Hello Fintech Friends,

Welcome to the 2,439 new readers who’ve joined us since last week. You’re joining 177,000+ other subscribers who are overwhelmed by all the fintech, stablecoin, and crypto news this week. Today's newsletter is brought to you by our good friends at Plaid.

Wow –

We have a lot to get through this week. Announcements, news, recaps, and product launches, so so many product launches... Half of these stories would be the headline in any other week.

🍻 Stablecon Side Events: We just launched our official side events page for Stablecon at stablecon.com/events – come for the conference, stay for the community meetups! A great list of meetups hosted by Fireblocks, Bridge, Visa, AiPrise, Conduit, BRLA, Caliza, Utila, Confirmo, Trace Finance, and Squads Labs.

📰 Public companies wrap-up, stablecoins, and AI: I want to highlight a few great writeups and interviews we published this week – Payments are cool again by Jevgenijs Kazanins, AI for small business lending by Julie VerHage-Greenberg and Jillian Williams, and The Great Rebundling of Financial Services by Chuk Okpalugo.

🏦 The US Treasury on stablecoins: It's kind of mind-blowing how quickly things are moving in stablecoin land – the US Treasury just published an overview of digital money, how it impacts treasury markets, and different stablecoin use cases. I've shared some of the graphics below.

🎟️ Pay-With-Crypto for Stablecon: Speaking of... tickets for Stablecon are still available at a 10% discount – and you can now pay with crypto! We've partnered with Stripe to enable stablecoin ticket purchases at stablecon.com/tickets

💸 Cross-Border, Banking, & B2B Recap: We've been teasing the video from our NY Fintech Week talk with PingPong CEO of International Business David Messenger. Now you can watch the whole talk on Youtube.

​Key topics included real-time payments – exploring the latest innovations in real-time payments and how they’re reshaping cross-border transactions – and cross-border money movement – analyzing the challenges and opportunities in facilitating smooth cross-border B2B payments. Check it out:

Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below.

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

Financial services are evolving fast. Learn how to adapt your strategy with actionable insight from over 2,000 consumers in our latest report, Money Talks.

Read the report.

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🏦 Financial Services & Banking

🚀 Product Launches

Nasdaq and Amazon Web Services unveiled a capital markets infrastructure blueprint together that focuses on enhancing liquidity, facilitating capital flows, and driving growth.

Mastercard introduced Agent Pay, an agentic payments technology designed to power commerce with AI. Mastercard also announced a strategy to support stablecoin transactions, introducing global end-to-end acceptance and payment capabilities, partnering with crypto platforms like MetaMask, Kraken, and Binance to enable wallet integration and card issuance. (You can see them discuss this on-stage at Stablecon.)

And Visa launched a lot at their launch day this week, including:

• AI-powered 'agentic commerce' advancements to allow consumers to find and buy with AI, introducing new strategic partnerships with Anthropic, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Perplexity, Samsung, and Stripe.
• A new rewards card for people who participate in Sam Altman's Worldcoin 'proof of humanity' basic income project, called The World Card.
• Partnering with stablecoin sandwhich payments orchestration provider Bridge to launch a card-issuing product for debit cards backed by stablecoin balances.
• A stablecoin-backed card in partnership with Fuse.
• Visa also reported a rise in quarterly profit, driven by strong card spending volumes, and announced a $30 billion share repurchase plan.

📰 Other News

The UK Government released draft legislation to regulate cryptocurrency exchanges, dealers, and agents, aiming to enhance consumer protection and foster innovation.

Morgan Stanley plans to offer crypto trading to its retail E*Trade customers.

Nasdaq wants to increase the number of days that options on megacaps like Nvidia and Tesla can expire.

The Federal Reserve withdrew its guidance requiring banks to seek approval before engaging in crypto-asset and dollar token activities.

Nacha and JP Morgan's Kinexys are collaborating to enhance account validation services by integrating their payment information networks.

