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!
Citi is done getting smaller. Now it has to get better.
After years of restructuring, Citi is putting its rebuilt infrastructure to work.
Citi delivered its best quarterly revenue in a decade. Revenue reached $24.8 billion, up 14% year over year, while net income jumped 45% to $5.8 billion and investment banking revenue rose 44%. Yet the stock fell 4.2% after earnings.
Investors are moving past whether the bank can generate earnings and toward what management does with them. Citi’s 13% Q2 Return on Tangible Common Equity (RoTCE) was already above its 10%-11% 2026 target, but management has kept that target intact while leaving room to pull forward investment spending. Its next test is proving the rebuilt bank can become a more effective growth machine.
The $1 trillion franchise hiding in plain sight
Citi’s Services business – Treasury and Trade Solutions and Securities Services – is where the bank’s growth strategy is becoming most tangible.
Services revenue rose 18% in Q2 to a record $5.5 billion, while average deposits grew 19% to about $1.1 trillion. Cross-border transaction value rose 13%, assets under custody and administration increased 22%, and the business generated a 30.9% RoTCE, more than twice Citi’s 13% firmwide return.
The bigger opportunity lies in what happens when Citi can connect those capabilities within the same institutional relationship. A bank sitting inside a company’s daily cash flows can see when balances build, receivables shift, currency exposure emerges, or financing needs appear.
Payments can be the entry point, but a wider opportunity is owning more of what happens around the money.
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 in your inbox every Friday!
1. Klarna (KLAR) – Close: $14
Klarna Card reached 6.5 million active users across 16 countries, up from 1.3 million a year ago, while paying subscribers reached 2 million, eight times the year-earlier level.
But Klarna cut its full-year GMV outlook to $149-$151 billion from more than $155 billion as discretionary spending weakened in Germany. The stock fell more than 20% after the results.
Why it matters: Klarna Card, pay-in-full transactions, subscriptions, and larger-ticket financing are giving it more ways to monetize the same customer relationship. But the lowered outlook is a reminder that expanding the product set doesn’t remove Klarna’s exposure to consumer spending. The question now is whether these newer businesses can make Klarna’s revenue less dependent on the broader shopping cycle.
Visa and Mastercard joined Rain’s newly launched Agentic Payments Alliance, alongside Fiserv, Circle, Solana, and Remitly, to work on standards for how AI agents will transact.
The coalition will focus on agent identity, authorization, fraud, loyalty, and regulation – the infrastructure questions that have to be solved before agents can transact at meaningful scale.
Why it matters: The agentic commerce debate is moving beyond “can an AI agent buy something?” to who gives the agent permission to pay, what limits apply, and who is responsible when something goes wrong. Visa and Mastercard’s involvement matters because those decisions will shape how the existing payments system adapts to software acting on behalf of consumers. The rails are starting to help define how agentic commerce works.
3. Citi (C) – Close: $129.67
Citi launched Custody+, a suite of near- and real-time custody capabilities designed for compressed settlement cycles, continuous markets, and increasingly automated investment decisions.
The bank is also building digital-asset custody on the same architecture, with bitcoin expected to be the first asset supported later this year.
Why it matters: Custody has historically been built around batches, cutoffs, and end-of-day processes. Citi is effectively acknowledging that the underlying financial system is moving toward continuous activity and custody has to move with it. There will be a common architecture for traditional and digital assets: rather than treating crypto as a separate infrastructure layer, Citi is trying to make it another asset type within the same custody system.
4. PayPal (PYPL) – Close: $62.30
PayPal and Venmo are expanding into tuition payments through integrations with Illumia, Nelnet Campus Commerce, and TouchNet, giving students and families the option to pay schools directly through their platforms.
The integrations are already live at schools including Bellarmine, Butler, Kansas State, and Michigan State, with more institutions expected to join.
Why it matters: Tuition is a large, recurring payment that still runs through fragmented systems at many schools. PayPal is trying to insert itself into an existing institutional workflow rather than simply compete for another checkout transaction. If its wallets can handle more of the payments people already make, the network becomes more embedded in everyday financial activity rather than relying on individual transactions.
5. Robinhood (HOOD) – Close: $95.10
CEO Vlad Tenev is pushing U.S. policymakers to update securities rules to allow tokenized stocks, arguing that American investors shouldn’t be excluded from infrastructure being built around American assets.
