In prediction markets, the house always wins (TWIF 6/12)

Hello fintech friends,

Welcome to the new readers who’ve joined us since last week. You’re joining 174,000+ other subscribers who love fintech. Photo from the AP. Today's newsletter is brought to you by our friends at Plaid.

Driving the news this week:

The CFTC proposed a new rulebook for prediction markets in the US. The framework would allow most sports-related bets while trying to avoid inviting obvious manipulation.

Under the new rules, contracts on player injuries, officiating outcomes, "first-pitch" bets, player ejections, and virtually all bets on war, terrorism, or assassinations would be barred as not in the public interest.

The proposal is notable for what it doesn't do: No raising the minimum age from 18 to 21, no ban on athlete prop bets, and no return to Biden-era election betting restrictions. It formally rescinds the 2024 ban on sports-related event contracts, replacing prohibition with regulated permission — a win for Kalshi and Polymarket.

Scrutiny of prediction markets has grown due to well-timed trades ahead of Trump's major policy surprises. Those trades netted millions for unknown traders, and alleged insider trading cases have multiplied: a Special Forces soldier bet on Maduro's capture, George Santos wagered on his own State of the Union attendance, and many Trump insiders have allegedly bet on policy announcements right before the President’s Truth Social tweets.

Little wonder, then, that the rulemaking doesn’t have much to say about insider trading.

But maybe the key players will read the room and self-regulate: Kalshi also announced this week that it will require users to disclose their employers before placing trades in markets deemed at higher risk for insider trading or manipulation — including contracts tied to corporate performance, national security, and major geopolitical events.

Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below.

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

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

Bank of America is prepping a cross-border real-time payments service launching next quarter, letting corporate, commercial, and financial institution clients send and receive funds instantly through Swift or its CashPro platform.

Mastercard launched Agent Pay for Machines, a service to allow transactions to be permissioned, orchestrated and settled at machine speed across its global payments network.

BMO rolled out DollarGPS, a financial navigation app developed by fintech MSN Holding for its US customers. The tool uses customers' financial data and modeling to deliver long-term projections on net worth, cash flows, and debt.

Lloyds teamed up with Stripe to launch Lloyds Accept, a suite of payment tools for small businesses embedded in Lloyds and Bank of Scotland Business Accounts. Powered by Stripe Connect, the offering includes Tap to Pay on smartphones, payment links, and terminal devices.

Visa partnered with OpenAI to secure payments for shoppers within ChatGPT, with purchases backed by Visa's network, security infrastructure, and credentialing capabilities, subject to user controls like spending limits and required approvals.

Japan's three megabanks — MUFG, SMBC, and Mizuho — are plotting a joint stablecoin rollout, planning to begin live commercial transactions by the end of fiscal 2026 (March 2027).

FINNY launched FINNY for Enterprise Teams, a growth platform built for centralized marketing and business development teams at large wealth management firms, with Mercer Advisors serving as flagship enterprise user.

Ramp launched Ramp Applied AI Solutions, a new offering that embeds dedicated engineers with enterprise finance teams to deploy AI agents across accounts payable, procurement, close, expense management, and other finance workflows.

Maple Finance partnered with Tempo, the Stripe- and Paradigm-incubated payments blockchain, to make its syrupUSDC available to fintechs building on Tempo's networ.

Revolut unveiled a market-leading 5% AER instant access savings rate for new UK customers, with the promotional rate running through December 4 on balances up to £25,000.

Rain released its Agent Control Layer, a capability embedded across its APIs that lets businesses set programmatic guardrails on how AI agents spend and move money before transactions occur.

Hey Savi and PayPal launched what they call the UK's first agentic commerce platform with in-app checkout, pairing Hey Savi's AI fashion search across 10,000+ brands with PayPal's agentic commerce and payment layer.

Record OS, founded by early Wise employees Dhruv Chadha and José Luis De La Peña, launched publicly with $2 million in pre-seed funding led by Episode 1 to build a self-assessment platform for the UK's new Making Tax Digital regime.

The European Central Bank is moving to rein in Revolut's European arm, temporarily curbing its ability to launch new products in the EEA and blocking new customers and acquisitions outside the bloc until it fixes "deficiencies" in its approval processes.

Convicted FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried applied for a presidential pardon, more than two years after his conviction over the collapse of his crypto exchange.