Posted on

What Klarna, Coinbase, and Chase are building next

    Weekly 10-Q

    The weekly 10-Q newsletter is part of the Tearsheet Pro subscription, where I unpack the recent moves and strategies of leading banks and fintechs in the public space, coupled with stock market analysis. In your inbox every Friday!

    Message Sara

    What Klarna, Coinbase, and Chase are building next

    Klarna, Coinbase, and Chase and the business of moving closer to the customer.

    This week saw Klarna move deeper into deposits, Coinbase using stablecoins to re-engineer credit access, and Chase building intelligence layers around small business decision-making. 

    These moves offer a snapshot of how financial firms are searching for growth beyond the boundaries that originally defined them.

    Klarna: Turning spending behavior into a deposit engine

    Klarna has launched a US high-yield savings account in its app. This is the next step in a longer shift of treating spending and saving as a single behavioral system.

    The accounts -– FDIC-insured through WebBank, with no minimums, no fees, and yields above 3% APY -– place Klarna directly inside the deposit economy. “The average American earns less than half a percent on their savings, not because better options don’t exist, but because their bank hasn’t had to compete,” said Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO and co-founder of Klarna.

    …

    subscription wall for TS Pro

    Posted on

    Letter from the Editor: The AI productivity story is easy to tell until you sit inside the institution building it

    The ‘Letter from the Editor’ series features exclusive insight and opinion-driven analysis from Tearsheet editor Sara Khairi. The focus is on linking ideas, questioning assumptions, and tracking shifts across both mature and emerging trends in financial services.

    This is now PRO-only content. Subscribe to PRO so you never miss a Letter from the Editor exclusive.

     

     

     

    Issue # 6

     

    The AI story in financial services is usually told as a productivity story: output rises, headcount becomes more efficient, workflows compress, and banks enter a phase where complexity is finally “managed” rather than accumulated. In this version, AI is not disruptive so much as it is smoothing the edges of an already familiar efficiency curve.

    But the closer you look at how this is being implemented inside institutions, the clearer it becomes that the real change is in how capabilities are organized and managed across the organization. More and more, the language used to describe these systems carries greater weight than the systems themselves.

    We see this in the way AI is being rolled out across institutions such as J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Citi. Whether in advisor copilots in wealth management or generative AI tools embedded in analyst workflows, the lens remains consistent: support, instead of substitution. Yet the vocabulary that surrounds these deployments often carries its own subtext – terms like “streamlining,” “lower-value work,” and “operational simplification” imply a reshaping of hierarchy rather than just a refinement of process.

    That gap between what is being built and how it is being described is where today’s analysis is focused. 

    …

    Posted on

    The 3-Min Read: Why Anthropic is becoming AI’s reference point

    In the span of just twelve months, Anthropic has shifted from being one of several frontier AI labs to a gravitational center of the industry. The change is driven by a compounding sequence of capital inflows, enterprise adoption, and infrastructure-scale positioning that increasingly resembles platform formation rather than startup growth.

    The clearest signal came on May 28, 2026, when the company closed a $65 billion Series H round at a $965 billion post-money valuation, briefly making it the world’s most valuable AI startup ahead of OpenAI. Its valuation has climbed rapidly from $183 billion in Series F to $380 billion in Series G, and nearly doubled again in the latest round.

    This momentum is being driven by strong enterprise demand. Anthropic now reports an annualized revenue run-rate above $47 billion, largely fueled by adoption of its Claude models in coding and agent-based workflows. Increasingly, Claude is being embedded into production systems where productivity gains translate directly into cost reduction.

    Coding has become the primary growth engine, marking the second signal. Software development is now the operating layer of modern enterprises. As Claude moves deeper into these workflows, Anthropic’s identity shifts from product builder to infrastructure provider.

    But rapid growth comes with pressure. The company is close to its first operating profit, yet compute costs remain heavy. In Q1 2026, it spent 71 cents for every dollar of revenue on compute, expected to improve to 56 cents in the next quarter. Efficiency is improving, but only because demand is rising fast enough to absorb training and inference costs. Yet Anthropic has also cautioned that planned infrastructure investments could make profitability difficult to sustain over the full year. This tension between scaling demand and managing compute costs is now a pressing challenge for frontier AI companies. Bankers and investors are increasingly focused on Anthropic’s token economics and compute costs, worried that rising AI usage costs could pressure margins and make it harder to justify its valuation after an IPO.