Robinhood says its Robinhood Chain has already processed 100 million transactions, while its Stock Tokens provide exposure to more than 190 U.S. stocks across 120-plus countries.
Why it matters: Robinhood is now lobbying for the regulatory framework that would let tokenized assets become a mainstream part of U.S. markets. That makes this a bigger strategic bet on how ownership itself could work, including 24/7 trading and faster settlement. But the regulatory push also highlights the unresolved question: tokenizing an asset doesn’t automatically mean you’ve preserved all the protections and market infrastructure surrounding the underlying security.
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!
Is it time for AI to enter the payback period and show its ROI?
AI’s contribution remains buried in the broader earnings numbers.
Block’s latest quarter is an early test of what happens when a financial company doesn’t simply add AI to its products but, in fact, restructures the company around it. Six months after cutting more than 40% of its workforce, Block reported 25% year-over-year gross profit growth, a record 27% adjusted operating margin, and 65% growth in adjusted diluted EPS. It also raised its full-year outlook.
That doesn’t prove AI is responsible for the improvement from head to toe. But it gives investors a real operating experiment to watch, which is relatively more useful than another AI product announcement at the moment.
Last week, I looked at Block’s Q2’26 results and how AI is increasingly shaping the way the company operates. That got me thinking about the next question. If AI is changing the operating model, how do we know when AI itself is actually paying off?
A little context: Block’s bet started in February 2026, when CEO Jack Dorsey cut more than 4,000 jobs and argued that AI had changed the economics of how the company could operate. That meant smaller teams equipped with increasingly capable intelligence tools could do more work, faster.
Six months later, there are signs that the operating model is changing. Block said it shipped 130 features in the first half of 2026, more than three times the 40 it shipped during the same period a year earlier. AI tools are now involved in nearly every production code change and review.
CFO Amrita Ahuja said the company was able to achieve “record profitability” while continuing to invest in growth, with AI helping increase product velocity.
The numbers are significant because they show up alongside – not instead of – business growth. Square gross profit and gross payment volume each increased 13%. Cash App gross profit grew 31%. Consumer lending originations rose 59%. Block raised its full-year gross profit forecast to $12.51 billion and adjusted EPS growth forecast to 70%.
That makes Block a pretty clean case study for the emerging question of AI ROI.
But there is an important catch: the company still can’t isolate how much of that performance came from AI alone.
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 in your inbox every Friday!
1. Wells Fargo (WFC) – Close: $88.11
Wells Fargo plans to launch tokenized deposits for select corporate and commercial clients this fall, initially enabling 24/7 movement and settlement between U.S. dollars and British pounds.
The move puts Wells Fargo into a more direct contest with J.P. Morgan and Citi over the future of bank-based digital money for corporate payments, with expansion to more clients, currencies, and countries planned for 2027.
Why it matters: The move gives corporate treasurers some of the speed and programmability of stablecoins without asking them to move money into a separate digital asset. If payments can eventually be tied to invoices, delivery milestones, or other business conditions, the bigger opportunity is automating the workflow around the payment itself. The catch is interoperability: a tokenized deposit is only as useful as its ability to move beyond one bank’s network.
2. Block (XYZ) – Close: $83.09
Square is expanding Bill Pay so sellers can use their Square Credit Card to pay vendors even when those vendors don’t accept cards, with funds delivered via ACH or check.
The refreshed card offers 3% cash back on Square Bill Pay transactions and 1.5% on other purchases, adding another reason for sellers to keep more of their spending inside Square.
Why it matters: Block’s Square is pushing its credit product deeper into the day-to-day cash-flow management of a small business. The important move is removing the card-acceptance constraint that normally limits where business credit can be used. Combined with Square’s deposits, lending, and payments products, the company is making the case for managing more of the business’s financial life in one place, while giving itself more opportunities to monetize that relationship.
3. Coinbase (COIN) – Close: $153.90
Coinbase Business can now accept payments from AI agents through the x402 open standard, with transactions settling instantly in USDC.
The update comes alongside broader payment tools, while Coinbase says its Business platform now serves more than 5,000 companies and has powered more than 100,000 payments.
