Jamie Dimon wants fewer bankers and more AI builders. But what does that really mean for the thousands of finance professionals already in the workforc…

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This week’s reports highlight the convergence of AI, digital assets, and next-generation payment infrastructure. Citi’s Tokenization 2030 projects tokenized assets could reach $5.5–8 trillion by 2030, driven by tokenized equities, treasuries, and the growing adoption of digital money for settlement. The Race for Frictionless Machine Payments examines how AI agents are creating demand for a new payment stack built on stablecoins and low-cost blockchain rails, with protocols such as x402, MPP, AP2, and Visa’s initiatives forming the foundations of machine-to-machine commerce. Meanwhile, McKinsey’s The Emerging Architecture of On-Chain Money argues that while stablecoins continue to gain attention, tokenized deposits and bank-led digital money networks are already processing significantly larger volumes, suggesting the future financial system will likely consist of interoperable layers of stablecoins, tokenized bank deposits, and eventually central bank digital money. Together, these reports point to a future where programmable assets, autonomous agents, and on-chain settlement infrastructure reshape how money moves across both consumer and institutional markets.

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Deep Dive of the Week

The Directory Of The UK and European Card Issuing and Program Management Platforms

The card issuing space has never been harder to read from the outside. Platforms that look similar on the surface have fundamentally different license structures, network relationships, regional coverage, and feature depth. I built this guide to cut through the noise mapping 22 companies across every dimension that actually matters when choosing a card issuing partner. If you are building a card program, migrating an existing one, or doing competitive due diligence on this market, this is the reference you need. The companion Excel file gives you the full comparison in filterable form.

What this guide covers

This deep dive profiles 22 card issuing processors and program management platforms in the UK and Europe across six structured dimensions: license type and issuing jurisdiction, card network membership, card types supported, key platform features, and geographic coverage. Every profile is built from publicly available information and official company documentation as of June 2026. Where data is not publicly disclosed, I mark it as “Not disclosed” rather than guess.

The accompanying file has seven tabs: Overview, Licenses, Card Networks, Card Types, Features, Regions, and a Master Table with all dimensions combined and filterable.

This week’s reports

1️⃣Five shifts powering payments

2️⃣The Race for Frictionless Machine Payments

3️⃣The emerging architecture of on-chain money

4️⃣Digital Assets & the Future of Wholesale Banking

5️⃣SWOT Assessment of Agentic Commerce for Retailers

6️⃣Tokenization 2030

7️⃣x402: Unlocking The Internet’s Missing Payment Layer

Five shifts powering payments

One of the interesting insights for me is that by 2030, agentic commerce is expected to total around $2-$5 trillion, representing between 3-7% of global payment volumes.

In this omnichannel world, a new form of shopping has the potential to change the way people shop forever—agentic commerce.

Agentic AI is expected to be responsible for up to a quarter of the U.S. e-commerce market by 2030. Consumers can use agentic AI to autonomously perform a range of shopping tasks including searching for products; searching for where to buy those products; reading reviews or product specifications; making recommendations; and finally, completing the purchasing journey on their behalf.

For now, agentic commerce is primarily used for product discovery: 30% of consumers now use AI tools to research products and compare options.34 However, we believe agentic AI will rapidly move up the commerce value chain, starting with repeat, low-risk items like groceries, before including more high-value items like tickets, travel and even automobiles.

For businesses, adapting to agentic commerce means adopting “sell-side” AI agents that will manage inventory and pricing, and interacting with “buy-side” AI agents by marketing their goods to them and ensuring their products are chosen over a competitor’s. In a world where AI agents are making purchase decisions, the concept of brand loyalty may no longer be as powerful. AI agents may turn their focus on objective factors such as price, stock availability and how fast purchases can be delivered. This can be both a challenge and an opportunity for merchants.

These processes may not only exist online. AI is also going to transform areas such as customer support, where AI-powered chatbots or virtual assistants can provide on-demand or proactive support to help customers with queries or resolve issues such as returns or payment problems. Gartner believes that by 2028, 60% of brands will use AI agents to interact with customers, which will act like “digital concierges.”

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The card issuing space has never been harder to read from the outside. Platforms that look similar on the surface have fundamentally different license structures, network relationships, regional coverage, and feature depth. I built this guide to cut through the noise mapping 22 companies across every dimension that actually matters when choosing a card issuing partner. If you are building a card program, migrating an existing one, or doing competitive due diligence on this market, this is the reference you need. The companion Excel file gives you the full comparison in filterable form.

What this guide covers

This deep dive profiles 22 card issuing processors and program management platforms in the UK and Europe across six structured dimensions: license type and issuing jurisdiction, card network membership, card types supported, key platform features, and geographic coverage. Every profile is built from publicly available information and official company documentation as of June 2026. Where data is not publicly disclosed, I mark it as “Not disclosed” rather than guess.

The accompanying file has seven tabs: Overview, Licenses, Card Networks, Card Types, Features, Regions, and a Master Table with all dimensions combined and filterable.

Company profiles

Pure-play card-issuing processors

Built primarily to process cards for fintechs and financial institutions:

Marqeta — API-first card issuing platform built for debit, credit, prepaid, and virtual cards with JIT funding and dynamic spend controls

Thredd — UK-based issuer processor (formerly Global Processing Services) focused on prepaid, debit, and credit program management

Enfuce — Finnish cloud-native card processor with BIN sponsorship, multi-country coverage, and modular architecture

Paymentology — Global card issuing and processing platform (Lume) with strong emerging market and crypto card coverage

Wallester — Estonian Visa Principal Member offering white-label card issuing and BaaS for the EEA and UK

BaaS with issuing

Banking-as-a-service platforms where card issuance is one layer of a broader product:

Solaris — German-licensed bank offering embedded finance APIs including debit and prepaid card issuance across Europe

Swan — French EMI providing embedded accounts and card programs to B2B software platforms across Europe

Railsr — UK embedded finance platform for wallets, cards, and rewards programs (new agent onboarding currently restricted by FCA)

Modulr — UK payments automation platform with card issuance for payroll, travel, and corporate spend use cases

Equals Money — UK Mastercard issuer combining FX expertise with multi-currency card programs and BaaS capabilities

Paynetics — Bulgarian/UK dual-regulated EMI offering card issuing, acquiring, and BIN sponsorship across Europe

Global infrastructure with issuing

Large-scale payments infrastructure companies with issuing as a strategic product line:

Adyen — Dutch global acquiring and issuing platform with commercial card capabilities for enterprise clients

Stripe — US-based PSP with Stripe Issuing offering prepaid and virtual cards via API in the UK, US, and EU

Airwallex — Australian/UK global payments platform with multi-currency card issuance embedded into its financial infrastructure

Nium — Singapore-based global payments network with card issuance and stablecoin-backed card programs

Pismo — Cloud-native banking and card technology platform (acquired by Visa in 2023) processing for tier-1 banks in Latin America and beyond

Enterprise/legacy processors

Established payment infrastructure companies with card processing at scale:

Worldline — French payments giant processing cards across Europe for banks and institutions at enterprise scale

Openway — Belgian software vendor (Way4 platform) for card issuing, merchant acquiring, and digital wallets sold to banks and processors globally

Nexi — Italian payment technology group with card issuing and processing across Southern and Central Europe

Full-stack PSP + issuing

Payment service providers that have added issuing capabilities to a broader stack:

Nuvei — Canadian global PSP with virtual card issuing and BIN sponsorship for fintechs and platforms

SDK Finance — Lithuanian white-label fintech software platform (source code license model) for building card programs and digital banks

Decta — UK/Cyprus/Ireland EMI with full-stack acquiring, issuer processing, BIN sponsorship, and white-label card issuing

What’s Behind the Subscribe Button

Subscribers get the full structured profile for each of the 22 companies covering: what they do, license type and issuing jurisdiction, card network relationships, card types, key platform features, and regional coverage. Each profile is 3–5 sentences of prose plus structured data. Companies are organized by category. The section ends with guidance on how to use this map when making a build/buy/partner decision.

