WORKWEEK

Most bank executives that you speak with tend to be quite rational. Sometimes coldly so. I remember talking to a chief lending officer at a small regional bank operating out of the Southeastern U.S. about his need to mitigate the geographic concentration risk of his bank’s loan book and only later realizing what he was…

3 Fintech News Stories #1: Lilly, Revisited.  What happened? In my last newsletter, I wrote a bit about a new fintech company called Lilly, which is focused on helping consumers invest for retirement through, among other things, channeling the money they earn through cashback credit cards into IRAs. In researching the company, I noticed that…

#1: Too Big To Be Competent What happened? Stop me if you’ve heard this one before – Wells Fargo screwed over a bunch of its customers and was fined by a regulator: Today, the CFPB is ordering Wells Fargo to pay more than $2 billion in redress to over 16 million consumers and a $1.7…

3 Fintech News Stories #1: For Whom the Chime Tolls  What happened? Chime reportedly tried to buy DailyPay, a provider of earned wage access, a couple of times earlier this year: Chime offered to buy earned wage access startup DailyPay twice this year, first for $1.6 billion and then for $2 billion, and was rejected…

Video games used to be simple.  Two players hit a ball back and forth until one of them misses, and the other player scores a point. The first to 11 points wins. It wasn’t until a few years later (around 1975) that things started to get more complex. That was when a computer programmer and…

3 Fintech News Stories #1: Eating Its Way Up the Stack  What happened? Plaid is bringing a new product out of beta: Plaid today announced that after two years in beta, its machine learning (ML) risk engine, Signal, will be available to customers seeking to upgrade their automated clearing house (ACH) transaction services with fraud…