    Which leads to the third signal: capital structure alignment. On June 1, Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO, working with Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, alongside J.P. Morgan Chase. Anthropic leadership notes that frontier model training requires sustained access to large-scale capital, and public markets are structurally better suited to that need. 

    Alongside expansion, Anthropic is also moving carefully on safety and control. Through Project Glasswing, the company has scaled access to its Mythos cybersecurity model from roughly 50 organizations to 150 across more than 15 countries. The system has already helped identify more than 10,000 high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities in widely used software.

    The same capabilities used to detect vulnerabilities could also be used to exploit them, so the model distribution is limited to vetted partners. Expansion happens through controlled channels rather than open release.

    Anthropic is also exploring broader deployment of the model through discussions with the EU cybersecurity agency ENISA, which could extend access beyond the US and UK for the first time – widening its user base through institutional gatekeepers.

    What Anthropic is becoming

    These shifts show Anthropic evolving into three roles:

    1. A capital-scale company moving toward public-market size with trillion-dollar ambitions.
    2. An embedded intelligence layer inside enterprise systems, especially in software development.
    3. A controlled provider of high-risk AI systems, distributed through strict governance frameworks.

    Anthropic is trying to scale and contain at the same time. The broader question is whether the economic and governance structures around frontier AI can scale at the same pace as the systems they are now trying to contain.

    Posted on

    The Week in Market Moves | May 28-June 4, 2026

    Company signals and market response

    This analysis tracks the top company developments and how markets absorbed them through Thursday’s close, focusing on where shifting narratives translate into price action.

    It is part of Tearsheet PRO’s weekly 10-Q Newsletter, where strategy meets market reaction. I track how leading banks and fintechs are evolving in public markets and how investors are pricing those moves.

    Subscribe to PRO and get the full 10-Q story every Friday!

    1. Wise (WSE) – Close: $11.05

    • Wise is under investigation in Belgium over suspected AML lapses tied to cross-border flows totaling roughly €500M.
    • The probe follows earlier regulatory pressure in Europe and past remediation efforts across its AML and compliance systems.

    Why it matters: This goes to the core of what scaled cross-border fintech looks like under regulatory stress. As transaction volumes grow and geographies expand, the AML surface area expands with it.

    For Wise, the issue is less about whether it has controls in place and more about whether those controls can keep pace with increasingly fragmented enforcement regimes across jurisdictions.

    It also underscores a broader reality for cross-border players: speed and scale are only as durable as the compliance architecture underneath them.

    2. SoFi (SOFI) – Close: $16.92

    • SoFi introduced an AI-powered financial coach that aggregates data across over 12,000 institutions to provide personalized guidance.
    • Early testing shows 70% of engaged users took financial actions such as debt repayment or account optimization.

    Why it matters: This move pushes SoFi beyond being a multi-product financial app into a decision-making layer across a user’s entire financial life. The key shift is scope.

    By pulling in external financial data, SoFi is effectively positioning itself as the interpretive layer over fragmented financial behavior. That creates a stronger feedback loop between insight, recommendation, and action than product bundling alone ever could.

    3. Affirm (AFRM) – Close: $68.57

    • Affirm and Stripe expanded their partnership to bring BNPL capabilities to UK merchants using Stripe.
    • The collaboration also includes joint work on AI-powered commerce and tokenized, pay-over-time checkout experiences.

    Why it matters: This move is about checkout becoming a programmable decision layer. Payments are becoming adaptive financial choices embedded in commerce flows.

    Stripe continues to position itself as the orchestration layer for merchant payments, while Affirm plugs into that layer at the point of consumer decision.

    4. LendingClub (LC) – Close: $17.28

    • LendingClub is shifting its listing to Nasdaq alongside a rebrand to “Happen Bank” as it evolves into a broader digital-first bank.
    • The company is repositioning beyond lending into deposits, marketplace finance, and a more diversified banking model.

    Why it matters: The rebrand reflects LendingClub’s structural identity shift from product company to full-stack financial institution.