Why it matters: This is one of the clearer signs that agentic commerce is starting to require its own payment infrastructure. An AI agent doesn’t have a traditional checkout experience or necessarily want to navigate cards, invoices, and banking portals the way a human does. USDC and x402 give machines a way to transact directly, but the bigger question is whether businesses will actually want autonomous agents making payments and what controls they’ll eventually require when they do.
4. Intuit (INTU) – Close: $358.29
Intuit is adding Intuit Intelligence Chat to QuickBooks Online Advanced and Intuit Enterprise Suite, allowing finance teams to query business data and trigger workflows using natural language.
QuickBooks Online Advanced is also bringing bill pay, payments, and AI-driven bookkeeping into the core subscription, including “Books Upkeep” for continuous transaction reconciliation.
Why it matters: Intuit is moving beyond the familiar “AI assistant” pitch and putting AI directly into the financial workflows where decisions and transactions happen. That’s a meaningful shift for the middle market: the value isn’t just getting an answer faster, but having the system resolve transactions, reconcile books, and initiate workflows. It also raises the bar for measuring AI’s value: less about how often users chat with an AI tool and more about how much manual finance work disappears.
5. Klarna (KLAR) – Close: $20.68
Klarna is rolling out four new membership tiers across 11 European markets, ranging from €4.99 to €44.99 [roughly $5.75-$51.80] per month, with higher tiers offering more cashback, subscriptions, travel benefits, and protections.
The company is simultaneously removing service fees and increasing rewards, positioning the membership model as a broader financial relationship rather than simply a BNPL add-on.
Why it matters: Klarna is trying to make the membership itself a gateway to more of the customer’s financial life. The higher tiers are bundling payments, rewards, subscriptions, travel, and card usage into one recurring relationship. That matters because the economics of a financial platform can look very different when it earns from a customer’s broader engagement rather than from individual transactions alone.
In this edition we will spotlight Jeff Pomeroy, Payment Services & Crypto.
Executive Summary
Six months after setting an ambitious agenda that included unifying PayPal’s global platform, expanding in-store, and scaling value-added services, Jeff Pomeroy is back on The Quarterly Review with progress to show on all three.
He also plants a flag on a newly broadened mandate: one platform for every business, every channel, and every payment modality — future-proofed with crypto and agentic commerce. And he shares his read on trends worth watching, including where he thinks the next durable moat in payments will be built, and what he’s doing to build it.
“When we last spoke, I framed our work around one idea: intense focus,” Pomeroy said. “Now I’m coming up for air to tell you about it.”
Here is what Pomeroy and his team have accomplished since our last conversation:
Made value-added services like network tokenization self-serve, converting nearly all merchants in a recent free-trial.
Closed a string of omni-channel deals via Verifone, including PayPal’s first omnichannel government contract.
Brought Australia and Europe fully onto PayPal’s unified platform and began moving processing in-house.
Broadened his remit into a new org, Payment Services & Crypto, unifying enterprise, small-business, crypto, and agentic commerce.
The Full Review
A few quarters ago, Pomeroy set three priorities for PayPal’s enterprise payments business: a unified global platform, in-store expansion via Verifone, and scaled value-added services. Six months later, he’s back with what he calls a clean sweep.
“The short version is that we stayed the course,” Pomeroy said. “This is an industry that produces a new shiny object every week, and most of the discipline is in not chasing it.”
That discipline came from guardrails he’d put in place, measuring every initiative against merchant demand, ROI, and contractual obligations.
“That discipline is showing up exactly where it should,” he said, “in the deals we’re closing, the services merchants are turning on, and how we’re executing in the public market.”
Objective 01: Scaling value-added services
Six months ago, the goal was to scale value-added services — network tokenization, smart retries, debit routing, and payouts. Pomeroy says that work has moved from launch to self-serve: merchants can now go into their portal, look at their own reporting, and switch on some of PayPal’s most meaningful services themselves.
“That’s a different business than the one we had a year ago,” he said.
The bigger challenge, he says, was getting merchants to understand what they’re worth. So his team built a proof mechanism that turns on network tokens for free and lets merchants watch what it does to their own numbers.
“We did exactly that with hundreds of merchants recently, and all but one kept the tokens on at the end of the trial,” he said, “because once they could see the value it returned to their payments experience, the decision made itself.”
His team built tooling that surfaces a merchant’s own performance data such as auth rates and costs. “That lets us walk in with the merchant’s own performance in front of us and have a real conversation instead of a sales pitch,” he said.
