Fintech Nexus Newsletter

The largest small business lender that you may not even know exists is Amazon Lending. The tech behemoth loans out billions of dollars every year to small businesses on its marketplace. Today, we learned about a new fintech partnership Amazon is entering into with SellersFi (formerly Sellers Funding). SellersFi is a seven-year-old small business lending fintech focused on e-commerce platforms. They provide e-commerce merchants with working capital, payments solutions and more.

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.

Yesterday, Apple held its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), during which it made several interesting announcements. The most relevant to fintech is the new "Tap to Cash" feature that will be built into iOS18. As it sounds, this will allow users to send and receive Apple Cash simply by holding two iPhones together.

A lack of financial literacy can be devastating to maintaining financial health. The big problem is that most people find financial literacy programs boring and don't stick to it. Many fintechs and banks have tried to counteract this by creating gamified learning.

As we hear tell of Mint's demise it becomes clear that the market for personal finance management is evolving beyond just budgeting.

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.

It has been a busy last few days for the CFPB and their fintech work. For the third consecutive day this week our lead story concerns actions taken by the CFPB. This time it is around BNPL. The CFPB is proposing new rules that would essentially lump BNPL in with credit cards when it comes to consumer protections.

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.

For the past two decades, the investment banking ecosystem in fintech has been dominated by one player: Steve McLaughlin's FT Partners. Now, that is not to say that other investments have not done deals. The really big deals are often done by the likes of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, or JPMorgan Chase.

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.