Archive
Everything published by Fintech Takes.
August 2025
- AUG 6Alix, Narrative, Ogment AI, & SOLO
- AUG 6Not Fintech Investment Advice: Alix, Narrative, Ogment AI, & SOLOWelcome back to Not Fintech Investment Advice, where Simon Taylor and I riff about fintech companies we’re absolutely not giving investment advice on (though this one may test our willpower).
- AUG 4Don’t Forget About The Other Banks
- AUG 1Random Thoughts
July 2025
- JUL 31Debt Management’s Abundance MomentLending is a relationship business. However, I believe one of the enduring frustrations in lending is that consumers and lenders are rarely in the same place in the relationship at the same time. Think about the consumer credit lifecycle. You start out in marketing. Consumers sift through a range of similar-looking options via comparison sites […]
- JUL 31Fintech Takes x FairPlay Presents Model Citizens Ep 3: Compliance Officers in the Age of AI: Creating Second Line 2.0Welcome back to Model Citizens: AI Compliance for Banks and Fintech Lenders , a six-part miniseries from the Fintech Takes podcast in partnership with FairPlay.
- JUL 30Who Owns the Data? Who Wins Stablecoins?
- JUL 30Fintech Recap: Chase vs. Data, Congress vs. CryptoWelcome back to Fintech Takes. I’m Alex Johnson, joined (as always) by my partner-in-recapping, Jason Mikula.
- JUL 29Fintech Takes x FairPlay Presents Model Citizens Ep 2: Credit Risk Analytics in the Age of AIWelcome back to Model Citizens: AI Compliance for Banks and Fintech Lenders , a six-part miniseries from the Fintech Takes podcast in partnership with FairPlay.
- JUL 28Trust vs. Data
- JUL 28Fintech Takes x FairPlay Presents Model Citizens: Into the CFPB Void: Regulatory Free-for-All in Financial ServicesWelcome to Model Citizens: AI Compliance for Banks and Fintech Lenders , a six-part miniseries from the Fintech Takes podcast in partnership with FairPlay.
- JUL 25The Fintech Takes: Builders Summit
- JUL 23Hello (costly) APIs; Goodbye CFPB, DEI, & CDFIs
- JUL 23Fintech Takes: Chase Leads, the CFPB Retreats, and There’s Still No ThroughlineWelcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m Alex Johnson, joined by Evan Weinberger, Bloomberg Law reporter and bank regulation whisperer (and the rare guest who can quote both Caddyshack and Empire Strikes Back in a single episode, enjoy).
- JUL 21Girls! Girls! You’re Both Pretty!
- JUL 18Bad For You ≠ Bad For Your Customers
- JUL 17Reaching Beyond the Low-Hanging Fruit in Cash Flow LendingWe should start by saying the use of cash flow data in lending is not new. Perhaps the two most obvious questions to ask when considering whether or not to loan someone money are, “How much money do you have today?” and “How much money will you have in two weeks?” Lenders have been asking […]
- JUL 16What $795, Rent, & Bitcoin Have in Common
- JUL 16Fintech Takes: Cards, Rent, and CryptoWelcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m Alex Johnson, joined by Matthew Goldman — Totavi founder, serial fintech builder (Wallaby, Vertical), ex-Bankrate, and still rocking 30 credit cards.
- JUL 14JPMorgan Chase Drops the Hammer
- JUL 11Pulte Should Push For Cash Flow Underwriting
- JUL 9Polar, Multiply Mortgage, OpenTrade, & Spinwheel
- JUL 9Not Fintech Investment Advice: Polar, Multiply Mortgage, OpenTrade, & SpinwheelWelcome back to Not Fintech Investment Advice, where Simon Taylor and I talk about fintech companies that we’re definitely not giving investment advice on.
