Reports: Micro-Market Relevance: The Real Goal of BaaS; AI and Fraud in 2025: What Every Payments Leader Should Know; Inside the Shadow Banking Networks Powering Global Crime

Let’s dive into this week’s curated collection of fintech reports, whitepapers, and expert guidelines in the latest edition of Fintech Wrap Up. Every resource featured is available for download.

Insights & Reports:

1️⃣Brazil’s Open Finance just leveled up — and 2024 was the year it went pro

2️⃣Banking on Gen AI in Credit: Turning Caution into Competitive Advantage

3️⃣Payments Fraud Is Evolving — Here’s How Providers Can Keep Up

4️⃣AI and Fraud in 2025: What Every Payments Leader Should Know

5️⃣Inside the Shadow Banking Networks Powering Global Crime

6️⃣Africa’s Digital Banking Shift: Lessons for the Modern Market

7️⃣Micro-Market Relevance: The Real Goal of BaaS

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TL;DR:

Welcome to this week’s Fintech Wrap Up, where we cut through the noise and get to the signal.

What happened?
Brazil’s Open Finance hit maturity in 2024, with 62M active consents, 102B API calls, and corporate adoption up 91.7% YoY. Payments got smarter with recurring Pix and seamless transfers, while a new governance body now orchestrates the ecosystem. Meanwhile, banks are flirting with generative AI in credit — but cautiously. Only 12% of North American banks have deployed live use cases, though “agentic” AI promises full lending-journey automation. On the darker side, payments fraud is evolving fast, powered by AI on both sides of the fight. Stripe reports some attacks topping 1M transactions on a single merchant, but AI-led defenses are proving just as adaptive.

So what?
Brazil’s trajectory shows open finance can move from regulatory mandate to commercial engine when governance, tech, and adoption align. Banks risk being left behind if they treat gen AI as a side experiment rather than a core capability. And in payments, fraud prevention is no longer about static rules — it’s an AI-powered arms race requiring orchestration across onboarding, transaction monitoring, and customer engagement.

My take:
2025 feels like the year financial infrastructure stops being “under the hood” and starts steering the car. Open finance in Brazil is already setting global pace. Gen AI is the new competitive moat — but only for those who move from pilots to platform thinking. And in fraud, the winners will be those who match criminals’ creativity with equally agile, AI-driven defenses. The common thread? Integrated, intelligent, and always one step ahead.

Thanks for reading Fintech Wrap Up—we’ll see you in the future of finance.

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Insights

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Reports

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Brazil’s Open Finance just leveled up — and 2024 was the year it went pro

After four years of steady build-out, the ecosystem has officially entered its next era with the creation of the Open Finance Brazil Association (AOF). Think of it as the conductor of a 1,000-piece orchestra made up of banks, fintechs, credit unions, and payment institutions — finally giving the ecosystem its own governance, structure, and long-term sustainability.

Here’s what stood out from 2024:

1️⃣ User adoption hit new highs:

Over 62 million active consents and a staggering 102 billion API calls. Users aren’t just testing Open Finance; they’re living in it.

2️⃣ Payments went next-gen: