Fintech Nexus Newsletter

There is a new report out today that looks at the impact of generative AI on the workforce and what industries will be most impacted. We have heard before that white-collar jobs, those people with college degrees will be most impacted. This report tries to quantify some of this impact.

Yesterday, Apple shared details on Apple Card usage for the first time. The card was introduced in 2019 and since then it has acquired 12 million users, not a bad effort in less than five years. Users earn Daily Cash rewards when they use the card and Apple reported that the total for 2023 was over $1 billion.

The largest small business lender that you may not even know exists is Amazon Lending. The tech behemoth loans out billions of dollars every year to small businesses on its marketplace. Today, we learned about a new fintech partnership Amazon is entering into with SellersFi (formerly Sellers Funding). SellersFi is a seven-year-old small business lending fintech focused on e-commerce platforms. They provide e-commerce merchants with working capital, payments solutions and more.

It was only Thursday of last week when our lead story was about the challenges banks were facing in the Banking-as-a-Service space. Then Friday we learned that Blue Ridge Bank was hit with its second regulatory action in less than 18 months and is now deemed to be in a "troubled condition".

It is a bold or naïve CEO that prefaces a major announcement with the words, "This will shock the world". New PayPal CEO Alex Chriss said exactly that in his first public interview since becoming CEO. That was a week ago and he was referring to major announcements that would happen at the company's Innovation Day that it conducted yesterday.

It is a bold or naïve CEO that prefaces a major announcement with the words, "This will shock the world". New PayPal CEO Alex Chriss said exactly that in his first public interview since becoming CEO. That was a week ago and he was referring to major announcements that would happen at the company's Innovation Day that it conducted yesterday.

You could say Banking as a Service is under siege. The number of severe enforcement actions BaaS banks received skyrocketed in 2023 to 13.5% of the total. When you consider there are probably only around 100 banks out of 4,800 that are involved in banking as a service, you can see why this number is disturbing.

A $200m equity raise at a valuation double the previous round? No you did not wake up in 2021 this morning, it is (checks watch) definitely January 2024. I was just chatting with someone earlier this week about equity raises and I commented that there seems to be much more activity this month than in January 2023. While we are most definitely not back in 2021, VCs seem to be opening up their checkbooks a little more.

It has been almost two weeks since the SEC approved Bitcoin ETFs and we now have some data on the 10 ETFs that have been trading since then. The two biggest and oldest names in finance are leading the way: BlackRock and Fidelity. Each fund has attracted more than $1 billion in inflows.

This year has not started well for loanDepot. We first heard the news two weeks ago that the mortgage lender had suffered a cyber attack that shut down critical systems.