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Happy Friday, Fintech Takers!

I can just tell, by the prompt way that you opened this email, that you’ve had a productive week. So, let me be the first to say, “well done!”

I have too. I put a lot of work into today’s newsletter, so let’s get right to it.

- Alex

P.S. — Stablecoins as Payments Infrastructure (A Conversation for Skeptics), my virtual event with Rain and Western Union, is next week. It’s going to be a great conversation and I’d love for you to be a part of it.

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Here I Go Again

I promised my wife I wouldn’t do this.

I promised my doctor I wouldn’t do this.

I promised my spiritual advisor — who specializes in dealing with family curses — that I wouldn’t do this.

But I’m sorry, I have to.

I have to keep writing about strange credit builder products as long as strange credit builder products continue to exist. As an advocate for financial health and an inveterate credit infrastructure nerd, this category of fintech is just irresistible to me.

As long as there’s an interesting story to chase in this area, I will chase it. And today’s story is very interesting. However, before we get there, I want to refresh our collective memory on what credit builder products are, how they work, and why they’re controversial.

A Quick Refresh on Credit Builder Products

Let’s do this with a quick Q&A.

What are credit builder products?

There are many different types of credit builders (as we’ll discuss in a minute), but the most common are lending products that are designed with the primary goal of establishing, improving, or repairing a consumer’s credit history.

Wait, I thought the primary goal of lending products is to lend consumers money?!?

Normally that’s true, but what fintech companies have discovered over the last 20 years is that consumers are very confused by how the U.S. credit system works and are desperate for quick and easy solutions to help them understand and improve their credit worthiness.

I have had multiple B2C fintech founders tell me that the number one thing that their customers ask them for is help building their credit, which is why credit builder products tend to end up as high priorities on B2C fintech companies’ roadmaps.

But what are credit builder products, exactly? How do they work?

There is an almost endless variety of them out there, but they mostly end up falling into one of four categories:

• Installment Loans: The consumer gets an installment loan, but is restricted in how they are able to use the funds. As they pay off the loan, the on-time payments are reported to the credit bureaus. The provider makes money on the interest or, in the case of a no-interest loan, subscription fees.

• Secured Cards: The consumer gets a card with a credit line that is set based on the amount of money that they have set aside as the security deposit. When the consumer pays off their monthly balance, that repayment is reported to the credit bureaus. Traditional bank secured cards usually require an upfront security deposit. Open secured cards, which fintech companies like Chime and Current have popularized, set the credit limit and security deposit dynamically. Credit interchange is the primary revenue driver. 

• Alternative Data Reporting: The consumer works with the provider to report recurring non-credit payments that they are already making to the credit bureaus. Rent and utility payments are the most common, but there are other types of payments that credit builders will occasionally try to transform into bureau-reportable data. This is a service offered by a number of third-party providers, but the credit bureaus are also increasingly focused on sourcing this alternative data directly. When furnishment is facilitated by a third-party provider, the most common monetization strategy is a one-time fee or a subscription fee.  

• Credit Repair: This is a comparatively new offering within the world of fintech credit builders, though it’s not a new idea (legacy providers like Lexington Law have been doing this for decades). Essentially, the consumer hires the provider to dispute tradelines in their credit files on their behalf, as is their right under the FCRA, with the hope that it will result in the removal of negative tradelines (whether they are legitimate or not) and an increase in their credit scores. The primary monetization strategy here is subscription fees, though there are specific legal constraints on how credit repair firms can charge for their services.

Wait. Unless I’m mistaken, none of these credit builder products actually involve the data furnisher taking any credit risk. Can that be right?

Yep, that’s right.

Remember, the purpose of these products is to make the user’s credit score go up. That’s it. Consumers aren’t getting these products in order to access liquidity. Indeed, the reason they need these products in the first place is because they can’t get access to additional liquidity because their credit scores aren’t good enough.

Credit builder products don’t require you to have good credit to get them (that would defeat the purpose), so the providers of these products need to design clever workarounds so that they are generating reportable positive repayment data without actually extending real credit and taking real credit risk.

