Fintech Nexus Newsletter

Yesterday, the OCC issued new guidance for banks, addressing the risks of buy now pay later lending. The guidance focused on the popular "pay in 4" segment of BNPL.  Not surprisingly, the national bank regulator recommended tight oversight of third-party servicers, the importance of transparent loan terms and fraud mitigation.

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.

While AI chatbots have been around for several years, with the rapid AI advances of the past 18 months, they are reaching a new level of usefulness.

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.

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.

The Fed came back with a plan yesterday to debit card fees for merchants. Will it be too much for banks to handle?

European core banking provider Temenos is the latest victim of a Hindenburg Short Report. The detailed report cites interviews with 25 former employees that allegedly uncovered manipulated earnings and accounting regularities.

More positive signs for fintech as spend management unicorn Ramp closed another large funding round. The $150 million was officially called a Series D extension, but it comes at a $7.65 billion valuation, a significant improvement over the $300 million raised for the initial Series D, which was at $5.8 billion.

Here is another use case for generative AI. BNPL giant Klarna is using Gen AI to run marketing campaigns and generate images.

Late Friday, we learned that Synapse has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and that its assets will be acquired by payments infrastructure company TabaPay. This will not come as a surprise to anyone who has been following the slow-moving Synapse saga for the last 12+ months. The company had done multiple rounds of layoffs and had an ongoing dispute with Mercury.