The stablecoin, bitcoin, and real-time payments land grab (TWIF 12/15)

Hello Fintech Friends,

Whether they're banks or fintechs, more and more financial services providers are moving with lightning speed to enable as many new forms of digital payment as possible, in a bid to win customer transaction volumes.

Also - the 2023 Fintech Formal photo album is out! Relive the night with us 👇

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

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Director of Strategic Accounts at Zero Hash

Zero Hash is a crypto-as-a-service API that enables any platform to integrate digital assets natively into their customer experience quickly and easily (a matter of API endpoints). We power neo-banks, broker-dealers, and payment groups to offer digital asset trading and custody, crypto-backed rewards and round-ups programs, yield through staking and DeFi and NFTs.

Italian bank Intesa Sanpaolo launched a payment ring in partnership with Mastercard, because we haven't had enough first-party fraud lately.

American Express launched SafeKey 2.3 to upgrade its merchant and consumer purchase protections.

Deutsche Bank is collaborating with crypto investor Galaxy Digital and liquidity provider Flow Traders to create a stablecoin, while Fnality, the international blokchain-based payments consortium of global banks, conducted its first live transactions.

Samsung is joining Mastercard's new Wallet Express programme to make it easier for UK banks and card issuers to implement its phone mobile wallet offering.

Mastercard partnered with fintech Brim to embed payment solutions across its end-to-end platform, creating secure experiences for customers and partners.

Visa and Mastercard plan to lower their Canadian interchange fees by up to 27%.

Goldman Sachs is doubling down on private credit.

Spain's CaixaBank is hiring a 100-person generative AI team (maybe it's just reallocating 2022's crypto and web3 teams...)

Who's making the regulators' naughty list this year? Royal Bank of Canada was fined $7.5 million for AML failures. The FDIC hit First Fed Bank with an order to change its practices, alleging unsafe or unsound banking practices, regarding its relationship with fintech partner Quin Ventures.

Regulators are probing Comerica after a botched technology upgrade left the bank’s wealth-management unit short millions of dollars.

The OCC issued guidance to US banks warning them to make sure that buy now, pay later loans are offered in a "safe and sound" manner. The Bank of England, PRA and the FCA issued proposals to increase oversight of critical third parties to financial institutions. The UK's Payment Systems Regulator is proposing a cap on cross-border interchange fees on credit and debit cards. And US congress voted to overturn the CFPB's newly-proposed small business lending transparency rule.

HR and background check platform Checkr introduced gig worker payment and onboarding tools.

Melio added RTP and FedNow real-time payment options to its B2B payment platform.

The parent company of bitcoin life insurer Meanwhile Insurance will give US investors exposure to BTC with its Bitcoin Private Credit Fund.

Airbnb launched pay-over-time in partnership with Klarna in the UK.

Google (disclosure, where I worked) added buy-now-pay-later options to its mobile wallet via Zip and Affirm. The company also lost its antitrust lawsuit against Epic Games, which may pave the way for Android and Apple's app stores to open up more in-app forms of payment for developers.

Wealthfront introduced same-day withdrawals from its 5.00% APY cash account.

Brokerage Clear Street introduced fixed income investing products.

Amazon will no longer accept Venmo as a form of payment in 2024.

Block is planning to release its Bitcoin hardware wallet, BitKey, to 95 countries soon, and Crypto.com received authorization to be licensed as an E-Money institution in the UK.

The stock of India's payment giant Paytm dropped 20% on news of the firm curbing its small-dollar personal loans in the face of new regulation.

AirWallex partnered with e-comm marketplace Woo to become a payment solution on the platform.

FreedomPay partnered with Citi Retail Services to enable Citi Pay lending solutions at the point of purchase for interested merchants.

Block's music streaming service Tidal, purchased from Jay Z by Jack Dorsey, is laying off 10% of its staff.