Global newsletter

We are almost one year removed from the banking crisis precipitated by the struggles at Silicon Valley Bank. Now, another bank is having its own struggles. New York Community Bank (NYCB) has announced a new CEO and discovered "material weaknesses" in some of its internal procedures.

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.

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.

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.

If you are not paying attention to Nubank, it is time you did. Last week the Latin American fintech leader released their Q4 and full-year earnings and it was another very solid report.

Block reported earnings after the bell yesterday and it was a strong report with solid revenue growth in both Cash App and Square. Revenue for the fourth quarter was above expectations at $5.77 billion and gross profit was $2.03 billion, up 22% from a year ago.

While AI seems to be everywhere these days, one place it is getting real traction is in the compliance space. There is a lot of manual, repetitive work in the compliance teams at large banks and fintechs. Hummingbird is looking to ease that burden with the launch of a new AI-based compliance tool.

We haven't talked about crypto for a while in this newsletter. Coinbase reported earnings yesterday so this provides a perfect opportunity to reflect on the state of crypto.