BMO Harris Bank enables transgender and non-binary communities to use their true first names on their cards

Lending, Member Exclusive, Payments

Affirm wants its data to tell a more complete customer story

• Affirm is mining its data for a better read on borrowers with its new transformer-based underwriting model.
• By extracting new signals from existing data, the BNPL firm is betting that its transaction-level view of consumers can become a competitive advantage in its own right.

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.

AI Innovation, Banking, Payments

How J.P. Morgan Payments eliminated 13 billion keystrokes a year by automating the paper behind payments

• Rather than waging war on checks, J.P. Morgan Payments is tackling the manual workflows behind them.
• JPM Payments' systems now process more than 4,000 envelope and document variations, while its AI platform delivers over 99.999% accuracy in data extraction and business-rule validation.

AI Innovation, Member Exclusive, Payments

Paper still defines payments’ last mile. J.P. Morgan Payments thinks AI and robotics can tackle that.

• Most payment discussions assume the biggest challenge is moving money from Point A to Point B. What if the bigger bottleneck is actually the operational noise surrounding the payment?
• Investing in checks sounds like a step backward, but J.P. Morgan Payments is doing exactly that – because paper checks still create the greatest operational friction in the modern financial system.

Blockchain and Crypto, Member Exclusive, Payments

The on-chain credit card: Stablecoin credit moves from experiment to infrastructure

• What does banking look like when money can be spent outside the traditional account structure?
• June's announcements point to a new model: card programs backed by tokenized dollars. But stablecoin-backed credit raises three harder questions.