But … if the providers of these products aren’t actually taking any credit risk, is the data furnished to the bureaus a useful signal for other lenders?

That’s the 1.5 billion dollar question!

The promise that these products are making to users is that they will improve their credit scores and, thus, their odds of being approved for mainstream, low-cost credit products.

But is that true?

Well, in the early days (circa 2015 - 2022), it mostly was true. This wasn’t necessarily because the data coming from these products was trustworthy, but more because the credit bureaus and mainstream consumer lenders weren’t paying close attention to these new credit builder tradelines. Users’ scores went up, as did their approval odds, but it was an artificial bump.

It was also a temporary one. As lenders started waking up to the danger posed by these products (i.e., that they might be approving customers for loans who were worse credit risks than they appeared), they started to take action to mitigate that danger. They pressured the credit bureaus to stop letting any fintech company that wanted to furnish data and they started creating attributes in their custom credit risk models to identify and screen out these credit builder tradelines. The result was confusing for users who started to experience a gap between the credit application outcomes they expected (based on what they thought their FICO Score was) and the outcomes they actually experienced (because the lenders they applied to had filtered the credit builder tradelines out of their proprietary models).

Lately, the problem has gotten even worse. Once credit risk professionals discovered what fintech companies were up to with credit builder products, they did what they always do — they analyzed the data.

What they found was that credit builder tradelines are, in many cases, a highly useful negative signal. Based on the conversations I’ve had reporting this story, the emerging best practice is not to exclude credit builder tradelines from your credit risk models (which is a neutral treatment), but to treat the tradeline as a negative signal in their custom models, or to decline the applicant outright.

The motivation for this isn’t punitive. The credit risk folks are just listening to the math and the math is telling them that consumers who use modern fintech credit builder products are consistently worse credit risks than consumers who don’t, across all credit quality tiers.

There are two reasons for this.

First, the way that fintech companies market these products, which essentially boils down to “here’s an easy button to improve your credit score,” appears to attract high-risk consumers. These might be individuals who know something about their future credit performance that hasn’t shown up in the credit bureau data yet. Or they might be individuals who are trying to find a shortcut to boost a damaged credit profile quickly, rather than doing the slow and steady work to rebuild their profile organically. Regardless, they tend to perform worse than consumers with similar profiles who don’t use fintech credit builder products.

Second, fintech credit builder products are a large and growing vector for synthetic identity fraud, in which criminals seed new fictitious identities within the credit bureaus, build up the credit histories and scores associated with those identities, and then use them to acquire credit with no intention of repaying. Credit builders help fraudsters fast track this process by speeding up the process of establishing a positive credit history around a previously unknown or thin-file identity.

So where does that leave us?

Credit builder products are still an effective product for B2C fintech companies looking to acquire users because the U.S. credit system remains confusing, difficult to navigate, and filled with people desperate for a quick fix. The products are appealing to consumers.

However, the efficacy of these products has changed dramatically over the last decade. Today, they are more likely to hurt a user’s chances of being approved for credit than they are to help.

This puts the fintech founders and operators who design credit builder products in a difficult spot. Many of them seem to genuinely want to help consumers improve their scores as quickly as possible. To quote one such founder — Cynthia Chen, Co-founder and CEO of Kikoff — “I wish there were a magic wand that you could use to turn a 500 credit score into 850 in a second.”

That attitude is laudable in the abstract. However, when it's expressed through product design — when fintech founders and operators actually try to build that magic wand — they frequently end up making the problem worse. 

Speaking of Kikoff …

Kikoff was founded in 2019 by Chen and Christophe Chong (CTO), with the goal of helping consumers without a credit history establish one, and helping those with credit histories to continue building credit. It raised a seed round from Lightspeed in 2019, a Series A led by Lightspeed in 2020 ($12.5M across the two rounds), and a $30M Series B led by Portage Ventures in 2021.

