Hi! It's Kiah. For (exciting) content calendar reasons (a forthcoming multipart series), I am electing to do my year in newsletters at week 50 instead of 52. 🙂

Was this email forwarded to you?

Subscribe Here

Fifty Newsletters Later

Today is the fiftieth newsletter of Fintech Takes Banking.

As I round the first year of writing what is hopefully one of the nerdiest, but also most interesting and most amusing, newsletters about the United States banking industry, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the rich tapestry of content of the last 50 newsletters.

If you are not a Day One subscriber, this is a great time to catch up on some newsletters you might’ve missed! And if you are a fan and know someone who should subscribe, this is a great way to let them know what to expect each week.

Bank Nerds Unite: A bunch of nerdy bank topics

• I want to read more about credit quality and risk management. Should I worry about credit quality? Yes! No. What do I need to know about credit risk transfers?

• Remember when one of the biggest stories in banking was about loan loss accounting? Me too. Here are some newsletters covering adjustments to CECL, five years after implementation, including Here Lies the CECL Double Count and End of an Era for Messy M&A Accounting. I also wrote about the “held to maturity” designation and how using it to hide unrealized losses ends up hurting bank earnings in the long term.

• In which I was totally right about my favorite conspiracy theory in banking: Why Does Chase Build Branches near Chick-fil-A?, Financial Institutions Branch Out After a Decade of Trimming and Fact Checking My Chase Theory (!!)

The Companies that Want to be Banks, without Becoming a Bank

One important area of banking today is understanding the interest, ambition and motivation of companies that want to be some type of bank. For those of us who come from, or have basically only covered, the insured depository institution space, this can feel a little like visiting a new country and trying to figure out what’s the same here and there, and what’s different.

• Do you want to know more about national crypto trust charters and where they fit into the financial ecosystem? Check out these newsletters: The Crypto Trust Bank Zombie Springs to Life, Out of 4,000 Banks, One and If it looks like a bank and walks like a bank….

• Do you want to know more about Federal Reserve master accounts? Check out All Accounted For, One Account to Rule Them All and A Narrow View of Reserve Banking

• Learn all about industrial loan companies in the following newsletters: The Industrial Bank Complex and Everything You Wanted to Know about ILCs but Were Too Afraid to Ask.

• Does this overlap at all with how we determine interest rates in this country? Sort of! Some of these companies are seeking charters in states with no interest rate caps, while others are buying banks with national charters. To learn more about interest rate exportation and its maybe uncertain future, check out: What We Mean When We Say “Make a Loan”, The DIDMCA Mystery Morass and How the DIDMCA Debate Dims Dual Banking

I Love Weird Bank History

• Cryptocurrency is the new bearer bond. What you need to know about the OG bearer bonds, and why they fell out of favor, in these newsletters: A Brief History of Bearer Bonds, 1960s-1988 and Up and Vanished.

• Read about the rise and fall of Riggs Bank, which called itself the most important bank in the most important city in the world (disrespectful).

• I wrote about my personal vendetta against checks, or how this antiquated payment became a modern fraud vector in these newsletters: When will the last check be written? and Regulators’ Reality Check on Check Fraud

• Literal new money, or the country’s nearly two-decade saga to produce an accessible dollar bill.

• Why were New York and Atlanta selected for Federal Reserve Bank locations?

That's all for this week! I hope FTTB is a weekly bright spot in your inbox. I hope along the way, it’s provided you with information and context that helped make sense of some area of finance, understand why it matters and what to do about it, if anything. But I also hope you’ve found it accessible, interesting and entertaining — dare I say sometimes funny? It’s a dream to write FIFTY of these and share them with all of you; I hope you’ve enjoyed them too!

Sponsored by Linker Finance

Bank executives tend to sort AI risk by department. That works until two tasks inside the same department share a label but not a consequence.

Linker 360, the customer intelligence platform from Linker Finance, scopes agentic access by task, not department. Governance happens before the AI runs, not after something goes wrong.

Give your bankers a platform to better serve their customers, while limiting your AI agents to the data they need.

Agentic AI for Banks

💡 EVENT SPOTLIGHT

Most agentic AI projects don't stall because the tech is bad. They stall because compliance got treated like a retroactive speed bump instead of an early stakeholder.

There’s a better way. Join me for a working session that explores how to get pilots into production: start narrow, bring compliance and risk in before launch and measure impact instead of vibes.

If your bank's AI conversation (and projects) keeps stalling, come find out why.

FROM THE VAULT

What’s on my mind and filling my time:

🥘 Seasonal recipes that slap: I suspect that this recipe for creamy corn miso pasta from Food & Wine made it significantly harder to find campanelli pasta recently. I've made this roasted tomatoes with white beans twice — add a splash of white wine vinegar and enjoy with crusty toasted bread. I also brought over a chickpea and avocado salad and tortilla chips to a friend's house recently, prompting her to say "I love your little bean salads."

👀 Cannot stop laughing: at how perfect the firm name "Situational Awareness" is, given the news that the AI-focused hedge fund sold most of its stock portfolio to Citadel after suffering deep losses. It reminded me of my someday-ambitions to write about the most-ironically named failed banks. Good work here, everyone.

🎙️ On Bank Nerd Corner: I chat with Thea Garon, financial well-being lead at the Urban Institute, about recent research exploring how Generation Z (age 18 and 30) approaches money, risk and financial planning. I uncover my complicated millennial feelings toward these young consumers, who are at times financially responsible, financially anxious and financially nihilistic.

🎧 Bonus Podcast Rec: Episode 3 of Agent of Record, with Parlay Finance and me, is now out! Corey LeBlanc, cofounder and CTO of Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based Locality Bank and CEO of Locality Ventures, shares his approach to discussing AI, technology and bank strategy with the board with Parlay Finance CEO Alex McLeod and me. The latest episode of Agent of Record is a must listen for every financial institution with a board (that’s all of them).*

*This rec is brought to you by one of our fantastic brand partners.

Thanks for reading this newsletter and the 49 others that came before it. Excited to return to our regularly scheduled bank nerdiness next week. - Kiah