The team’s speed comes from process restructuring and optimization. PayPal has leaned into AI internally to reduce time-to-live for products, freeing teams to focus their judgment on the parts of a payments problem that actually need a human who understands how the rails behave.
“AI doesn’t replace that,” he said. “It clears the runway so we get to it faster.”
Objective 02: Winning in-store and omni-channel
The Verifone partnership remains, in Pomeroy’s words, the spine of PayPal’s move into physical retail, and he says the deals are coming through. His team has closed an array of omnichannel deals with real net-new volume, despite a deliberately small team in market and a pipeline several times larger than its previously closed business. Among the wins is PayPal’s first government deal in omnichannel.
“Which is not the kind of logo you expect to win in payments this early,” he said, “and exactly the kind of proof point that tells you the model works.”
But Pomeroy is clear that in-store is only part of the ambition. The bigger goal is making PayPal’s and Venmo’s own wallets feel as natural in a physical store as they already do online. He reaches for a nautical analogy to describe why offline is where the growth now lives.
“When we first docked twenty years ago, it was a quiet marina, and it was all ours,” he said. “Now it’s become pretty crowded. So, what do you do when the marina is full? You go find new water to sail. Offline is clear, open water.”
Pomeroy wants a PayPal or Venmo transaction to flow as seamlessly in person as tapping a card, and he wants merchants to offer those wallets first, every time. However, this ambition is additive rather than exclusive.
“We will always take a payment,” he said. “Our obligation is to bring merchants and consumers into these new environments so that every part of the business rises with them.”
Objective 03: One unified platform, globally
Of the three original priorities, Pomeroy says platform unification has been the most satisfying to watch land. Australia is now fully live on PayPal’s global stack, and so is Europe, for both new business coming in and the existing book of merchants. By the end of the year, he expects the migration to be complete, putting every market on one unified payment stack.
“And we’re not stopping at routing transactions through partners,” he said. “The next step is bringing more of the processing in-house, which is already live in its first market.”
The point, Pomeroy stressed, is that the merchant experience stays constant even as the infrastructure underneath it changes. “The merchant keeps one connection the entire time,” he said. “The plumbing behind it changes; their experience doesn’t.”
The bigger mandate: Payment Services, Crypto, and Agentic
Pomeroy’s remit has broadened into a new organization, Payment Services & Crypto, sharpening what he once described as PayPal’s North Star.
“We want to become a flexible platform for all businesses, operating in every channel, with every payment modality,” he said.
Practically, that means merging enterprise and small-business processing into one center of payment excellence. “The question was when, not if,” he said. “The levers we built on the enterprise side and the levers that have lived in small business no longer have to live in separate boxes.”
Crypto belongs on that same platform, he argues. With more than 600 million crypto wallets globally, he sees efficiency gains across settlement, cross-border payments, and payouts.
“It’s becoming part of the global financial infrastructure, and at that point it can’t be a separate business anymore,” he said. “Putting payments and crypto under one roof is how you bring scale and speed to both.”
He also flagged a distribution gap: much of PayPal’s volume now arrives through platforms like BigCommerce, Wix, WooCommerce, and Shopware, where its value-added services have historically been unavailable. “The next leg of the journey is getting our services onto all of those surfaces, so it stops mattering how a merchant reaches us,” he said.
Pomeroy also names agentic commerce as an area he’s watching closely. “In thirty years in payments, you almost never see a genuinely new channel appear,” he said, “and this is one.” With AI agents projected to drive trillions in commerce by decade’s end, he sees the infrastructure for that shift as still unbuilt at scale. “You earn the right to answer those questions by building the foundation and putting up the volume,” he said. “Then you’ve won.”
A word for other leaders
Last time, Pomeroy talked about the leadership habits he tries to model, building a culture that sticks, empowering people rather than making them ask for permission, and carving out time to think. This time, his advice for other leaders is more compact.
“It is too easy to be distracted by the news cycle,” he said. “Focus in on what you can deliver, what drives value for your customers, and where your teams actually take pride in delivering things in a very focused and measurable way. That’s the whole game.”
This may be the final entry in this particular check-in series, but Pomeroy isn’t ready to close the book entirely.
“I know this series is over,” he said, “but I’d love to check in again next year to talk about how our North Star is coming into clearer focus.”