Kikoff confirmed to me, on the record, that it more than doubled its revenue in 2025 to more than $300M while remaining profitable, and that it has more than one million active users. In its on-the-record statement, it described its mission to me as building "radically affordable financial tools to help customers achieve financial security," and says it has helped "millions of consumers" who lack a credit score or carry a thin file build credit "so that they can access auto loans, mortgages, and other credit products."

To understand how it got to this point, it’s worth tracing Kikoff’s history since 2019. The first thing to note is that Kikoff’s core product has evolved significantly over the last seven years.

The initial pitch was as simple as it was unsustainable. Here’s a screenshot from Kikoff’s website in March of 2020:

Yes, you’re reading that correctly. Kikoff’s first product was a no fee/no interest $12 loan that would be deposited into a customer’s Kikoff digital wallet and then repaid back to Kikoff, in $1 increments over 12 months.

That is, to state the obvious, not a loan in any meaningful sense of the word. It’s also not something that the credit bureaus, even back in their experimental fintech furnishing years, would be willing to accept repayment data on for long (according to multiple sources who I spoke with for this story, the credit bureaus did indeed strenuously object to this product construct). So Kikoff pivoted away from it and to a new offering: the Kikoff Credit Account. Here’s how Kikoff explained the change to its users in a Q&A from its March 2021 website:

 The Kikoff Credit Account that replaced the $12 loan remains the company’s flagship product to this day. Here’s how the March 2021 website described it:

Again, yes, you’re reading that correctly. The Kikoff Credit Account (circa 2021) was a no interest/no fee $500 revolving line of credit which could only be used to buy products from the Kikoff store.

What types of products, you ask? Here’s what TechCrunch reported in June of 2021, when the company announced its Series B:

Users can purchase things like e-books covering a variety of finance-related topics such as how to plan and budget, or profit from trading bitcoin. It also has a selection of courses that it has purchased resell rights for, covering topics such as personal finance education, or how to set up an e-commerce store or even how to learn Python programming skills.

These e-books were also Kikoff’s initial monetization play, as the TechCrunch article explains:

The company also does not charge any interest on its credit line or fees for the financing.

“There’s no cost of borrowing money,” she [Cynthia Chen] said. Instead, Kikoff collects revenue by taking the margin between the wholesale price for the items it sells in its store and the retail price that customers pay.

Since 2021, the company has not raised any additional venture capital. However, it clearly has not been idle. It has grown from hundreds of thousands of users in June of 2021 to more than 1 million active users today. It has reached a $300M revenue run rate and profitability.

The question is how?

From what I have been able to piece together, the company has pursued two different growth and monetization strategies over the last five years.

The first is to mature the core Credit Account product into a premium offering. In 2022, the company bumped up the product’s total revolving credit line up to $750 and began charging a $5 monthly subscription fee. In 2024, the company expanded the offering even more by introducing additional capabilities and benefits, spread out across three different subscription tiers. This is the same basic pricing structure that the company offers today:

Rent reporting, which only goes to Equifax and TransUnion and only reports positive rental payment history (which is a source of frustration for lenders), is available across all three plans. Same for the new credit disputes feature, which uses AI to generate personalized, FCRA-compliant dispute letters to attempt to get tradelines removed from users’ credit files. The $20/month premium plan bumps the credit line up to $2,500 and adds utility bill reporting, the option to report up to two years of past rental payment history for a one-time $50 fee, and an AI debt negotiation service that can automatically negotiate settlements with creditors. The ultimate plan bumps the credit line up to $3,500 and adds $1M in identity theft insurance to the bundle.

In all cases, the Kikoff Credit Account revolving credit line can only be used to purchase educational resources from the Kikoff store (which run $10-$20 a piece) and to pay for the Kikoff Credit Account subscriptions (Kikoff now emphasizes this as the primary use case for the credit line). This circular design serves to minimize credit risk for Kikoff as well as to keep users’ credit utilization ratios low, which is a positive signal in most credit risk models.

The second growth strategy that Kikoff has been pursuing is one that has flown under the radar. I only noticed it because of a stray sentence in a recent article:

Kikoff, which offers credit-building and personal finance tools, said it now serves millions of users across its Kikoff, Grant, and Catch platforms.     