    Moving to Nasdaq aligns with its repositioning toward a more tech-forward narrative, but the real change is architectural. LendingClub is effectively trying to escape its original constraint as a lender and reframe itself as a system for financial activity rather than a single product.

    5. Bank of America (BAC) – Close: $54.07

    • Bank of America is launching a real-time cross-border payments solution integrated with SWIFT and its CashPro platform.
    • The system connects multiple global instant payment networks, including UPI, Faster Payments, and SPEI.

    Why it matters: This is a traditional bank directly responding to the real-time expectations set by fintech and payment networks. The move is about compressing settlement latency across jurisdictions while maintaining institutional control.

    The key shift is interoperability, connecting fragmented domestic instant payment systems into a unified corporate experience layer.

    Posted on

    SoFi bets the future of finance is fewer handoffs

      Weekly 10-Q

      The weekly 10-Q newsletter is part of the Tearsheet Pro subscription, where I unpack the recent moves and strategies of leading banks and fintechs in the public space, coupled with stock market analysis. In your inbox every Friday!

      Message Sara

      SoFi bets the future of finance is fewer handoffs

      SoFi’s new playbook: Own the customer, own the infrastructure, own the money movement

      The last ten years saw financial services steadily unbundle. Specialists emerged for lending, investing, payments, banking infrastructure, financial planning, and compliance. As a result, consumers gained more choice, and financial institutions gained more vendors. But the result was also more fragmentation. Money moved through multiple systems, customer information was stored in multiple databases, and financial decisions were made without a complete picture.

      SoFi’s string of announcements between May and June suggests the company sees the next phase differently. In less than a month, it acquired assets from capital markets platform PrimaryBid, bought loan servicing software provider Peach Finance, expanded access to its stablecoin SoFiUSD, hired payments veteran Kathleen Pierce-Gilmore to lead its technology business, and launched an AI-powered financial coach.

      These developments point to the firm’s broader attempt to reduce the number of handoffs between financial products, systems, and decisions.

      From products to systems

      SoFi started as a consumer products company, scaling from student loans into banking, investing, and credit cards through its single integrated financial platform.

      …

      subscription wall for TS Pro

      Posted on

      The Week in Market Moves | May 21-28, 2026

      Company signals and market response

      This analysis tracks the top company developments and how markets absorbed them through Thursday’s close, focusing on where shifting narratives translate into price action.

      It is part of Tearsheet PRO’s weekly 10-Q Newsletter, where strategy meets market reaction. I track how leading banks and fintechs are evolving in public markets and how investors are pricing those moves.

      Subscribe to PRO and get the full 10-Q story every Friday!

      1. Mastercard (MA) – Close: $493.75

      • Mastercard is asking Brazilian processors to share half the losses tied to Banco Master’s collapse and Will Financeira’s card portfolio exposure.
      • The dispute sits at the intersection of new central bank liability rules and legacy card-network risk allocation during issuer failure.

      Why it matters: Mastercard is testing how far network liability can extend when an issuer fails mid-transition in a tightening regulatory regime. Banco Master is a Brazilian bank that grew rapidly through high-yield debt funding and later faced cash flow stress, leading to its collapse and liquidation. The Banco Master collapse exposed ambiguity over who absorbs systemic fallout in card ecosystems.

      Brazil’s central bank has already shifted more responsibility onto payment networks for settlement guarantees, but Mastercard is pushing back on retroactive interpretation of those rules. The standoff signals a broader fault line: as regulators push for guaranteed settlement finality, networks are being forced to rethink how risk is distributed across issuers, acquirers, and schemes.

      If unresolved, this becomes less about one failed fintech and more about how payment networks price and structure systemic risk in emerging markets.

      2. Circle (CRCL) – Close: $108.24

      • Circle co-founder Sean Neville’s Catena Labs raised $30M and received OCC acceptance for a national trust bank charter application.
      • The company is building an “AI-native financial institution” designed for agent-driven transactions with embedded controls and policy layers.

      Why it matters: Circle co-founder Sean Neville is now rebuilding the financial stack around AI agents. His new venture, Catena Labs, is an AI-native financial infrastructure startup positioning agents as the primary actors in moving money, with humans acting as supervisors rather than initiators. This extends his earlier work in stablecoin-based payments into regulated banking rails designed for agent-driven finance.