- JUL 7Bilt isn’t a Unicorn3 Fintech News Stories #1: Bilt isn’t a Unicorn What happened? Bilt is in talks to raise a new round of funding at a $10 billion valuation. Lucinda Shen at Axios reports: Rent rewards startup Bilt is in talks to raise at a roughly $10 billion valuation, in a round likely to be led by […]
- JUL 4Independence DayI love disaster movies. I love them so much. I love them to the degree that my wife mocks me for it, which is fair because some of them are truly terrible (looking at you, Moonfall). But many of them are good! And very entertaining! And one has become an annual tradition in my household: […]
- JUL 2BNPL, FICO, and the Data That Isn’t There3 BIG IDEAS FROM THE PODCAST Jason Mikula and I kicked off the 12th season of the Fintech Takes podcast with a deceptively simple question: What happens when you try to modernize a 36-year-old credit score with data the credit bureaus don’t actually have? If you’ve been watching the credit bureaus’ pursuit of BNPL data […]
- JUL 2Fintech Recap: BNPL’s Black Box, Synapse’s Maybe-Bailout, and Crypto DreamsWelcome back to Fintech Takes. I’m Alex Johnson, joined (as always) with my partner-in-fintech-recapping, Jason Mikula. Let’s get into it.
June 2025
- JUN 30Fiserv’s Stablecoin Won’t Help Community Banks3 Fintech News Stories #1: The Revenue-Based Financing Space Grows Up What happened? Capchase is acquiring a company called Vartana: Capchase acquired Vartana to accelerate the product roadmap and market expansion of its tech-powered vendor financing offerings. The acquisition brings together Vartana’s vendor financing platform and Capchase’s vendor financing for B2B software and hardware […]
- JUN 27Why Is This Happening?An Exhaustive Review of the History and Nascent Culture of the CFPB Here’s the question: Would the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) still be getting aggressively hollowed out by Trump Administration officials and Republicans in Congress if the agency had been run differently over the last 14 years? It’s entirely possible that the answer to […]
- JUN 26The Primacy DirectiveChime, the newly public neobank, is aiming to capture primary financial relationships with the 227 million Americans who earn $200,000 or less annually. This is a company that isn’t really a bank in any recognizable way. No charter. No branches. A very narrow product set. A business model that eschews net interest margin. And, most […]
- JUN 25The Credit Score Time Bomb Is Ticking3 BIG IDEAS FROM THE PODCAST This week’s guest is Martin Kleinbard; Founder of Granular Fintech, ex-CFPB staffer, and author of one of the most interesting research reports I’ve read in ages, How Cash Flow Data Can Diffuse the Credit Score Time Bomb. So interesting, in fact, that we decided to publish it through the […]
- JUN 25Fintech Takes: Credit Scores, Cash Flow, and the Coming Trust CollapseWelcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m your host, Alex Johnson, joined by Martin Kleinbard; advisor at Granular, ex-CFPB, and author of the absolute banger of a research report How Cash Flow Data Can Diffuse the Credit Score Time Bomb (which we just published on Fintech Takes!).
- JUN 23The Lonely Mountain3 Fintech News Stories #1: FICO Jumps Into the Shallow End of the BNPL Pool What happened? FICO announced that it will be launching two new versions of its credit score, specifically focused on addressing the growth of BNPL: The company will offer the products — FICO Score 10 BNPL and FICO Score 10 […]
- JUN 20A Fintech TraveloguePlanning a Trip to Yellowstone The first question you need to answer when planning a trip to Yellowstone National Park is which entrances you are going to use to enter and exit the park. Fun fact: Despite the fact that 96% of the park is located in Wyoming, and only 3% is located in Montana, […]
- JUN 18Small Businesses Don’t Need More Cash. They Need Better Cash Flow Management.It’s universally acknowledged that running a small business is difficult.
- JUN 18Regulated Payment Stablecoins Are Almost Here!3 BIG IDEAS FROM THE PODCAST This week’s episode features none other than James Wester, co-head of Payments Research at Javelin Strategy & Research and official Fintech Takes Stablecoin Correspondent (we’re just going to go ahead and give him that title). Last time James was on the pod, we had a very specific question that […]
- JUN 18Fintech Takes: Are Stablecoins a Threat…or Just Better Infrastructure?Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I’m Alex Johnson, and today we’re lucky enough to dig into stablecoins (again!) with James Wester, co-head of payments research at Javelin Strategy & Research, who previously led strategic communications for blockchain, crypto, and digital currencies PayPal and served as a market research analyst at IDC.
