Tag: AI financial services

Brains, Blockchain, and Backbone: How finance evolved in 2025

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2025 was anything but ordinary. AI evolved from tools to agentic decision-makers. Crypto roared back and shrugged off skepticism to reclaim a seat at the table. And regional banks, long content to play it safe and lurk in the shadows, began experimenting, innovating, and proving they can move differently yet fast.

As the year wraps up, we zoom in on the standout trends across publicly traded companies I covered this year — and what they signal for 2026.

Trend 1: AI — How AI found its place in banking, from a back-office helper to a decision-making partner

2025 began with a mix of fascination and unease around AI in the financial sector. There was a cloud of uncertainty: could AI take over jobs, reshape banking as we know it, or disrupt entire business models? At industry gatherings like the World Economic Forum 2025 at Davos, AI wasn’t just a topic – it was the topic. Panel after panel debated whether AI would be a villain, a tool, or a teammate.

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The Wall Street incumbent embraces stability over volatility in asset management

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On December 1, Goldman Sachs revealed plans to acquire Innovator Capital Management, a provider of defined-outcome ETFs, bringing 159 defined-outcome ETFs and $28 billion in assets under management into its portfolio. This move underscores where the incumbent bank now prioritizes growth.

[Defined-outcome ETFs, also called “buffered” ETFs, are exchange-traded funds designed to deliver a specific, pre-set investment result over a defined period. They use options and derivatives to offer upside potential while limiting downside losses.]

This is a structural pivot. Innovator gives Goldman scale in one of the fastest-growing corners of public markets and nudges the firm a little further out from the revenue volatility that has long defined its dominance. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2026.

Why Innovator, and why now

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A storied beginning and a forward-looking purpose

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In 1935, with $25,000 borrowed from friends and family, Harold Webster Smith founded the First Federal Savings and Loan Association of Waterbury, Connecticut, to help people build homes during the Great Depression. His vision was that banking should serve the people around you, not just the bottom line.

The organization was later renamed Webster Bank when it went public in 2002 and converted to a national commercial bank in 2004, enabling broader service offerings while largely preserving its regional identity. 

Today, Stamford, Connecticut, serves as its headquarters, but its branches extend from suburban New York to Rhode Island and Massachusetts, giving it a solid regional footprint.

Webster Bank (NYSE: WBS) remains true to its ethos: serving communities across the Northeast while moving billions of dollars of healthcare payments and powering fintech platforms behind the scenes. 

Webster Bank’s evolution from a local thrift to a publicly traded commercial institution reflects a long-term focus. The bank serves clients across three key areas: commercial banking, consumer banking, and healthcare financial services.

In today’s 10Q edition: What’s Left in the Shadows, we shine a light on the less-talked-about publicly traded names in the industry that do their own thing but remain integral to the banking ecosystem.

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Klarna and SoFi: Betting big on credit and crypto

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If fintech competition were a boxing ring, Klarna and SoFi are trading very different kinds of punches, but both are very much in the fight for meaningful scale.

Case Study 1: Klarna — Stretching the BNPL muscle in the US

Recent move: Klarna struck a deal with Elliott Investment Management to sell up to $6.5 billion in US “Fair Financing” loans over the next two years. These are not short-term, no-interest BNPL loans — they’re fixed-term installment loans, with Klarna retaining underwriting and servicing duties.

Why it matters:

• Capital efficiency — By selling receivables under a forward-flow agreement, Klarna frees up balance sheet capacity to issue more loans. 
• Scalable risk management — Rather than raising debt or equity, this structure allows Klarna to grow its credit book without taking on too much risk upfront.
• US-centric growth — Fair Financing is growing faster in the US than globally (Klarna disclosed GMV up 244% in the US, vs. 139% globally over the past year). 

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The trajectories of Robinhood, Upstart, and LendingClub highlight the broader fintech trends heading into 2026

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The latest round of earnings from Robinhood, Upstart, and LendingClub reads less like a scoreboard and more like a temperature check on what fintech even means now. Each firm, in its own way, is evolving past the product it was born with – the trading app, the AI-driven lender, the online credit marketplace – and chasing something harder: resilience.

But how they’re getting there couldn’t look more different.

Robinhood: From trades to everything

Robinhood’s early years were about giving retail traders a seat at the table, but its recent quarters have been about building a whole new table.

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Why Truist’s new business card isn’t really only about the card

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As competition for SMB loyalty intensifies, financial institutions are rethinking where the first touchpoint begins. Increasingly, that entry point isn’t a checking account or a loan – it’s a card.

