With its Shop Small campaign, American Express incentivizes its cardholders to support small businesses

Payments

What Block’s $200 billion credit operation teaches banks about first-party data

• Block has extended over $200 billion in credit globally by underwriting customers with first-party data from Cash App and Square, bypassing the bureau feeds that leave 100 million Americans invisible to traditional lenders
• The same risk philosophy runs across all three products: maximize access, reduce cognitive burden on repayment, and reinvest efficiency gains back into expanding credit

Modern Marketing, Payments

How Wise is betting on infrastructure and brand

• Wise is building direct payment rail connections globally (8 live by 2026), with Lauren Langbridge expanding institutional partnerships like Morgan Stanley, Wealthsimple, and Upwork.
• Scott Viohl is driving Wise's North American brand awareness via creator-led campaigns, achieving 80%+ US adult reach and double-digit lifts in brand awareness.

Payments, Podcasts

Squarespace’s Corey Zettler on building a financial services suite for small businesses

• Squarespace has expanded beyond website building to offer a growing suite of financial tools for small businesses, including payments, capital, and a new integrated balance account with a Visa debit card.
• On the Tearsheet Podcast, director of product Corey Zettler explains the company's build-vs-partner approach, what it's learned from three product launches, and how it plans to deepen its financial services offering for service.

Payments, Podcasts

How Paze is betting bank trust can crack the digital wallet market

• The digital wallet space is crowded, but Paze is betting that consumer trust in banks — not tech giants — is the unlock.
• In this episode, Serge Elkiner, General Manager of Paze at Early Warning Services, breaks down how the bank-backed wallet is building toward critical mass through merchant expansion, issuer growth, and a deliberate focus on the consumers other wallets haven't won yet.

Artificial Intelligence, Business of Fintech, Payments

In the world of Stripe: Acquisitions, agentic AI, and stablecoins

• Stripe is making moves to dominate every layer of payments, from a potential PayPal acquisition to AI billing tools and stablecoin infrastructure.
• Stripe processed $1.9T in volume, its new AI billing tool tracks LLM usage in real time, and its x402 integration lets AI agents send and receive stablecoin payments autonomously.