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!
Forget the earnings. Watch where these fintechs are placing their bets.
Chime, Block, and Circle each used the quarter to explain where fintech’s next moat will come from.
This week, Chime, Block, and Circle all delivered solid 2026 second quarters. Each firm used the moment to explain a much bigger strategic shift: Chime is turning direct deposits into a lending advantage, Block is rebuilding its operating model around AI, and Circle is racing to become infrastructure before stablecoins become commoditized.
For Chime, direct deposit becomes a lending moat
Direct deposit has been fintech’s favorite engagement metric. Convince customers to route their paycheck into your account, and they’ll likely stick around longer and use more products.
Chime’s latest quarter suggests the company now sees direct deposit as its underwriting infrastructure.
Instant Loan originations climbed nearly 70% sequentially to $300 million, while MyPay, Chime’s earned wage access product, generated $4.5 billion in originations. Those businesses are expanding because recurring payroll deposits give the company continuous visibility into a member’s income, cash flow, and repayment behavior.
CEO Chris Britt described it as the company’s “success in developing primary account relationships,” adding that “these recurring direct deposits drive more precise underwriting and an advantaged loan repayment position.”
That philosophy runs through Chime Prime, the company’s premium banking tier for members who receive at least $3,000 in monthly direct deposits. Those members unlock higher MyPay limits, automatic Instant Loan qualification, and additional benefits. The objective is to encourage members to consolidate more of their financial lives inside Chime.
The strategy appears to be working. CFO Matt Newcomb said Chime added more members making at least $3,000 in monthly direct deposits than in any previous quarter, while late-stage paycheck conversions reached a record. The company subsequently raised its full-year member growth target.
As AI makes underwriting models increasingly accessible, differentiation is likely to come less from the model itself and more from the quality of the data behind it – something a lot of financial leaders are now emphasizing. Chime’s advantage is that recurring paycheck data gives it a proprietary, real-time view of a member’s financial life that’s harder to replicate.
For Block, AI becomes the company’s operating model
Block announced widespread layoffs earlier this year, and much of the conversation centered on those workforce reductions. Six months later, CEO Jack Dorsey pointed investors somewhere else. “The biggest proof point is our shipping velocity,” he told analysts.
Rather than treating AI primarily as a customer feature, Block is first using AI to rethink how the company builds software.
Every accounts payable and accounts receivable department runs on the same friction: invoices chased four or five times, payments late more than 30% of the time, and credit control teams that can run 20, 30, even 50 people deep at a mid-sized corporate. Virtual cards were built to solve exactly that problem, and the growth numbers show it — spend is projected to hit $17.4 trillion by 2029, according to Juniper Research. Today I’m joined by Marc Pettican, global head of corporate solutions at Mastercard, who’s spent decades working both sides of the payments ecosystem, from the merchant acquiring side to leading commercial cards.
We get into what’s really driving virtual card growth beyond the macro tailwinds, how Mastercard balances network economics between buyers and suppliers, and the build-versus-partner calculus behind expanding from travel into verticals like fleet and logistics, healthcare, insurance, and marketplaces. We also dig into embedded finance and the challenge of staying visible in the stack even as payments become invisible to the end user — plus where Mastercard sees its right to win in agentic payments, account-to-account transfers, and stablecoins. Marc closes with his advice for commercial card heads at mid-sized banks over the next twelve months.
Top-line Takeaway: For Mastercard’s Marc Pettican, the future of commercial payments isn’t about replacing one payment rail with another—it’s about orchestrating them all. As accounts payable and receivable remain burdened by manual processes, delayed payments, and working capital pressures, Pettican argues that virtual cards are becoming the foundation for re-engineering B2B cash flow. That strategy extends beyond travel into industries like healthcare, insurance, and logistics, while embedding payments directly into enterprise workflows and connecting cards, account-to-account transfers, and stablecoins. Mastercard’s role, he says, is to serve as the trust and orchestration layer that enables businesses to move money smoothly, regardless of how they choose to pay or get paid.
Read the whole transcript (for TS Pro subscribers)
Building an equal-sided ecosystem, from Barclaycard to Mastercard
Paul Weiss has spent decades running large-scale technology transformations. He knows what the complexity curve looks like, how it stops growing arithmetically at a certain scale and starts growing geometrically. When he joined Regions Bank as Chief Transformation Officer and inherited a core modernization already underway with Temenos, he knew what he was walking into.