Subscribe to Fintech Wrap Up to access the full profiles and download the Excel file.

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We cover:

• Why 15% of online …

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This week’s reports collectively describe a financial system shifting from bank-led infrastructure toward programmable, AI- and stablecoin-enabled networks. State of Stablecoin & Crypto Payments 2026 shows stablecoins moving into real production use by major institutions, though adoption is still limited by merchant acceptance and fragmented user experiences. Stablecoin Strategy for Asia 2026 highlights Asia as a key growth region, where stablecoins could streamline large remittance and trade flows that current cross-border rails handle inefficiently. Beyond Concentration: Where Non-USD Stablecoins Can Scale suggests future growth beyond USD dominance in markets where local currency stability and access matter more than global liquidity. Project Acacia – Exploring the role of digital money in wholesale tokenised asset markets emphasizes tokenization benefits in settlement efficiency but notes regulatory and coordination barriers. Meanwhile, KPMG Global AI in Finance 2026 and Global Banking Annual Review 2026 show AI and fintech pressure reshaping banking competition, while Five shifts powering payments points to agentic AI changing how commerce is discovered and executed.

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Deep Dive of the Week

Inside Wise’s Products, Licenses, Rails, and the Technology Stack

On May 11, 2026, Wise began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker WSE, a dual listing alongside its existing London Stock Exchange presence. The moment was symbolic. Wise isn’t just adding liquidity or broadening its investor base. The Nasdaq move signals something more deliberate: Wise is reframing itself not as a consumer fintech, but as financial infrastructure, the kind institutions and regulators think about differently than apps.

To understand why that framing matters, you have to understand what Wise has actually built over fifteen years, and where it’s now pointing that infrastructure.

This week’s reports

1️⃣State of Stablecoin & Crypto Payments 2026

2️⃣Stablecoin Strategy for Asia 2026

3️⃣Project Acacia – Exploring the role of digital money in wholesale tokenised asset markets

4️⃣KPMG Global AI in Finance 2026

5️⃣Beyond Concentration: Where Non-USD Stablecoins Can Scale

6️⃣Global Banking Annual Review 2026

7️⃣Five shifts powering payments

State of Stablecoin & Crypto Payments 2026

In 2025, Stripe, PayPal, Visa, and JPMorganChase all moved from evaluating stablecoin payments to running them in production.

Three drivers converged:

Infrastructure readiness — Major PSPs and banks went live with stablecoin payments. The rails no longer felt like an experiment.

Regulatory clarity — The US, EU, and Asia-Pacific now have frameworks in force or taking effect. The uncertainty that held institutions back is clearing.

Market demand — User adoption signals are strong, and stablecoins now dominate crypto payment volume.

If 2025 was the year stablecoins scaled, 2026 is the year they must prove their utility.

Key findings from the data are explored in detail across Sections 4–9.

Highlights include:

Stablecoin ownership is surging — surpassing Solana in the WalletConnect user base, with 51% of users aged 18–34 holding stablecoins (Section 5)

USDT and USDC dominate — held by 82% and 80% of survey respondents; onchain data shows USDC leads globally by holder count (759K) while USDT dominates Asia (Section 5)

The market is concentrated but fragmenting — two issuers control 94% of supply, but bank-issued and DeFi-native stablecoins are emerging fast (Section 5)

1.11 million WalletConnect wallets hold $36.3 billion in stablecoins — but the top 0.4% of wallets hold 98% of all value, revealing extreme concentration beneath the surface (Section 5)

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On May 11, 2026, Wise began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker WSE, a dual listing alongside its existing London Stock Exchange presence. The moment was symbolic. Wise isn’t just adding liquidity or broadening its investor base. The Nasdaq move signals something more deliberate: Wise is reframing itself not as a consumer fintech, but as financial infrastructure, the kind institutions and regulators think about differently than apps.

To understand why that framing matters, you have to understand what Wise has actually built over fifteen years, and where it’s now pointing that infrastructure.

The problem was never just fees

The conventional story about Wise is that it solved a pricing problem that it showed up, exposed the hidden FX markups banks were charging, and gave consumers a fair rate. That story is true, but it undersells what they actually did.

Traditional cross-border payments run on correspondent banking. When money moves from Australia to the US, it typically hops through two or three intermediary banks each converting currencies, each taking a cut. The sender faces an upfront fee, then pays again through FX markups at each conversion, often without seeing the full cost until it’s done. The result: roughly 3.5% in fees, and 2–5 business days in wait time.

Wise replaced that chain. Instead of routing money through Singapore and Hong Kong and then New York, it created a model where value is moved locally in each jurisdiction and netted internally. A sender in Australia puts money in; Wise pays out from its local holdings in the destination country. No international wire. No correspondent bank taking a margin.

This is harder than it sounds, and it’s the reason no one had done it cleanly before.

To execute that model globally requires three things that compound in difficulty: regulatory licenses to operate in each market, direct connections to local payment systems, and technology that can coordinate it all in real time. Wise now holds 80+ licenses across the globe, has direct participations in 8 domestic payment systems (UK Faster Payments, EU SEPA, Brazil Pix, Singapore FAST, Australia’s NPP, Hungary’s RPS, Japan’s Zengin, and the Philippines’ InstaPay), and runs a single global technology stack maintained by over 1,000 engineers across 20+ service locations.

The outcome: 75% of transfers delivered in under 20 seconds. An average take rate of just 52 basis points. 4.7 million transactions per day. 99.9%+ uptime. Those numbers are not marketing. They are the operating benchmarks of a payments network that has spent 15 years becoming structurally cheaper to run than the system it replaced.

The three-product stack

Wise’s commercial surface area breaks into three products, each targeting a different customer tier while drawing from the same underlying infrastructure.

Wise account

The consumer product a multi-currency wallet that lets individuals hold 40+ currencies, send internationally at the mid-market rate, spend via a debit card, and earn yield through Wise Assets (money market funds and stock exposure). The newly launched UK current account integrates all of this and offers a yield of 3.26% on everyday balances versus 0% at most UK high street banks. The strategic intent is to make Wise the primary financial home for the globally mobile: travelers, digital nomads, expats, freelancers, remote workers. About 70% of customer growth comes from word of mouth

.

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We discuss why the UK is becoming one of Coinbase’s most important markets, how stablecoins could reshap…

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The reports collectively highlight a major transformation underway in financial services, driven by tokenization, digital money, and real-time infrastructure. Card Issuing in 1,000 Words explains how modern card payments function as a “chain of promises,” where issuers, networks, and acquirers coordinate authorization and settlement, with different card types—debit, prepaid, credit, and charge—shaping risk and economics. Three Types of Digital Money frames the future monetary landscape through CBDCs, deposit tokens, and stablecoins, emphasizing how differences in issuer backing, transfer mechanisms, and banking-system integration will influence regulation, monetary policy, and financial stability. Meanwhile, Banking in the Tokenized Economy argues that tokenization is no longer experimental but a strategic shift reshaping banking business models, with institutions investing in custody, hybrid cloud infrastructure, and AI-enabled settlement systems to remain competitive. Together, these reports suggest the future of finance will be increasingly programmable, real-time, and software-driven, forcing banks and payment providers to rethink infrastructure, customer relationships, and sources of value creation.

