Fintech news moves fast. That's what Open Office Hours is for. Aug 20, 2 PM ET: @AlexH_Johnson Founder of Fintech Takes, opens the floor to the whole Finity Network. No deck. No script. Just real answers, and the occasional classic Alex crash out when a topic hits a nerve 🙃 Open to everyone. What's the fintech question you can't get a straight answer to anywhere else? Drop it below, might get tackled live on the 20th. Register here: finitynetwork.com/events/2c0…

A crypto exchange just built a gift card that turns a stablecoin, the most traceable dollar on earth, into cash. Businesses can buy these in bulk and hand them out for rewards and promos. Whoever holds the code controls the funds. No identity check happens until someone redeems it. That's the problem. The whole pitch for stablecoins over cash is the paper trail: every transfer sits on a public ledger, and a compliant issuer can freeze a bad wallet in minutes. A gift card erases that. The code can pass through a text or a screenshot with no record of who had it or when. The only identity check in the entire chain happens at redemption, run by an exchange whose operator pleaded guilty last year to running an unlicensed money-transfer operation and paid a fine north of a quarter-billion dollars, for the exact kind of identity failure baked into this product. If traceability is the industry's main argument for stablecoins, issuers and exchanges owe an answer for a product built to route around it. One-off gray area, or the first of a pattern? Inspired by Alex Johnson's Fintech Takes newsletter.

The FDIC just proposed a fintech certification system that gives banks zero legal protection for using it. Bank and fintech trade groups are working with the FDIC to build a standard-setting body that would certify which fintechs are safe enough for banks to onboard. A separate industry effort is running a regulator-observed pilot doing something narrower: standardizing what a finished verification check looks like once it's done, not the verification process itself. Most people will read this as "regulators finally streamlining fintech oversight." That's not what's happening. The certification model is voluntary. It gives banks no safe harbor even when they use it. And it has to cover a KYC vendor, a lending-as-a-service platform, and a BaaS middleware provider under one standard, even though those businesses look nothing alike from a risk standpoint. Widen the standard enough to fit all of them and it stops meaning anything. Narrow it down to something useful and you've moved the same evaluation problem into a new building. The verification-sharing approach avoids that trap. It never asks whether a fintech is trustworthy. It makes a finished verification check something the next bank can trust and reuse, without redoing the work. Specific and auditable beats broad and voluntary. Neither model fixes what's driving this: competition pushes every player, supervised or not, to move faster and take on more risk to keep up. You can't regulate that instinct out of existence. The only lever is changing what it costs to take the careful route instead of the fast one. Watch which one banks put budget behind next year. That'll tell you more than either press release will. If you had to bet, which one gets adopted first: certification, or reusable verification? Inspired by @AlexH_Johnson's Fintech Takes newsletter. 61,000+ fintech and banking execs read it for breakdowns like this. Subscribe here: fintechtakes.com/newsletter-…

Fintech had more funding than it could spend in 2021. It didn't have charters. Founders wanted their own bank license. They couldn't get one, so they partnered with the few banks willing to sponsor them, Bancorp among them. Charters were scarce. Middleware was the workaround. That scarcity is back, aimed at a new set of applicants. Erebor and Augustus already have charters. World Liberty Financial has one pending. Founder of Fintech Takes, @AlexH_Johnson, and @mikulaja, Publisher of Fintech Business Weekly, trace both eras on the new Fintech Takes episode: the 2021 scramble and the current wave, and who gets picked this time. Did founders build a fintech boom in 2021, or work around a broken charter process? Listen to the full breakdown here: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…

The Finity app is now live. Fintech doesn't wait for you to be back at your desk. Not mid-meeting, not after the conference wraps, not tomorrow. Fast answers and sharp peer insight, now in your pocket the moment you really need them. iOS and Android. Scan the QR code at the end of the video to download. Oh and this is round two of three big announcements. New name first. App second. The last one's the biggest. Make sure you're the first to hear it: finitynetwork.com/announceme…

