Marqeta's $1B day 🤝 Stripe's $1T year (TWIF 3/15)

Hello Fintech Friends,

We're less than 3 months into 2024 and already an overwhelming number of fintechs have announced all-time milestones. Stripe, who released their 2023 Annual Letter this week, is the latest to set new records:

I sat down with Stripe President and Co-Founder John Collison to hear more about Stripe's year, its quickly-growing revenue and finance automation suite, integrating new payment rails, the exploration of AI at Stripe, and more. Check out the interview on our Youtube and below.

If you're coming to New York Fintech Week in April, we'll be hosting events all week! On Monday April 8th, I'll join Ellevest's Sallie Krawcheck, Bessemer's Charles Birnbaum, and FirstMark's Adam Nelson for a World of WealthTech panel, hosted by SVB.

We'll also host a Tuesday Fireside Chat with Itai Damti, the CEO of Unit*, at their offices,

And we're partnered with Rise once again for Monday morning Fintech Coffee,

And last but certainly not least, the Fintech Week Kickoff Party with Method, Spade, and Bond.

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

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Mastercard launched an open banking-powered subscription management tool that banks can plug into their apps and announced a test card with Metamask and Baanx to let users spend crypto by directly converting to fiat.

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The UK is looking into letting private companies trade their shares on public exchanges, and this week announced that the London Stock Market will accept applications for bitcoin and ethereum ETNs, sending prices to new highs. In Hong Kong, ten financial institutions plan to apply to launch bitcoin spot ETFs.

Elsewhere, Goldman Sachs and BNY Mellon partnered with other Wall Street banks to pilot the Canton Network for tokenized assets on the blockchain – and even BlackRock is now going all in on bitcoin.

In faster payments news – India’s UPI payments went live in Nepal and the UK will give banks an extra 72 hours to stall payments if they suspect authorised push payment fraud.

Spanish bank BBVA signed a partnership with Cisco to deliver cybersecurity, collaboration, data center, networking and services delivered by a specialised team.

Mastercard partnered with fintech Galileo to expand product access to the Latin American fintech ecosystem.

It emerged that the Federal Home Loan Bank system charged SVB's regulatory rescuers a $285 million fee to wind down emergency financing.

British bank NatWest is killing off its buy-now-pay-later product less than two years after launch.

UniCredit, Italy’s second-largest bank, was fined €2.8 million over a 2018 data breach.

Australian exchange ASX will pay a $1 million penalty for failing to transparently disclose order information.

The US Chamber of Commerce filed a lawsuit against the CFPB to prevent it from implementing a cap on credit card late fees.

Canadian small business banking provider Vault* launched sub-accounts for businesses.

Buy-now-pay-later provider Klarna is launching open banking settlements in the UK to minimize payment failures.

Apple is moving from finance application to finance platform with the launch of FinanceKit, an API that lets developers fetch transactions and balance information from Apple Card, Apple Cash and Savings with Apple, and partnerships with PFMs like Monarch.

Financial marketplace MoneyLion added a premium membership offering and artificial intelligence-powered search to its PFM.

Chime partnered with Column Tax and April to launch free in-app tax filing.

TomoCredit – the card company which started by offering applicants free crypto, then withdrew the free crypto offer and pivoted to 20% crypto cashback rewards, then scaled down to a 1% cashback card, then pivoted to a “no FICO, no problem” charge card meant to build credit, then moved on to offering a premium black card, then stopped paying its bills – this week launched TomoScore, a new credit-building tool for users without credit scores.

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Card issuer Marqeta processed over $1 billion in a single day.

Brazilian accounting giant CloudWalk announced $320.5 million in revenue and $22.3 million in 2023, with plans to expand to the US.

Octane Lending completed a $300 million securitization.

A group of crypto and finance firms, including Uniswap and Coinfund, came together to promote blockchain-based treasury trading.

Business banking platform Tide will enter the German market.

Cash advance provider Wayflyer is expanding beyond online-only businesses to support brands that sell into brick-and-mortar.

Earned wage access provider DailyPay announced that users can now get early payroll access through Visa+

Treasury management tech provider Treasure Financial partnered with Moment* and Apex to launched fixed income investing.

Quantexa partnered with Microsoft to make its financial decision intelligence solution available to Azure users.

Fireblocks partnered with Zodia Markets to enable simpler stablecoin cross-border payments for large corporations and institutions.

Global payment orchestration provider TabaPay is reportedly working on a deal to acquire embattled banking-as-a-service platform Synapse, after JP Morgan was reportedly retained to find an acquirer (via options including bankruptcy) but did not receive any offers. TabaPay is a vendor of Synapse’s which the latter blames for a $12 million dispute with its partner bank Evolve.

The State of New York settled with cash-advance lender Yellowstone for a $1.4 billion recovery from how it charged interest to borrowers.

Small business and freelancer banking platform Oxygen also plans to shut down its banking services and pivot to health-focused solutions, per Fintech Business Weekly.

Pan-African payments and remittances provider Chipper Cash has suspended its US services and asked customers to withdraw money from the US platform.

Klarna must pay a fine of $733,00 for violating the EU's GDPR regulations.

UK small business lender Funding Circle* (where I first worked in fintech) will separate its US operation from the UK business as its losses widen, to pivot to a new US busines model and, refocus on its more profitable UK business.

Spain blocked Sam Altman's Worldcoin startup from collecting personal data.