Tag: Crypto

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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The story of how Affirm found its second growth engine

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Big announcements are often greeted with fast fanfare, but sometimes clues of fintech’s evolution and a company’s growth roadmap are tucked inside quarterly filings. That’s the case with Affirm’s Q4 2025 results, which came out at the end of August.

The earnings figures were notable: $876 million in revenue, up 33% year-over-year, a swing to $69 million in net income, and Affirm’s GMV growth year-over-year was about 43%, from $7.2 billion to $10.4 billion in Q4.

Given how often Affirm has been boxed in as a BNPL (buy now pay later) pure-play, the move into sustained profitability on its own could have carried the story. This time, though, the detail worth dwelling on was buried in the product data, and how a specific product is emerging as Affirm’s second growth engine. The first growth engine remains BNPL at checkout.

The product in focus is the Affirm Card, which has steadily grown over the past five years since its launch. It’s a debit card that lets users decide whether to pay upfront or make payments over time, all managed through the Affirm app.

In the recent earnings, Affirm card GMV more than doubled, up 132% to $1.2 billion. Active cardholders nearly doubled, reaching 2.3 million, and in-store spend increased by 187%. These are beyond just signs of adoption; more like Affirm turning its card into a core payments habit. With early AdaptAI deployments driving an average 5% increase in GMV for adopting merchants, you get a picture of the fintech doing more than selling installments. Affirm is moving into an infrastructure that merchants, especially SMBs, can build on.

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September Analysis: Firms’ different tactics, but a shared recognition

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By early 2026, Colorado-based FirstBank’s logo will give way to PNC’s navy and orange. Across the country, a Filipino nurse in New York tests out Remitly’s new membership model to send remittance back home, while a coffee shop owner in Minneapolis logs into U.S. Bank to approve payroll without switching tabs. 

These are three very different scenes, but together they show how the edges of financial services are being redrawn from three different directions: scale, reinvention, and integration. 

PNC is buying its way into Colorado dominance with the FirstBank acquisition deal. Remitly, once known mostly for remittances, is positioning itself as a financial hub for users and SMBs with its new Remitly One membership. And U.S. Bank is folding payroll directly into its small business dashboard, in a move that’s more about tightening its grip on the cash flow nerve center.

Each tells a story about how financial institutions, big and small, are recalibrating what it means to serve customers in 2025 and beyond.

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Payroll’s bigger role beyond payday

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Payroll has historically lagged behind other enterprise functions in terms of flexibility and speed. Green Dot has been working on that gap since 2004, when it introduced rapid! to streamline wage payments. Two decades later, rapid! is expanding its role, evolving into a platform that connects payroll with the larger ecosystem of digital payments.

rapid! offers PayCard, on-demand earned wage access (EWA), and disbursement solutions that now serve over 7,000 businesses. It sits within Green Dot’s broader fintech and banking ecosystem and is powered by the company’s own proprietary money-movement technology, which supports real-time payments across the US.

“It’s a natural extension of our mission to simplify and democratize financial access for workers and businesses alike,” notes Crystal Bryant-Minter, Sr. Vice President, GM Wage and Corporate Disbursement at Green Dot.

With its new partnership, rapid! is wiring earned wage access and real-time payouts into Workday’s payroll and HCM systems. Workday, the cloud platform for workforce and financial management, gives employers a single hub to run both people operations and finance.

For Green Dot, it also signals how payroll and payouts could be the front door to something larger: embedded financial services at scale.

In our conversation, Bryant-Minter unpacks how the recent partnership signals about Green Dot’s long game in embedded finance and whether payroll can be the starting line for deeper financial integration.

Crystal Bryant-Minter, Sr. Vice President, GM Wage and Corporate Disbursement at Green Dot

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Quietly building, steadily growing

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When you think of America’s banking landscape, the names that immediately come to mind are the Wall Street skyscrapers and their logos that dominate media headlines: J.P. Morgan, Citi, Bank of America. However, lurking far from the spotlight are non-mega banks with balance sheets hefty enough to rival the GDPs of mid-tier states, but they move so quietly that one could almost miss them. 

One of these shadow giants is BOK Financial [BOKF]. Founded in 1910, this Oklahoma-born institution has spent more than a century weaving itself into the economic fabric of the Midwest and Southwest.

The institution’s journey could have ended three decades ago. But its story is that of a phoenix, emerging stronger from the fire. 

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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One framework, many doors.

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Citizens Bank hit reset on its open banking API earlier this year, modernizing the framework.

The bank began developing the new framework in 2023 under Financial Data Exchange (FDX) standards, phasing out older patchwork APIs and the risk of screen scraping. The beta arrived in mid-2024, with the full launch in Q1 2025.

The new API framework gives business, commercial, wealth, and private banking customers the same access through a single endpoint, making integration easier for fintechs and platforms with mixed user bases. The system adjusts its data output based on the account type.

In the longer term, the move positions the bank for faster collaboration with fintechs and data aggregators, creating pathways for new services to reach customers more quickly. For both businesses and individuals, this could mean smarter financial planning, more tailored products, and an improved banking experience that blends well with the tools they already use.

Oscar Gonzalez, Head of Product Management for Access & Delivery Channels at Citizens, walked me through the bank’s decision to launch its new open banking API framework and the pain points it aims to solve.

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