Stripe pulled Visa, Mastercard, Amex, and Coinbase into a consortium to launch a stablecoin. Days later, some of the companies listed in the announcement pushed back on how their involvement was being characterized. In the latest episode of his podcast, Fintech Takes Creator and Founder, @AlexH_Johnson, brought in James Wester, co-head of payments research at Javelin Strategy & Research, to sort out what's real. The two laid out the gap between the announcement and the substance behind it. There's no published framework yet, and the decision-making structure remains unsettled. A long roster of household names doesn't answer the harder questions. James' take: the real prize here isn't a better stablecoin. It's control of a much bigger layer of commerce. Circle has been positioning itself around infrastructure for AI-driven transactions, barely mentioning the word "stablecoin" in its own messaging. That broader land grab may be what's pulling the rest of the industry together to build an alternative. Alex and James also trace why coalitions like this one usually collapse under their own weight, what made Zelle a rare exception, and why this launch has drawn a shrug from regulators where Libra drew a full-blown crackdown back in 2019. The difference says a lot about how far stablecoin oversight has come. They claim you won't see any of this at checkout. You'll feel it eventually, in who ends up setting the price of moving your money. The full conversation is live on the Fintech Takes podcast, listen here: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…

Your bank's answer when you get scammed into wiring money yourself: not our problem, you authorized it. Fraud, someone else moves your money, means the bank covers it. Scams, you send it yourself, mean the bank doesn't. House Financial Services Committee staff just published a report echoing the standard argument banks make: cover scam losses and people stop being careful. The UK tested that argument. Since October 2024, UK banks must reimburse scam victims within 5 days, split 50/50 with the receiving bank. 21 months later: scam losses fell 21%, £73M a year. Reimbursement rates climbed from 54% to 65%. Fraudsters gaming the system accounted for 0.5% of scam value. The House report doesn't mention any of it. Neither does the Bank Policy Institute's survey. Which US banks fight a rule like this hardest?

Huge news: The Fintech Takes Network is officially Finity. What started around a single newsletter has grown into a network of 7,000+ fintech operators, practitioners, and leaders. @AlexH_Johnson, @khaslett, the newsletters, and podcasts aren't going anywhere. Our brand is just evolving to match the community. See the rebrand here: lnkd.in/ed4YFzgm

The cheapest flight ≠ the right flight. @FintechTakes nails why the "lowest logical fare" problem has broken every travel tool ever built: the logic is contextual, not a rule. BILL Travel was built for exactly this. Context-aware, not just cost-aware. 🔗 ow.ly/cAtH50ZnwOZ

"Debanking" now means redlining, crypto de-risking, account closures, or a government conspiracy, depending on who's saying it. A word that means five things means nothing. The real issue has a name: reputation risk.

Can Stripe build Circle before Circle builds Stripe? There’s an opportunity for someone to use a regulated, USD-backed stablecoin to significantly disrupt the global payments ecosystem. This is not a big direct revenue generation opportunity because the economics of stablecoins aren’t that good (especially if there’s any competition). However, it is a big indirect revenue generation opportunity if you can stack value-add services on top of a ubiquitous stablecoin rail. Circle is well on its way to owning that regulated, USD-backed stablecoin rail. More recently, it has been working to build out those value-add services (CCTP, CPN, USYC, agentic payments capabilities, etc.) Stripe obviously has a ton of value-add payments services already built. It has been working to retrofit those services for stablecoins and to build new, stablecoin-native value-add services. The problem for Stripe is that it doesn’t control the underlying stablecoin payment rail. Circle does and it has been working to vertically integrate it in order to lock the Stripes of the world out of the more lucrative opportunities higher up in the stack. Stripe’s initial response was to acquire Bridge and (through Bridge) to issue its own stablecoin (USDB). What Stripe seems to have realized is that this strategy for building out the Circle side of its business is going to take too long. Circle has too big of a lead. So, Stripe has taken a page out of the big banks’ book and has launched a consortium (Open Standard) which will develop its own regulated, USD-backed payment stablecoin (OUSD) to compete with Circle. It has convinced quite a few other companies to be a part of the consortium as well, including Adyen, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, U.S. Bank, Coinbase, Google, and Shopify. Stripe is incentivizing participation by creating a somewhat-decentralized governance structure for Open Standard and is incentivizing adoption by eliminating fees to mint and redeem and sharing nearly all the float revenue with the partners who are using OUSD. Essentially, Stripe is teaming up with everyone who makes money in any part of the payments stack (except Circle) and creating a new stablecoin business model that makes stablecoin issuance unsurvivable as a standalone business. This puts Circle in a tough spot, because, unlike Stripe, Circle can’t adopt a consortium-style approach to building out the Stripe side of its business. It needs to own that side of the business, which means it needs to build (or acquire) it itself. OUSD isn’t guaranteed to succeed. It has some massive execution and governance challenges ahead of it. And regulators will have their say, at some point. But it is an indicator of how important Stripe (and its partners) think regulated, USD-backed stablecoins are as foundational payments infrastructure.

