Everyone is going to have a stablecoin strategy (TWIF 6/5)

Hello Fintech Friends,

Welcome to the new readers who’ve joined us since last week. You’re joining 173,000+ other subscribers who love fintech. Photo by Gizem Agdag. Today's newsletter is brought to you by our friends at Alloy.

This is, you know, nominally a fintech newsletter.

But you’ll notice from this week’s coverage that most of the new product launches came from banks and financial services players. And there are two common threads: stablecoins and AI.

Stables and AI are increasingly blending the distinction between the fintech and crypto spaces, but they’re also blending the distinction between fintechs and banks. A surprising outcome of the stablecoin goldrush may be that banks themselves end up fighting innovators’ dilemma by operating more like fintechs.

Driving the news this week: JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Citi are planning to launch a shared tokenized deposit network by mid-2027, operated by The Clearing House — a defensive move squarely aimed at stablecoins. The system, which some banks are calling "the bridge" and others "the chain," would convert traditional bank deposits into blockchain-based tokens that can move quickly around the clock while keeping funds inside the regulated banking system.

And they’re not alone: Fifth Third, Mastercard, Experian, Cross River, and a consortium of UK banks all launched new AI and tokenization projects this week. Return of the banks, or innovation theater?

It’s not hard to see why more banks want to be like fintechs: According to the latest data from FT Partners and BCG, fintech revenues surpasses half a trillion dollars this year, with 74% of the biggest public players turning a profit and average EBITDA margins rising 400 basis points to 20% in 2025. See the full report here.

Thinking about launching your own stablecoin strateggy?

Join us at Stablecon in Washington DC Sep 9-11! Ticket prices go up tonight at midnight:

And don’t forget: We’re hosting a whole calendar of community events that week around the conference.

Want to partner? Add your event to the Stablecoin Week agenda.

Have a big stablecoin announcement to share? We’ll help you break it to media, like Thunes’ banking integration announcement from last month’s Stablecon EMEA:

Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below.

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

Fifth Third launched "Fifth Third for Business," a comprehensive small business banking experience combining digital lending, faster payments, cash flow tools, and local banker support — arriving after the bank became the ninth-largest U.S. bank following its merger with Comerica.

Experian launched an Experian Loans app inside ChatGPT, letting consumers explore personalized personal loan offers from its lender network directly within the conversational AI platform — the company's latest extension of its marketplace into third-party AI interfaces.

Cross River Bank agreed to purchase up to $250 million of Figure's crypto-backed loans under a forward-flow agreement, marking the bank's first transaction in digital-asset-backed lending and signaling growing institutional appetite for the asset class as it rebounds from the 2022 crypto credit collapse.

The UK Payments Initiative went live as a new industry-backed company with support from Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, NatWest, Revolut, Monzo, and Starling Bank, with the explicit aim of challenging the dominance of Visa and Mastercard, which currently process over 90% of UK card transactions.

Bank of America announced plans to launch a cross-border real-time payments solution next quarter, enabling corporate and institutional clients to send funds instantly via Swift or its CashPro platform to networks including Mexico's SPEI, the UK's Faster Payments, and India's UPI, with full-principal delivery and no lifting fees.

Mastercard expanded its global settlement network to support 24/7 on-chain settlement using regulated stablecoins including Circle's USDC, Ripple's RLUSD, Paxos-issued PYUSD, and SoFi's SoFiUSD across eight blockchains — giving card issuers and acquirers the ability to settle intraday, on weekends, and on holidays for the first time.

Experian launched its Agent Operating System™, a new agentic AI layer within its Ascend Platform designed to help financial services firms safely scale AI across the lending lifecycle — with ServiceNow as the first partner to integrate, connecting its AI agents to Experian's data and decisioning infrastructure.

CFTC Chairman Michael Selig permitted the listing of a bitcoin perpetual contract on a CFTC-registered exchange — the first time the U.S. regulatory framework has opened a formal pathway for crypto perps.

The U.S. Treasury launched the Trump Accounts app on all major app stores nationwide, allowing families to activate government-backed investment accounts for children ahead of the program's official July 4 launch — at which point eligible children will begin receiving a $1,000 starter contribution.

Quotes of the Week

MoneyGram launched MGUSD, a native U.S. dollar stablecoin issued by Bridge (a Stripe company), built on Stellar and held in Fireblocks wallets — positioning it as the foundation for a broader suite of financial services across its global remittance network.

UK Payments Initiative, a consortium of banks and fintechs, launched the UK's first new payment scheme in nearly 20 years, establishing a shared rulebook for recurring and automated account-to-account payments powered by Open Banking — taking direct aim at cards and direct debit.

Coinbase partnered with Checkout.com to enable stablecoin acceptance across the latter's network of 1,000+ enterprise merchants, letting consumers pay in USDC or USDT while merchants continue to settle in USD through existing rails.

Plynk unveiled a full app rebrand and upgrade, adding a 25% dividend match offer, higher deposit limits, new data visualizations, and a guest mode for users who want to explore the platform before opening a brokerage account.

Oscilar launched Agent Hub, a suite of 30+ coordinated AI agents for risk operations spanning fraud, AML, credit, onboarding, and sanctions — all operating from a unified customer data layer, with customers like SoFi, MoneyGram, and Nuvei already in production.

Crossmint launched an agentic card payments API built on Visa Intelligent Commerce and Basis Theory, letting AI agents make secure, tokenized payments using users' existing Visa cards — with the capability already live in platforms including Claude Code and OpenClaw.

Fireblocks launched Flow, a stablecoin acceptance product for PSPs and fintechs that plugs into existing checkout flows and supports 800+ external wallets across EVM, Solana, and Bitcoin — with Flutterwave among the launch partners.

The Open Transaction Layer launched as an open protocol standard for identity, compliance data exchange, and transaction coordination across institutions, unhosted wallets, and AI agents, backed by a founding group that includes Fireblocks, Robinhood, MetaMask, SoFi, Cross River Bank, and others.

Gusto unveiled Cofounder, an AI agent that automates payroll, compliance, and marketing workflows for small businesses, arriving as the company's own data showed 60% of new business owners used AI to launch their companies in 2025.

ampersend, the autonomous agent payments platform built by Edge & Node, launched real-time sanctions screening and counterparty risk controls for AI agent payments in partnership with TRM Labs.

Cash App released a $25 NFC-powered wand that lets users tap to pay anywhere Visa's tap-to-pay platform is accepted, linked to the Cash App Card — the first in a planned lineup of tag form factors targeting younger users.

Thrive Holdings, Joshua Kushner's AI roll-up vehicle, pledged $1 billion to acquire local accounting firms across the U.S., continuing its push to automate white-collar work with AI.

Paxos became the first blockchain-native firm to receive SEC registration as a clearing agency, allowing its PSSC subsidiary to settle eligible securities on-chain.

Hyperliquid, the 24/7 decentralized crypto exchange, has emerged as a go-to venue for Wall Street traders looking to build or exit positions on weekends and overnight.

OpenAI unveiled a series of new Codex plugins targeting equity investment, banking, and sales roles, with legal and corporate finance features to follow.

Apple readied a native bill-splitting feature for iOS 27, letting users photograph a receipt, assign items per person, and fire off payment requests via Apple Cash.

Wise saw its shares crater as much as 15% after the Brussels Public Prosecutor's Office disclosed an advanced investigation into its European entity over roughly €500 million in suspicious transactions allegedly linked to fraud, corruption, and drug trafficking.