The Apple Card Has a New Home
Happy Monday, Fintech Takers!
I hope you had a restorative weekend, because the news simply does not stop.
Over the last three days, President Trump pledged to cap credit card interest rates at 10% for one year, and Jay Powell posted a video responding to grand jury subpoenas from the Department of Justice, regarding his June 2025 testimony to Congress about the Federal Reserve’s $2.5 billion headquarters renovation project in Washington, D.C.
Despite falling within the general realm of financial services, I don’t have much to say about either of these news stories, apart from the fact that they are dumb and infuriating. We live in a dumb and infuriating timeline.
Anyway … I do have a lot to say about what’s been happening, more narrowly and concretely, in banking and fintech recently, so let’s get into that!
- Alex
P.S. — Kiah and I are thinking of co-hosting an event during NY Fintech Week in April. This would be an intimate event for leaders in banking who are interested in implementing AI across their org. Would you be interested? Let me know here.
Ornamental Iron (c. 1936) by Gilbert Sackerman.
3 FINTECH NEWS STORIES
#1: The Apple Card Has a New HomeCopy anchor linkCopied
What happened?Copy anchor linkCopied
Well, it finally happened. Goldman Sachs offloaded the Apple Card portfolio, one of the last remnants of its ill-fated consumer banking initiative, to JPMorgan Chase:
JPMorgan Chase has reached a deal to take over the Apple credit-card program from Goldman Sachs, further cementing JPMorgan’s status as a behemoth in the credit-card sector and marking the final chapter of Goldman’s failed experiment in consumer lending.
The biggest bank in the country will become the new issuer of the tech-giant’s credit card, one of the largest co-branded programs with some $20 billion in balances.
So what?Copy anchor linkCopied
For Goldman, the embarrassment is finally over. The company’s foray into consumer banking was a mistake, but at least when it was just Marcus, it was entirely under the company’s control. Where things really spun out of control was when the company got aggressive in growing inorganically through acquisitions (remember Greensky?) and partnerships (Apple, most prominently).
Now, it’s mostly over (I guess the core checking/savings play is still going?), and instead of selling its $20 billion Apple Card portfolio for a premium (up to $2 billion wouldn’t have been unreasonable given the cachet of Apple’s customers), it’s giving JPMC a $1 billion discount to take it off its hands.
The reason Goldman has to pay to get away from Apple is that it signed a really bad agreement with Apple, which allowed the tech company to basically do whatever it wanted. And that resulted in a poorly-performing portfolio, as the Wall Street Journal reports:
The discount in this deal reflects a high exposure to subprime borrowers and what has been a higher-than-industry-average delinquency rate, creating the potential for significant losses on the outstanding balances. Concerns about those losses slowed the deal talks and contributed to hesitation from JPMorgan and other banks that looked at pursuing a deal.
Unlike their counterparts at Goldman Sachs in 2019, the folks running JPMC’s co-brand credit card business today aren’t stupid. They undoubtedly negotiated a much better deal with Apple, which will give JPMC more latitude in managing the risk of the portfolio and/or a more favorable risk-sharing arrangement. I’m also guessing that JPMC thinks it will be a little bit better than Goldman was at both underwriting new customers and rehabilitating delinquent customers, which seems like a smart bet.
Interestingly, the Wall Street Journal is also reporting that JPMC views this deal as an opportunity to cross-sell additional products to Apple’s coveted customer base, starting with a JPMC-powered Apple savings account:
JPMorgan is also planning to launch a new Apple savings account, according to people familiar with the matter. Consumers with existing Apple savings accounts at Goldman will decide whether they want to stay there or open an account with JPMorgan, the people said.
This is interesting to me because the Apple of 2019 would never have allowed two different banks to fight over its customers. It would have made a clean, seamless move for all of its financial products, from one provider to another. Or, alternatively, it would have found a way to cut the banks out of it and offer the products directly, as it briefly explored with its Project Breakout.
Apple has clearly been chastened by its failures in financial services over the last decade, which is great news for JPMC.
