Fintech Nexus Newsletter

In a blog post yesterday describing their 2024 plans, we learned that X will be launching peer-to-peer payments later this year. We know that the company has been slowly obtaining money transmitter licenses as it builds out its payments capabilities. But this is the first time we have heard about concrete plans to launch a payments service.

It has finally happened. More than a decade after receiving the first spot bitcoin ETF application the SEC gave its approval yesterday. While this was widely expected, it wasn't a slam dunk as demonstrated by the tight vote: 3-2 in favor with SEC Chair Gary Gensler providing the deciding vote.

Two years ago, before the crypto meltdown of 2022, stablecoin issuer Circle announced that it was going to go public via SPAC at a $9 billion valuation. But then, you know, 2022 happened (Celsius, 3AC, Luna, BlockFi, FTX, etc). So plans were quietly shelved in December of that horrible year for crypto.

The impact of AI in financial services will gain a renewed focus on Capitol Hill. There has been an AI task force on the House Financial Services Committee for some time but we learned late last week that a new bipartisan working group on AI has been formed.

Today, a new global report was released from Nasdaq and Oliver Wyman on illicit money flows and the numbers are sobering. The Global Financial Crime Report quantifies the total amount of illicit financial activity and the number is an eye-popping $3.1 trillion. Included in this number is bank fraud covering payments, checks and credit card fraud which is estimated at around $450 billion.

The long-awaited new overdrafts rule from the CFPB was unveiled today. Since Rohit Chopra took over as head of the CFPB in 2021, they have made it clear that they were going after overdraft fees and this proposed rule is the culmination of those efforts.

The SEC has not had a great track record in court cases against crypto firms in the last few months. And another important case is playing out right now in a New York federal courtroom. Back in June of last year the SEC sued Coinbase arguing that it was operating illegally and that it should register as an exchange and be overseen by the SEC.

We had an update from the Federal Reserve on FedNow this week. There are now 400 banks participating in the instant payments network as either a sender or receiver. They launched last July with 35 institutions and have been growing steadily since then. The last public statement that I have heard was when FedNow chief, Mark Gould, spoke at the American Fintech Council's Policy Summit in November when they had 200 banks on the platform.

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.

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.