- JUN 16Apple Just Rewired Digital KYC3 Fintech News Stories #1: Plaid’s Fraud Prevention Endgame What happened? Plaid announced a new product: Today we’re launching Plaid Protect: a real-time fraud intelligence system that helps detect and prevent fraud from the moment a user first interacts with your app or service. By drawing on fraud signals across a billion devices in the […]
- JUN 13Honest TaglinesEveryone who writes about the financial services ecosystem does it in their own way. Some people rely on on-the-record interviews with subject matter experts. Some lean on their own personal experiences. Some cultivate private sources and use them to break news stories. I do some of that, but most of my work is based on […]
- JUN 11Agents, Access, & Actual Help3 BIG IDEAS FROM THE PODCAST In this week’s episode of Not Fintech Investment Advice, Simon Taylor and I did what we always do: picked a few fintech companies we found interesting … and then let the conversation spiral gloriously out of control. We started with agentic payments infrastructure, detoured through embedded mortgages for real […]
- JUN 11Not Fintech Investment Advice: Nekuda, Vontive, Atticus, & AffinitiWelcome back to Not Fintech Investment Advice, where Simon Taylor and I talk about fintech companies that we’re definitely not giving investment advice on!
- JUN 9Plaid/Experian3 Fintech News Stories #1: Plaid/Experian What happened? Plaid and Experian are partnering on cash flow underwriting: Today, Experian and Plaid announced a strategic collaboration to lower barriers to accessing cashflow solutions and expanding financial inclusion. Now, banks, credit unions and consumer lenders can leverage Experian and Plaid’s combined expertise in real-time cashflow data and […]
- JUN 6The GENIUS Act Sets Stablecoin Bankruptcies Up To FailToday’s essay was written by my bank nerd friend, Todd Phillips. Todd is an Assistant Professor at Georgia State University’s Robinson College of Business and a former attorney for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. As debate continues about whether stablecoins are deposits (they aren’t) and whether stablecoin issuers are banks (more debatable), it is worth […]
- JUN 4IPOs, Interchange, & an Identity Crises3 BIG IDEAS FROM THE PODCAST In this week’s episode of Fintech Recap, Jason Mikula and I break down a surprisingly busy stretch of fintech Liberation Day headlines. Surprise! The IPO window is open after all: eToro priced above its range, Circle (the issuer of the USDC stablecoin) is looking to IPO, and Jason and […]
- JUN 4Fintech Recap: Chime’s Rorschach Test, Fintech vs. Sand, and Crypto’s Legislative MakeoverIn this week’s episode of Fintech Recap, Jason Mikula and I break down a surprisingly busy run of headlines. The IPO window is open after all: eToro priced above its range, Circle (the issuer of the USDC stablecoin) is eyeing a debut, and we can’t not dig into Chime’s S-1.
- JUN 2A Durable Non-Interest Income StrategyHere’s a question I am obsessed with — How can we ensure that banks and credit unions survive? On its face, this obsession might strike you as odd. I write about fintech, which, if we apply the transitive property of content creation, also means that I write about disruption. Why, you might ask, should someone […]
- JUN 2Caught in No Man’s Land3 Fintech News Stories #1: Can IFTTT For Banking Work? What happened? A fintech startup raised some money: In a financial world defined by fragmentation, fintech startup Sequence wants to become the master switch. The company, founded just a year ago, has secured an additional $7.5 million in funding to expand its platform, a kind […]
May 2025
- MAY 30Stablecoin State of MindI was delighted to get the opportunity this week to attend and speak at Stablecon, a stablecoin-focused conference put on by Nik Milanović and the team at This Week in Fintech in New York. I moderated a session — The Shifting Regulatory Sands of Stablecoins — featuring an all-star group of panelists: Flavia Naves, Chris […]
- MAY 29It’s Time for a Layered Approach to Credit Risk Underwriting“Lending money isn’t like playing tennis against a wall. There’s always someone on the other side of the net. Often there are multiple someones.”
