The firm is calling it the Plaid Portal and not explicitly tying the launch with a privacy settlement the firm reached on Friday, but the timing is close enough to call.
Meet Islands of Cool, a blockchain-based carbon removal project out of New Zealand that wants to make carbon offsets cool.
Instead of joining a major payments provider, Plaid aims to disrupt the Visa, Mastercard, and Amex payment empire. Partners like Square, Dwolla, and new arrivals to the Plaid ecosystem Checkout.com and Marqeta are members of the new program, building payment capabilities for the new age of fintech.
The principle behind Mastercard’s CipherTrace acquisition, L1 growth, and IRS getting your bank data
Paying attention is the path to seeing and doing. Mastercard has bought CipherTrace to see blockchain-based finance, to launch new businesses, and to plug in more networks into its nexus. The crypto networks proliferate at every layer, creating more computation on Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Fantom, and Solana. The US executive seeks to see more too, asking the banks for their records of financial transactions to enforce taxation compliance.
One of the world's biggest payment processors, Visa made a clear statement: like credit cards and online banking before, NFTs and blockchain are the waves of the future.
Coinbase and Mastercard announced a partnership to offer users more "payment choices" on the upcoming Coinbase NFT platform.
In this analysis, we want to update the discussion of card networks, money movement, and the potential existential threat — or perhaps evolution — to existing infrastructure. It continues the thread on articles like Is Plaid cheap at $5.3 billion for $500 billion Visa? and Marqeta's $300MM of revenue & Ethereum's $20B in ann. transaction fees highlight opportunity and industry structure, and Who are the customers of Embedded Finance, and what do they reveal about Stripe, Affirm, DriveWealth, and Green Dot?, and more generally in this research section. We map Plaid’s progress in building out a payments ecosystem, and highlight Affirm’s debit card product powered in a novel manner through open banking. The analysis visualizes a likely evolution of the space with the introduction of Web3, and highlights a couple of early symptoms.
Square upgrades Cash App into a payment processing powerhouse, completing the loop between the consumer and merchant side of the house. Goldman Sachs acquires GreenSky, adding a lending business at the point of intent. This analysis connects these symptoms into a framework explaining the increasing integration between commerce and finance, and the increasing role that demand generation plays. That in turn explains how the attention and creator economies interconnect with financial services.
We started the month with the huge news that Square was acquiring Afterpay and we ended with Amazon’s deal with Affirm.
It seems like every day there is more news coming out of this sector, it is white-hot right now.
In this conversation, we delve deep into next generation finance and banking with CJ MacDonald, the Founder and CEO of Step – an incredibly successful neobank on a mission to improve the financial future of the next generation.
More specifically, we discuss traditional vs. digital banking, how personal experiences influence entrepreneurial the spirit, immersive market research, banking-as-a-service, the importance of financial literacy amongst Millenials and Gen-Z, the power of influencers who actually believe in a brand, aspirational brands vs. plastic Wells Fargo stage coaches, and lastly the proliferation of crypto in the minds of the next generation.