Experian just launched a personal loan shopping experience inside ChatGPT. Alex Johnson thinks it's the right move…but not for the reasons you'd expect. The real question isn't whether Experian's ChatGPT app works. It's what happens to the entire B2C financial services lead gen business when AI chatbots become the primary interface for shopping loans, credit cards, and insurance. Companies like Credit Karma, NerdWallet, and LendingTree are betting on two paths: GEO (becoming the source AI models cite) or embedded apps (building first-party experiences that surface inside the chatbot). Both strategies are defensible. Neither is fully in their control. That's the problem. OpenAI decides who wins. And no partnership agreement changes that. Experian happens to be the best-positioned to absorb the risk; its core credit bureau business is a floor that its competitors don't have. But the broader industry has a much harder version of this problem to solve.

Bankruptcies up 14% YoY. New credit card vintages already underperforming. Subprime auto delinquencies at 20-year highs. No single data point is a crisis. But Alex Johnson and Dave Wasik of 2nd Order Solutions see all three converging into the same uncomfortable conclusion: the consumer credit system has a lot less room for error than it did a year ago. On the latest Facing Credit, they get into the research behind those yellow flags, the politicization of consumer sentiment data, and what the rollback of disparate impact enforcement actually means for lenders navigating an increasingly complex patchwork of state and federal requirements. One of the best Facing Credit episodes yet. Go give it a listen: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…

Cash flow intelligence sounds like a no-brainer…until you try to actually deploy it. Last month Alex, Collin Galster (Nova Credit), and Michael Krzysko (Imprint) broke down what actually happens when lenders deploy cash flow intelligence at scale. The opt-in findings alone are worth the watch.

Ramp just raised $750M at a $44B valuation, which is roughly 44x their current revenue. I'm impressed by the level of conviction Ramp has been able to instill in the investors that have poured roughly $3B into the company since 2019, including, most recently, the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan. Personally, I'm not sure I get it. I admire Ramp. It's a super smart company that has a genuinely strong handle on AI and is growing and shipping product extremely fast, but $44B? That's more than PayPal, which currently has a market cap of $38B on $32B in revenue. "Fine," you might say. "PayPal is an absolute mess. Ramp should be worth more than it." OK, what about Fifth Third? It has almost $300B in assets and generated $9B in revenue last year (good for $2.5B in profit). Its market cap is currently the same as Ramp's valuation. "Yes," you acknowledge. "Fifth Third is a better-run company than PayPal, but it's a bank. It's slow. Looking forward, its growth trajectory is very modest. Ramp's growth potential makes it a much better bet." So, what about Affirm? Affirm is just as smart as Ramp. It has just as strong a handle on AI as Ramp. It's profitable and on track to generate more than $4B in revenue this year, which would be a 33% increase year-over-year. Affirm's market cap is currently $22B, half of what Ramp was just valued at. That just doesn't seem correct. Something is being mispriced and my hunch is that it's Ramp. But we won't know that until it goes public, if it ever does.