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Deep Dive of the Week

Structural Analysis of Visa’s Value-Added Services

The contemporary payments landscape is defined by the progressive decoupling of software intelligence from proprietary physical transaction rails. Historically, global card networks operated as unified utility systems, extracting rent primarily from transaction clearing and settlement routed exclusively over their own systems. Under this legacy framework, monetization was strictly tied to the proprietary network volume. However, the rise of account-to-account (A2A) infrastructure, domestic real-time payments (RTP) schemes, and decentralized ledgers has fragmented transaction routing. In response, Visa has established its Value-Added Services (VAS) division, a strategic shift designed to monetize transactions regardless of the underlying payment network.

During fiscal year 2025, Visa processed 257.5 billion transactions on its proprietary networks, up from 233.8 billion in fiscal year 2024 and 212.6 billion in fiscal year 2023. Total payments and cash volume reached $16.7 trillion in fiscal year 2025, supported by 4.9 billion payment credentials. GAAP net revenue grew 11% year-over-year to $40.0 billion, driven primarily by transaction volumes, nominal cross-border processing, and nominal payments volume.

Against this transaction processing baseline, the VAS portfolio has emerged as a high-margin revenue engine, delivering a 20% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in constant dollars since fiscal year 2021. In fiscal year 2025, VAS generated nearly $11 billion ($10.9 billion) in revenue, representing a 24% increase over the prior fiscal year.

The structural contribution of VAS to Visa’s net revenue rose from 22% in fiscal year 2021 to 24% in fiscal year 2024. Over the same period, the geographic distribution of VAS revenue shifted internationally, with the share generated outside the United States increasing from 57% to 60%. This geographic dispersion indicates that international markets, characterized by fragmented domestic clearing rails and diverse regulatory systems, have the highest demand for standardized software modules that optimize payment performance.

This week’s reports

1️⃣How Blockchain and Tokenization Can Propel Finance Into the Real-Time Future

2️⃣Three Types of Digital Money

3️⃣Banking in the tokenized economy

4️⃣Key Insights from the 2026 Global eCommerce Payments & Fraud Report

5️⃣What payment optimization really means

6️⃣Card issuing in 1,000 words

7️⃣The Future of Digital Assets

How Blockchain and Tokenization Can Propel Finance Into the Real-Time Future

Modern life operates at the speed of thought. In a 24/7 and always-on digital economy, individuals command global services with a single tap, ordering goods at midnight, streaming a movie, paying a friend, and communicating across time zones without friction.

Technology has redefined our lives, business and society. Many of the architectures, practices and processes that underpin commerce, trade, securities and other critical financial interactions, however, are still playing catch up and are constrained by legacy infrastructure.

This is the always-on divide: a structural gap between an increasingly realtime global economy and a financial system that still operates in parts through batches or intervals. Significant progress has been made, and financial infrastructure is certainly more interconnected than it was in decades past. From the emergence of correspondent banking to the ubiquity of SWIFT messaging and centralized clearing, each iteration has incrementally improved how money and value circulates. However, these advancements have largely retained a model where data and information are transmitted separately from the final settlement of value. While this separation is a practical and efficient design for certain payment types, it represents a fundamental limitation in the context of a fully real-time global economy.

Current end-to-end services rely on a fragmented model of coordinating independent entities. While this establishes a baseline of trust, it means the financial system is prone to be constrained by structural inefficiencies:

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The contemporary payments landscape is defined by the progressive decoupling of software intelligence from proprietary physical transaction rails. Historically, global card networks operated as unified utility systems, extracting rent primarily from transaction clearing and settlement routed exclusively over their own systems. Under this legacy framework, monetization was strictly tied to the proprietary network volume. However, the rise of account-to-account (A2A) infrastructure, domestic real-time payments (RTP) schemes, and decentralized ledgers has fragmented transaction routing. In response, Visa has established its Value-Added Services (VAS) division, a strategic shift designed to monetize transactions regardless of the underlying payment network.

During fiscal year 2025, Visa processed 257.5 billion transactions on its proprietary networks, up from 233.8 billion in fiscal year 2024 and 212.6 billion in fiscal year 2023. Total payments and cash volume reached $16.7 trillion in fiscal year 2025, supported by 4.9 billion payment credentials. GAAP net revenue grew 11% year-over-year to $40.0 billion, driven primarily by transaction volumes, nominal cross-border processing, and nominal payments volume.

Against this transaction processing baseline, the VAS portfolio has emerged as a high-margin revenue engine, delivering a 20% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in constant dollars since fiscal year 2021. In fiscal year 2025, VAS generated nearly $11 billion ($10.9 billion) in revenue, representing a 24% increase over the prior fiscal year.

The structural contribution of VAS to Visa’s net revenue rose from 22% in fiscal year 2021 to 24% in fiscal year 2024. Over the same period, the geographic distribution of VAS revenue shifted internationally, with the share generated outside the United States increasing from 57% to 60%. This geographic dispersion indicates that international markets, characterized by fragmented domestic clearing rails and diverse regulatory systems, have the highest demand for standardized software modules that optimize payment performance.

Total addressable market dynamics

The strategic objective of the VAS portfolio is to address a projected $520 billion total addressable market (TAM). With fiscal year 2024 VAS revenues at $8.8 billion, the organization has captured approximately 2% of this opportunity.¹ The distribution of revenue and growth rates across individual VAS portfolios highlights a long runway for software-driven expansion.

The varying CAGRs across these portfolios reveal that while Issuing and Acceptance remain the volume-heavy anchors of the division, the fastest expansion is occurring in Advisory & Other Services. The mid-thirties CAGR in Advisory indicates a structural trend where financial institutions and large merchants are relying on predictive data engines to protect operating margins under interchange compression.

The Visa as a Service Stack

For developers, fintech founders, and software engineers, accessing the global payments network requires programmatic, modular, and highly available interfaces. The organization delivers its services through the Visa as a Service (VaaS) stack, an API-driven architecture structured into four distinct layers.

The foundational layer consists of the physical networks and global telecommunications systems, including four redundant global data centers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Singapore. This physical layer maintains six-nines of operational reliability and sub-second response times across 200 countries and territories, supporting settlement in 160 currencies.

The services layer abstracts core transactional operations into discrete, reusable software components. Capabilities such as tokenization, multi-factor authentication, and transaction verification are decoupled from card routing, allowing clients to consume them as standalone services.

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Tyler explains why traditional rules-based systems and machine learning models are no longer enough as fraud becomes faster, more automated, and more sophisticated. He also b…

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This week’s fintech reports highlight a major shift in global financial infrastructure driven by stablecoins, AI, blockchain, and vertically integrated fintech models. The core theme across the reports is that finance is moving toward programmable, real-time systems where payments, treasury, lending, and settlement increasingly converge into unified infrastructure layers. Stablecoins are evolving from crypto tools into foundational financial rails, while blockchain is being adopted as a settlement and reconciliation upgrade for banks rather than a speculative technology. At the same time, AI adoption across financial services is accelerating globally, with both institutions and regulators embedding AI into operations and governance. Emerging markets across Africa and MENA continue expanding rapidly beyond payments into lending, SME finance, and digital infrastructure, while companies like Ant International demonstrate how integrated fintech ecosystems combining payments, wallets, treasury, and embedded finance are shaping the future of global commerce.