      The key shift is architectural: agents get wallets, balances, and payment rails, while humans get a “control plane” to set constraints, approvals, and limits. That separation signals where the industry is heading, away from human-initiated transactions and toward delegated economic activity executed by software.

      If this model scales, the core battleground in financial services shifts from UX and apps to governance infrastructure: how much autonomy AI agents are allowed to have, and who controls the boundaries of that autonomy.

      3. Robinhood (HOOD) – Close: $84.84

      • Robinhood received Canadian regulatory approval for its acquisition of WonderFi, deepening its crypto infrastructure footprint.
      • The deal complements earlier acquisitions like Bitstamp as Robinhood expands custody, compliance, and trading infrastructure.

      Why it matters: Robinhood is rebuilding itself as a multi-layer financial platform spanning brokerage, crypto infrastructure, and emerging market-style financial products.

      Crypto trading revenue has fallen sharply, down roughly 47% year-over-year, but that decline is being offset by subscription products, prediction markets, and derivatives-linked activity. The WonderFi acquisition announced in 2024 extends this shift by adding regulated Canadian crypto rails, staking, and custody capabilities.

      The broader signal is structural repositioning: Robinhood is moving from a single-product brokerage dependent on trading volatility to a platform that combines investing, speculation, and infrastructure ownership. In that model, trading becomes one of several monetization layers inside a broader financial ecosystem.

      Posted on

      May’s public fintech theme: Operating systems over products

        Weekly 10-Q

        The weekly 10-Q newsletter is part of the Tearsheet Pro subscription, where I unpack the recent moves and strategies of leading banks and fintechs in the public space, coupled with stock market analysis. In your inbox every Friday!

        Message Sara

        May’s public fintech theme: Operating systems over products

        Firms are pushing closer to the decision layer where financial actions are executed.

        May showed that companies are tightening control over the infrastructure that runs financial systems, including coordination, decisioning, workflows, and the underlying data layers.

        Across Coinbase, LendingClub, Green Dot, Citi, and Intuit, the details differ. The direction doesn’t. Each firm is moving one layer down the stack, closer to where financial decisions are actually made and executed.

        1. Coinbase: Still trading-led, increasingly infrastructure-shaped

        Coinbase is building toward an “everything exchange,” but its business is still defined in real time by trading.

        Q4 2025 (reported February 2026) made that clear: revenue of $1.78B, down 22% year over year, and a $666M net loss tied to weaker trading activity. Yet subscription and services revenue held up at $727M, driven by custody, stablecoins, and institutional products.

        Two engines are now visible:

        • Trading: volatility, upside/downside driver

        • Subscriptions and infrastructure: baseline, recurring layer

        CEO Brian Armstrong called Coinbase in “pole position” for 2026. Structurally, it is still a volatility-priced company building a stability engine underneath it.

        2. LendingClub: The business changed first, the name followed

        …

        subscription wall for TS Pro

        Posted on

        The uneven geography of modern finance: AI, branches, and BNPL

          Financial firms are choosing to anchor themselves before, during, or after a transaction.

          This week didn’t offer a single storyline to hang everything on. Instead, it gave us three companies moving in completely different directions, signaling how far financial services has drifted from any shared playbook.

          PayPal is trying to teach small businesses how to use AI. Chase is opening more branches in an era defined by digital banking. And Klarna is turning payments into more of a daily habit loop.

          It all comes down to: how do you stay relevant when the way people interact with money is shifting faster than the institutions themselves?

          PayPal wants AI to stop feeling like AI

          PayPal and Anthropic have partnered to help small businesses adopt AI, including training and workflow integration. 

          PayPal is no longer confined to the checkout flow; through its integration with Anthropic’s Claude, it is moving closer to SMB workflows where transactions are initiated and executed. In effect, it is extending from a payments layer into the operational layer around business activity.

          …

          subscription wall for TS Pro

          Posted on

          The Week in Market Moves | May 14–21, 2026

          Company signals and market response

          This analysis tracks the top 5 company developments and how markets absorbed them through Thursday’s close, focusing on where shifting narratives translate into price action.

          It is part of Tearsheet PRO’s weekly 10-Q Newsletter, where strategy meets market reaction. I track how leading banks and fintechs are evolving in public markets and how investors are pricing those moves.

