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Finity
@FinityWW
The room where fintech actually talks.
Fewer pitches than LinkedIn, better takes than the conference bar.
Usually.
Fewer pitches than LinkedIn, better takes than the conference bar.
Usually.
34 Following 3.3K Followers 129 Posts
Latest posts 5
Fintech news moves fast. That's what Open Office Hours is for.
Aug 20, 2 PM ET: @AlexH_Johnson Founder of Fintech Takes, opens the floor to the whole Finity Network. No deck. No script. Just real answers, and the occasional classic Alex crash out when a topic hits a nerve 🙃
Open to everyone.
What's the fintech question you can't get a straight answer to anywhere else? Drop it below, might get tackled live on the 20th.
Register here: finitynetwork.com/events/2c0a7a3…
Aug 20, 2 PM ET: @AlexH_Johnson Founder of Fintech Takes, opens the floor to the whole Finity Network. No deck. No script. Just real answers, and the occasional classic Alex crash out when a topic hits a nerve 🙃
Open to everyone.
What's the fintech question you can't get a straight answer to anywhere else? Drop it below, might get tackled live on the 20th.
Register here: finitynetwork.com/events/2c0a7a3…
finitynetwork.com Fintech Open Office Hours — August Edition A crypto exchange just built a gift card that turns a stablecoin, the most traceable dollar on earth, into cash.
Businesses can buy these in bulk and hand them out for rewards and promos. Whoever holds the code controls the funds. No identity check happens until someone redeems it.
That's the problem. The whole pitch for stablecoins over cash is the paper trail: every transfer sits on a public ledger, and a compliant issuer can freeze a bad wallet in minutes. A gift card erases that. The code can pass through a text or a screenshot with no record of who had it or when.
The only identity check in the entire chain happens at redemption, run by an exchange whose operator pleaded guilty last year to running an unlicensed money-transfer operation and paid a fine north of a quarter-billion dollars, for the exact kind of identity failure baked into this product.
If traceability is the industry's main argument for stablecoins, issuers and exchanges owe an answer for a product built to route around it.
One-off gray area, or the first of a pattern?
Inspired by Alex Johnson's Fintech Takes newsletter.
Businesses can buy these in bulk and hand them out for rewards and promos. Whoever holds the code controls the funds. No identity check happens until someone redeems it.
That's the problem. The whole pitch for stablecoins over cash is the paper trail: every transfer sits on a public ledger, and a compliant issuer can freeze a bad wallet in minutes. A gift card erases that. The code can pass through a text or a screenshot with no record of who had it or when.
The only identity check in the entire chain happens at redemption, run by an exchange whose operator pleaded guilty last year to running an unlicensed money-transfer operation and paid a fine north of a quarter-billion dollars, for the exact kind of identity failure baked into this product.
If traceability is the industry's main argument for stablecoins, issuers and exchanges owe an answer for a product built to route around it.
One-off gray area, or the first of a pattern?
Inspired by Alex Johnson's Fintech Takes newsletter.
The FDIC just proposed a fintech certification system that gives banks zero legal protection for using it.
Bank and fintech trade groups are working with the FDIC to build a standard-setting body that would certify which fintechs are safe enough for banks to onboard. A separate industry effort is running a regulator-observed pilot doing something narrower: standardizing what a finished verification check looks like once it's done, not the verification process itself.
Most people will read this as "regulators finally streamlining fintech oversight."
That's not what's happening.
The certification model is voluntary. It gives banks no safe harbor even when they use it. And it has to cover a KYC vendor, a lending-as-a-service platform, and a BaaS middleware provider under one standard, even though those businesses look nothing alike from a risk standpoint. Widen the standard enough to fit all of them and it stops meaning anything. Narrow it down to something useful and you've moved the same evaluation problem into a new building.
The verification-sharing approach avoids that trap. It never asks whether a fintech is trustworthy. It makes a finished verification check something the next bank can trust and reuse, without redoing the work. Specific and auditable beats broad and voluntary.
Neither model fixes what's driving this: competition pushes every player, supervised or not, to move faster and take on more risk to keep up. You can't regulate that instinct out of existence. The only lever is changing what it costs to take the careful route instead of the fast one.
Watch which one banks put budget behind next year. That'll tell you more than either press release will.
If you had to bet, which one gets adopted first: certification, or reusable verification?
Inspired by @AlexH_Johnson's Fintech Takes newsletter. 61,000+ fintech and banking execs read it for breakdowns like this. Subscribe here: fintechtakes.com/newsletter-sub…
Bank and fintech trade groups are working with the FDIC to build a standard-setting body that would certify which fintechs are safe enough for banks to onboard. A separate industry effort is running a regulator-observed pilot doing something narrower: standardizing what a finished verification check looks like once it's done, not the verification process itself.
Most people will read this as "regulators finally streamlining fintech oversight."
That's not what's happening.
The certification model is voluntary. It gives banks no safe harbor even when they use it. And it has to cover a KYC vendor, a lending-as-a-service platform, and a BaaS middleware provider under one standard, even though those businesses look nothing alike from a risk standpoint. Widen the standard enough to fit all of them and it stops meaning anything. Narrow it down to something useful and you've moved the same evaluation problem into a new building.
The verification-sharing approach avoids that trap. It never asks whether a fintech is trustworthy. It makes a finished verification check something the next bank can trust and reuse, without redoing the work. Specific and auditable beats broad and voluntary.
Neither model fixes what's driving this: competition pushes every player, supervised or not, to move faster and take on more risk to keep up. You can't regulate that instinct out of existence. The only lever is changing what it costs to take the careful route instead of the fast one.
Watch which one banks put budget behind next year. That'll tell you more than either press release will.
If you had to bet, which one gets adopted first: certification, or reusable verification?
Inspired by @AlexH_Johnson's Fintech Takes newsletter. 61,000+ fintech and banking execs read it for breakdowns like this. Subscribe here: fintechtakes.com/newsletter-sub…
Fintech had more funding than it could spend in 2021. It didn't have charters.
Founders wanted their own bank license. They couldn't get one, so they partnered with the few banks willing to sponsor them, Bancorp among them. Charters were scarce. Middleware was the workaround.
That scarcity is back, aimed at a new set of applicants. Erebor and Augustus already have charters. World Liberty Financial has one pending. Founder of Fintech Takes, @AlexH_Johnson, and @mikulaja, Publisher of Fintech Business Weekly, trace both eras on the new Fintech Takes episode: the 2021 scramble and the current wave, and who gets picked this time.
Did founders build a fintech boom in 2021, or work around a broken charter process?
Listen to the full breakdown here: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fin…
Founders wanted their own bank license. They couldn't get one, so they partnered with the few banks willing to sponsor them, Bancorp among them. Charters were scarce. Middleware was the workaround.
That scarcity is back, aimed at a new set of applicants. Erebor and Augustus already have charters. World Liberty Financial has one pending. Founder of Fintech Takes, @AlexH_Johnson, and @mikulaja, Publisher of Fintech Business Weekly, trace both eras on the new Fintech Takes episode: the 2021 scramble and the current wave, and who gets picked this time.
Did founders build a fintech boom in 2021, or work around a broken charter process?
Listen to the full breakdown here: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fin…
podcasts.apple.com Fintech Recap: No-KYC Cards and Political Bank Charters Aplenty Podcast Episode · Fintech Takes · August 5 · 1h 21m