Millions of users. Millions, plural. That's more than the one-million figure Kikoff lists on its website, and when I asked about the gap, the company explained it as a matter of definition. The 1 million, it told me, counts "a unique individual with an active Credit Account tradeline as of April 2026." The "millions" counts "our total active user base across the full portfolio."

This poses some obvious follow-up questions: What is the “full portfolio” of Kikoff products? And what are the Grant and Catch platforms, specifically?

A House of Brands

From what I can tell, starting in late 2023, Kikoff began launching a series of satellite fintech products, all separately branded and designed to both drive revenue and user acquisition and engagement.

There are actually three of these satellite products today: Grant, Catch, and Ponder. And what’s most interesting about them is that none of them have anything to do with credit building.

Let’s review each of them.

First up, Grant.

Grant is a cash advance app that fronts you a small, non-recourse advance, sized not from any employer or payroll connection but from the deposit patterns it reads in the bank account you link through Plaid.

The headline number is "up to $500," but Grant's own disclosures describe something smaller: based on its March – May 2026 data, the average first-time advance ran about $66 and the average repeat advance about $155, and only around 3.6% of users who string together consecutive on-time repayments ever reach that $500 ceiling. Taking an advance is nominally free — no interest, no mandatory fee — so Grant's revenue comes from two charges built around it. The first is an "express" fee of $2 to $21, scaled to the size of the advance, in order to access the money within 60 seconds rather than waiting the standard 2-3 business days. The second is a premium Grant Plus subscription, which runs for $9.99 per month and provides additional budgeting and alert features. Notably, users can get a cash advance without subscribing to Grant Plus, but the only way to do so is to email support and ask for a free Grant Advance, which is an option Grant discloses in the fine print and surfaces nowhere in the app's normal flow.

Interestingly, Grant didn’t start off being called Grant. The initial brand was Oasis, and, if you look back through its original terms and conditions from October of 2024, you will notice a number of odd details, including a reference to “Wealthfront Brokerage” and a contact phone number for Oasis that is actually the phone number for the South Carolina Department of Consumer Affairs. These suggest that the Oasis agreement may have been a sloppily-done copy-and-paste job, which is not exactly confidence inspiring.

Thankfully these errors seem to have been corrected during the Grant rebrand, but even the updated customer agreement (dated November 11, 2025) contains an oddity that is worth flagging. Obviously, as a cash advance provider, rather than a lender, the money that Grant gives to users is non-recourse. As Grant specifies in its customer agreement, this means that it can’t take any action to collect on a missed payment:

If you fail to repay an Advance, Grant Money will not engage in any debt collection activities, place the unpaid amount of the Advance and any Expedited Delivery Fee with or sell the unpaid amount to a third party for the purpose of debt collection activities, or report you to a consumer reporting agency.

That’s standard for cash advance products, but it’s worth pointing out how strange it is for Kikoff, a company that was founded to help consumers establish and improve their credit histories, to offer a financing product that doesn’t furnish on-time payments to the credit bureaus.

However, just because Grant doesn’t furnish data to the credit bureaus doesn’t mean that it can’t or won’t pull data from the credit bureaus. Here’s another interesting passage from the customer agreement:

You specifically consent that you authorize Grant Money and its affiliated companies to request and receive copies of consumer reports, scores and other information about you from third parties, including, but not limited to, Experian, TransUnion and Equifax, in accordance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act and other applicable laws. You consent that you authorize Grant Money and its affiliated companies to display information about you such as your credit information to you and to provide you with relevant financial recommendations and marketing offers.   

This isn’t a theoretical “hey, one day we may do this, so heads up” type of thing. These marketing offers already have a home in the app: Grant Marketplace, which serves up loans, credit cards, and rates "curated just for you." I asked Kikoff directly which lenders or partners advertise in the Grant Marketplace, and how the company is compensated for those placements. It didn’t answer the question, but instead described the Marketplace as offering "access to a range of financial products, including bank accounts, loans, credit cards, and insurance." So it remains unclear which companies, if any, actually advertise there.

