Fintech Nexus Newsletter

We learned yesterday that federal prosecutors are investigating Block for widespread compliance lapses. NBC News broke this story after interviewing a former Block employee. This person provided roughly 100 pages of documents that showed transactions involving entities in countries subject to U.S. sanctions.

As the price of bitcoin goes, so goes Coinbase. Bitcoin hit an all-time high in the first quarter, and Coinbase reported its best-ever results. The company made $1.18 billion in net income on total revenue of $1.64 billion. Those are impressive numbers, any way you look at them.

The SEC is at it again. Over the weekend we learned that the SEC has sent a Wells Notice to Robinhood regarding its crypto activities.

It was almost a year ago when FIS acquired embedded finance startup Bond. CEO Roy Ng and much of the team stayed on at FIS. Today, we learned about the fruits of this integration. FIS has announced the launch of Atelio by FIS, its new embedded finance platform.

Nubank is a fintech phenomenon. The numbers speak for themselves. Today, the Brazilian digital bank announced that it has surpassed 100 million customers in the three countries it operates in: Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. It is the first digital bank outside of Asia to hit that milestone.

Upstart has been a trailblazer when it comes to using AI in lending. They were the first fintech lender to make it a core part of their offering.

The fintech soap opera that is the Synapse saga took another turn yesterday. We learned less than three weeks ago that TabaPay was acquiring Synapse out of bankruptcy. Now, that deal appears to have fallen apart as disagreements between Synapse, Evolve Bank and Trust and Mercury remain unresolved.

While the AI hype cycle continues, we are starting to see real fintech products come to market using this new technology. Today, core banking provider Temenos has announced the release of its Responsible Generative AI solutions for core banking as part of its "AI-infused banking platform."

We learned back in February that Klarna's AI chatbot was doing the work of 700 people. Today, Klarna is reporting about its employee's internal use of AI. It's internal AI assistant, named Kiki, is answering 2,000 employee questions a day and over 87% of its employees are now using it.

Chime is getting into the earned wage access business. The leading digital bank announced yesterday that it is launching MyPay, a new earned wage access service that will allow customers to access up to $500 of their paycheck before payday.