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Deep Dive of the Week

Ant International’s Multi-Product Commerce Infrastructure

In recent years, Ant International has evolved into a unified techfin platform powering global commerce. Its core stack combines cross-border payments (Alipay+ and Antom), digital wallets, global account services (WorldFirst), embedded finance (Bettr), plus an AI-driven layer for compliance and fintech services. As a result, the company now connects 2 billion consumer accounts to over 150 million merchants worldwide through Alipay+, processes 20+ million transactions daily, and spans 300+ payment methods across 220+ markets. WorldFirst and Bettr provide global account services to 1.6 mn SMEs, and over 30 mn underserved businesses and individuals access credit. This article breaks down the technology and product strategy behind Ant International’s platform convergence.

The platform supports 300+ payment methods, all major card schemes, 50+ wallet and bank apps, 10+ national QR systems in 220+ markets. This means consumers can use preferred local payment options, for example, SGQR, DuitNow, PromptPay, QRIS, etc., while merchants connect through one integration.

Antom’s merchant gateway serves businesses in 50+ countries, enabling them to accept payments in 100+ currencies and reach customers in over 200 markets. Its services go beyond payments to include digital marketing and store digitization. WorldFirst’s global account and treasury services provide one-stop cross-border accounts, payments, FX conversion, and even supply-chain financing. In combination, WorldFirst and Bettr serve 1.6+ million small businesses and provide credit access to 30+ million underserved MSMEs and consumers.

Together, these products form a converged infrastructure layer: all facets of commerce transactions, payment acceptance, wallets, corporate accounts, and lending are integrated via APIs and common services. For example, Alipay+ links global bank apps and e-wallets to merchants via SWIFT rails and ISO 20022 messaging. Antom supports card and alternative payments through an enterprise-grade gateway, including APM checkout and digital wallets. Bettr provides embedded finance APIs to accelerate merchant growth, and WorldFirst offers treasury APIs such as a multi-currency account and fund management for cross-border trade. All services share identity, risk, and funds movement flows on Ant’s unified stack.

This week’s reports

1️⃣The BaaS Wreckage and Regulatory Thaw That Cleared the Way for Nubank’s US Entry

2️⃣The new stack for global finance: Stablecoins edition

3️⃣The global expansion of stablecoins

4️⃣2026 Global AI in Financial Services Report

5️⃣Blockchain for banks

6️⃣Unlocking Africa’s Second FinTech Wave

7️⃣The next phase of MENA fintech growth

The BaaS Wreckage and Regulatory Thaw That Cleared the Way for Nubank’s US Entry

The most important idea in this report is not Nubank’s entry. It is that failure removed optionality.

The BaaS model did not evolve. It collapsed under its own structure. Compliance was fragmented, ownership was unclear, and when stress hit, no single entity could answer for the system. The Synapse failure exposed this directly: money, ledger, and responsibility were split across parties that could not reconcile reality when it mattered .

That is not a product failure. That is a design failure.

What followed was predictable. Regulators did not just tighten rules. They forced a reversion to clear ownership. The system moved from distributed responsibility back to vertically integrated accountability.

At the same time, the co-branded model failed for a different reason. Economics, not compliance. Banks funded risk they did not control, while fintechs controlled distribution without holding balance sheet consequences. The result was mispriced risk and sustained losses. When the assumptions broke, the partnerships unwound.

Two different models. Same outcome. Misalignment between control and responsibility.

The key shift is what survived.

The licensed digital bank model did not win because it is more innovative. It won because it is structurally coherent. One entity holds the charter, the balance sheet, the compliance, and the customer. That alignment is what regulators can supervise and what markets can price.

Everything else was filtered out.

The report frames this as a “regulatory thaw,” but the more accurate framing is a reset. The system cleared unstable abstractions before allowing new entrants. Nubank did not just arrive at the right time. It avoided every failure mode before the reset happened .

That is the real advantage.

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In recent years, Ant International has evolved into a unified techfin platform powering global commerce. Its core stack combines cross-border payments (Alipay+ and Antom), digital wallets, global account services (WorldFirst), embedded finance (Bettr), plus an AI-driven layer for compliance and fintech services. As a result, the company now connects 2 billion consumer accounts to over 150 million merchants worldwide through Alipay+, processes 20+ million transactions daily, and spans 300+ payment methods across 220+ markets. WorldFirst and Bettr provide global account services to 1.6 mn SMEs, and over 30 mn underserved businesses and individuals access credit. This article breaks down the technology and product strategy behind Ant International’s platform convergence

• The platform supports 300+ payment methods, all major card schemes, 50+ wallet and bank apps, 10+ national QR systems in 220+ markets. This means consumers can use preferred local payment options, for example, SGQR, DuitNow, PromptPay, QRIS, etc., while merchants connect through one integration.

• Antom’s merchant gateway serves businesses in 50+ countries, enabling them to accept payments in 100+ currencies and reach customers in over 200 markets. Its services go beyond payments to include digital marketing and store digitization. WorldFirst’s global account and treasury services provide one-stop cross-border accounts, payments, FX conversion, and even supply-chain financing. In combination, WorldFirst and Bettr serve 1.6+ million small businesses and provide credit access to 30+ million underserved MSMEs and consumers.

Together, these products form a converged infrastructure layer: all facets of commerce transactions, payment acceptance, wallets, corporate accounts, and lending are integrated via APIs and common services. For example, Alipay+ links global bank apps and e-wallets to merchants via SWIFT rails and ISO 20022 messaging. Antom supports card and alternative payments through an enterprise-grade gateway, including APM checkout and digital wallets. Bettr provides embedded finance APIs to accelerate merchant growth, and WorldFirst offers treasury APIs such as a multi-currency account and fund management for cross-border trade. All services share identity, risk, and funds movement flows on Ant’s unified stack.

Payments and Wallets Platform

At the center are global payment services. Ant International’s payment layer, mainly Alipay+ and Antom, creates a unified acceptance network. Alipay+ is a wallet gateway that “allows consumers to use their preferred payment methods seamlessly and securely, online and offline.” It interoperates digital wallets and apps including 36 e-wallet partners and BNPL apps across borders. Antom is the merchant-facing payment engine, described by the company as providing “unified, vertical-specific digital payment solutions” for businesses of all sizes. Together, they link 2 billion user accounts to 150+ million merchants, enabling one-click checkout in a wide variety of currencies and payment schemes.

This interoperability is supported by extensive APIs and integrations. The platform connects over 10 national QR payment networks and the major card and ACH networks, plus dozens of local wallets, under a single API. For example, through partnerships and standards like ISO 20022, Ant International demonstrated a live bank-to-wallet payment solution: Standard Chartered Bank accounts can send funds to Alipay+-enabled e-wallets globally, leveraging SWIFT infrastructure. In effect, Ant’s payments layer abstracts a complex global network of rails cards, ACH, QR, and wallets into one operating layer for merchants.

On the merchant side, Antom’s SDKs and tools make it simple to onboard new merchants. The Antom Copilot 2.0 is a key example: it automates payment integration, merchant onboarding, risk checks and chargeback resolution in an AI-driven workflow. Within a year, 72% of Antom-onboarded merchants had completed their own payment integration using the Copilot, and it has boosted chargeback handling efficiency by ~46%. These capabilities mean merchants get connected faster and maintain higher transaction success rates on the platform.

Key quantitative highlights of the payments/wallets layer include:

• 300+ payment methods supported (cards, 50 mobile wallets/bank apps, 10+ national QR codes).

• 20+ million daily transactions on average across the network.

• Acceptance in 220+ markets worldwide.

