It's all good in the Robinhood (TWIF 8/4)

Hello Fintech Friends,

We already have 40 sign-ups for our Mexico City Fintech Trek!

If you missed it last week: from October 18th to 20th, we'll be taking a group of 30-50 fintech enthusiasts to fully immerse in the Mexico City fintech ecosystem. We'll be working with our partner Quona to bring together founders, investors, executives, and fintech leaders in LatAm's fintech capital.

👉 Interested in joining? Let us know in our Attendee Application Form here.

👉 ¿Interesado ? Háganos saber en nuestra solicitud aquí.

We’ll also be coming to the Hamptons in two weeks! Spots are limited but first-come-first served. Sign up below:

And we’ll see you at DevCon in August with our friends from Method:

…and in Tel Aviv in September with our friends from Team8!

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

👉 Paytrix* (paytrix.io) is hiring a full-time Enterprise Sales lead in London. (Mid-Senior level, 51-200 employees, learn more here.)

600 low-income public-school students in San Francisco were given a bank account with $50 to start saving for college in 2011. The program, started to help lower-income families save for college, now has 52,000 active accounts and $15 million in deposits - $10 million of which came from the students’ families themselves. Still, only a quarter of families have deposited their own money into the accounts. Read more about this fascinating public financial education initiative here.

Our friends at Foundation Capital put together An open letter to the Federal Reserve: “The FedNow System doesn’t improve coverage nor economics, neither does it create new use cases nor meaningfully increase transaction speed (relative to “push to card”). What it does do (if anything) is create confusion about which faster payment network to use.”

CNBC put together a comprehensive list of the 200 top global fintech companies.

Which generation is ‘over’ credit cards again? According to new data from American Express, card spending by Gen Z and Millennial users grew 21% over the last quarter. (Source)

The Western Pacific country of Palau and cryptocurrency builder Ripple are partnering to build a government-backed stablecoin.

American Express launched a new sync program that offers a suite of B2B payments APIs to corporates and lets merchants issue virtual cards on-demand. The card network also partnered with Skipify to let cardholders automatically apply merchant rewards and select the right AmEx card at checkout, using their emails as UUIDs.

Mastercard is kicking cannabis vendors off of its debit cards and Visa is auditing merchants that try to charge credit card surcharges to pay with its cards.

Blockchain is coming from the banks: Commerzbank successfully made a blockchain-based letter of credit transaction.

Citizens Bank partnered with Wyndham hotels to let customers buy-now-pay-later for vacations.

The SEC has confirmed for us all (phew) that ‘bitcoin is not crypto’ and put out new guidance for investment firms to avoid conflicts of interest when using predictive data analytics, while the FDIC searches for somebody to buy Signature Bank’s $18.5 billion of private equity-linked loans.

The UK and Singapore are collaborating on sustainable finance.

France’s privacy watchdog CNIL and UK regulators are looking more closely at Worldcoin’s eye-scanning crypto project to see if it violates data privacy laws and GDPR.

And the FDIC is mad about how banks are reporting their deposit data.

Brale launched its new Treasury product, to let users deploy a stablecoin in under an hour.

Trustmi launched a fraud detection platform for B2B payment processes.

Grounded, led by founder Danae Vachata, launched a banking deposit marketplace with backing from BMO.

Small business neobank Novo launched a new working capital product for its customers and raised $125 million to lend to them.

Embedded insurance provider for financial advisors Modern Life* launched a generative AI assistant for managing life insurance.

Ramp launched a beefed-up version of their core product offering: Ramp Plus.

Bluevine launched a new accounts payable option.

Pocketnest launched a financial wellness tool for independent financial advisor practices.

B2B payments platform Melio launched an option for small businesses to buy-now-pay-later.

Shopify is getting into the consumer credit card game.

Latin American food delivery app Rappi will begin offering loans to restaurants.

eToro registered as a digital asset exchange in Spain.

Russians sent trading of cryptocurrency Tether up 277% as the Wagner rebellion erupted, to dump their rubles.

Apple crossed $10 billion held in its consumer savings accounts.

Robinhood posted its first-ever profitable quarter, logging $25 million in net income thanks to higher interest rates.

LatAm corporate banking platform Jeeves hit $40 million in ARR and expanded into business prepaid cards and cross-border transactions.

Japanese neobank Habitto crossed 12,000 downloads in its first month.

Treasury Prime partnered with Academy Bank.

Klarna is quietly winding down its open banking payments sub-brand.

Corporate bond trading platform LedgerEdge went into bankruptcy.

The SEC came after the founder of crypto ponzi Hex for a fraud of over $1 billion.

Coinbase revealed the SEC asked it to delist all cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin.