's merchants and Amazon Pay added Affirm as a merchant payment option.

Envestnet | Yodlee partnered with American Express on customer-permissioned data sharing.

Stripe and Block's Cash App partnered up on letting Stripe's US customers use Cash App's digital wallet as a payment method.

Blackhawk Network partnered with Google Pay to enable cash-to-digital payments for Japanese customers.

Embedded finance provider Inswitch partnered with Brazil's Banco Rendimento to enable Brazilians worldwide to make payments with its PIX network rails.

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👎 The Bad News

The CFPB is sounding the alarm about Cash App, Venmo, PayPal, and other digital wallets for not being regulated like bank accounts.

The US SEC sued both Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, and Coinbase, the largest in the US, for de-facto offering unregistered securities through their sale of digital currencies.

Affirm's stock also took a beating due to missed earnings. The firm cut 500 jobs as a result and closed its crypto payments unit.

African B2B commerce platform MarketForce is trimming its budget after investors backed out on $8 million in VC commitments.

Payroll services provider Zellis confirmed that data of eight clients had been stolen due to a zero day vulnerability.

Come meet us in-person at fintechhappyhour.com, and join our angel investing syndicate.