- MAY 28Cash Flow Underwriting: The Key to Small Banks’ Small Business Lending AmbitionsAccording to Cornerstone Advisors’ annual What’s Going On in Banking? Report , a growing percentage of community banks are making loans to small businesses (microloans under $75,000 and loans to sole proprietorships) a growth priority.
- MAY 28Fintech Takes: Gambling, Finance, and the FalloutWelcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m your host, Alex Johnson, and today we’re digging into one of the most urgent (and underdiscussed) financial issues in America: gambling. My guest is Alex DeMarco, founder and CEO of MoneyStack, who’s helping reframe gambling addiction not just as a behavioral health issue, but as a financial…
- MAY 26This is Why Big Banks Have Consortiums3 Fintech News Stories #1: This is Why Big Banks Have Consortiums What happened? The big banks are discussing the possibility of jointly issuing a stablecoin: The nation’s biggest banks are exploring whether to team up to issue a joint stablecoin, a step intended to fend off escalating competition from the cryptocurrency industry. The conversations […]
- MAY 24The Chime TestThere’s something poetic about Chime’s newest commercial, featuring former NBA star, coach, and TV announcer Mark Jackson. Depending on your point of view, you might think of Mark Jackson as an indelible part of recent basketball history; a great player with a sneakily influential style, an important coach who helped nudge the Warriors towards their […]
- MAY 21Not Fintech Investment Advice: Cardamon, Sprive, Figg, & GlideWelcome back to Not Fintech Investment Advice, the podcast where Simon Taylor and I (Alex Johnson) talk through fintech companies we’re intrigued by, puzzled by, and occasionally want to manifest into existence (but definitely not invest in).
- MAY 19We Don’t Need Customers. We Just Need Their Credit Cards.3 Fintech News Stories #1: We Don’t Need Customers. We Just Need Their Credit Cards. What happened? An agentic payments company raised some money: Nekuda, a startup building infrastructure for agentic payments, today announced a $5M funding round led by Madrona Ventures with participation from global financial leaders including Amex Ventures and Visa Ventures. […]
- MAY 16Fintech Player Comps (The W Edition)We’re doing another edition of fintech player comps, but this time we are focused on the WNBA, which kicked off its 2025 season today. A couple of quick notes: Now let’s get to it. Chime — A’ja Wilson Plays with a patient relentlessness that wears down opponents. Oddly dependent on marketing spend to grow her […]
- MAY 15The Cambrian Explosion in Financial Services FraudPaleontologists use the term Cambrian Explosion to describe the moment 540 million years ago when almost every major animal body type appeared in the fossil record. It was an “explosion” of biological diversity without parallel in Earth’s history.
- MAY 14Fintech Takes: What the Hell’s Going On (Bank Regulation, Stablecoins, and Credit)Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I’m your host, Alex Johnson, and joining me for his second spin on the podcast merry-go-round is Rob Blackwell (Chief Content Officer at IntraFi and host of the Banking With Interest podcast).
- MAY 12I Told You So!3 Fintech News Stories #1: I Told You So! What happened? Dave reported better-than-expected Q1 2025 earnings: Dave, currently valued at $1.44 billion by market capitalization, reported its first-quarter 2025 earnings, surpassing analyst expectations with a significant jump in both earnings and revenue. The company reported earnings per share (EPS) of $2.48, substantially higher than […]
- MAY 9Community Banks Should Fear StablecoinsAn hour before a scheduled procedural vote in the U.S. Senate on the GENIUS Act, which would establish a federal regulatory framework for stablecoins, the President and CEO of the Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA), Rebeca Romero Rainey, issued a statement. The statement begins: On behalf of the nation’s community bankers, ICBA urges the […]
- MAY 7Fintech Recap: BaaS Breakdown, Super App Déjà Vu, and the Tomo TrainwreckWelcome back to Fintech Takes. I’m Alex Johnson, joined by Jason Mikula, and we are once again unable to resist the siren call of Bass Island. Tour we must.
