fintech Archives - Page 2 of 17

March 19, 2026March 19, 2026

Why fintechs are transitioning from partners to principals in banking

Fintech’s core value proposition was that financial services could be delivered without owning a bank charter. That model produced an entire generation of financial companies. But it also created a structural dependency: fintechs could innovate quickly and focus on software, distribution, and user experience, yet the underlying regulatory authority, lending licenses, deposit insurance, and access to the financial system, remained largely with partner banks.

By early 2026, signs of a shift in that architecture have started to emerge. Within the last three months, three prominent fintechs have applied for bank charters. Buy-now-pay-later provider Affirm applied to establish a bank subsidiary, followed by cross-border payments platform Payoneer, which filed for a national trust bank to support stablecoin infrastructure. And this month, AI lending platform Upstart applied to become a national bank.

One quarter, three charters

These charter applications are fueled by different objectives.

Affirm: Owning the lending stack

In January, Affirm applied to establish Affirm Bank, a Nevada-chartered industrial loan company regulated by state authorities and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

Industrial loan companies (ILCs) can be owned by commercial companies while still operating as FDIC-insured banks, allowing non-bank firms to enter banking without becoming traditional bank holding companies.

For Affirm, the charter could change the economics and structure of its lending platform. The firm can reduce reliance on partners and take greater control over the credit lifecycle, better manage funding costs, expand the scope of its products, and align underwriting, funding, and servicing under a single roof.

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March 10, 2026May 14, 2026

The Quarterly Review: Wise’s Scott Viohl wins audiences through humor and creator-led marketing

In this edition we will check back in with Scott Viohl, Regional Marketing Lead for North America, at Wise.

Executive summary

When we last checked in with Viohl, he was focused on deepening the firm’s presence in the region and analyzing its campaigns to sharpen future efforts.

Over the past four months, his priorities have centered on scaling Wise’s North American footprint, refining how the team measures campaign performance, and pushing creative boundaries through a new wave of creator-led advertising.

Here is what Viohl accomplished:

Scaled Wise’s North American brand presence through its biggest-ever TV campaign, reaching over 80% of adults in key US markets and over 60% in target Canadian regions, while delivering double-digit lifts in brand awareness and measurable growth in new customers and transactions.

Launched a creator-led campaign built around the bespoke fictional character “Don T. Overpay,” proving that native, entertainment-first content can drive stronger organic engagement than traditional product-focused advertising.

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March 2, 2026May 5, 2026

Coinbase rides the waves of stress and opportunity with its ‘Everything Exchange’ vision

Coinbase is trying to bridge two financial worlds: crypto and traditional finance, while navigating the challenges of public policy.

Coinbase [NASDAQ: COIN] is outgrowing its early role as a simple crypto exchange.

Recent moves suggest that the firm is evolving into a unified platform for multiple financial assets and services, positioning itself as a bridge between traditional finance and the digital asset economy. This transformation is guided by what the company calls its “Everything Exchange” strategy – a term it began emphasizing in late 2025 – aimed at removing boundaries between asset classes and offering trading, financial services, and developer infrastructure within a single integrated platform.

“Our Everything Exchange vision is about removing artificial boundaries between asset classes and building for the next generation of markets,” the company noted in its recent press release.

But broadening that scope also exposes Coinbase to new regulatory, competitive, and market pressures: the balancing acts that come with trying to be more than a crypto exchange.

Everything Exchange comes to life

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February 24, 2026May 14, 2026

Citizens’ CIO on the ethos that led the bank into the cloud and beyond

Not all banks are stuck in the mainframe era.

Today, we look at Citizens, which has been on an impressive modernization and innovation journey, speaking with the bank’s Chief Information Officer and Head of Technology Services, Michael Ruttledge, to understand how one of America’s oldest institutions shed the weight of legacy technology, moved entirely to the cloud, and built the organizational ethos to carry its progress forward.

The start of the road

Citizens was once owned by the Royal Bank of Scotland, which divested its stake in 2015. Ruttledge, who joined the firm in 2019, was coming into an organization already in the process of modernizing. “When I joined it was a good time because people started to move more applications to the cloud and more were moving into agile development,” he said.

Since his joining, the firm has been focused on its “Next Gen Technology” initiative that focuses on 5 main pillars and serves as the spine for its modernization efforts:

Empowering the development cycle: Move into an agile environment through developing DevSecOps tools and test automation.

Enhancing communication within the infrastructure: Leverage APIs to modernize the technology stack.

Improving internal capabilities and talent: Upskilling the current workforce because the bank had previously skewed towards outsourcing and developed considerable technical debt within the team.

Transitioning away from mainframes: Moving the infrastructure to the cloud and remote servers.

Fortifying the core: Protecting its core banking software by enhancing stability and security against cyber threats.

For a firm that was established in 1828, and (in Ruttledge’s words) the “last company on the planet to be using IBM Big Insights,” the Next Gen Technology initiative has been able to realize big results: “We’re the only super regional bank that is completely in the cloud. All of our business apps are either in the Azure or AWS public clouds and we are now in the process of decommitting our data centers in North Carolina,” he shared.

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February 26, 2026March 2, 2026

How embedded BNPL optimizes cash flow for SMBs: Inside the Intuit-Affirm partnership

For years, fintech competed by building better products. Now it’s competing for something more valuable: control of the moment when a financial decision is made.

The recent Intuit-Affirm partnership offers a clear window into this shift. By embedding Affirm’s pay-over-time directly into QuickBooks invoices, the companies are transforming the accounting software into a decision layer, enabling financial actions directly within the workflow.

