Tag: payments

The IPO glow — and the hard part that comes after

---

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

 

…

---

The story of how Affirm found its second growth engine

---

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.

…

---

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

---

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.

…

---

Payroll’s bigger role beyond payday

---

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

…

---

Quietly building, steadily growing

---

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.

…

---

One framework, many doors.

---

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.

…

---

How Chime, SoFi, and Nubank are redrawing the digital banking map

---

For years, digital banks were the upstarts, carving out space on the promise of sleek apps, fewer fees, and a friendlier relationship with money. But the honeymoon phase of ‘fintech versus banks’ has ended. Now, the spotlight falls on who can actually scale, turn a profit, and keep growing without losing the very customers who signed up to escape Wall Street sameness. 

Three names, Chime, SoFi, and Nubank, are providing three different answers to that existential question. Their recent moves echo the global digital banking sector that’s both maturing and experimenting with new endeavors.

Chime [CHYM]: The IPO debutante under pressure

Chime’s recent numbers underscore both promise and pressure. The neobank achieved profitability in the first quarter of 2025. And while the firm has seen profitable quarters before, Q1 2025 is the first to appear in tandem with its IPO filing.

By the numbers: 

• As of March 2025, the company reported $518.7 million in revenue for the quarter, up from $391.9 million a year earlier, with net income of $12.9 million. 
• For full-year 2024, revenue climbed to $1.67 billion, but the company still posted a small net loss of $25.3 million, though that’s a marked improvement from its $203 million loss in 2023. 
• Its member base sits at about 8.6 million active users, most of whom rely heavily on its debit and credit card products.

The fuller arc: After years of IPO speculation, Chime finally hit Wall Street this summer. Its IPO was priced at $27 a share and opened at $43, a 49% pop that resulted in a public market cap of about $9.8 billion.

The IPO raised $864 million, giving Chime a war chest to push deeper into its target market: Americans earning under $100,000 a year; nearly 200 million people who Chime argues are overcharged by the old banking system.

But IPOs are as much about what’s next as what’s past. 

…

---

For banks, it’s a way to modernize without blowing up the ‘trust’ model

---

Coinbase, once a Silicon Valley outsider pitching crypto as an alternative to the banking system, is now doing business with the very institutions it was supposed to disrupt.

In recent weeks, two of the most prominent names in American finance — PNC and J.P. Morgan — have formally partnered with the exchange. It’s not a headline grab so much as a quiet redrawing of boundaries. The roles are shifting: banks are moving closer to the chain, and Coinbase is evolving beyond being just a crypto trading platform.

The partnerships, while distinct in purpose, point to the same broader trend: crypto is no longer relegated to the kids’ table. PNC is using Coinbase to bring crypto access directly into its digital banking experience. J.P. Morgan is embedding Coinbase integrations into consumer rewards and funding flows, and piloting tokenized deposit infrastructure on Coinbase’s Base chain. 

We explore the specifics of each partnership.

Coinbase and PNC: From branches to blockchains

…

---

The future of banking? It’s not all in Manhattan…

---

Caught between the community banks that know every face in town and the global big ol’ boys that span continents, regional banks are increasingly making meaningful strides in marrying tradition with innovation.

In today’s 10Q edition, we spotlight two such publicly traded regional banks and the strategic moves they’re making.

Part 1: The PNC Case

A Pittsburgh-based institution with a national footprint: PNC Financial Services, headquartered in Pittsburgh, isn’t just a “regional” bank in the narrow sense. With assets of over half a trillion dollars and operations stretching from the Northeast to the Sun Belt, it occupies that increasingly blurred category of “super-regional.” It has a significant footprint in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and other Midwestern states, but its 2021 acquisition of BBVA USA widened its reach drastically into Texas, Arizona, and Alabama, giving it true coast-to-coast visibility.

PNC has positioned itself as an active player in a fast-evolving financial landscape. The bank has been steadily investing in technology, digital banking platforms, and financial literacy tools. But its most recent move signals a brave step into a territory still considered high-risk or unproven by many traditional banking peers.

Crypto, carefully – PNC’s partnership with Coinbase: In July 2025, PNC announced a partnership with Coinbase to expand access to crypto-related financial services for its clients. 

Unlike many crypto service launches that flood retail markets with apps and coins, this collaboration is institutional in focus. The partnership is structured to serve institutional clients — institutional investors, businesses, high-net-worth individuals, and possibly fintech infrastructure needs — rather than the average retail investor. 

The move allows PNC’s banking clients to buy, hold, and sell cryptocurrencies directly through PNC’s own platform, powered by Coinbase’s Crypto-as-a-Service (CaaS) infrastructure. This gives PNC a “plug-and-play” model for digital asset access, while maintaining the brand consistency and trust it has built over the decades.

It also works the other way around.

…

---