- MAY 5Open Banking Is In Danger3 Fintech News Stories #1: Open Banking Is In Danger What happened? The CFPB is expected to make some significant changes to the Personal Financial Data Rights Rule, which had been finalized by Rohit Chopra late last year: The Trump administration is poised to reopen a Biden-era rule allowing customers to share their sensitive bank […]
- MAY 2The California DFPI Makes a Visit to BaaS Island#1: The California DFPI Makes a Visit to BaaS Island What happened? Hatch Bank entered into a consent order with the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation (DFPI). Among other things, the consent order requires the bank to: So what? Hatch Bank is a California-chartered BaaS sponsor bank with $118 million in assets. It […]
April 2025
- APR 30Fintech Takes: The Prodigal Return of Frank Rotman; On Financial Nihilism and Rebuilding The GameWelcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m your host, Alex Johnson, and today, one of our favorite guests is making a triumphant return visit—Frank Rotman, founding partner and CIO at QED Investors.
- APR 28A New BaaS Warp Core is About to Come Online3 Fintech News Stories #1: Why Would Stablecoin Issuers Want to Become Regular Banks? What happened? A couple of interesting stablecoin things. First, a bunch of stablecoin and stablecoin-adjacent crypto companies are considering acquiring bank charters or licenses, according to the Wall Street Journal (emphasis mine): A host of crypto firms including Circle and BitGo […]
- APR 25Everyone Wants To Be The FICO of Cash Flow DataFICO is one of the most successful fintech companies ever. Since the release of the first general-purpose credit score — the FICO Score — in 1989, which transformed credit scoring from a one-off consulting business (with high incremental costs) to a SaaS business (with almost zero incremental costs), the company has been on a tear. […]
- APR 21Plaid-ify Any Website3 Fintech News Stories #1: Updates From The Spend Management Space What happened? A couple of interesting announcements from the world of spend management. First, Pipe (the embedded finance platform) acquired Glean.ai: Pipe, a fintech company enabling embedded financial solutions for software platforms, today announced its strategic acquisition of Glean.ai, a leading AI-powered spend management […]
- APR 18Deregulatory UncertaintyBack in November, after Donald Trump was elected President, the market surged. Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal used a very apt analogy to explain the upswing in optimism: Across a range of industries right now, it feels like investors are betting on Rumspringa, the rite of passage for Amish youth where the rules go away for awhile. […]
- APR 16Not Fintech Investment Advice: Ubyx, Codex, Agent AV, & ExperianWelcome back to Not Fintech Investment Advice, where Simon Taylor and I talk about fintech companies that we’re definitely not giving investment advice on! The theme of this episode is infrastructure galore.
- APR 16Can LLMs Manufacture Better Credit Decisions?One of the challenges in writing about fintech is that it’s not always intuitive how a new technology will reshape the financial services industry. In other industries, it’s more obvious because the mechanics of how those industries work are more concrete. They have tangible inputs and outputs and relatively straightforward manufacturing processes. Financial services is […]
- APR 15Introducing the Fintech Takes Network
- APR 14Pax Americana3 Fintech News Stories #1: Turning a Drizzle Into a Downpour What happened? Rain, an earned wage access provider, raised a Series B: Rain, a startup offering an employer-integrated earned wage access (EWA) app coupled with financial-wellness features like overdraft alerts and spending trends, has raised $75 million in an all-equity Series B round. So […]