Truist’s recent launch of its Business Premium Visa Infinite card fits squarely into that evolution. The super-regional bank is using the card as a relationship anchor: a gateway into an ecosystem of payments, working capital, and treasury solutions built around how small businesses operate.

Chris Ward, Head of Enterprise Payments at Truist

“It’s not just a credit product — it’s a relationship anchor,” says Chris Ward, Head of Enterprise Payments at Truist. That framing reflects a broader shift in banking strategy: away from transactional products and toward integrated, ecosystem-driven relationships where a card becomes both a data engine and a loyalty bridge.

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Inside the mind of a Payments Technologist Leader

Payments is an industry that rarely stands still, and Sri Shivananda has spent enough time in its trenches to know how fast the ground can shift. Now Global Head of Payments Technology at J.P. Morgan Payments, his reflections on leadership and innovation cut through the usual hype.

Shivananda’s career – from PayPal and eBay to one of the world’s largest banks – gives him a long view of how payments and its underlying tech have evolved. What he’s watching closely today: how real-time payments are setting new expectations, how AI is starting to reconfigure workflows, and why building inclusive teams matters if any of that is going to work at scale.

Here’s my full conversation with him on what it takes to build in a rapidly evolving landscape.

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The industry is starting to act like rate tailwinds are no longer guaranteed… because they’re not.

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Main takeaways from today’s Edition: Big banks are expanding their focus from a credit-first approach to infrastructure-focused moves.

A few of this week’s notable earnings highlights:

• J.P. Morgan Chase: $14.4B in Q3 profit; payments revenue up 13% YoY, leaning on network scale and capital discipline.
• The Bank of New York Mellon: $1.34B in profit; fee income dominates, signaling its growing role as the institutional back office.
• Citigroup: $3.8B in profit; treasury and trade solutions up 7% YoY as its restructuring tilts toward core transaction banking.

Writer’s Take:

• Infrastructure is the new growth engine. Some of the biggest US banks are shifting their bets from lending booms to owning the financial plumbing.
• The common thread among all three of these major banks is prioritizing payments, servicing, and transaction flows over pure lending growth.
• Trendline points to fee-based revenue resilience, operational efficiency, and a race to own the rails of global finance. Less talk about rate windfalls, more about rails and recurring flows.

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For the better part of two years, the story of America’s largest banks has been consistent: net interest income swelling on the back of higher rates, resilient consumers, and sturdy balance sheets. But Q3 2025 marked a different pattern.

This quarter was about how the biggest financial institutions are deliberately repositioning themselves for a landscape where rate tailwinds alone may no longer do the heavy lifting.

The headline numbers from J.P. Morgan Chase, The Bank of New York Mellon, and Citigroup were strong, but the subtext was even solid: strategic capital deployment, infrastructure modernization, and measured credit vigilance are now front and center.

This quarter, Wall Street stopped coasting on macro and started working on what comes after it.

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The infrastructure race no one’s talking about

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Every era of finance has its kingmakers, besides the big ol’ guys. In the 2000s, it was payment processors. In the 2010s, it was fintech front ends. And now, in 2025, the battle lines are being drawn around the deep infrastructure of money: where it sits, how it moves, and what intelligence governs it.

This week, three very different players, U.S. Bank, BNY, and Nvidia, made moves that, on the surface, belong to different worlds: stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and AI. But taken together, they tell a tale of finance reorganizing around infrastructure that can scale and survive regulatory and market pressure. Institutions that understand this are positioning themselves early.

U.S. Bank: Taking a seat in the engine room of stablecoins

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The IPO glow — and the hard part that comes after

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For a company built on the promise of ‘buy now, pay later,’ Klarna took its time when it came to the stock market. Two decades after its founding in Stockholm, the fintech finally rang the bell on the New York Stock Exchange this September under the ticker KLAR, pulling off the largest IPO of 2025 (as of today). Shares priced at $40 and quickly surged, pushing Klarna’s valuation near $20 billion — a head-turning debut that restored some shine to one of fintech’s most scrutinized names.

However, its first month on the market has been a mix of optimism, scrutiny, and the realities of life as a listed fintech: steady user and revenue growth, exciting product launches, but also the weight of losses, competition, and investor pressure.

We look at what Klarna is doing after going public. The deeper question now, in fact, isn’t whether it belongs on Wall Street, but how it plans to thrive there.

Stats that map the arc from startup to public company

 

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