The Blue Wave Hits Financial Services

Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I’m your host, Alex Johnson, and I’ve flashed the regulatory bat signal to bring Rob Blackwell (Chief Content Officer & Head of External Affairs at IntraFi and host of the Banking With Interest podcast) back for an emergency edition of What the Hell Is Going On. The midterms delivered a blue wave Rob calls “generational.” But did Democrats win, or did Republicans lose?  And what does it mean for financial services? We get into: How Fairshake spent $50 million against Sherrod Brown and lost (and what that means for crypto’s political leverage and the CLARITY Act), and why World Liberty Financial’s trust charter is headed for congressional scrutiny. Why Elizabeth Warren and Maxine Waters could soon wield committee gavels, and what comes next for the gutted CFPB, with newly empowered state Democrats eyeing bank fees in the meantime. Whether bipartisanship has a future. Trump says he’s open to deals, but Rob puts the odds at 3/10, citing a housing bill Trump nearly vetoed after coming to see a provision he’d requested as Warren’s. Plus, a tribute to Sir Patrick Stewart and Rob’s case for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  --- This episode is brought to you by Increase.  Increase offers API-first banking for ambitious technology companies. Companies like Coast, Gusto, and Ramp rely on Increase technology to process more than $500B annualized in payments, card transactions, and loans. Learn more at https://increase.com/  --- Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/ And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page. --- Follow Alex:  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson X: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson --- Follow Rob: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-blackwell-63884826/ X: https://x.com/robblackwellAB

Welcome back to Fintech Recap. I'm Alex Johnson, joined as always by my partner in recapping, Jason Mikula. We kick things off with the big takeaways from Money20/20, where AI agents were everywhere, and so was the anxiety about what they're already doing inside banks. Big banks want to block them, while fintech companies see opportunity. Will blocking agents eventually become a competitive disadvantage? Then, it’s our charter watch. In the narrowing window to secure approval under the current administration, we discuss what fintech companies may stand to gain from national trust bank charters. (We also dig into SoFi’s new tokenized deposit, SOFIE, which pays 4.4% APY and converts into SoFiUSD – in part to ask who it’s for!) Next, bank to debanking we go. The OCC says its new report on the nine largest banks provides “irrefutable evidence.” We read it, and we’re unconvinced.   Finally, EarnIn sued Maryland over a law prohibiting earned wage access providers from soliciting tips, prompting my entirely predictable rant about tipping in financial services (which also conveniently serves as my Can't Let It Go!). As for Jason, he discovered that the CFPB has appointed a Chief Superintelligence Officer, despite having no superintelligence use cases to report. --- This episode is brought to you by Increase.  Increase offers API-first banking for ambitious technology companies. Companies like Coast, Gusto, and Ramp rely on Increase technology to process more than $500B annualized in payments, card transactions, and loans. Learn more at https://increase.com/  --- Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/ And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page. --- Follow Alex:  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson X: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson --- Follow Jason: Newsletter: https://fintechbusinessweekly.substack.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonmikula/

Welcome to Season 2 of Collections Conversations, a new miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at C&R Software, which digs into how AI is reshaping debt collections. In this season, we’re surveying everything that happens after origination by bouncing around different markets and talking to folks with different experiences. In Episode 4, I sit down with Anders Wallin, who has spent a lot of time on the technology side of credit (he’s worked as CIO for a traditional credit bureau and a debt purchaser, and even at FICO). We apply that view to collections and recovery, the most neglected stage of the credit lifecycle. We start with the opportunities lenders miss when they see technology primarily as a way to avoid risk and cut costs. Banks invest plenty in acquiring customers, but the switch flips the moment a payment’s missed. Ironically, debt buyers often take the more customer-centric approach.  At Hoist, the debt purchaser Anders joined in 2012, the word “debtor” was banned, and machine learning helped them understand what borrowers wanted to pay. Anders says customers who default typically come back as payers 5-7 years later. We get into: Why big banks are “really bad” at collections, and what the UK’s outsourcing and debt sale market gets right Why “your liability is now their asset” changes how a debt gets treated How open banking data could enable sustainable, individualized repayment plans How Swedish lenders verify last month’s paycheck, and why northern and southern Europe view debt so differently. Tune in for a conversation about the customer on the other side of every delinquent account (and why they’re probably coming back). --- This episode is brought to you by C&R Software.  More than just debt collection, C&R sets the global standard for AI-native, humanized credit management. They simplify the complex with end-to-end credit-risk lifecycle support, powered by automated workflows, AI-native intelligence, and real-time, data-driven decisioning. Learn more at https://hubs.ly/Q03Wl1DY0. --- Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/ And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page. --- Follow Alex:  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson --- Follow Anders: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anderswallin/

Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I’m Alex Johnson, joined by Dan Romero, who leads GTM at Tempo, the payments-focused blockchain co-created by Stripe and Paradigm, for a deep dive into crypto’s future as payments infrastructure. With the GENIUS Act establishing a federal regulatory framework for stablecoins, banks and payment companies have a clearer path to adopting them as a payment rail.  I start with a challenge to Dan: explain Tempo as if I were a community bank CFO who knows absolutely nothing about crypto.  From there, we explore the bets Tempo and Stripe are making about the trade-offs that come with moving money on-chain (from the economics of stablecoins and AI-driven transactions to the trade-offs between instant settlement, consumer protections, privacy, and public liquidity). Highlights include: Why Stripe built a new blockchain with a dedicated payments lane, rather than have payments compete with crypto trades for space (Dan’s analogy: imagine Visa and the NYSE competing for bandwidth on the same server). How OpenUSD proposes sharing most of its net interest margin with distributors, and whether Stripe's expanding payments stack can remain neutral toward competitors. Could AI agents be stablecoins' breakthrough? Dan explores the rail-agnostic Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), and why agents may be more willing to switch payment methods. Can stablecoins compete with cards on consumer protections, especially if AI agents can handle disputes on our behalf? Can enterprises keep blockchain balances private and still access public liquidity? Tune in for a breezy tour of the bets being placed on stablecoin rails, from someone fluent in both crypto and payments. --- This episode is brought to you by Increase.  Increase offers API-first banking for ambitious technology companies. Companies like Coast, Gusto, and Ramp rely on Increase technology to process more than $500B annualized in payments, card transactions, and loans. Learn more at https://increase.com/  --- Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/ And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page. --- Follow Alex:  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson X: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson --- Follow Dan: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielwromero/

Welcome to Season 2 of Collections Conversations, a new miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at C&R Software. The series digs into how generative AI is reshaping debt collections, and this season, we’re surveying everything that happens after origination by bouncing around different markets and talking to folks with different experiences. In Episode 3, I sit down with Tal Schwartz, General Partner at North Exit Ventures, whose Canadian Fintech newsletter I’m a big fan of and whose background in Canadian financial services, particularly fintech and lending, shapes much of what we discuss. We start with the Canadian lending market, where a handful of enormous banks control the vast majority of financial assets and nonbank lenders have found opportunities in the credit categories that banks can't (or won’t) serve.  Tal estimates that Canada tends to lag the U.S. by 5-8 years in fintech product innovation. But that delay has its advantages. Canadian companies get to see what works elsewhere, and regulators get to see what doesn't. Many early-stage fintech lenders treat servicing and collections as a future problem because, well, they haven't issued any loans yet. Tal thinks the irony is that, in the age of AI, this overlooked part of the lending lifecycle is particularly ripe for disruption. We get into: Why Canada's new interest rate cap could push some borrowers out of regulated credit markets, even as the country finally appears to be making progress on open banking  How cash flow underwriting became an advantage for Canadian nonbank lenders long before traditional banks started warming to the idea Why Canada's wave of mortgage renewals could show up in credit card and auto-loan delinquencies before it shows up in mortgage performance How AI could take on some surprisingly complicated servicing problems (including contact strategies that comply with different provincial laws) Canada has a habit of watching which U.S. fintech products take off and Canadianizing the best of them. Maybe the U.S. could return the favor when it comes to open banking? --- This episode is brought to you by C&R Software.  More than just debt collection, C&R sets the global standard for AI-native, humanized credit management. They simplify the complex with end-to-end credit-risk lifecycle support, powered by automated workflows, AI-native intelligence, and real-time, data-driven decisioning. Learn more at https://hubs.ly/Q03Wl1DY0. --- Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/ And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page. --- Follow Alex:  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson --- Follow Tal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/talbschwartz/