“80% of banks would reject clients if they processed cryptocurrency.”

💬 Quote of the Week

“But if you meet with the head of a payroll software company and ask him “are you able to keep track of all of your customers’ employees globally so they can pay them” he will be like “man that is the great unsolved problem of computer science, we are pretty sure that it violates the laws of classical physics but we have our best scientists working on it and with a few billion dollars of infrastructure investment we’re hoping to crack it by 2050, but certainly our competitors will never figure it out.” - Matt Levine

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

PayPal released the Agent Toolkit, a library designed to simplify the integration of PayPal's core commerce functionalities into AI agent workflows, enabling tasks like order management and subscription handling.

Revolut announced plans to launch monthly mobile phone plans in the UK and Germany this year, aiming to disrupt the established telecoms market in the EU. 5G, 20 GB, for £/€12.50 a month.

Plaid launched a new Plaid MCP server that brings data, insights, and troubleshooting into one conversation with Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant.

insightsoftware launched EZLease Lessor, a solution designed to reduce risk, cost, and complexity for lessor accounting by automating compliance processes and providing real-time insights.

Tomo Mortgage launched TrueRate, a free tool to give homebuyers a full view into what lenders are actually charging.

Xero introduced US online bill payments powered by BILL, helping small businesses streamline their accounts payable and improve cash flow management.

Fasten unveiled it Fasten Rewards Visa Card, offering consumers rewards on auto-related purchases, including car loan or lease payments, gas, and maintenance, to make car ownership more affordable.

Lynx rolled out new fraud prevention models that shift from identifying isolated fraudulent transactions to detecting entire fraud networks, enhancing the ability to identify complex patterns of fraudulent behavior.

Cross River expanded its international payments solution, offering businesses a range of payment pathways—from SWIFT to local bank rails—powered by smart routing to streamline cost-effective cross-border transactions.

Acuity launched the Acuity Agent Fleet, an agentic AI platform designed to enhance operational efficiency for banks, asset managers, and private equity firms.

Financial services are evolving fast. Learn how to adapt your strategy with actionable insight from over 2,000 consumers in our latest report, Money Talks.

Read the report.

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

🍻 Upcoming Events

Join us for the first LA Fintech Breakfast, hosted by HSBC, Fenwick and Clocktower Ventures. This is a gathering for fintech founders, investors, and enthusiasts to connect, share insights, and talk all things fintech over coffee and light bites.

💼 Job of the Week

Check out our job board for the full run-down.

📰 Other News

A court ruled yesterday that Apple may no longer charge a 30% surcharge for payments made in-app on its platform, opening developers to add their own in-app payment methods.

Coinbase integrated the Lightning Network into its Bitcoin transactions, resulting in 15% of its Bitcoin volume being processed through Lightspark's infrastructure within a year.

Revolut expanded its internal 'Karma' system, linking employee bonuses to adherence to risk and compliance processes and reported a 149% increase in pre-tax profits for 2024, reaching $1.4 billion, with revenues jumping 72% to $4 billion.

Stripe is developing a new stablecoin product through its subsidiary, Bridge, to bypass conventional payment rails.

Darragh Buckley, the CEO of Increase, informed the Federal Reserve that he personally intends to acquire a controlling interest in the holding company of a small community bank.

Wayflyer marked its fifth anniversary by announcing it has lent over $5 billion in working capital to more than 5,000 small businesses globally, including $2.8 billion to over 2,000 U.S. companies.

TomoCredit are somehow still doing their thing.

🤝 Partnership Corner

Crypto.com partnered with Green Dot to enhance banking and money movement features for its U.S. customers.

👎 The Bad News

Deel filed a countersuit against Rippling in Delaware, accusing it of defamation, libel, and deceptive trade practices. This countersuit responded to Rippling's earlier allegations of corporate espionage involving a former employee who admitted to spying on Rippling for Deel.