Next, let’s look at Catch.

Catch is a free settlement-finder app: connect your bank and card accounts through Plaid, and it scans your transaction history against a database of active, court-approved class-action settlements to tell you which ones you might be owed money from (Temu, Snapchat, Apple, AT&T, etc.) When it finds a match, it walks you through filing, and for some claims it offers an "auto-file" feature that fills in and submits the forms for you. It takes no cut of whatever you recover; the money comes straight from the settlement administrators, and there's no subscription and no fee.

The most ironic detail is in Catch’s Terms of Service, which include a class-action waiver that routes every dispute into binding individual arbitration and has the user and Kikoff waive "any right to participate in a class, collective, or representative action." This requirement is very common in B2C products’ terms and conditions (across industries), but it strikes me as a bit incongruous given that Catch is built on the premise that class actions are how ordinary people claw back money from large companies.

Finally, let’s look at Ponder.

Of all the satellite products in the Kikoff Portfolio, this is the one that I conceptually like the most. It’s a PFM app that takes a decidedly different approach. Here’s how the description on the Apple App Store puts it:

Most finance apps are built on one flawed assumption: they know what you care about. Monarch shows you a spending breakdown. Copilot shows you a net worth chart. Every one of them ships with a fixed dashboard and tells you: this is how you should think about your money.

Ponder is different. You decide what to track.

Tell Ponder what matters to you — in plain English — and it builds your dashboard. No templates. No assumed categories. No prescribed layout. Just your finances, exactly how you think about them.

That’s a compelling idea! And it’s something I’ve been thinking about since hearing Patrick Collison describe the future of software as bespoke and created on-demand, like pizza. The vision for this product would seem to be the PFM version of Collison’s concept.

Neat theory, but I do have some questions:

• Is it a good idea to have a PFM app that is dynamically built by an LLM for each individual user? Isn’t it possible that that product design choice, at least at our current state of AI development, will result in excessive errors, mistakes, and hallucinations? Ponder’s own Terms of Service warn of this exact problem, writing that the product’s “outputs can be confidently stated but factually wrong, inconsistent across sessions, or based on information that has since changed.”

• Assuming this choice for a PFM user interface gets traction in the market (and I think that’s possible!) how would Ponder maintain the product’s competitive differentiation? Wouldn’t this be an incredibly easy idea for a company like OpenAI (which has 900M+ weekly active users and a ton of money) to copy and improve upon?

• Everything about this product, including its namecheck of Monarch and Copilot in the app store description, suggests that it is targeted at higher net worth consumer segments, which don’t tend to struggle with liquidity or access to credit. This is very different from Kikoff, Grant, and Catch, which makes me wonder why Kikoff decided to pursue this product idea rather than one that is more obviously relevant to its core customer base.  

Now, at this point, again, you may be wondering why Kikoff is doing all of this. It’s fine to have a multi-pronged growth strategy, but trying to scale up a credit builder business and establish a cash advance business and a class-action-settlement-claim-as-a-service business and a personal financial management business, all without raising any additional capital from investors seems like a bit much, doesn’t it?  

What exactly is the purpose of this intense, but scattershot pursuit of growth? Is the company trying to demonstrate enough traction to justify raising a Series C at a higher valuation? Is the company positioning itself for an IPO?

I have no idea.

However, there was a recent legal complaint filed in Delaware's Chancery Court that touches on some of these same questions: 

Christophe Chong is seeking documents from Kikoff, the credit-building startup he co-founded, via a complaint in Delaware's Chancery Court, to support his allegations that CEO Cynthia Chen fired him for pushing an IPO and that she pressured him to sell his equity at a steep discount to consolidate her control over the company.

Chong's court request puts the spotlight on a tension building across the startup ecosystem: As companies stay private longer and increasingly lean on secondaries for liquidity, shareholders are at the mercy of whoever controls the cap table—and approves any share sales.