          Subscribe to PRO and get the full 10-Q story every Friday!

          1. Klarna (KLAR) – Close: $15.93

          • Klarna is embedding itself directly into Worldline’s acquiring and merchant infrastructure, starting with e-commerce and eventually extending into in-store POS systems across Europe.
          • The partnership gives Klarna distribution through one of Europe’s largest payment acceptance networks at a time when BNPL usage is expanding beyond discretionary purchases into everyday cash flow management.
          • Klarna launched a shopping app inside ChatGPT that lets users search products, compare prices and check live inventory without leaving the conversation.
          • The move pushes Klarna upstream from payments into product discovery, where purchase decisions increasingly begin inside AI interfaces rather than search engines or retailer apps.

          Why it matters: This move is less about adding another payment button and more about distribution power. Klarna is moving from being a checkout feature into core payments infrastructure. By integrating deeper into Worldline’s stack, Klarna becomes easier for merchants to activate and harder to ignore. The timing matters too. BNPL is increasingly functioning as a short-term cash flow tool for younger consumers. Klarna understands that the winner in BNPL may not be the firm with the best consumer app, but the one most deeply wired into merchant systems and transaction flows.

          Klarna is positioning itself for a world where commerce starts with conversation instead of browsing. If consumers begin asking AI what to buy, the firms controlling that discovery layer gain influence long before checkout happens. What’s interesting is that Klarna is no longer waiting at the payment stage. It wants to sit at the moment of intent formation, when shoppers compare, evaluate, and narrow choices. That changes Klarna’s role from transaction processor to commerce intermediary. In AI-driven retail, discovery may become as valuable as payments themselves.

          2. Intuit (INTU) – Close: $307.07

          • Intuit is cutting roughly 17% of its workforce while redirecting resources toward generative AI infrastructure and product integration.
          • The company is simultaneously restructuring around AI-powered services rather than standalone software tools, supported by partnerships with Anthropic and OpenAI.

          Why it matters: This is not just a cost-cutting story. It reflects a deeper shift in how software companies think about value creation. Traditional SaaS products were built around menus, workflows, and manual inputs. AI changes that model entirely.

          Intuit envisions that accounting, tax, and SMB operations will increasingly run through AI-led orchestration rather than conventional software navigation. The layoffs signal how aggressively firms are willing to reorganize themselves around that assumption even before the long-term economics are fully proven.

          3. NVIDIA (NVDA) – Close: $219.51

          • NVIDIA reported a record $82 billion in revenue for the first quarter of FY2027, which corresponds to the quarter ending around April 2026, as demand surged for infrastructure powering agentic AI systems capable of executing tasks. 
          • The company introduced a clearer distinction between AI reasoning infrastructure and AI execution infrastructure, positioning new chips like Vera around task completion economics rather than raw compute rental.

          Why it matters: The important shift here is that AI infrastructure is becoming tied to staffing replacement economics. Earlier AI waves mostly enhanced software features. Agentic AI is being sold as operational capacity; systems that can investigate, execute, and complete workflows with minimal human involvement.

          That changes the spending logic. Businesses no longer view AI compute as experimental R&D spending. They increasingly view it as infrastructure directly tied to productivity and cost savings. NVIDIA is effectively becoming the industrial backbone for automated digital staffing.

          4. American Express (AXP) – Close: $309.70

          • American Express and Fanatics are launching a co-branded sports rewards card tied to FanCash, collectibles, tickets, and fan experiences.
          • Fanatics will also become Amex’s first sports-focused Membership Rewards transfer partner, linking payments directly into a broader sports commerce ecosystem.

          Why it matters: This deal shows how rewards programs are evolving from generic cashback structures into identity-driven ecosystems. Sports fandom already produces recurring spending behavior, emotional loyalty, and community participation. Payments firms increasingly want to sit inside those engagement loops.

          For Amex, the card is less about transactions alone and more about relevance. The goal is to turn spending into participation, where rewards are connected to experiences, access and belonging rather than points accumulation. Fanatics, meanwhile, gets another mechanism to keep users circulating inside its ecosystem longer.