Welcome back to Not Fintech Investment Advice, where Simon Taylor and I offer up fintech startups that caught our eye and offer absolutely no investment advice. First up is Symphony, which rewards people with travel points for setting money aside rather than spending it, with returns available in cash, points, or both. The wrinkle? Its yield comes from investments rather than FDIC-insured deposits, which sends us down a rabbit hole about where saving ends and investing begins. Next is Spoolis, an early-stage company exploring guarantees for the outcomes of work delegated to AI agents. We explore how the software-plus-insurance model from cybersecurity might translate to agentic AI, and whether insurance is even the right mechanism for every workflow.  Then there’s Piston, which handles fuel payments for fleets without fuel cards. Simon sees the potential to build a payments network around geographically concentrated fleets, while I see the Ramp ethos applied to a gas pump. A surprisingly compelling real-world application of open finance. Finally, we close with MoneyStack, which brings financial counseling into behavioral health recovery, starting with gambling addiction treatment programs. We talk about the vicious cycle between debt and mental health, and how prediction markets sidestep the state taxes that fund this kind of treatment. Plus, our closing manifestation: more companies like MoneyStack in every corner of financial services, please.  --- This episode is brought to you by Increase.  Increase offers API-first banking for ambitious technology companies. Companies like Coast, Gusto, and Ramp rely on Increase technology to process more than $500B annualized in payments, card transactions, and loans. Learn more at https://increase.com/  --- Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: https://fintechtakes.com/  And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page. Follow Alex:  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson Follow Simon: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sytaylor/ Newsletter: https://brainfood.xyz As mentioned in this episode: Fintech NerdCon: https://fintechnerdcon.com Tokenized podcast: https://www.tokenizedpod.com/  Predicted newsletter: https://predicted.co/ --- Companies featured: https://www.symphony.io/ https://spoolis.com/  https://www.piston.com/ https://www.moneystack.com/

Welcome to Season 2 of Collections Conversations, a new miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at C&R Software. The series digs into how generative AI is reshaping debt collections, and this season, we’re surveying everything that happens after origination by bouncing around different markets and talking to folks with different experiences. In Episode 2, I sit down with Neré Jansen Van Vuuren, Head of Sales for Africa at C&R Software, who has spent most of her career working for banks and lenders across the continent. We explore how credit works when a household’s income arrives on market days and after harvests rather than as a monthly salary, and what that asks of lenders once a payment is missed. Neré says you can approve a loan in minutes, but the real test comes when a salary is late, or a transport is delayed. A missed payment, she says, is a signal; not an explanation. I love that point because too often, I see lenders jump at the signal without waiting for the explanation. And in the U.S., we tend to check affordability at origination and rarely afterward, even though I think we should keep assessing it for the life of the loan. We get into: Why many South African households manage a portfolio of diverse income streams, and why what looks irregular on a spreadsheet may be a deliberate, resilient strategy Why a sale isn’t a sale if the money’s not in the bank, and why many fintechs underestimate how different servicing is from acquisition How AI, ironically, can make collections conversations more personal than they are today Neré’s closing thought? Access only becomes inclusion when the product works with how people earn, travel, trade, borrow, repay, and recover from financial pressure. --- This episode is brought to you by C&R Software.  More than just debt collection, C&R sets the global standard for AI-native, humanized credit management. They simplify the complex with end-to-end credit-risk lifecycle support, powered by automated workflows, AI-native intelligence, and real-time, data-driven decisioning. Learn more at https://hubs.ly/Q03Wl1DY0. --- Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/ And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page. --- Follow Alex:  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson --- Follow Neré: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ner%C3%A9-jansen-van-vuuren-4512a4a3/