Kikoff hasn't raised new capital since a $30 million Series B in 2021, per PitchBook data, yet was valued at $1.5 billion in March through a secondary transaction. Chong alleges that Chen manipulated secondary sales for her own benefit, harming investors, according to court documents filed April 9. 

Whoa! Those are some spicy allegations!

Let’s end today’s essay by parsing Chong’s complaint and Kikoff’s response, both of which I have had the opportunity to review.

He Said, She Said

Let’s do this by revisiting our Q&A gimmick one more time.

Kikoff was valued at $1.5B? That seems really high, doesn’t it?

Yes, but the key thing to keep in mind is that this valuation was determined through a secondary sale of existing shares, not through a new primary funding round. We don’t know who sold their shares or who bought them or what rationale (if any) the buyer had in assigning that $1.5B valuation. I asked Kikoff about this secondary sale, but the company did not provide any additional information.

So, what is Chong alleging?

Well, first I want to clarify that Chong isn’t suing Kikoff or Chen for damages or to unwind anything. His complaint is what’s called a “books and records” complaint. He’s suing to look at documents. The evidentiary bar for this type of complaint is very low. Chong just has to convince the court there's a credible basis to suspect something went wrong.

That said, the story told in Chong’s complaint is quite dramatic.

Chong alleges that Chen methodically removed the checks on her power, one at a time, and then used that consolidated control to set the terms of secondary share sales in a way that enriched her and disadvantaged everyone else — Chong included.

Kikoff has a five-seat board, but even though Chen held only a minority of the company's economic interest, the complaint says she controlled over 50% of the vote for the two common-stock seats. To convert that into outright control, Chong alleges that she needed to clear out the directors who might provide oversight.

According to the complaint, Alex Taussig (Lightspeed's appointed board member), was the first target. Chong alleges that Taussig made himself a target by insisting on due diligence on a proposed founder equity grant. Chen's response, as conveyed in the complaint, was to threaten Taussig. The complaint quotes from an instant message from Chen to Chong:

I think Alex was scared… I threatened to [] make him look stupid in front of his boss" and "in front of his LPs.

And, in the same exchange, to float manufacturing a discrimination claim as leverage:

I can also raise a question on whether Lightspeed is discriminating female founders. Portage has a clause on DEI in their term sheet. I don't think this is a reputational risk that rich Canadian family wants to take.

The complaint states that Taussig resigned, and Lightspeed has left the seat empty ever since.

Chong was allegedly the next target. His complaint states that in June 2025, he pitched Chen on taking Kikoff public; she agreed in the meeting, then reversed herself two days later and angrily told staff to "stop talking about IPO." The reason, per the complaint, is structural: an IPO brings public stockholders and oversight, which would be the opposite of the captive board that Chen was building. He claims that she fired him shortly on transparently pretextual grounds. Removing Chong allegedly did double duty: it silenced the IPO push and vacated his common-stock seat.

Then came the capstone. With two seats now empty, Chong alleges that Chen had the board rewrite its own voting rules so that her single seat carries extra votes for every vacant one — handing her three of five votes from one chair.

The complaint also alleges that Chen and a "billionaire friend" bought out low-information minority holders — former employees, some of whom needed the cash — at roughly a third of what Chen's own stock had fetched in a near-contemporaneous sale, with Chen privately boasting of buying out her "good friends" at a "cheap valuation." The point of lowballing everyone else, per the complaint, was to manufacture a record of depressed prices she could then use to pressure Chong into selling his shares well below their true value.

Again, I want to make it clear that these are Chong’s allegations of what happened. Kikoff manifestly disagrees with the complaint’s allegations, as it made clear in its own filing.

OK, so what exactly was Kikoff’s response to this complaint?

Here's the key thing to remember: this is a fight about whether Chong gets to see documents, not yet about whether Chen or Kikoff did anything wrong. So Kikoff doesn't have to prove the story false. It just has to argue Chong has no legitimate reason to go digging. And the striking part of Kikoff’s filing is how little of Chong's actual timeline it attempts to deny. The co-founding, the roles, the dates, the shrinking board, the buyout offers, the charter change — Kikoff mostly concedes the bones of all of it. Most tellingly, it never denies that Chen wrote those damning text messages. Its response, over and over, is that Chong is quoting them "out of context," which is a very different thing from saying they aren't real.

