Fintech Nexus Newsletter

By Isabelle Castro Margaroli McHenry’s “ugly baby” of a stablecoin bill is making some steps forward…albeit at a snail’s pace....

We are entering the thick of fintech earnings season and in the last 24 hours, we have seen earnings from two fintech pioneers: PayPal and Adyen. They tell very different stories.

When I first chatted with Mike Cagney back in 2011, when he was CEO of SoFi, it was clear he had big goals. His second act in fintech, Figure, quickly became a leader in home equity lending with all loans originated and processed through blockchain technology.

It’s almost a year since those fateful few days that toppled the crypto king from his throne, and at last, Sam Bankman Fried’s trial is over.

Until now, if you wanted to use the myriad of Stripe's product offerings, you had to process payments through Stripe. But that is no longer the case. At the company's annual conference in San Francisco yesterday, Stripe Chief Product Officer Will Gaybrick announced that the company is "extending our modularity to the very core of Stripe: payments processing."

While it is not yet a wave, fintech consolidation is starting to pick up. And yesterday we learned of another deal, this one in the investing space. While this deal was telegraphed a few months ago there was an official announcement yesterday. Leading investment fintech Yieldstreet is acquiring the real estate platform Cadre.

For some time Fnality has focused on the development of a wholesale payments system built on blockchain. Today, they closed a funding round to help launch.

Forbes is out with its ninth annual Fintech 50 this morning, a subjective list of the hottest startups in fintech. The list is created by Forbes editors, is only open to private companies and it involves analyzing data as well as interviews with company CEOs and industry insiders.

After they famously imploded in March 2023, you could be forgiven for thinking that Silicon Valley Bank's fintech business was done. Not so. This time last year SVB was still the go-to bank for fintech companies, with the vast majority of venture-backed firms as clients. That changed in March.

While check usage has been in decline for years, for many businesses it is still a primary method of payment. According to the Federal Reserve we processed over three billion commercial checks in 2023 valued at over $8 trillion.