#2: Making Fetch HappenCopy anchor linkCopied
What happened?Copy anchor linkCopied
Coastal Community Bank is acquiring GreenFi:
Coastal Financial Corporation … today announced that it has acquired ownership of the GreenFi brand of climate-friendly consumer financial services products from Mission Financial Partners.
As part of the transaction, Mission Financial Partners will continue to partner with Coastal to operate and market the GreenFi program through its existing technology platform. This structure is designed to maintain operational continuity while enabling Coastal to guide the brand over time. Mission Financial Partners will also continue to offer customers access to sustainable investment options through its Redwood Fund family of mutual fund products.
Coastal will continue to serve as the banking partner for GreenFi's consumer financial services program and assume responsibility for governance, oversight, and long-term brand stewardship.
So what?Copy anchor linkCopied
I’ve written a lot about GreenFi over the last six years. You’d probably recognize it by its former name — Aspiration.
Here’s a quick timeline:
- 2015: Aspiration launches a sustainability-focused checking account in partnership with Radius Bank, promising to help climate-conscious consumers align their values with their financial choices (e.g., debit card transactions rounded up to support tree planting, deposits would never fund the fossil fuel industry, etc.)
- 2018: Aspiration switches to Coastal Community Bank as its BaaS partner bank.
- 2021 – 2023: Aspiration announces a SPAC (very sus at the time), pulls back from the consumer neobank space, and leans into the B2B sustainability-as-a-service business, and then terminates the SPAC. Also, during this time, Tim Newell joins Aspiration as its first Chief Innovation Officer.
- 2024: Newell, through his company Mission Financial Partners, acquires Aspiration’s consumer business.
- 2025: Aspiration (now entirely a B2B sustainability-as-a-service business) files for bankruptcy. It is later revealed that one of the co-founders committed fraud, lying to investors about the business to raise money. Also in 2025, Newell wisely rebrands Aspiration’s consumer business to GreenFi. The brand relaunched in April 2025, announcing $17 million in new funding and plans to launch additional products (e.g., higher-yield savings accounts, climate-friendly credit cards, additional impact investments, green loans).
- 2026: Coastal Community Bank acquires GreenFi for an undisclosed sum.
I joke sometimes that personal financial management (PFM) is the rake that fintech founders can’t stop themselves from stepping on, repeatedly. It never leads to a successful, venture-scale business, but that doesn’t stop founders from trying, with an admirable level of stubbornness.
A neobank for climate-conscious consumers is, perhaps, another good example. There’s no real evidence that a large segment of the market wants it, but there is a small segment of banking and fintech executives who don’t seem to care. They’re Gretchen, and they’re going to make fetch happen.
Tim Newell has been the standard-bearer for the past four years. And now the flag is being passed to the folks at Coastal. I’m not sure how it makes strategic sense for them (traditionally, in BaaS, the bank relies on the expertise of the fintech company to build the product and acquire the customers), but I wish them luck. Like PFM, a neobank for climate-conscious consumers is an idea I want to see succeed.
#3: If You Bet in a Casino, It’s GamblingCopy anchor linkCopied
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Polymarket and Parcl (missing an “e” there, guys!) are teaming up to allow people to bet on housing prices:
Parcl, the real-time housing data and onchain real estate platform, and Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market, today announced a partnership to bring Parcl’s daily housing price indices to a new suite of real estate prediction markets on Polymarket.
The partnership will introduce housing-focused markets that settle against Parcl’s published price indices, giving traders and analysts an objective, data-driven reference point for forecasting where home prices are headed. Polymarket will list and operate the markets; Parcl will provide independent index data and settlement reference values designed for transparent verification.
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At some point in the future, it may be possible for a homeowner to log into their mortgage servicer’s integrated homeownership portal and see everything they need to see regarding the most important financial asset they will ever own. Amortization schedule, mortgage payment history, homeowners’ insurance policy coverage, tax payments, utility bills, HOA updates, and, most importantly, objective information on the price of their home, their level of equity in it, and educational information and options for leveraging that equity and/or reducing their risk exposure.
To be honest, it’s kind of insane that we don’t have this already.
