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Hello fintech friends,
Driving the news:
The White House agreed this week to sweeping ethics language in the Senate's crypto market structure bill, barring federal officials from issuing cryptocurrencies — a concession aimed at defusing Democratic objections over President Trump's reported $1.4 billion in personal crypto profits.
The latest draft bans officials from sponsoring digital assets but allows crypto holdings, meaning the rule targets the World Liberty Financial / memecoin model. The enforcement question matters more than the prohibition itself. The current draft leans heavily on DOJ for ethics enforcement, while Democrats want state attorneys general to have a clear role if federal enforcement fails.
But the ethics compromises do pave the way for the most comprehensive digital assets market structure bill yet to become law.
And some of the world’s largest institutions are already testing where tokenization can improve payments, settlement, and capital markets. Results from these pilots are showing institutions which products should move onchain, where blockchain needs to connect with existing systems, and which use cases have strong enough economics to scale.
“We are seeing the benefits in select product categories of moving from a digitized system to a blockchain system. It’s passing the P&L test.”
That’s what Representative French Hill, Chair of the House Financial Services Committee, told me in our conversation this week on the CLARITY Act and American financial competitiveness. See the full conversation on Stablecon’s Stablecoin Pulse Podcast.
Elsewhere in important financial news, Hong Kong’s ZA Bank introduced a “football hangover” day off for employees following Sunday’s FIFA World Cup final.
Read on for everything else that happened this week in fintech!
- Nik
The Rundown
🏦 Financial Services & Banking
Mastercard rolled out Wallet Services, a suite of SDKs and a Secure Element applet that lets banks and fintechs embed contactless payments in their own apps across both iOS and Android.
Samsung launched the Samsung Galaxy Card, its first U.S. credit card, built natively into Samsung Wallet with Barclays and Visa. The card offers up to 5% cash back on Samsung purchases and takes direct aim at the Apple Card playbook.
Georgia's five largest banks — Bank of Georgia, TBC Bank, Liberty Bank, Terabank, and Basisbank — agreed to modernize their treasury operations on Nasdaq's Calypso platform.
The London Stock Exchange announced plans for LSE 24, a 24/5 trading venue built for algorithmic and agentic trading.
🚀 Product Launches
First of all, in this week’s biggest news, business banking platform Mercury launched checkbooks.*
OnePay launched OnePay Personal Loans in partnership with Upgrade, letting customers apply for $1,000–$50,000 loans directly in the OnePay app..
Chime introduced Chime Invest, bringing commission-free stock and ETF trading and managed portfolios into its app, built on Atomic Invest.
MoneyLion rolled out MoneyLion One, a membership bundling 1% daily cashback, fee-free investing, a forthcoming 3.64% APY savings account, and identity protection.
Trulioo launched the UBO Discovery Agent, an AI tool that reconstructs beneficial ownership across jurisdictions where official registries fall short.
Intuit introduced the Intuit Business Credit Card, a Mastercard issued by WebBank that syncs natively with QuickBooks, offering 2% cash back.
Ramp brought stablecoin accounts and payments to its customers, letting businesses hold, earn on, and pay vendors in USDC and USDT, built on Bridge.
Glia unveiled three configurable AI "response modes" — Strict, Rephrase, and Compose — for its Glia Banker agent.
Yahoo Finance added real-time options data to its AlphaSpace platform, powered by Unusual Whales, giving subscribers live options chains, flow screening, and automated unusual-activity alerts.
💸 Other News
Stripe generated $3.2 billion in cash in 2025 as revenue jumped roughly a third to $6.8 billion, per The Information. The growth has been fueled largely by the AI boom; Stripe processes payments for the big labs, setting the $159 billion company up for an acquisition hunt. (The payfac is reportedly considering a $10 billion acquisition of AI model marketplace OpenRouter.)
Zerohash and Marqeta partnered to bring stablecoin spending to global card networks, letting Marqeta customers embed stablecoin-backed card programs with zerohash handling custody, compliance, and liquidity.
