Fintech Nexus Newsletter

The US dollar stablecoin market has long been dominated by Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC). Together these stablecoins have a market cap of around $140 billion or so. While others have tried, notably PayPal last year, there is no other stablecoin with a market cap of more than $3 billion.

We know consumers love BNPL, with millions preferring it over credit cards as a purchase method. We also know that much has been written about consumers misusing BNPL and causing themselves financial difficulties.

Anyway you slice it, we have not been doing a good job in stopping money laundering. It is estimated that we only catch 1-2% of all illicit money flowing through the banking system. Yet as an industry, we spend many billions of dollars in this fight.

In May of last year, Petal announced it had raised a new funding round and was spinning off its infrastructure unit, Prism Data. But then we heard in November that Petal was struggling and looking for a buyer.

We learned a couple of weeks back that the former head of Marcus, Swati Bhatia, had taken a job at Santander to lead U.S. consumer and business banking. Yesterday, we learned more details about what this new job is going to entail.

We learned a couple of weeks back that the former head of Marcus, Swati Bhatia, had taken a job at Santander to lead U.S. consumer and business banking. Yesterday, we learned more details about what this new job is going to entail.

Earnings season for financial services officially kicked off this morning, with three of the top four banks reporting earnings. Let's look at JPMorgan first. By most measures, they crushed it. The country's largest bank reported $13.42 billion in profit on $41.93 billion in revenue - that is for the first quarter folks, not a year.

Those of you following along closely will know that Fintech Nexus sold its event business to Fintech Meetup in June of last year. We have been focused on digital media since then.

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.

There have been quite a few fintech startups in recent months that have pivoted to B2B from B2C (Tally, HMBradley, Onyx Private for example), but we haven't seen any fintechs go in the other direction until Mercury announced their personal banking product today.