Where Kikoff’s filing does dig in hard is on one point: It insists all five board seats are now filled, so the whole ‘Chen rigged a captive board to give herself extra votes’ story is, Kikoff argues, dead on arrival. Kikoff’s filing doesn't deny the extra-votes provision exists in the charter, it just continually states that the empty board seats have been filled.

From there, Kikoff’s filing flips the script and casts Chong as the villain. In its version, Chong refused to do some routine regulatory paperwork the company needed, then tried to ransom his cooperation to get the company to repurchase his shares. His own advisor allegedly asked for "$40M for solving Kikoff's urgent regulatory situation." In response to my question about this incident, Kikoff clarified that the “urgent regulatory situation” was a subsidiary that needed to complete licensing requirements in Wisconsin, which required Chong's sign-off in his capacity as a "control person." The company says Chong refused, said he wouldn't comply with future requests either, and that his representative told Kikoff he was seeking $40M for solving Kikoff's urgent regulatory situation. Kikoff says it declined and restructured its subsidiaries to route around him.

Kikoff’s filing also pointed out that Chong, back when he was a director, approved many of the very deals he now calls self-dealing, and it digs up his own messages calling a sub-$10-billion IPO a “dumb move” and Taussig's exit "for the best," which undercuts his portrait of himself as the good-governance martyr.

That is dramatic! What do you think is going to happen next?

First, let's be clear about where we actually are, because it's a little less dramatic than either side's rhetoric suggests. The primary thing that the two sides were fighting over initially — the confidentiality terms for document sharing — has been resolved. The court endorsed Kikoff's version and both sides signed it. Chong is getting some documents, though the two sides are still fighting over exactly which ones.

In terms of what will happen next, it’s anyone’s guess. I don’t have a strong read on the credibility of those on either side of the dispute and much of the juicy detail in the filings has been redacted. We’ll have to wait to see how the case develops.

Shortcuts

Credit building, in a modern fintech context, is about shortcuts. Well-intentioned shortcuts. Justifiable shortcuts. But shortcuts all the same.

Consumers want credit builder products because they appear to represent the shortest straight line back to a prime credit score.

Fintech companies want to provide credit builder products because it is a reliably low-risk way to acquire customers and generate revenue.

Credit bureaus want to collect credit builder tradelines because they promise valuable signal for credit risk models (though the bureaus’ understanding of why that signal is valuable has evolved considerably over the last five years) and a way to establish commercial relationships with fast-growing fintech companies.

Everyone, individually, is acting in their own best interests. And yet, what Kikoff’s circuitous and occasionally bumpy path over the last seven years reinforces for me is that shortcuts are almost always, over the long run, bad business.

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!

WHERE I'LL BE

There are some great virtual events coming up soon, and planning for the fall fintech season is well underway. Here's where I'm planning to be this summer (virtually) and in September (in person).

💻 Stablecoins as Payments Infrastructure (A Conversation for Skeptics) | June 30 | Virtual

Western Union is leaning all the way in on stablecoins, and the more you learn about what its doing, the more it makes sense. We'll be talking about it in this virtual event, sponsored by Rain.

✈️ FinovateFall | September 9-11 | New York City

My can't miss fall conference! September in New York is glorious and the fintech conversations will be too.

✈️ Cash Flow Intelligence Summit | September 10 | New York City

Nova Credit has rebranded this from the "Cash Flow Underwriting Summit" to the "Cash Flow Intelligence Summit." Come find out why.

✈️ FDATA Global Open Finance Summit | September 17 | Toronto

This will be my first time at an FDATA event and my first time back to Toronto in a long time. If you work in open banking in Canada and want to yell at me for my bad takes in the past, this is your chance!

✈️ AI-Native Banking & Fintech Conference | September 29 | Salt Lake City

The name of this event is a mouthful, but the content and networking are both A+.

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— Alex