Why, as a homeowner, am I not able to log in to my account with my mortgage servicer, see how much equity I have built up, and push a button to take a loan out against that equity?
And while, in general, real estate does tend to go up, that’s not universally true everywhere all the time. Sometimes the price of your house goes down. Maybe because of a natural disaster like a tornado. Or maybe because the main employer in your town shuts down. Regardless, it might be a risk that you want to hedge against.
There are already some mechanisms that allow you to hedge this risk. That’s what homeowners’ insurance is, and there’s a reason your mortgage provider requires you to have it.
However, you might also want to hedge your risk in a more targeted fashion, perhaps by investing in futures or options on average home prices across a diversified index of towns and cities. Technically, you can do this today through what are called metro-level Case-Shiller indexes, which are repeat-sales measures of home prices for specific metropolitan areas and underlie a small set of derivatives that trade on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. In theory, these contracts let homeowners hedge against broad declines in local housing prices, though in practice they work poorly as a hedging tool because the market is extremely illiquid and bid-ask spreads tend to be very wide.
So, you could argue that Polymarket and Parcl are trying to solve this problem. They want to replace Case-Shiller indexes with a set of tradable event contracts on major U.S. housing markets that are more granular and liquid, allowing homeowners (and others) to more effectively hedge real estate risk.
This argument would, of course, be bullshit.
Not because it’s not theoretically possible, but because it’s not what’s actually happening.
The infuriating thing about prediction markets being regulated as commodities by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is that any event can be considered a commodity, as long as it is “associated with a financial, commercial, or economic consequence.” We should be able to have a reasonable conversation about the limits of that definition (as Todd Phillips recently argued in a Fintech Takes essay), but that would require having a regulatory apparatus that hadn’t been captured by special interests, which, sadly, we do not have at the moment.
So, instead, prediction markets just list all of the most fun-to-gamble-on even contracts they can think of, self-certify them with the CFTC, and then, when asked about them, argue that they could theoretically be used to hedge real economic risk, no matter how ridiculous their examples are.
This is the problem with the legal arguments around prediction markets — they look at the bet (could this be used to hedge an economic risk?) rather than the environment in which the bet is being placed. The problem isn’t hedging. It’s where you hedge. Hedging in a casino is gambling because casinos attract people who don’t give a shit about risk management. Hedging through a banking app or an insurance broker can be hedging because the people who log into their banking apps or call their insurance brokers often do care about risk management.
Polymarket and Kalshi could choose to supply well-regulated, highly liquid risk management tools through responsible distributors (banks, insurance companies, etc.) to consumers solely for the purpose of hedging their personal economic risks.
But that’s not what they’re doing. They are operating casinos.
2 READING RECOMMENDATIONS
#1: Kontigo: Y Combinator's Venezuelan Sanctions Evasion Startup (by Jason Mikula, Fintech Business Weekly) 📚Copy anchor linkCopied
Speaking of living in a dumb and infuriating timeline, I give you Kontigo!
Sanctions-Evasion-as-a-Service (SEaaS?) is a fast way to grow, and a very fast way to end up the subject of a 5,000+ word investigative report from Jason.
And, as I posted on Twitter, this story stretches far beyond Kontigo.
#2: One Regulation E, Two Very Different Regimes (by Patrick McKenzie, Bits About Money) 📚Copy anchor linkCopied
Good stuff from Patrick on the applicability of Reg E to different payment modalities.
1 QUESTION FROM THE FINTECH TAKES NETWORK
There are a TON of interesting questions being asked in the Fintech Takes Network. I’ll share one question, sourced from the Network, each week. However, if you’d like to join the conversation, please apply to join the Fintech Takes Network.
There’s no way that President Trump’s proclamation of a 10% cap on credit card interest rates actually happens, right?
Obviously, this isn’t something he can do through unitary executive action, and it feels like way too big a change (with way too much entrenched opposition) to push through Congress.
It’s just messaging, right?
If you have any thoughts on this question, reply to this email or DM me in the Fintech Takes Network!
Thanks for the read! Let me know what you thought by replying back to this email.
— Alex
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