Global Accounts and Treasury

Complementing payments is a cross-border account and treasury layer built on the WorldFirst platform. WorldFirst provides one-stop account services for businesses operating internationally. In practice, this includes multi-currency collection accounts, global payments, currency conversion and hedging, and supply-chain financing options. Small traders can open local accounts in key currencies or regions to receive payments and pay suppliers more cheaply. All currency conversions and transfers happen through WorldFirst’s treasury infrastructure.

Ant International claims to manage “the largest number of global accounts” for businesses, especially SMEs, in cross-border commerce. This suggests its platform handles vast volumes of multi-currency transactions and holds significant deposit balances. By offering treasury-as-a-service APIs, Ant’s platform enables merchants to automate cash management e.g., API-triggered FX hedges or automated disbursements in the same interface as payments and wallets. This effectively brings corporate finance into the unified stack.

In Ant’s strategy, the global account function is key to enabling every business to go global from day one. WorldFirst’s technology is layered into the platform: for instance, SMEs paid in one currency can automatically trigger exchange and payouts in another currency via the same dashboard. In sum, the account/treasury layer turns Ant’s infrastructure into a digital bank for merchants, ensuring payments, collections and currency management flow through one system.

Embedded Finance and Credit

The third pillar is inclusive finance and credit, delivered mainly by Bettr. Bettr’s API-driven platform provides loans, credit lines, and other financial services to SMEs and individuals who lack traditional access. It embeds credit offers at the point of sale or online checkout. Through Bettr, Ant International has extended credit access to 30 million+ underserved businesses and consumers. These loans are often financed via partnerships with local lenders or via blockchain-enabled capital pools.

Bettr is tightly integrated with Alipay+ and Antom. For example, when a merchant onboards via Antom, the same backend can check SME creditworthiness using Ant’s data and AI models, and offer them financing through Bettr. Similarly, consumers in emerging markets can get microloans at checkout via mobile wallets powered by Alipay+. The strategy here is “strategic value boosters”: Ant International explicitly positions embedded financing, credit and treasury as growth enablers for merchants. By offering credit as a service, Ant International can increase transaction volume and lock in customer relationships.

On the tech side, Ant is applying advanced tech to lending. Its sustainability report notes that credit services are integrating new AI and blockchain capabilities. While details are sparse, this could mean using distributed ledgers for credit risk or identity, or AI for loan approval. The combination of global payments and embedded credit creates a tight feedback loop: payments data helps underwrite loans, and credit expands purchasing power on the platform.

AI-Driven Product Layer

Underpinning all products is an AI/FinTech layer. Ant International has been keen to brand itself as an “AI commerce” pioneer. It has opened up several AI frameworks and tools for partners and internal use:

• Agentic Payment Solutions: Antom launched an agentic payment solution that lets AI agents conduct payments on behalf of users. It supports APMs and cards in one checkout flow, effectively enabling conversational or automated purchasing. Relatedly, at MoMents 2026 Ant introduced an Agentic Mobile Protocol (AMP) – an open-source framework for mobile-based agentic payments. AMP allows AI-driven apps and even wearables to transact by calling standardized payment APIs, enhancing interoperability.

• GenAI Cockpit (FinAI-as-a-Service): A cloud platform that provides large language model toolkits and APIs for fintech use cases. For example, Malaysia’s TNG eWallet and Pakistan’s Easypaisa use it to build AI agents on top of their payment apps. Ant’s strategy is to “democratize FinAI” by giving emerging markets plug-and-play AI platforms without huge investment.

• EPOS360: An AI-powered SME app that integrates point-of-sale (POS) checkout, banking, and financing into one interface. EPOS360 bundles merchant tools such as sales reporting, customer engagement, etc. with access to working capital and cross-border payments. It’s currently piloted in Southeast Asia onboarding via wallet mini-programs like TNG.

• Antom Copilot (AI Merchant Assistant): Beyond onboarding, Antom’s Copilot uses machine learning on real transaction data to help merchants optimize billing, handle chargebacks, and manage disputes. In practice it “learns from real-world cases” to automate routine tasks.

• AI SHIELD (Fraud and Risk Engine): A 3-in-1 risk model with 7+ billion parameters that fuses graph, sequence and tabular data to flag high-risk transactions. It achieves over 95% precision in fraud detection and boosts payment success by ~13.5%. Ant shares parts of this risk technology via a Digital Wallet Guardian Partnership, enabling wallets and banks on its platform to access anti-fraud and fund-protection tools.

• Falcon TST (AI FX Model): A mixture-of-experts AI model 8.5+ billion parameters used internally to forecast foreign exchange moves. It achieves ~93% accuracy on month-ahead FX forecasts and has cut Ant International’s FX hedging costs by up to 60%. Notably, Ant open-sourced this model in 2025 to encourage community adoption.

• AI-as-a-Service Partnerships: Ant is working with Visa, Mastercard and others on protocols e.g. Model Context Protocol for AI commerce. It pilots tokenized, agentic card payments with Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay, embedding Visa’s trust into AI apps.

These AI and tech innovations do not stand alone; they are integrated into the product stack. For instance, SHIELD’s risk scores feed into Antom and Alipay+ to reduce fraud platform-wide. The GenAI and agentic frameworks are available to partners building on Alipay+. The overall approach is to use AI to automate and scale key flows such as payment onboarding, risk assessment, and customer service in the commerce stack.

Compliance, Security, and Trust

Behind the scenes, Ant International invests heavily in compliance and security as part of its infrastructure. The company holds licenses in 60+ markets and has built a multi-layered AML and KYC framework. The AI-driven SHIELD model above is one layer of fraud prevention. There is also a 3-layer anti-money-laundering program anchored on global control standards. Ant promotes a “Privacy Enhancing Technology” program to enable cross-border wallet use without exposing user PII.

On the payments rails side, Ant is extending standards like ISO 20022 to more corridors. The SWIFT partnership to enable bank-to-wallet transfers is a prime example. By bridging SWIFT with mobile wallets, Ant’s stack creates a single settlement layer that spans traditional banking and new fintech rails. Similarly, Ant has forged alliances with national banks and networks (e.g. Saudi SAMA, Vietnam’s NAPAS) to embed its stack in local systems. In effect, the platform is designed for interoperability and compliance – every new market or payment network is another plug-in, rather than a silo.

Strategic Architecture and Integration

Strategically, Ant International positions itself as an end-to-end platform provider for merchants and fintech partners. Its leadership emphasizes a “layered solutions” approach: combining the four pillars Alipay+, Antom, Bettr, and WorldFirst to deliver comprehensive growth solutions. In practice, this means a single sign-on/API key can unlock payment acceptance, wallet access, account treasury functions, and financing altogether. Data flows seamlessly: a merchant’s sales data from Alipay+ can inform credit underwriting in Bettr, or a flagged fraudulent payment in Antom can trigger an AML check. The components share a common identity and data bus.

Ant International’s marketing calls this a “unified techfin platform” enabling inclusive growth. Indeed, its press materials describe “layered partnerships” linking 2 billion accounts and 150 million merchants. This suggests a modular architecture: each new partner wallet, bank, or gov’t network plugs into the Ant stack’s APIs. The whole stack is cloud-hosted and microservices-based (implied by scale and open-source initiatives), allowing rapid deployment of new features like agentic payments or Islamic finance programs without rebuilding core systems.

