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Hello fintech friends,
Driving the news this week, JP Morgan announced that it will block usage of its platform and banking actions from third-party agents like Muse and Instinct:
Chase’s digital app will, at least for now, be limited to human users.
On its face, the rationale makes some sense: When an agent hallucinates and executes a flawed prompt, the recourse path under rules like Regulation E for unauthorized electronic fund transfers becomes…. pretty opaque.
If an agent accidentally transfers $10,000, who holds the liability: the customer, the AI platform, or the bank?
In some ways, this is an extension of the same old open banking fight: banks didn’t want to give consumers read access to their data, and now they don’t want consumers to have programmatic write access either.
Of course, there is a cynical and more likely interpretation here too: Banks want to keep deposits on their platforms. And who could blame them? Chase alone retains over $1 trillion in Consumer & Community Banking deposits at its banks. If an agent can suddenly allow users to move money to higher-yielding assets, Chase might see that number start to shrink.
But as more and more of the internet’s usage becomes agentic, it’s not clear that burying your head in the sand will be the winning strategy.
Over a long enough timeline, consumers move to the best user experience, and that will probably be First Bank of Agents.
Now… interestingly, the JPM restriction is only on third-party agents. Could this mean the bank is building its own customer agent? It feels inevitable that they’ll in on the gold rush by offering a proprietary consumer banking agent like Bank of America’s Erica. But a proprietary agent carries even higher risk for JPM, so don’t expect this anytime soon.
But, as with so many other platform shifts, it’s not clear why specialized offerings will win over great generalist agents when it comes to consumer preferences. Do I want 30 different conversation histories and profiles to reference, or one?
Not all banks are following in Chase’s footsteps: as Mercury CEO Immad Akhund tweeted, their bank has seen MCP usage explode since they allowed agents on the platform. And he’s not alone: Qonto, Slash, Nymbus, Brighty and others have all released MCP features recently.
Time will tell how soon other banks follow suit.
By the way, the nominations for our annual Changemakers awards close tonight…
And we just added Yoshi Yokokawa, Co-Founder & CEO of Alpaca, as our fifth judge 🙌
Changemakers spotlights the individuals and teams driving structural, positive impact across the fintech ecosystem.
See you at Fintech Formal for the awards show 👋
- Nik
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The Rundown
🏦 Financial Services & Banking
SBS launched the SBS AI Foundation, a sovereign AI platform built with NVIDIA that lets banks run generative and agentic AI without customer or transaction data leaving their own environment.
Crédit Agricole rolled out Crédit Agricole Deutschland, a new universal retail bank for Germany going live at the end of October.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s adoption of VantageScore is rattling FICO’s long hold on the mortgage market, raising new questions about risk.
Visa won PBOC approval to prepare a domestic bank card clearing business in China, becoming the third international card network cleared to do so after AmEx and Mastercard. Meanwhile, Mastercard integrated its BVNK acquisition into its new Global Money Platform, a unified payments layer for both fiat and stablecoin card payments.
The FCA ramped up enforcement against illegal finfluencer promotions, going from one action in 2023 to 74 in 2025. Only 15 of those actions led to criminal measures.
Treasury fined Bank of America $1.2B over failures in its anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance, crediting $750M of that to the OCC’s own penalty. It was the third-largest fine in Treasury’s history.
🚀 Product Launches
Clair launched Clair Connect, bringing cash advances directly into Clair’s partner’s platforms and apps. You can see our recent interview with Clair CEO Nico Simko here, where we talked about earned wage access and why Clair made the strategic decision to go embedded-first instead of direct-to-consumer.
Rain launched embedded stablecoin wallets that its partners can offer inside their own apps, so users can get paid, save, spend, and send from a single balance.
Freehand rolled out Freehand Pay, which lets its AI agents pay suppliers in their local currency over local rails, powered by Stripe.
Spade unveiled a transaction foundation model meant to give regional banks and mid-tier fintechs the kind of predictive tools Wall Street giants build in-house.
Square introduced a $1,999 restaurant kiosk with conversational AI voice ordering.
Benepass launched AI-powered benefits support that employees and HR teams can use inside Benepass or through ChatGPT and Claude.
Kinective debuted Report Builder Agent, which builds dashboards and reports from plain-language prompts for banks and credit unions.
Mesh* launched Link Chat, which lets users fund accounts and start transactions with natural-language requests.
Splitwise released Itemize, a free feature that splits a restaurant bill from a photo of the receipt, with tax and tip divided proportionally.
Pineapple Financial rebranded as Pentiv and launched an intelligence platform for mortgage agents and brokerages.
Nivo unveiled Lender Collect, an AI assistant that coordinates a lending case from the first broker email through underwriting prep.
FIS launched Agentic Insights Suite, an agentic AI tool that gives CFOs forward-looking views of cash flow and risk.
Veryfi made its Fraud Detection & Prevention Suite generally available; it flags fraudulent checks, receipts, and invoices in real time.
💸 Other News
Revolut put out a call for a scent-branding agency to create a signature fragrance (yes really) as it gets ready to open its first physical store in Barcelona and a network of airport lounges.
Google rolled out Gemini 4 in the Gemini app with a new tasks mode and connections to more than 40 apps, including Instacart, OpenTable, and Shopify.
🚨 Final Hours: Changemaker Nominations Close Tonight at Midnight
Today is your last chance to put forward the builders, platforms, and investors who shaped the last 12–18 months in fintech. Public nominations officially close tonight, Friday, October 16, at 11:59 PM ET.
We are also thrilled to introduce the fifth and final leader completing our independent judging panel: Yoshi Yokokawa, Co-Founder & CEO of Alpaca.
To preserve total editorial independence, TWIF is not voting. 100% of the scoring and selection authority rests with our five-member panel:
Laura Spiekerman, Co-Founder & President, Alloy
Nicole Casperson, Founder & CEO, Fintech Is Femme
Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder & General Partner, Better Tomorrow Ventures
Simon Taylor, Head of Strategy at Sardine & Author, Fintech Brainfood
Yoshi Yokokawa, Co-Founder & CEO, Alpaca
Quote of the Week
“A VC, when discussing AI applied to one of the hottest fintech sectors, accounting, told me flippantly: “no self-respecting VC does not have an AI accounting play yet.”
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See you at Money2020 👋 - Nik
