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Happy Monday, Fintech Takers!

I hope you had a restorative weekend.

Congrats to Spain on their World Cup victory. That wasn’t exactly an entertaining game (unless you like watching goalkeepers do amazing things … then Emiliano Martínez was your guy), but it was tense and, I think, the right team won in the end.

On a completely separate topic, if you’re at all like me, you likely find the constant buzz around agentic commerce to be annoying and unproductive. If that’s true, you’ll want to tune into next week’s virtual event — Know Your Agent (A New Problem for Old Defenses) — for an honest conversation about agentic commerce and the challenges (and opportunities) it presents. I promise you it will be the most interesting conversation on agentic commerce and KYA that you’ve ever heard. Register now! 

- Alex

P.S. — It feels simultaneously like I’ve been married to Mrs. Fintech Takes forever and like our wedding was just yesterday. I guess that’s what it feels like when you marry your soulmate. Regardless, the calendar says it has been 12 years and I’m grateful for every one of them!

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Sponsored by C&R Software

Here's an unpopular opinion for a debt collection platform to have: more automation should mean more humanity, not less.

C&R Software builds its AI-native collections platform around that idea (instead of around, say, headcount reduction).

Their AI absorbs the repetitive parts (outreach cadence, documentation, compliance checks), freeing up human judgment for the accounts that most need it.

That's a different starting point than most collections tech, which usually optimizes for fewer humans touching more accounts.

C&R's bet is the opposite: use automation to buy back the time a real conversation requires.

In credit and collections, that difference shows up fast, in repayment rates and in whether anyone stays a customer afterward.

Meet the platform

Andromeda Speciosa by Abraham Jacobus Wendel.

3 FINTECH NEWS STORIES

#1: This is Why You Build a Payments-focused L1

What happened?

Tempo released a new capability:

Introducing Receive Policies

On most blockchains, any token can be sent to any account: There's no easy way to restrict who can send you assets or refuse an unwanted token.

Receive policies bring these features to Tempo, enforced by the protocol.

A receive policy configures three things:

• Tokens: the assets an account accepts

• Senders: the addresses it will accept transactions from

• Recovery authority: who can reclaim a transfer that gets blocked

Receive policies are opt-in. An account without one works as normal.

The interesting part is what happens to a transfer the account doesn't accept. It succeeds at the protocol level, the funds route to a guard with a receipt, and they stay recoverable by the named authority.

A blocked transfer becomes a recovery workflow instead of an incident.

So what?

I remember when I was first experimenting with DeFi, being surprised that anyone (marketers, scammers, etc.) could send stuff to my wallet and it would just appear in there, with no way to stop it. I expressed this surprise on Twitter and the reaction from DeFi folks was, “Duh. That’s how permissionless cryptographic infrastructure works. Think of it like your mailbox. Anyone can send you anything.”

I did not find this to be a particularly reassuring or compelling answer. Indeed, it seemed to me to be just another reason why DeFi would never go mainstream.

Well, I’m sure true Defi people HATE this new feature from Tempo, but, from my perspective, it’s a great example of why you would build a payments-focused layer-1 blockchain. This is a feature that should exist in payments-focused crypto infrastructure. In fact, as a payments primitive, it’s something that would have a ton of utility outside of crypto.

Think about all the problems that we’ve had with scams on Zelle and other P2P payments networks.

All of the focus goes to the sender — the innocent consumer who is tricked into sending money to a bad guy — and understandably so. Liability rules under Reg E hinge on whether the payment in question was authorized by the sender. That’s why the spotlight is always on that side of the transaction. However, one of the sharpest criticisms of Early Warning Services (the operator of Zelle) in the CFPB’s 2024 lawsuit was about the poor job that the banks have done restricting and tracking the receiving accounts, letting the same bad actors collect fraudulent funds across institutions, over and over.   

What’s notable to me about this side of the transaction, apart from the lack of incentive that banks have to address it, is that, even if they wanted to address it, they lack the tooling to do so. There’s no easy, automated way to screen a counterparty before the money lands, and no clean, programmatic method for setting suspect inbound funds aside so a victim can be made whole without a subpoena.