          5. J.P. Morgan Chase (JPM) – Close: $303

          • Jamie Dimon said J.P. Morgan could eventually hire more AI specialists than traditional bankers as automation reshapes parts of the bank.
          • The firm is already deploying AI tools across investment banking workflows and cybersecurity operations while relying on natural attrition to gradually rebalance its workforce.

          Why it matters: Banks are moving beyond experimenting with AI and starting to redesign organizational structures around it. What J.P. Morgan is describing is not simply productivity software layered onto existing jobs. It is a gradual reallocation of staff toward technical and AI-operational roles.

          Dimon’s vision is notable because it is more pragmatic than the “AI replaces everyone” rhetoric circulating elsewhere in banking. But the direction is still clear: future financial institutions may compete less on headcount scale and more on how effectively they combine domain expertise with machine-driven execution.

          Posted on

          The Week in Market Moves | May 7–14, 2026

          Company signals and market response

          This analysis tracks the top 5 company developments and how markets absorbed them through Thursday’s close, focusing on where shifting narratives translate into price action.

          It is part of Tearsheet PRO’s weekly 10-Q Newsletter, where strategy meets market reaction. I track how leading banks and fintechs are evolving in public markets and how investors are pricing those moves.

          Subscribe to PRO and get the full 10-Q story every Friday!

          1. SoFi (SOFI) – Close: $15.77

          • SoFi has acquired PrimaryBid’s directed share program assets, ending its independent operations.
          • The deal builds on an existing partnership around equity issuance infrastructure (DSP2.0) for public offerings.

          Why it matters: This is SoFi pushing beyond consumer banking into the plumbing of capital markets. Instead of just letting users invest, it is starting to touch how equity offerings are structured and distributed. The move signals a broader ambition: not just to serve retail investors, but to sit closer to how companies raise capital in the first place. This shifts SoFi into a more complex, institution-facing layer of finance where scale alone is not the advantage; equally important are trust, regulatory depth, and execution quality.

          2. Remitly (RELY) – Close: $23.23

          • Remitly Business is now fully available to SMBs in Canada after earlier US and UK expansion.
          • New features include bulk international payments and ‘send via link’ workflows to simplify recipient onboarding.

          Why it matters: Remitly is trying to turn cross-border payments from a consumer remittance product into a business operating layer. The real opportunity is removing the operational drag of international pay runs, beneficiary errors, and fragmented payout workflows. If it works, Remitly becomes less of a remittance app and more of a back-office utility for global SMB commerce. The challenge will be whether it can stay simple as it moves deeper into business complexity.

          3. Coinbase (COIN) – Close: $220.70

          • Coinbase introduced Solana-backed loans, allowing users to borrow USDC against SOL holdings.
          • Loans are powered by Morpho’s on-chain lending infrastructure with instant access and flexible repayment.

          Why it matters: Coinbase is continuing its shift from exchange to financial infrastructure layer. Crypto-backed lending turns dormant assets into usable cash flow without forcing users to exit positions. That pushes Coinbase closer to being a credit intermediary, not just a trading venue. The bet is clear: if crypto assets are going to sit in long-term portfolios, the real value comes from making them productive. The risk sits in volatility cycles as credit tied to asset prices is only as stable as the market beneath it.

          4. Affirm (AFRM) – Close: $66.16

          • Transaction frequency per user has risen 50%, reaching 6.7 transactions annually.
          • Affirm is expanding into cards, wallets, banking integrations, and an industrial bank structure.

          Why it matters: Affirm is moving away from being a point-of-sale financing tool and toward a broader payments network. The emphasis is no longer just lending at checkout, but increasing how often users interact with the ecosystem. That creates a feedback loop: more transactions generate more data, which strengthens underwriting and improves targeting. The ambition is to become embedded in consumer spend flows.

          5. Chase (JPM) – Close: $300.33

          • J.P. Morgan is preparing to launch its retail banking push in Germany, starting with a savings account.
          • The strategy mirrors an entry-first model used by digital banks: land deposits, then expand products.

          Why it matters: This is a conservative but deliberate entry into European retail banking. Instead of trying to compete head-on with incumbents, J.P. Morgan is using savings as a low-friction entry point to build customer relationships. It reflects a broader truth in retail banking: distribution often starts simple, then deepens over time. The harder question is whether a US banking giant can translate brand strength into everyday consumer relevance in a market where local incumbents already dominate trust and habit.