Visa vs. Mastercard: Who had a stronger quarter?

10-Q, Member Exclusive

Forget the earnings. Watch where these fintechs are placing their bets.

• Chime, Block, and Circle each used the quarter to make the case for where fintech’s next moat will be built.
• Chime is finding a lending advantage in the direct-deposit relationship, Block is rebuilding around AI, and Circle is betting that the bigger opportunity lies in owning the infrastructure beneath stablecoins.

Member Exclusive, Opinion

Have we mistaken ChatGPT-like LLMs and AI agents for the whole transformation?

• The industry is increasingly asking: What needs to surround AI before we can trust it?
• AI needs four things to work well in financial services: data, context, governance, and human oversight. The first two sharpen its intelligence; the latter two make it trustworthy.

Banking, Member Exclusive

How banks have stopped thinking in products and started thinking in customer journeys

• As banks weave AI into their customer experiences, many are looking for ways to translate years of customer data into a more complete picture of each customer's needs and context.
• The difference isn't the data itself, but how well a bank makes sense of a customer's context and goals and builds the right response around that.

Artificial Intelligence, Banking, Data, Member Exclusive

Before chasing AI, Bank of America wants banks to fix their data first

• Bank of America has resisted the urge to use AI as a shortcut to efficiency, a temptation that has driven many companies into expensive and poorly conceived AI investments.
• EricaAssist offers the clearest example of Bank of America's data-first AI strategy, with the bank recently enhancing the employee assistant by integrating Gen AI capabilities.

AI Innovation, Member Exclusive, Payments, Podcasts

Mastercard’s Marc Pettican on the road to a $17.4 trillion virtual card market

• Mastercard projects virtual card spend will hit $17.4 trillion by 2029, and Marc Pettican explains what's fueling that growth.
• He details Mastercard's push into agentic payments, embedded finance, and a multi-rail strategy spanning cards, account-to-account, and stablecoins.