Tempo just shipped exactly that primitive — hold the funds, name who can recover them — as a protocol default.

Amusingly, Tempo’s initial implementation of this primitive appears to be as a tool for the receiver, rather than as a guardrail for the sender (or the network operator). This makes sense if you think about it in a crypto context. The characteristic problem on a public blockchain isn't push-payment fraud, it's getting deluged with junk — dust attacks, scam airdrops, worthless tokens spammed at your address by anyone with a few cents of gas. So Tempo tuned the primitive for that problem: Quarantine the garbage, set it aside, sort through it later for anything worth keeping. A spam folder for your wallet.

But the primitive itself is (I think) direction-agnostic. "Hold the funds, let a pre-named authority reclaim them" shouldn’t care which way you point it. Aim the recovery authority at the account holder and you've built a spam filter. Aim it at a network operator, an issuer, or a regulator, and you've built the thing bank rails have never had: A receivership that can set aside funds sitting in a suspected scam account and return them to a victim without a year of litigation.

#2: Chime is the Anti-Robinhood

What happened?

Chime is getting into wealth management:

Chime … today announced the launch of Chime Invest, bringing investing to the Chime app where members already get paid, spend, and save. Members can buy stocks and ETFs commission-free, or let an expert-managed portfolio do the work for them, with no account minimums.

For members who want their investing handled for them, they can choose an expert-built, diversified portfolio personalized to their goals and risk profile, managed by Atomic Invest, an SEC registered investment adviser. Managed Portfolios have no account balance minimums and have no management fees for Chime Prime members, a 0.10% annual management fee for Chime Plus members, and 0.25% for all other Chime members.

So what?

There’s a quote from Chime’s CEO in the press release that stuck out to me:

The hardest part of investing is often getting started and sticking with it.

Fintech already solved the getting started part of the problem. Fractional stock investing with no commission fees knocked down all the barriers for consumers who wanted to start investing.

Where fintech diverges, philosophically, is on the sticking with it part of the problem.

Some companies — like the one that rhymes with Bobinzood — solve for this problem by building the most addictively-engaging investing experience possible. Prominently displayed meme stocks, cryptocurrencies, celebratory animations, and even prediction market event contracts. That’s the core of the product. And the topline metric that everyone in the company is most responsive to is monthly active users; how often are our users making trades?

It’s notable to me that Chime’s answer to the question, “How do we get customers to stick with investing?” is to take the investing out of their hands entirely. The premium version of Chime Invest is the managed portfolios offering, which is available for free to Chime Prime members (who qualify for Chime Prime with $3,000+ in monthly direct deposits).

Commission-free self-directed investing is also available — and notably it only offers stocks and ETFs, not crypto or prediction market contracts — but it’s not the focus. Chime knows its target customer is lower income, but, perhaps more importantly, time-poor. And instead of trying to compete for a share of their limited time, the company is offering those users a wealth management solution that doesn’t require any time at all. That strikes me as a very good product decision.

Speaking of which, I’ll be curious to see how Chime’s product decisions in this area of its business compound over time. It has designed the core offerings. It has picked a vendor. And it has figured out the pricing model. But how will the product actually be implemented within the Chime mobile app? Chime's emerging superpower is that it sits on the direct deposit, and the highest-leverage version of this product is one where investing happens automatically — roundups swept into a portfolio, or a slice of every paycheck peeled off before it can be spent. That's a behavior change Chime is uniquely positioned to accelerate and I’m guessing it’s where, directionally, we will see the product evolve.

#3: Tether’s Investments vs. Central Bankers

What happened?

Tether invested in a South American neobank:

Stablecoin giant Tether has invested $20 million in Argentine neobank Ualá as part of a broader $197 million funding round that valued the fintech at $3.2 billion on a post-money basis.

The investment was part of a funding round initially led by Allianz X in March 2026, with participation from new and existing global investors, including Stone Ridge Holdings Group, Tencent, TABLE Holdings, L.P., Soros Fund Management LLC, D1 Capital Partners, and Jubarte.

