Fintech Nexus Newsletter

With the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried in the spotlight last month it is easy to forget that there is still the massive FTX bankruptcy that has to be sorted out. The next step in that process has now been revealed in the form of a proposal. At this stage, it is just a proposal that must be approved by creditors before it can go to the bankruptcy judge. But the major creditor and consumer groups have agreed to the plan outline.

Forbes is out with its ninth annual Fintech 50 this morning, a subjective list of the hottest startups in fintech. The list is created by Forbes editors, is only open to private companies and it involves analyzing data as well as interviews with company CEOs and industry insiders.

Today, the company announced that they had added a programmable payments feature to their private permissioned blockchain-based JPM Coin.

Last month, it was Chase, this month, it is PayPal launching a new ad business. PayPal has hired Uber's former head of advertising to run PayPal Ads, the new division that will be selling targeted ads based on its customer data.

You may remember a few months ago when PayPal launched Tap-to-Pay on Android for merchants using Venmo and Zettle. Yesterday, the fintech behemoth announced that the feature has now been added for iPhone users.

There is a new report out today that looks at the impact of generative AI on the workforce and what industries will be most impacted. We have heard before that white-collar jobs, those people with college degrees will be most impacted. This report tries to quantify some of this impact.

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.

UK digital banking pioneer Monzo reported its financial results for the 2023-24 fiscal year today. The numbers are impressive. Total revenue was £880 million for the year, more than 2x the £356 million from the previous year.

On Friday, the CFPB announced it was suing mobile peer-to-peer lending platform SoLo Funds for multiple issues. SoLo Funds targets minority and other underserved borrowers with short-term loans of up to $575. This is a challenging population to serve and a difficult niche to profit from.

Many people have called Capital One the original fintech.  Founded in 1994 by Richard Fairbanks and Nigel Morris (of QED) Capital One broke new ground as a monoline credit card bank that married technology and data science before that was a thing in banking.