Welcome back to Fintech Takes! I’m Alex Johnson, joined once again by Dan Murphy (partner at Allon Advisors and former CFPB official who worked on the Section 1033 open banking rule) to ask some annoying questions about agentic finance. We start in Toronto, at the FDATA Global Summit, where AI agents effectively hijacked an open banking conference and screen-scraping veterans began to recognize a familiar fight.  From there, we follow the flow of a transaction as it might go through an AI agent, checkpoint by checkpoint. Highlights include: If we already struggle with KYB, how will we verify agents that can be spun up by the thousands and killed once they stop being useful — especially without a national digital identity system? Who decides what an agent can actually do? Dan walks through frameworks in the UK, Australia, and Brazil, and confesses he once wrote off variable recurring payments as just subscriptions. (They are not.) Dan’s hot take on the L word: whoever asks where liability lies is usually the one holding it and trying to get out of it. And why consumer trust has to come before the liability fights, not after. When an agent knows more than the person it represents, whose interests does it serve? What can fiduciary law teach us about a technology built around swarms of agents? The agentic economy will land in financial services first. How these questions get answered in the industry will determine what agents do in healthcare, education, and beyond. --- This episode is brought to you by Increase.  Increase offers API-first banking for ambitious technology companies. Companies like Coast, Gusto, and Ramp rely on Increase technology to process more than $500B annualized in payments, card transactions, and loans. Learn more at https://increase.com/  --- Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/ And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page. --- Follow Alex:  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson X: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson --- Follow Dan: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danieljmurphy01/ 

Welcome back to Fintech Recap. I'm Alex Johnson, joined as always by my partner in recapping, Jason Mikula. We kick things off with Whop, a creator marketplace that announced last week that anyone can launch a neobank on its platform in 15 minutes. Jason tried it. I unpack why a self-custody wallet built to function like a bank account opens a new kind of regulatory arbitrage. Next, we get into a data breach at Revolut. As Jason reported, a hacker group threatened to sell identity information and account balances and transaction histories of about 680 Revolut users. The group then sent Revolut legal requests for their data (and Revolut complied, for about six months). That's poor timing for a company with conditional approval for a U.S. bank charter. From there, Chime has agreed to buy Stride, one of its partner banks, for $590 million in cash. That keeps the combined bank (roughly $7B in assets) below the $10B threshold that has long shaped Chime's interchange-heavy business model. Jason weighs in on talking points that change when the roadmap does, and on how leverage can shift toward a fintech partner that outgrows its bank. Plus, in our Can't Let It Gos: an AI-generated ad for Kalshi in which a man suspects his girlfriend is cheating, only to learn she's been betting on egg prices, and a termination letter (newly released through a FOIA request) for the official the OCC named in 2023 to run its Office of Financial Technology. --- This episode is brought to you by Increase.  Increase offers API-first banking for ambitious technology companies. Companies like Coast, Gusto, and Ramp rely on Increase technology to process more than $500B annualized in payments, card transactions, and loans. Learn more at https://increase.com/  --- Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/ And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page. --- Follow Alex:  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson X: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson --- Follow Jason: Newsletter: https://fintechbusinessweekly.substack.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonmikula/

Welcome to Season 2 of Collections Conversations, a new miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at C&R Software. The series digs into how generative AI is reshaping debt collections; what it enables, what it complicates, and why it might finally force the industry to retire the word “collections” altogether. In Episode 1, I sit down with Luke Broadhurst, CEO of Credit Strategy, who has covered the U.K. banking and fintech scene (particularly from a credit perspective), for more than two decades.  We explore how U.K. fintech companies treat customers once things go wrong, and what the U.S. can learn from it. Fintech has spent years making onboarding easy. Luke says a missed payment is when a lender's customer centricity either comes through or doesn't. Asked whether AI belongs in decisions like these, Luke says undoubtedly, but a human has to own the consequences, even if a human doesn't press the button.  Owning the consequences, he says, is what Consumer Duty teaches. I don't think U.S. fintech has internalized that lesson just yet. We get into:  Whether the next era of fintech is a story of scale or of customer centricity (which Luke calls an operating model decision, not a user experience decision) How Consumer Duty went from a regulation U.K. lenders resisted to one the conversation at Credit Week now treats as a force for good Why fintech companies that build the world's best brakes can drive at 500 miles/hour Why smaller firms with less reputational risk are deploying AI while large institutions stay cautious for fear of getting it wrong Luke's advice?  Stop thinking technology is the advantage, and put finance before tech. --- This episode is brought to you by C&R Software.  More than just debt collection, C&R sets the global standard for AI-native, humanized credit management. They simplify the complex with end-to-end credit-risk lifecycle support, powered by automated workflows, AI-native intelligence, and real-time, data-driven decisioning. Learn more at https://hubs.ly/Q03Wl1DY0. --- Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/ And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page. --- Follow Alex:  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson --- Follow Luke: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luke-broadhurst-6a40592/