And, last month, a different Tether portfolio company focused on consumer payments integrated with Pix:

Tether-backed Oobit has integrated Brazil's PIX payment system, potentially making it easier for Brazilians to gain dollar exposure while continuing to make everyday payments in reais.

Oobit, a tap-to-pay smartphone app, on Tuesday introduced the feature that will allow nearly 170 million users of Brazil's popular PIX

So what?

Tether stood up an investing arm in mid-2024, pledged north of $1 billion in deals, and now sits behind roughly 140 companies — funded out of the multibillion-dollar profits its stablecoin reserves throw off.

One of the investment theses that Tether appears to be pursuing is putting money into fast-growing digital banking apps and products in countries where the demand to hold money in U.S. dollars is high.

The logic behind this thesis is obvious. Tether is the dominant supplier of U.S. dollar-denominated savings instruments to customers that can’t (for various reasons) access U.S. dollars. One major subcategory of these customers are consumers and small business owners living in countries with unstable monetary systems. Traditional banks in these countries are often not well-liked by their customers, which has created an opportunity for fintech disruptors to innovate, gain traction, and to scale rapidly.

What’s interesting is that the central bankers in those countries are, often, very encouraging of this fintech innovation. Take Brazil for example. Banco Central do Brasil (BCB) has enabled fintech innovation indirectly (it updated the rules for account opening to allow digital disruptors like Nubank to succeed) and directly (BCB, famously, designed and implemented PIX, which has become Brazilians’ overwhelmingly favorite way to pay).

This support, however, doesn’t always extend from fintech into crypto. Since late 2025 BCB has classified stablecoin transactions as foreign-exchange operations; in April it became the first G20 central bank to ban stablecoins from settling the offshore leg of regulated cross-border payments; and a proposed rule would let providers freeze larger transfers to self-custody wallets for 24 hours before they leave the system.

Each of these decisions has a narrow and specific justification (capital risk, AML compliance, etc.). However, more broadly, it seems apparent to me that Brazilian central bankers want the Brazilian financial system (including the fintech innovation and disruption occurring within it) to strengthen Brazil’s monetary system, and fintech innovation built on top of U.S. dollars (like Oobit) undermines that goal.

Ualá will be an interesting test case. The company’s CEO confirmed that Tether is participating purely as a financial investor, and the company has no plans to integrate USDT into the platform due to regulatory constraints around banks offering crypto in Argentina and Mexico (Ualá is licensed in both countries). That’s logical, but I doubt that Tether’s involvement is purely financial. Its investment in Ualá is also about gaining option value for future USDT adoption in countries where demand for U.S. dollars is strong. That’s something that Mexican and Argentinian central bankers (once they get over the World Cup) should take note of.   

2 READING RECOMMENDATIONS

#1: All Accounted For and One Account to Rule Them All (by Kiah Haslett, Fintech Takes Banking) 📚

A two-part series covering everything you ever wanted to know about Fed master accounts, from my friend and colleague Kiah.

#2: Kraken Financial’s “Skinny” Master Account Still Isn’t Live (by Jason Mikula, Fintech Business Weekly) 📚

And yet more on Fed master accounts, this time from Jason!

Truly, this is such a nerdy and niche topic. There’s only like 17 people outside the Fed who care, but Kiah, Jason, and I are three of them!

1 QUESTION FROM THE FINTECH TAKES NETWORK

There are a TON of interesting questions being asked in the Fintech Takes Network. I’ll share one question, sourced from the Network, each week. However, if you’d like to join the conversation, please apply to join the Fintech Takes Network. 

This has nothing to do with fintech, so forgive me, but it’s become an argument in one of my group chats and I need outside opinions: What are the top 5 U.S. sports cities?

My general thinking on this question is that you need to account for the number of professional sports teams a city has (both in the same sports and across different sports) and the level of passion that city’s fans have for the teams.

I have a clear top 4 in my mind, but I’m struggling with the fifth.

If you have any thoughts on this question, reply to this email or DM me in the Fintech Takes Network!

Thanks for the read! Let me know what you thought by replying back to this email.

— Alex