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{/if}Happy Friday, Fintech Takers.
As the year winds down, I keep thinking that 2025 somehow went way too fast and felt too long at the same time.
Some of that is, I think, being a parent (time moves in a very uneven fashion once you have kids), but a lot of it comes from how we asked the financial system to absorb an extraordinary amount of uncertainty and act like that was no big deal.
So rather than a Top 12 Fintech Takes sends of 2025 listicle*, I’m leaving you with something more akin to a stocking stuffer for your brain. (*To be clear, this is still a reading list!) Below you’ll find a set of the 5 big questions we kept asking the industry this year.
And under each one (hyperlinked accordingly), the top 12 most read sends of 2025 that wrestled with it, argued about it, and/or refused to let it go. - Alex |
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5 Questions That Defined 2025 (and my 12 most-read newsletters) |
1. What is the cost of uncertainty? |
The ousting of Rohit Chopra as the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (in February) and the gutting of the CFPB showed how quickly an agency can be hollowed out without ever being formally dismantled.
When rules remain on the books, but enforcement evaporates, nobody gets clarity. The same dynamic played out across trade, housing, and financial regulation more broadly.
Tariffs mattered less than how unpredictably they were announced, revised, and half-walked back. Deregulation mattered less than whether it was done through a durable process or performative gestures. Policy delivered via tweets (especially Bill Pulte’s tweets) *may* have looked decisive from the outside, but not from the inside.
Memos that pause enforcement without changing the law don’t reduce risk. Instead, they shift it onto the banks, lenders, and fintech companies forced to decide whether to move ahead anyway.
Markets can price risk, but they can’t price chaos. And in 2025, uncertainty became the most expensive input of all.
Related newsletters: |
2. How much are we willing to lose to sports betting? |
The biggest threat to consumers’ financial health this year wasn’t overdraft fees or credit card APRs. It was gambling.
Legalized sports betting has fueled spikes in gambling addiction and produced real-world harm that extends well beyond household balance sheets. But even if we set those broader societal harms aside, financial services companies should still be concerned.
Every dollar lost to betting is a dollar not saved, invested, or used to pay bills, and the line between financial products and gambling products is eroding fast. As platforms like Robinhood and Coinbase chase engagement through speculation, gambling stops being an edge case and starts being a business model. Long term, that is not financial innovation. It’s value extraction dressed up as ”fun.” Related newsletter: |
3. How do we make our credit system more resilient? |
The last few years exposed how fragile the U.S. credit system is.
Pandemic-era student loan interventions protected scores by changing how loan payments were reported, not by improving borrowers’ underlying ability or willingness to repay. When those reporting protections ended, delinquencies reappeared, and scores began to fall.
The problem is that credit reports and credit scores are easy (and tempting) to manipulate in order to achieve other public policy objectives. Cash flow data offers an alternative because it is harder to manipulate as a ground truth. It reflects what’s actually happening in consumers’ bank accounts, in real time.
However, as cash flow data begins to play a more central role in the lending ecosystem, a whole new set of questions emerge: How do we blend traditional credit data and cash flow data? How do we harmonize open banking regulations with credit data regulations like the FCRA? Who will become the FICO of cash flow underwriting? Related newsletters: |
4. Who gets to be a bank? |
Short answer: Everyone! Regulators have made it abundantly clear that charters — national bank charters, national trust bank charters, industrial loan charters, etc. — are now available to those that want them. And many want them! Legacy fintech companies like SmartBiz and PayPal. Crypto companies like Circle and Ripple. And new-school de novo banks like Erebor.
They have all applied for or received approvals from regulators to become banks! The more important question is, What does this trend mean?
Will these new banks dramatically alter the competitive landscape for traditional banks and credit unions? Will they be granted all of the same regulatory privileges that traditional banks have? (Fed Master Accounts are going to be an important area to watch.) Will these new banks be more aggressive in exploiting the relaxed supervision and enforcement environment we are currently in? Will we see a change in the pace of M&A activity in banking?
I don’t know! But I will be watching closely in 2026. Related newsletters: |
5. Who is best positioned to stop fraud? |
There are lots of potential answers, but none of them are definitive.
Plaid’s new fraud prevention product is built around the simple observation that fraud tactics are forever changing, but every scam still needs somewhere to park the money. Bank accounts are hard to obtain, hard to age convincingly, and expensive to fake at scale. That makes them a sturdier anchor for fraud detection than devices, sessions, or identities alone.
Apple’s expansion of Wallet-based identity verification fits the same pattern. It doesn’t solve fraud, but it standardizes high-confidence identity in a way that is cryptographically provable and easy to use. That raises the baseline for digital KYC without asking banks or fintechs to redesign their flows.
And as merchants continue to experiment with stablecoins, we’re going to see incentives shift again. Once payments move outside traditional card networks, fraud stops being a shared network problem and starts becoming an operational one for the companies that own the closed-loop networks. Related newsletter:
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Many lenders treat borrower hardship like a collections problem. TruStage™️ frames it as a product decision.
Payment protection bakes a safety net into your loan portfolio, helping reduce charge-offs, smooth cash flow, and add fee revenue.
TruStage also points to shifting sentiment: 70% of consumers say they’re more open to loan protection products now than in prior years.¹
Whether you’re a credit union, bank, or fintech lender, the choice you make today shows up in tomorrow’s portfolio.
You can keep treating hardship as a surprise, or design for it. |
1 TruStage, 2025 Consumer Lending Preferences Study. March 2025 LPS-8662431.1-1225-0128 |
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MORE QUESTIONS TO PONDER TOGETHER |
Big news for the endlessly curious (yes, you): I’m collecting your fintech questions on a rolling basis.
What’s keeping you up at night? What great mysteries in financial services beg to be unraveled? Think of it this way, if a stranger is a friend you just haven't met yet, your question is a Fintech Takes conversation waiting to happen.
One that could headline a Friday newsletter or be answered in an upcoming Fintech Office Hours event.
Drop your question here, whenever inspiration strikes! |
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Thanks for the read! Let me know what you thought by replying back to this email. — Alex |
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