What surprised him was the partnership.
“Very rarely have I had a partner that was as transparent and willing to collaborate as Temenos has been,” Weiss said. “Everything they’ve committed to, they’ve delivered. They’ve delivered on time.”
That kind of endorsement carries weight at this particular moment. Regions, with assets north of $155 billion, selected Temenos SaaS in 2023 to modernize its legacy systems for customer records and deposits, and is now roughly two years into an implementation that positions it to be one of the first large US banks to complete a move to a modern core.
The decision to go SaaS was deliberate. “We want to be able to focus on our customers and apply the functionality of the platform, rather than spending our focus on operating the platform,” Weiss said. Continuous upgrades, outsourced resilience, and the ability to redirect engineering attention toward customer outcomes rather than infrastructure maintenance drove the choice.
The goals were set before Weiss arrived. Regions is a customer-driven bank, and the legacy environment was working against that identity. Months-long product development cycles, extensive custom coding, friction at every point of the delivery chain. “The biggest thing we were looking for is end-to-end client responsiveness,” Weiss said, “with the flexibility that we can have with a new modern core.”
What Weiss brought to an already strong team was an engineering background and a specific discipline around managing complexity at scale. A core replacement at a bank like Regions means hundreds of integration points, each carrying its own data, compliance, and risk considerations, all of which have to move in concert. “Once you reach a certain scale, the complexity starts to increase geometrically, not arithmetically,” he said. “Thinking very carefully about how to manage complexity within the cost and timeframe that you have is a learned skill over time.”
The complexity is exactly what’s kept many banks on the sidelines. The appetite for multi-year, high-risk big bang replacements has largely evaporated, a change Temenos’s own executives are watching closely. “The large banks have now realized they can’t get on the AI train unless they really do modernize,” said Will Moroney, Temenos’s Chief Revenue Officer. The conversation has moved from wholesale replacement to progressive modernization, introducing new capabilities for deposits or lending while the legacy platform continues to run alongside, then migrating product by product.
Weiss sees AI reshaping the economics of that journey in ways that weren’t available when Regions started. Had the tools existed at the outset, he estimates the project could have been completed with roughly 30% less time and cost, a significant reduction, and one he believes will lower the barrier for other institutions considering similar moves. The areas where AI would have made the biggest difference: data management, data migration, integration, and testing. “These are all areas where generative AI can play a very strong role,” he said.
Regions has also been developing its own AI tools including Cash Flow IQ and Client IQ, but hasn’t fully deployed them yet. Governance, model validation, and the distance between demonstrated functionality and production readiness are all factors. “There’s a long way to go from demonstrated functionality to bringing it in house with model validation and everything else,” Weiss said. “It’s an exciting development and one that we’ll track through an appropriate governance process.”
Temenos has been focused on embedding AI directly into the platform rather than layering it on top — building “less but better,” with a deliberate narrowing of focus to use cases with broad impact across the client base. The FCM AI Agent, already live at a Tier 1 bank for sanctions screening, started at 5% of traffic and has been gradually expanded as the institution built organizational confidence alongside technical confidence.
Technical readiness first, organizational readiness alongside is a sequencing Weiss recognizes from the transformation playbook. The change management dimension of a core replacement is as demanding as the engineering dimension, and it extends well beyond the technology team. “One of the signatures of a core transformation is there’s a huge number of moving parts and pieces, none of which individually are particularly complex, but all those gears have to fit together in just the right way,” said a Temenos spokesperson.
For Regions, the competitive logic is straightforward. Being among the first large US banks to complete a move to a modern core creates flexibility that legacy-bound competitors won’t have. “We have a customer-centric culture,” Weiss said, “and what we’re doing is empowering our bankers with technology to serve our clients.”
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!
The market no longer takes earnings beats at face value
The quarter of “lower-quality growth”: Why good quarters aren’t good enough anymore
What kind of growth is this? The question surfaced repeatedly across this week’s second-quarter 2026 earnings. Companies including SoFi and Robinhood reported solid headline results. But investors looked past the beats and spent more time evaluating the businesses generating them than the numbers themselves.
Even stronger guidance failed to excite investors. Investors are more keen to know if growth is broad-based or concentrated, recurring or transactional, and whether those same growth engines will still be delivering a year from now.