Go-to-market, Ant bundles these services by use case. For example, an ecommerce platform could integrate Antom’s API to accept global payments, then use WorldFirst’s APIs to handle multi-currency payouts and Bettr’s API to offer installment loans at checkout. Or a mobile wallet app could adopt Alipay+ gateway for international receipts, connect to SHIELD for fraud monitoring, and tap GenAI Cockpit to build a travel-booking assistant. The end result is a converged layer: behind the scenes, all payments, wallets, accounts, credit, and security services operate as one platform.

Key Metrics

Ant International’s latest reports highlight the platform’s scale and scope, which are critical markers for founders and investors:

• 150+ million merchants connected globally across 220+ markets.

• 2+ billion user accounts reachable via its wallet/payment network.

• 300+ payment methods supported (cards, QR, 50+ wallets/bank apps, BNPL).

• 1.6+ million SMEs served with global account services.

• 30+ million credit users (MSMEs/underserved) accessing loans or financing.

• 20+ million daily transactions on average.

These metrics underscore the reach of Ant’s stack and its growing ecosystem. By offering so many channels and services through one platform, Ant International creates network effects: more merchants attract more wallets and vice versa.

Conclusion

In sum, Ant International’s sustainability report and recent releases paint the picture of a multi-product infrastructure stack being assembled for the era of AI-driven commerce. The company has re-engineered global payment rails, wallets, corporate accounts, and embedded finance into a single operating fabric. Its strategy is explicitly to integrate payments, treasury, compliance, AI and credit into one layer, enabling businesses of all sizes to “do business anywhere” through a unified platform. For fintech founders, strategists and engineers, Ant’s model shows how modular fintech services – from local wallets to global banks – can be woven into a common tech stack, powered by AI and blockchain, to support truly global commerce.

Sources:

Ant International’s 2025 Sustainability Report and press releases, along with Ant International public information and news coverage.

Ant International Highlights Democratising AI and Strengthening Trust in 2025 Sustainability Report | AFP.com

https://www.afp.com/en/infos/ant-international-highlights-democratising-ai-and-strengthening-trust-2025-sustainability

Expanding infrastructure for the age of AI commerce: Ant International connects over 150 million merchants with more than 2 billion consumers

https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/expanding-infrastructure-for-the-age-of-ai-commerce-ant-international-connects-over-150-million-merchants-with-more-than-2-billion-consumers-302758508.html

Global Digital Payments & Fintech Solutions | Ant International

https://www.ant-intl.com/en/

Ant International, Standard Chartered and Swift collaborate to pioneer bank-to-wallet payment solution backed by ISO 20022 | Swift

https://www.swift.com/news-events/press-releases/ant-international-standard-chartered-and-swift-collaborate-pioneer-bank-wallet-payment-solution-backed-iso-20022

Ant International Rilis Sustainability Report 2025! - Beli Hape - Halaman 2

https://www.belihape.id/berita/842682335/ant-international-rilis-sustainability-report-2025?page=2

PYMNTS | Ant’s Antom Debuts Agentic Payment Solution

https://www.pymnts.com/artificial-intelligence-2/2025/ants-antom-debuts-agentic-payment-solution/

Ant International Rilis Sustainability Report 2025! - Beli Hape - Halaman 3

https://www.belihape.id/berita/842682335/ant-international-rilis-sustainability-report-2025?page=3

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In this episode of the WRAP UP Podcast, I sit down with Sam Broner, the CEO of The Better Money Company, a former investor at Andreessen Horowitz, and a former engineer at Microsoft, to discuss why he left venture capital to build a stablecoin company.

Sam is building what …

Read more

The reports highlight how stablecoins and tokenization are reshaping financial infrastructure beyond crypto speculation. Stablecoin adoption is creating new startup opportunities in fiat off-ramping, enterprise compliance, privacy-focused payments, B2B FX liquidity, and global digital banking. At the same time, fintech continues expanding rapidly, with industry revenues reaching $650B in 2025 and projected to approach $2T by 2030, driven by stablecoin growth, consolidation, and increasing profitability. Meanwhile, asset tokenization is emerging as a structural upgrade for financial markets, improving settlement speed, collateral mobility, transparency, and operational efficiency, particularly in bonds and asset management. Together, the reports suggest the next phase of fintech will be defined by regulated digital assets, programmable financial infrastructure, and more efficient global payment and capital market systems.

Video of the Week

Deep Dive of the Week

The 2026 Directory of Stablecoin Card Program Enablers

The financial ecosystem of 2026 has definitively transitioned from a phase of speculative exploration to one of rigorous institutionalization. Stablecoins, once viewed through the lens of decentralized finance experiments, now serve as the primary settlement rails for internet-native commerce, representing a structural shift in how value is moved and spent globally. This transformation is anchored by the full deployment of the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation and the United States’ Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act, both of which have reached critical enforcement milestones as of early 2026.

In the European theatre, the April 2026 status report from the Spanish Government and EU tax agencies confirms that MiCA has moved from a legislative framework into an “eminently supervisory cycle”. The “grandfathering” transitional periods, which allowed legacy providers to operate under limited oversight, are concluding, with a hard deadline of July 1, 2026, for all Crypto-Asset Service Providers (CASPs) to secure full MiCA authorization or cease operations. This regulatory rigor has resulted in a consolidated market of 38 accredited Electronic Money Token (EMT) issuers, ensuring that any card program operating within the Eurozone utilizes tokens backed one-to-one by high-quality liquid assets and redeemable at par value.1 The implication for fintech founders is profound: the “regulatory arbitrage” era is over. Launching a card in Europe now requires an infrastructure partner that is either an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) or maintains a primary relationship with one to ensure that euro-denominated settlement layers like EURe are compliant with the categorical ban on interest-bearing stablecoins.

Simultaneously, the United States has seen the rapid maturation of the GENIUS Act framework. As of April 2026, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) have issued comprehensive rules defining the pathways to becoming a Permitted Payment Stablecoin Issuer (PPSI).9 These pathways—spanning subsidiaries of insured depository institutions, federally qualified issuers (FQPSIs), and state-qualified issuers (SQPSIs)—have effectively brought stablecoin issuance into the federal banking perimeter. For product managers, this means that U.S.-based stablecoin cards are no longer “fringe” products; they are regulated financial instruments supported by “pass-through” deposit insurance models and strict reserve asset concentration limits, which prohibit any single financial institution from holding more than 40% of an issuer’s reserve assets. The 2026 market is thus characterized by “bank-grade” systems that support multi-jurisdictional operations, where stablecoins like USDC and PYUSD are treated with the same prudential respect as traditional commercial bank deposits.

This institutionalization has driven stablecoin transfer volumes to unprecedented heights. By 2024, volume had already reached $27.6 trillion, exceeding the combined transaction volumes of Visa and Mastercard, and by 2026, this momentum has only accelerated as cross-border B2B payments and consumer card programs have matured. The “wild ride” of crypto has been replaced by the “steady hum” of stablecoin infrastructure, where the focus has shifted from ideological debates to the practical details of slippage management, cost-basis tracking, and real-time settlement across 190+ countries.

This week’s reports

1️⃣Reforming MiCA for Euro Stablecoins

2️⃣Five startup opportunities in stablecoins

3️⃣The next age of fintech

4️⃣Asset Tokenization in Financial Markets

5️⃣The Coming FinTech Liquidity Supercycle

6️⃣Dollar Supremacy

7️⃣Business Banking Digital Maturity

Reforming MiCA for Euro Stablecoins

Stablecoins are forcing a bigger question in Europe: can regulation protect markets without pricing itself out of relevance?

Europe built one of the world’s most comprehensive crypto frameworks. But comprehensive does not automatically mean competitive. The report argues euro stablecoins still account for less than 1% of global stablecoin volume, despite the euro’s role in global finance.

