The Front Page of Fintech

The largest fintech community in the world. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date on the latest in news opinions, and all things financial technology.

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The Front Page of Fintech

The largest fintech community in the world. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date on the latest in news opinions, and all things financial technology.

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Shady rebate payments have class action plaintiffs up in arms (TWIF 8/29)

Shady rebate payments have class action plaintiffs up in arms (TWIF 8/29)
Dubrovnik, 1980s

Hello Fintech Friends,

Welcome to the 601 new readers who’ve joined us since last week. You’re joining 206,000+ other subscribers. Today's newsletter is brought to you by Cascading AI.

Today's headline story is linked below from Forbes' Jeff Kauflin.

The scheme involved prepaid cards. Recipients of a $725 million settlement were issued rebate cards rather than check or bank transfers.

Because these cards operated through a fintech provider, the financial flows were less transparent—making it harder for regulators or even recipients to trace the transactions.

While not definitively stated, such a setup might have enabled cost savings, reduced administrative burdens, or even shielded party actions from public scrutiny—though it raises serious concerns about transparency and accountability.

I hate to say it.

I really hate to:

But this is something that transparent on-chain transactions would have exposed. We rarely talk about transparency as one of the key benefit of stablecoin payments, but it would be very difficult to hide elicit rebates in a wallet-to-wallet class action settlement transaction.

Stablecoins are for everyone.

Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below.

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


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Financial Services & Banking
Product Launches

Wells Fargo expanded its Personalized Unified Managed Account program, enabling qualified clients and advisors to hold a broad range of alternative investments—including private equity, private debt, hedge funds, liquid alternatives, and private real estate—all within a single account.

Neuberger Berman launched its first interval fund, the NB Asset-Based Credit Fund, offering individual investors access to income-focused, short-duration, asset-based private credit investments structured with daily valuations, low minimums, and limited quarterly liquidity.

Other News

The FTC Chair warned US big tech firms—including Apple, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, X, Signal, and Slack—to ensure compliance with UK and EU online safety regulations without compromising US data protections.

EU policymakers are weighing using public blockchains like Ethereum or Solana for the digital euro to counter the dominance of dollar-backed stablecoins in cross-border payments.

HSBC struggled with a mobile and online banking outage that triggered login errors, missed payments, and account access issues for customers across its platforms


Quote of the Week

“In a few years, no one will say they’re “using stablecoins,” just like nobody says they’re “using cloud computing” to store pictures of their kids. They’ll just use money. And stablecoins will be the infrastructure powering it all behind the scenes, moving billions across the globe in real time.” – Shan Aggarwal, Coinbase


Fintech
Product Launches

Plaid scaled its Layer onboarding feature to reach hundreds of millions of users by introducing “Layer Extended Autofill,” enabling faster, more seamless identity and banking data entry across more U.S. consumers.

Rainforest* rolled out two new features aimed at reducing failed payments and surcharging errors to accelerate and improve payment flows.

Kikoff launched an AI-powered credit-dispute tool (“AI Credit Disputes”) to help over 1 million users fix errors on their credit reports for free.

Instant Financial launched real-time, direct-to-bank wage transfers via its Instant Pay EWA solution in partnership with Payouts Network, giving employees same-day access to earned wages in their own bank accounts.

Ant International, Standard Chartered, and Swift collaborated on live production trials of a bank-to-wallet payment system using ISO 20022 messaging, enabling first transactions from Standard Chartered accounts to Alipay+ e-wallets via Swift’s global infrastructure.

Pleo teamed up with lemon.markets to launch “Pleo Investment Account,” an embedded treasury solution that enabled German business customers to invest surplus cash in money-market funds with next-day liquidity—all within the Pleo interface.

Trump Media & Technology Group launched a new venture called “Trump Media Group CRO Strategy” to amass billions of dollars in Cronos tokens through a partnership with Crypto.com and Yorkville Acquisition.


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Partnership Corner

FusionIQ partnered with Novum Investment Management to bring options trading to everyday investors via its platform.

Airwallex announced a partnership with Pipe to leverage its global financial infrastructure, enabling Pipe to offer same-day and next-day payouts and expand into new international markets faster.

Executives from South Korea’s top banks met with Tether and Circle to discuss forming dollar- and won-pegged stablecoin partnerships and distribution plans.

The Bad News

In a class-action payout case involving a $725 settlement from Meta, Blackhawk Network, the fintech that issues the digital cards that the payments are made on, agreed to provide a secret rebate to Angeion, the claims administration firm in charge of doling out the class action funds to harmed consumers. The plaintiffs’ attorneys in the Meta case that hired Angeion only discovered these rebates over the past few months.

The CFPB filed a complaint against Synapse for losing customer funds amid its April 2024 bankruptcy filing.

The Dutch central bank fined digital lender bunq €2.6 million for serious anti-money-laundering control deficiencies found during a compliance review.