Growth is becoming more about composition
SoFi’s second quarter 2026 earnings looked like the kind of report that would typically send a stock higher. The company posted record adjusted net revenue of $1.2 billion, up 40% year over year, while adjusted EPS beat expectations. It added 1.1 million new members, bringing its total to 15.8 million, raised its full-year revenue guidance, and continued expanding across lending, financial services, and its technology platform. By almost every traditional measure, it was a strong quarter.
CEO Anthony Noto struck a confident tone, pointing to the breadth of SoFi’s business as evidence that the firm’s long-running diversification strategy is beginning to pay off. He said the company’s broader business mix gives it the ability to sustain growth, adding that what excites him most is “the velocity of our growth.”
Yet investors weren’t entirely convinced. The stock fell after earnings and the debate quickly shifted to what was driving those results. Analysts focused on questions the earnings beat didn’t immediately answer.
Why did management raise its full-year revenue outlook but leave its profitability outlook unchanged?
How quickly can the Technology Platform business recover after losing a major client?
Is SoFi relying too heavily on balance-sheet growth rather than accelerating its higher-margin, fee-based businesses?
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 in your inbox every Friday!
1. Upstart (UPST) – Close: $26.51
Upstart received conditional approval from the OCC to establish Upstart Bank, N.A., marking a major step toward becoming a nationally chartered bank.
FDIC deposit insurance and Federal Reserve approval to become a bank holding company are still pending before the bank can launch.
Why it matters: For years, Upstart has positioned itself as the AI layer powering banks. A banking charter shifts that role. Rather than solely supplying underwriting technology, the company would gain greater control over funding, lending economics, and nationwide product distribution. It also reflects a broader shift in fintech: some firms are deciding that partnering with banks is no longer enough – they want to become one themselves.
2. Visa (V) – Close: $364.11
Visa is cutting 2,600 roles (around 7% of its workforce), primarily across technology and product teams, to redirect investment toward higher-growth businesses.
The company plans to reinvest in stablecoins, cross-border money movement, B2B payments and value-added services, while AI increasingly automates routine work.
Why it matters: Visa is reallocating resources toward where it believes the next decade of payments growth will come from. Stablecoins, commercial payments and AI are becoming core strategic priorities. The layoffs also signal that AI is beginning to reshape not just products, but how large financial institutions organize their workforce and allocate capital.
3. Citi (C) – Close: $131.42
Citi partnered with Infor to launch Citi Consolidate, a platform that digitizes invoice approvals, purchase orders and accounts payable workflows.
The solution aims to reduce manual reconciliation, speed invoice approvals and improve access to working capital for buyers and suppliers.
Why it matters: Payments have become faster. The workflows surrounding them often haven’t. As supply chains become more fragmented and global trade grows more complex, banks are finding that the bigger opportunity lies in orchestrating financial operations rather than simply processing transactions. Citi is betting that managing invoice data, approvals, and working capital will become as valuable as moving the money itself.
4. SoFi (SOFI) – Close: $16.02
Existing members generated 51% of all new products during the quarter, up from 35% a year earlier, highlighting the growing role of cross-selling across SoFi’s ecosystem.
The company is embedding AI more deeply into its platform, with SoFi Coach evolving from providing financial guidance to eventually taking actions such as subscription management and cancellations.
Why it matters: SoFi is shifting its focus from acquiring customers to increasing the value of each relationship. Every additional product deepens engagement while lowering customer acquisition costs across lending, banking, investing, and wealth. AI is becoming an enabler of that strategy by eventually taking actions on customers’ behalf, making the ecosystem more integrated and harder to leave.
5. Robinhood (HOOD) – Close: $87.34
Robinhood reported record revenue of $1.3 billion while continuing to expand across banking, credit cards, retirement accounts, Gold memberships and prediction markets.
CEO Vlad Tenev said the company’s next challenge is “the orchestration of all of these things into one story,” as it connects its expanding portfolio into a unified financial platform.
Why it matters: Robinhood is evolving beyond a brokerage into a broader financial platform. Banking, payments, investing, and credit are increasingly designed to reinforce one another rather than operate as standalone products. The real differentiator will be whether the firm can smoothly connect them into a single customer experience that captures a larger share of users’ financial lives.
