Fintech Nexus Newsletter

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Back in the go-go days of 2021 the two biggest names in crypto were known just by their initials: SBF (Sam Bankman-Fried) and CZ (Changpeng Zhao). They often took to Twitter arguing with each other about where the market was going and whether certain tokens were overvalued. But there were no bigger names than SBF and CZ. They controlled the biggest crypto exchanges, outside of Coinbase: FTX and Binance.

Goldman's push into consumer finance continues to be a disaster. While CEO David Solomon had grand plans, the entire move has proven to be an unmitigated disaster.