Intuit’s QuickBooks as a platform for action

Intuit has been transforming itself from a bookkeeping and tax software company into a full-spectrum financial operating system for small and midsize businesses (SMBs). Through strategic acquisitions like GoCo, which adds HR and compliance capabilities, and Deserve, which brings mobile-first credit card infrastructure, Intuit has expanded its platform beyond ledgers and payroll into a broader ecosystem. These moves have allowed the company to embed financial services directly into workflows, creating a sticky, end-to-end environment that SMBs rely on to run their businesses.

The Affirm partnership represents the next stage in this strategy’s evolution.

“We’re continuously evolving our overall Intuit platform to provide businesses and consumers with a seamless way to manage their money and fuel their financial success,” said David Hahn, Executive Vice President and GM of Intuit’s Services Group.

“The fintech solutions we’ve embedded in QuickBooks are a key part of this strategy, and adding Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) capabilities through our partnership with Affirm is a natural progression of the work we’ve done to provide businesses with a solution that allows them to view, manage, and take action on their finances in one central place,” he added.

David Hahn, Executive Vice President, General Manager, Services Group at Intuit

Embedded directly into QuickBooks Payments, Affirm allows QuickBooks customers to split an invoice into installments while the business gets paid upfront. For small businesses, that difference is critical: they can optimize cash flow and sales as they happen.

Owning the “Moment of Decision”

QuickBooks acts as both the distribution layer and the decision point when an invoice is issued.

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February 23, 2026May 5, 2026

Banking: AI, automation, and the rise of digital-first scale

The new battleground in banking is intelligent operations and scalable execution.

In 2026, banking is about moving money smarter, faster, and with fewer humans in the middle. Across corporate finance and global retail operations, banks are experimenting with technology and operational design in ways that challenge long-held assumptions about scale, speed, and control.

Three recent developments exemplify what’s happening in money movement: Goldman Sachs deploying AI agents, Truist automating corporate receivables, and Nubank expanding abroad with a lean digital model. All demonstrate how the modern banking playbook is evolving.

Case Analysis 1: Goldman Sachs’ AI agents as “digital colleagues”

Goldman Sachs is testing a new frontier in operational finance: it’s deploying autonomous AI agents built on Anthropic’s Claude mode to enhance internal productivity and streamline workflows. These agents are undergoing trials for rule-based tasks such as transaction reconciliation, trade accounting, and client onboarding; roles that have resisted automation for decades because of high regulatory and operational complexity.

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February 17, 2026May 14, 2026

Affirm’s move to become a bank signals a reconfiguration for the BaaS industry and beyond

It’s an interesting time for fintechs, despite regulatory uncertainties like the open banking ruling, that call infrastructural configurations into question. Fintechs like Affirm are also eyeing some greenfield opportunities like becoming a bank.

The charter rush

Getting a US bank charter isn’t easy. But the rising number of charter applications indicates that multiple major players in the industry perceive Trump’s second term in the White House as the right time to push for the elusive bank status.

Charter application activity has surged notably under the current administration. Just the first eight months of 2025 produced 21 applications – more than twice the total from the entirety of 2024, which saw only 8.

February 19, 2026March 2, 2026

Open banking’s paywall era – and what it means for banks, fintechs, and policy in 2026

J.P. Morgan processes nearly 2 billion API requests every month, but only about 13% correspond to direct, customer-initiated actions. The rest are background data calls powering budgeting apps, lending tools, and account connections across the fintech ecosystem.

For years, that access was largely free. But financial innovation seldom arrives in a straight line. Sometimes it swerves unexpectedly, forcing the industry to confront the tension between idealism and economics.

In 2025, the era of free access took a hit. J.P. Morgan started negotiating paid data-access agreements with third-party data aggregators like Plaid, MX, and Yodlee, signaling a broader shift in the economics of open banking.

For more than a decade, open banking ran on an implicit bargain: consumers could share their data freely, fintechs could innovate on top of it, and banks would absorb the infrastructure costs. Now, as data volumes surge and regulatory uncertainty lingers, the industry is confronting a harder question: If access to financial data becomes a commercial service, what does “open” banking really mean – and who ultimately foots the bill?

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February 16, 2026May 5, 2026

Why some major banks are bringing embedded finance in-house

Inside incumbent banks’ push to own the embedded finance stack

Capital One has spent the past two years doing something unusual for many US banks: rebuilding itself in plain view.

First came the Discover acquisition in 2024, a move widely read as a scale play that gave Capital One greater reach across credit cards, payment rails, and consumer financial infrastructure. Then came the Brex acquisition announcement in January 2026, a very different kind of asset on paper, but one that fits a similar underlying logic.

These deals signal that Capital One is collapsing the distance between product and distribution, software and balance sheet, embedded finance and the bank itself. This isn’t about cards. And it’s not really just about M&A. It’s about ownership.

Two deals, one story

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March 4, 2026May 20, 2026

Truist’s Dontá Wilson: ‘Innovation without empathy is empty’

There’s a tension at the heart of modern banking that technology doesn’t seem to totally resolve: how do you be both digitally excellent and deeply human at the same time? Most banks have picked a lane: either betting on digital efficiency or doubling down on relationship banking. But consumers aren’t asking for one or the other. They want both. They want their banking app to work flawlessly when they need it, and they want someone who actually knows them when it matters.

My guest today is Dontá Wilson, Truist’s Chief Consumer and Small Business Banking Officer. He leads 20,000 teammates serving clients through both digital channels and more than 1,900 community banking branches. His portfolio spans core deposits and loans to mortgage, auto, credit cards, and the full stack of consumer products. He also oversees Truist’s multi-year growth plan that’s reimagining both their digital experience and their physical branches using insights and AI.

We talked about how AI is redefining consumer expectations and trust, what it takes to innovate inside a highly regulated industry while keeping client purpose at the center, and why Dontá believes innovation without empathy is empty.