That gap matters.

Because stablecoins are no longer just crypto instruments. They are becoming payment rails, treasury tools, settlement assets, and increasingly the cash layer for tokenized markets.

The report highlights four structural frictions holding euro stablecoins back:

• ban on interest-bearing models

• rigid reserve allocation rules

• limited access to central bank infrastructure

• unclear cross-border frameworks

In simple terms: Europe has rules, but not yet the conditions for scale.

What I find most interesting is the competitive lens.

Read more

The financial ecosystem of 2026 has definitively transitioned from a phase of speculative exploration to one of rigorous institutionalization. Stablecoins, once viewed through the lens of decentralized finance experiments, now serve as the primary settlement rails for internet-native commerce, representing a structural shift in how value is moved and spent globally. This transformation is anchored by the full deployment of the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation and the United States’ Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act, both of which have reached critical enforcement milestones as of early 2026.

In the European theatre, the April 2026 status report from the Spanish Government and EU tax agencies confirms that MiCA has moved from a legislative framework into an “eminently supervisory cycle”. The “grandfathering” transitional periods, which allowed legacy providers to operate under limited oversight, are concluding, with a hard deadline of July 1, 2026, for all Crypto-Asset Service Providers (CASPs) to secure full MiCA authorization or cease operations. This regulatory rigor has resulted in a consolidated market of 38 accredited Electronic Money Token (EMT) issuers, ensuring that any card program operating within the Eurozone utilizes tokens backed one-to-one by high-quality liquid assets and redeemable at par value.¹ The implication for fintech founders is profound: the “regulatory arbitrage” era is over. Launching a card in Europe now requires an infrastructure partner that is either an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) or maintains a primary relationship with one to ensure that euro-denominated settlement layers like EURe are compliant with the categorical ban on interest-bearing stablecoins.

Simultaneously, the United States has seen the rapid maturation of the GENIUS Act framework. As of April 2026, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) have issued comprehensive rules defining the pathways to becoming a Permitted Payment Stablecoin Issuer (PPSI).⁹ These pathways—spanning subsidiaries of insured depository institutions, federally qualified issuers (FQPSIs), and state-qualified issuers (SQPSIs)—have effectively brought stablecoin issuance into the federal banking perimeter. For product managers, this means that U.S.-based stablecoin cards are no longer “fringe” products; they are regulated financial instruments supported by “pass-through” deposit insurance models and strict reserve asset concentration limits, which prohibit any single financial institution from holding more than 40% of an issuer’s reserve assets. The 2026 market is thus characterized by “bank-grade” systems that support multi-jurisdictional operations, where stablecoins like USDC and PYUSD are treated with the same prudential respect as traditional commercial bank deposits.

This institutionalization has driven stablecoin transfer volumes to unprecedented heights. By 2024, volume had already reached $27.6 trillion, exceeding the combined transaction volumes of Visa and Mastercard, and by 2026, this momentum has only accelerated as cross-border B2B payments and consumer card programs have matured. The “wild ride” of crypto has been replaced by the “steady hum” of stablecoin infrastructure, where the focus has shifted from ideological debates to the practical details of slippage management, cost-basis tracking, and real-time settlement across 190+ countries.

Comparative analysis of infrastructure enablers

Choosing an infrastructure partner in 2026 requires a multidimensional evaluation of their regulatory footprint, network permissions, and technological architecture. The following directory provides a structured comparison of the most significant enablers currently facilitating stablecoin card programs.

The competitive moats of the big six

Nium has solidified its moat by leveraging its status as a global infrastructure leader for real-time cross-border payments. By launching its stablecoin card issuance platform in early 2026, Nium effectively merged its 190-country payout network with the ability to issue cards on both Visa and Mastercard networks through a single API integration. For a fintech founder, Nium’s value proposition is “complexity abstraction”; they handle the chain-of-conversion complexity and the heavy regulatory lift of holding licenses across dozens of jurisdictions, which previously required months of custom infrastructure work. Their partnership with Coinbase further enhances their liquidity routing, making them the primary choice for enterprise-scale B2B and travel-related card programs that require high-volume, reliable settlement.

Rain differentiates itself with a “stablecoin-native” thesis for corporate finance. Its primary moat is built around the corporate expense use case for Web3 entities and DAOs. Rain’s cards allow organizations to spend directly from their stablecoin-denominated treasuries without constant fiat off-ramping. Their system utilizes smart contracts to turn “digital dollars into code,” enabling money-conditional transfers and real-time global settlements. For example, a Rain program can employ pre-funded escrow accounts where funds are released only when specific on-chain or off-chain triggers (like GPS delivery confirmation) are met. This makes Rain more than just a card issuer; they are a treasury management layer for the decentralized economy.

Baanx has carved out a unique position as the pioneer of the “self-custody card.” Their core moat is the ability to let users spend digital assets directly from their own wallets—including hardware wallets—without relinquishing control of the private keys. This “OpenFi” approach bridges traditional IBAN accounts with tokenized assets, allowing for instant finality on pricing across multiple FX pairs. Baanx’s infrastructure is particularly attractive to firms seeking to offer lending products, as users can borrow against their digital assets to fund card spending, effectively creating a credit line that avoids the immediate tax consequences of selling crypto.

Bridge (now the infrastructure arm of Stripe) remains the “developer-first” champion. Its moat is the “Open Issuance” platform, which allows businesses to launch their own branded stablecoins within days and immediately attach them to Visa-powered virtual or physical cards. Bridge supports a diverse range of funding models, from custodial Bridge wallets to non-custodial Privy wallets and Stripe Financial Accounts. Their focus is on “orchestration”—they provide the API-driven plumbing that handles the movement of USDB or other “GENIUS-ready” stablecoins across eight major chains (Ethereum, Solana, Base, Polygon, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism, and Stellar).

BVNK serves the enterprise B2B and cross-border treasury market, with a moat defined by “bank-grade” multi-jurisdictional compliance. Reporting $10 billion in annualized transaction volume, BVNK is a dominant player in the UK and European corridors. Their specific value proposition is their deep integration with incumbent rails; they were among the first to enable stablecoin payments for Visa Direct pilot programs and Mastercard’s settlement gateway stack. For fintechs moving regular B2B flows, BVNK offers same-day settlement in 30+ currencies and a mature Travel Rule integration via Notabene, making them the preferred partner for regulated remittance platforms.

Regional and technological specialists

The 2026 directory must also account for specialized players that address specific niches or regional requirements.

NAKA offers a “stablecoin-native” infrastructure that challenges traditional interchange-based revenue models. Their moat is a “Subscription-Based Framework”

Read more

We explore how global payments infrastructure is evolving beyond simple money movement into…

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The reports collectively show that financial services are entering a new phase driven by AI, cloud infrastructure, stablecoins, and modular payment systems. Banks and fintechs are moving from experimentation toward operational transformation, but legacy systems, fragmented data, regulatory pressure, and organizational complexity remain major barriers to scaling innovation. Across banking, payments, and fintech, the competitive advantage is shifting from owning infrastructure to building flexible, API-driven, AI-enabled platforms that can adapt quickly to changing customer and market demands. At the same time, stablecoins are evolving into real payment infrastructure with growing use in commerce, cross-border transfers, and programmable finance, particularly in emerging markets like Africa. The broader message across all reports is clear: the next generation of financial leaders will be the firms and ecosystems that simplify operations, modernize infrastructure, integrate AI responsibly, and create scalable environments for long-term innovation and growth.

