Hello Fintech Friends,

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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

Chase Bank is launching its first UK credit card, offering customers 0% interest on purchases for up to 15 months from its British digital bank.

Fiserv launched a stablecoin called FIUSD and introduced a platform built for regional and community banks (about 3,000 institutions), partnering with Solana, Circle, Paxos, PayPal, and card networks to help smaller banks enter the stablecoin market.

📰 Other News

Visa expanded its stablecoin capabilities across Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, partnering with African crypto exchange Yellow Card to pilot cross-border payment use cases.

American Express announced that it had planned its “largest investment ever” in refreshing its Platinum credit card later in 2025.

FICO unveiled that it will introduce two new credit scoring models—FICO Score 10 BNPL and FICO Score 10 T BNPL—that incorporated buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) data. It's collaborating with Affirm on the initiative, with rollout expected in fall 2025.

Bank of Korea confirmed that it would not oppose the issuance of a won-pegged stablecoin.

The CFPB proposed a rule change that would stop using its Civil Penalty Fund to pay for consumer education and financial literacy programs.

💬 Quotes of the Week

“Fed Chair Jerome Powell says the crypto stablecoin industry has matured and become more mainstream.” - Watcher

“Circle priced its IPO earlier this month at $31 per share, and closed Friday trading at $240.38 per share. That's a whopping 675% increase.” - Axios

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

Will stablecoins be the end of sanctions? A ruble-backed stablecoin, launched in Kyrgyzstan, moved $9 billion in its first four months. Most flows are weekday, done during office hour, reportedly trade payments or state linked actors.

Coinbase launched a stablecoin payments service, unveiling a “stablecoin payments stack” that enabled merchants (including those on Shopify) to accept USDC. It integrates wallet-native checkout (via Coinbase Wallet, MetaMask, Phantom), an API layer for PSPs to manage authorisations, captures, refunds, ledgering, subscriptions, and smart contracts for secure on‑chain transactions.

Zopa entered the UK current account market by launching its mobile‑first “Biscuit” account.

SoFi added new crypto services and blockchain-powered remittances.

Frich rolled out an AI-powered tool named “Frich Scoop” (or “financial reality check”) that estimates a person’s salary and lifestyle costs from their Instagram (and LinkedIn) posts.

Crypto exchange Kraken is launching daily rewards for users who send each other stablecoin and BTC payments using the platform, to catalyze usage.

Alkimiya launched its Stablecoin Metrics Market dashboard.

Expensify added support for importing company cards from over 10,000 banks worldwide.

Join Wilson Sonsini's Fintech and Artificial Intelligence Groups for a timely webinar exploring unexpected legal and regulatory questions wealthtech companies may face when using AI. The webinar will address issues for registered investment advisers, broker-dealers, and technology companies that partner with them. Questions to be discussed include:

• How using AI can trigger registration requirements as an investment adviser or a broker-dealer, even when used largely for analytics
• When engineers who create AI-based programs for wealthtech companies may be subject to regulation based on their coding activities
• When AI-based trading may cause market manipulation concerns
• What regulators expect to see from AI-related policies and procedures

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📰 Other News

X (formerly Twitter) announced that it will soon enable users to invest and trade directly on the platform. X Money will feature a digital wallet with peer-to-peer functionality (launching first in the U.S. via Visa), and a potential physical debit or credit card later in the year.

WhatsApp revealed that it will show ads for the first time, placing them in the Updates tab—not within private chats—and will also offer paid channel subscriptions.

Revolut revealed that CEO Nik Storonsky would stand to gain a lucrative bonus—up to 10% of the company—if he succeeds in tripling its valuation from $45 billion to $150 billion.

My answer to Jack Zhang. | Eytan Messika

My answer to Jack Zhang. Here are 14 problems faced by fintechs like Airwallex moving funds that we never speak about. Few people understand the process of payouts used by the best fintechs in the world. So let me simplify it here: Customers expect payments to be instant everywhere -> fintechs need to hold the currency of the recipient in a foreign account (nostro) -> fintechs need to forecast the amount required to payout and fund such account in advance (pre-funding) every day. This process creates massive underlying operational cost (probably tens of millions per year): 1/Fintechs must tie up massive amounts of capital in foreign accounts across dozens of countries —> Trapped capital cost 2/ Each corridor requires separate pre-funding, creating a geometric scaling problem as they expand —> Expansion cost 3/Predicting daily outflow per corridor becomes exponentially harder as you expand —> Forecasting cost 4/ Spikes in demand (holidays, events..) can drain accounts faster creating liquidity stresses —> Forecasting cost 5/ Managing relationships with dozens of correspondent banks, each with different requirements, cut-off times, and operational procedures -> Operational cost 6/ Holding foreign currency exposes fintechs to FX risk on their nostro accounts —> volatility cost 7/ Exposed to bank operational issues/problems —> Single point of failure cost 8/ Limited negotiating power compared to larger financial institutions -> New incumbents cost 9/ Cutting trading hours after bank hours —> Opportunity cost 10/ Need sophisticated treasury management staff, systems balances, reconcile, and manage cut offs across multiple accounts globally —> Operational cost 11/ Need massive credit funding to make this work at scale —> Debt cost 12/ Marketing "instant" payments while dealing with infrastructure limitations —> Brand cost 13/ Unable to do micro transactions —> Customer experience cost 14/ Need to buy options to hedge against variations in global currencies —> Volatility cost Let me be clear here: stablecoins solve 14/14 of those issues by rethinking from first principles how money moves. How? You don’t hold currencies in nostro accounts. It’s a pay as you go model. We still have issues (banking relationships, regulation, liquidity) but this is in the making. I will keep repeating this: Today we still move money like we ship cargos. Tomorrow, we’ll move money like we send emails. still think it will he hard to be more efficient now in G10 that for most fintechs because the scale is there - But what’s the true cost of moving funds? Wondering if it’s possible to do better with less capital intensive ops if we had to build it from scratch again? It's true that moving EUR->USD costs 1 bps at scale but if it takes 20m$/y to maintain with up to 50 millions in nostros locked. Is it worth it? (Broad assumption here) In exotics - it is. For G10 still a question mark. | 41 comments on LinkedIn

LinkedInEytan Messika

🤝 Partnership Corner

Mastercard joined Paxos’ Global Dollar Network, enabling multiple stablecoins (USDG, USDC, PYUSD, and FIUSD) across its global payment ecosystem.

Nova Credit integrated its cash-flow analytics into Imprint’s underwriting platform.

GiveCard teamed up with Visa to modernize public-sector disbursements.

👎 The Bad News

Worldline saw its share price plunge roughly 38% after a media investigation alleged that it concealed fraud by high-risk clients including gambling, pornography, and dating merchants.