- APR 11A (Mostly) Fintech Mailbag!OK, a mailbag! Let’s dive in! If we experience an economic downturn due to tariffs and other policy changes from the Trump Administration, what could we expect that to look like? What impacts to consumers and fintech might we see? Even with the 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs, there is still a very decent chance […]
- APR 9Fintech Recap: Klarna Goes Public, Mercury Splits, and Lending…Can HurtWelcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m Alex Johnson, and as always, I’m joined by my partner-in-crime, Jason Mikula. Today, we’re unpacking Klarna’s public debut, the growing rift between Mercury and Evolv, and why getting wrecked might just be the best education in lending
- APR 7How To Build a Credit CardI ended the second article in this series with a prediction:
- APR 7Stripe Takes a Tiny Step Towards Banking3 Fintech News Stories #1: Stripe Takes a Tiny Step Towards Banking What happened? Stripe applied for a Merchant Acquirer Limited Purpose Bank (MALPB) charter from the state of Georgia, and its application was accepted: Stripe detailed that the MALPB charter will allow the firm to broaden its payment processing offerings — in this case, […]
- APR 4Big Fintech EnergyA lot of interesting stuff has happened over the past couple of weeks (and this morning!) with late-stage private fintech companies and public fintech companies, so I thought it would be fun to use today’s essay to dissect them. Klarna The original plan for today’s essay did not include writing about Klarna. Many fintech observers […]
March 2025
- MAR 31Charmed, I’m Sure3 Fintech News Stories #1: Experian Wants To Be The FICO of Cash Flow Underwriting What happened? Experian launched a new credit score, built on consumer-permissioned cash flow data: Experian’s new Cashflow Score leverages consumer-permissioned transaction data provided by its clients. From there, Experian, acting as a technical service provider on behalf of its clients, […]
- MAR 28Cash Flow Data is Censorship-ResistantAccording to the New York Fed’s Liberty Street Economics blog, more than 9 million student loan borrowers will soon start to see substantial declines in their credit scores. Those declines will be larger for higher-score segments, with those in the 760 – 850 range seeing an average drop of 171 points: That’s a big deal. […]
- MAR 26Fintech Takes: Will Stablecoins Disrupt Retail…or Just Disappear?Welcome back to Fintech Takes! I’m Alex Johnson, and today we’re unpacking stablecoins with James Wester, co-head of payments research at Javelin Strategy & Research.
- MAR 25The Pay by Bank BreakthroughAn easy way to spot emerging trends is to look for examples of market incumbents overreacting. It’s not a common occurrence. Indeed, much of the modern theory of disruption is premised on the idea that market incumbents tend to underreact rather than overreact when confronted by some new (and potentially disruptive) technology or customer behavior. […]
- MAR 24Boring Fintech Companies Are About To Become Banks3 Fintech News Stories #1: Boring Fintech Companies Are About To Become Banks What happened? OakNorth announced that it intends to buy a community bank in the U.S.: London-based digital bank OakNorth intends to buy Birmingham, Michigan-based Community Unity Bank The deal, which is awaiting regulatory approval, will enable OakNorth to expand its business lending […]
- MAR 21Klarna FootnotesLawyers and accountants might disagree with this statement, but I’ve always thought that the process of becoming a public company is, primarily, a storytelling exercise. You are trying to engineer the best possible response from public market investors while complying with all the regulatory requirements for accurate business and financial reporting, which requires a very […]
- MAR 19Not Fintech Investment Advice: Payma, Shiboleth, Stablecore, and AstradaWelcome back to Not Fintech Investment Advice! I’m Alex Johnson, creator of Fintech Takes, recording live (!) at Fintech Meetup with my co-host, Simon Taylor—the genius behind Fintech Brain Food—sitting right across from me. How lucky are we?! Wait… how lucky are you?!?
