WORKWEEK

3 Fintech News Stories #1: The Great Convergence Continues  What happened? Product roadmaps continue to converge in the corporate card and expense management space: After three years offering startups banking services, San Francisco-based Mercury is launching a corporate charge card called IO. The corporate card market is an increasingly crowded sector of fintech with companies…

Over the last 15 years or so, I have observed a phenomenon that I like to call the fintech event lifecycle. It goes something like this: A new event emerges with a focus on financial technology and innovation. It attracts a small, but dedicated core group of speakers, attendees, and sponsors. The event takes risks…

3 Fintech News Stories #1: A Rocketship for Credit Unions?  What happened? An interesting partnership was announced (and didn’t get a ton of attention … tip of the hat to Rex Salisbury for pointing it out): Rocket Mortgage and Q2 have announced a partnership that enables banks and credit unions to offer customers and members…

Last month, I joked on Twitter about the challenges that fintech companies were going to start facing trying to get onboarded by banking-as-a-service (BaaS) banks as regulators started paying more attention to BaaS. At that time, there were plenty of rumors swirling that regulators were having some uncomfortable conversations with banks about BaaS and their…

3 Fintech News Stories #1: Marketers’ Dark Arts What happened? Credit Karma got in some trouble with the FTC: The Federal Trade Commission has taken action against credit services company Credit Karma for deploying dark patterns to misrepresent that consumers were “pre-approved” for credit card offers. The FTC alleges that the company used claims that…

Our story starts in Great Falls, Montana. And like most stories originating from Great Falls, this one is confusing and a bit depressing. (Editor’s note – I hate Great Falls with a passion that, I admit, isn’t entirely rational. If you’re not from Montana, you won’t understand. Just go with me on this.)  At a…