Video of the Week

Deep Dive of the Week

The Transaction Foundation Models

We are observing a structural re-architecture of the financial internet. The legacy stack, composed of siloed rule engines, task-specific machine learning models, and human-centric interfaces, is being replaced. We are moving toward a unified paradigm where self-supervised foundation models act as the core operating system for banking and payments. This is a move from information exchange to value exchange. The data suggests that we are witnessing the death of the manual rule engine and the birth of the behavioral embedding as the primary unit of fintech utility.

This deep dive analyzes the technical transition from Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDTs) to Transformer-based foundation models. I will examine the implementation of these systems at Revolut, PayPal, Stripe, and Plaid. I will also detail the infrastructure requirements, the economics of token inference, and the protocol layer defining how AI agents will transact in a zero-trust environment.

This week’s reports

1️⃣AI in banking​

2️⃣How radical simplification can transform corporate and investment banking

3️⃣From process automation to industry reimagination

4️⃣Stablecoins could reshape Africa’s digital payments landscape

5️⃣Next-Gen Acquiring Processing

6️⃣9 charts on what stablecoins are becoming

7️⃣Accelerating the Unicorn Landscape in UK Fintech

AI in banking​

Most banks are no longer asking whether AI matters.

They are asking how to scale it without breaking governance, data quality, or core operations.

One stat from this report stood out to me.

78% of organisations already use AI in at least one business function. 84% of business leaders expect AI to affect their business. Yet only 7% have fully scaled it. Another 31% are scaling, 34% are piloting, and 28% are still experimenting.

That gap says a lot.

AI in banking is real, but it is still uneven. Most banks are not running end to end AI driven journeys yet. They are using AI in narrow parts of the business where the value is easier to prove.

The clearest use cases are already visible.

Read more

We are observing a structural re-architecture of the financial internet. The legacy stack, composed of siloed rule engines, task-specific machine learning models, and human-centric interfaces, is being replaced. We are moving toward a unified paradigm where self-supervised foundation models act as the core operating system for banking and payments. This is a move from information exchange to value exchange. The data suggests that we are witnessing the death of the manual rule engine and the birth of the behavioral embedding as the primary unit of fintech utility.

This deep dive analyzes the technical transition from Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDTs) to Transformer-based foundation models. I will examine the implementation of these systems at Revolut, PayPal, Stripe, and Plaid. I will also detail the infrastructure requirements, the economics of token inference, and the protocol layer defining how AI agents will transact in a zero-trust environment.

The failure of task-specific architectures

For decades, the financial industry relied on Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDTs) like XGBoost and LightGBM. These models were fast, interpretable, and effective for tabular data. However, I believe they reached a ceiling because they depend on human-engineered features. A data scientist had to manually define what constituted a suspicious transaction velocity or a risky credit profile, and this created a bottleneck. Every new product required a new pipeline, a new set of labels, and a new round of feature engineering.

The performance data from Revolut and Plaid indicate that general-purpose foundation models outperform these task-specific models across the board. When a model learns the underlying grammar of transactions through self-supervision, it identifies signals that humans miss.

Relative performance improvements of foundation models

Revolut’s PRAGMA

Revolut’s PRAGMA (PRe-trained Banking Foundation Model) is a family of encoder-style models scaling from 10 million to 1 billion parameters. This is the largest published encoder backbone for consumer banking event sequences. PRAGMA treats transactions as part of a multi-source sequence that includes app navigation, communications, and profile state rather than isolated events.

The two-branch encoder architecture

The model uses a two-branch design to handle the heterogeneity of banking data, and I think this is the correct architectural choice for finance. One branch focuses on the profile state: static or slowly changing attributes like account tenure, plan type, and service region. The second branch processes the event history: dynamic sequences of transactions and app interactions.

These branches are fused by a history encoder. This allows the model to contextualize a specific transaction not just by the events that preceded it, but by the user’s overall state. If a user has been a “Metal” plan member for five years, a high-value purchase carries a different risk profile than it does for a new user on a “Standard” plan.

Percentile-based tokenization

I believe the most important innovation in PRAGMA is its approach to numerical data. Standard LLMs split numbers into digits. I think this is a mistake for financial reasoning because it discards magnitude and ordering. PRAGMA maps numerical values to percentile buckets.

Read more

We explore why agent-led transactions are not just about AI buying shoes or booking flights on behalf of consumers, but about a much deeper change in how commerce infrastructure may work. Noah expla…

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This week’s reports point to a clear shift in banking and fintech: the industry is moving from legacy infrastructure and manual workflows toward real-time, AI-driven, and programmable systems. Across stablecoin payments, agentic banking, and new operating models, the message is consistent — banks that modernize their technology stack, embed automation into execution, and build around trust and compliance will be best positioned to grow. At the same time, Europe’s fintech ecosystem, virtual cards, and rising VC activity show that capital is increasingly flowing toward infrastructure, efficiency, and on-chain finance.

Video of the Week

Deep Dive of the Week

The Emergence of the Bank Operating System

For decades, the financial industry has operated under the assumption that the core banking system is the sun around which all other technologies must orbit. This core-centric model was functional in an era of physical branches and daily batch cycles, but it has become a terminal constraint in the modern digital economy. The core is a monolithic system of record designed for stability over velocity. It was built to store data, not to orchestrate real-time commerce. In my analysis, the gravitational pull of these legacy cores is currently preventing banks from participating in the most lucrative segments of the fintech revolution.

Every modernization strategy over the last twenty years has been a variation of architectural accumulation. Banks add middleware to translate legacy code. They add point solutions to handle specific mobile features. They add third-party Banking as a Service platforms to enable fintech partnerships. The result is a surface-level digital experience that masks an underlying foundation of legacy debt. Smaller institutions that remain release cycle-bound, unable to launch a single feature without their vendor’s permission. Mid-sized banks are struggling with fragmented modernization and integration drag. Large banks are attempting in-house builds that are too expensive and slow to scale. These are different strategies, but they all suffer from the same friction.

What I see now is the formation of a new category: the Bank Operating System. This is a real-time, composable growth layer that repositions strategic control inside the bank. In this model, the core becomes the system of record while the operating system becomes the system of growth. This distinction is foundational. A real-time operating system layer helps banks launch revenue-generating products quickly, activates new payment rails without integration friction, and operates independently of core downtime.

This week’s reports

1️⃣The Agentic Banking Blueprint

2️⃣Technology Trends Redefining Banking

3️⃣State of European FinTech

4️⃣Stablecoin Payments Infrastructure

5️⃣Fintech VC Trends Q1 2026

6️⃣State of Fintech Q1’26 Report

7️⃣Virtual Cards as a Strategic Advantage

The Agentic Banking Blueprint

Over the past two decades, most transformation efforts have focused on digitization. Banks invested heavily in systems to capture data, streamline processes, and improve digital customer experiences. More recently, artificial intelligence (AI) has enhanced these efforts by helping employees analyze information, generate insights, and make better decisions.

However, the way work gets done has not changed as much as expected. Most execution still depends on manual coordination across teams, systems, and channels. Even when insights are available, follow-up is often inconsistent. Processes slow down where decisions need to be turned into action.

AI agents address this gap. Unlike traditional AI tools that only provide recommendations, AI agents are designed to take action. These agents can complete defined tasks, follow rules, and move processes forward across systems.

Now, a more advanced model is emerging: autonomous AI agents. These agents represent a new era of intelligent automation; they can learn from data, make decisions within defined objectives, and adapt to real-world conditions. Rather than just executing tasks, they manage outcomes within established guardrails and continuously improve performance over time.

Read more