- MAR 17$KLAR3 Fintech News Stories #1: $KLAR What happened? Exciting times for Klarna! The company has filed the paperwork to go public: Klarna, a provider of buy now, pay later loans filed its IPO prospectus on Friday, and plans to go public on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker symbol KLAR. Klarna, headquartered in Sweden, […]
- MAR 14The Download on Fintech MeetupI’m going to recap Fintech Meetup 2025 by answering a series of questions that I just made up. Wait, isn’t it cheating to do a Q&A when you’re the one coming up with the questions? Yes, it absolutely is. But it’s my newsletter, and this is the gimmick I want to use, so we’re doing […]
- MAR 10Know When to Hold ‘Em3 Fintech News Stories #1: The Reinvention of ACH What happened? Newline, Fifth Third’s embedded finance business unit, launched a new product: Newline is launching our new VRN and Authorization Stream products to the world, enabling clients to create unlimited account numbers, or aliases, for deposit accounts and authorize A2A payments in real-time. With Newline […]
- MAR 7The Biggest Threat to Consumers’ Financial HealthThe biggest threat to consumers’ financial health isn’t overdraft fees or credit card late fees or banks paying below-market rates on savings accounts. It’s gambling. The resurgence of gambling in our culture has already had devastating consequences on the lives and balance sheets of American consumers and their families. There are plenty of statistics that […]
- MAR 7The Path To A More Competitive Credit Card MarketIn the first article in this series, I made two assertions:
- MAR 59: Fintech Recap: Regulator Shuffle, Varo’s Struggles, and BNPL’s Dark SideWelcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m Alex Johnson, and as always, I’m joined by my partner-in-crime, Jason Mikula. Today, we’re unpacking the chaos around regulatory shifts, fintech’s shifting landscape, and the not-so-rosy reality of BNPL.
- MAR 3Chase Unfriends Social Media Platforms3 Fintech News Stories #1: Chase Unfriends Social Media Platforms What happened? JPMorgan Chase is going to be restricting Zelle transactions that originate from social media platforms: Chase Bank is going to make it harder to use Zelle for transactions stemming from social media. In an update to its policy on Zelle, Chase says it […]
February 2025
- FEB 28Five Things I Got Done This WeekYou may have heard about the email that federal government workers received last weekend asking them to list out five things they accomplished during the prior week. This ask, driven by the Department of Government Efficiency (not a real government department!), was made to, “ensure that federal workers are not ripping off American taxpayers, that […]
- FEB 268: Fintech Takes: Regulatory Roulette on Capital HillWelcome to Fintech Takes! I’m Alex Johnson, and today we’re heading straight into the belly of the beast—Washington, D.C.—where regulators, banks, and fintechs are jockeying for position. Joining me is Rob Blackwell, a 20-year American Banker veteran, Intrafi’s Chief Content Officer, and host of the Banking with Interest pod.
- FEB 24Blocking and Tackling3 Fintech News Stories #1: Blocking and Tackling What happened? Block reported its Q4 2024 numbers, and stock market analysts weren’t thrilled: Results for the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31 were mixed, hitting a sour note with investors. Revenue came in at $6.03 billion, an increase of 4.5% year over year but below analysts estimates […]
- FEB 21Pagaya Doesn’t Make Sense (To Me)The best way to do market research, in my experience, is to look for things that don’t make sense. Allow me to explain. When you are learning about something new, you will frequently encounter things that don’t make sense. Most of the time, your lack of understanding is a you problem. You don’t have the […]
- FEB 19The Future of Small Business Lending is EmbeddedEmbedded lending (delivering a loan in the context of the transaction that the borrower is trying to complete) usually wins over direct lending (requiring a borrower to proactively seek out a loan) because most borrowers value convenience in lending above everything else. A loan is a means to an end, not an end in and […]
- FEB 17Stop Building SaaS for SaaS!3 Fintech News Stories #1: Zero-Standing Privilege What happened? SGNL, a startup focused on identity management and cybersecurity, raised a $30M Series A: A startup called SGNL has built a new approach that it believes is better at securing how identities are used to access apps and more — it is based on the emerging […]
- FEB 14I ❤️ Fintech#1: He Loves Me … He Loves Me Not What happened? More fun and excitement at the CFPB. First, President Trump nominated Jonathan McKernan to be the new Director of the CFPB: McKernan previously served on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s board for more than two years, resigning his post Feb. 10. McKernan, a Republican, […]
- FEB 132025: The Year of the Credit CardIf you’ve worked in financial services long enough, you’ve likely seen a news headline like this:
- FEB 126: Not Fintech Investment Advice: Rail, Anchor, Sencillo, and ClosingLockWelcome back to Not Fintech Investment Advice, where instead of doling out investment advice (we’re not doing that), we spotlight interesting, new fintechs and share our perspectives. I’m Alex Johnson, creator of Fintech Takes, joined (as always) by my esteemed cohost Simon Taylor.
