🤖 Plaid Builds the Stack. Klarna Moves Up the Funnel. OpenAI is Reinventing the Insurance Quote.

🔨 Robinhood Loses Its Crypto Chief. Fidelity Tokenized Everything. Tiger Brokers Gets Mauled.

Robinhood just lost the executive who built its crypto operation — right as crypto revenue fell nearly half. Fidelity International launched its first tokenized fund and it's not a pilot program, it's live with a Moody's AAA rating. And China's securities regulator formally wound down Tiger Brokers' mainland business, giving investors a two-year countdown clock. Three stories, three very different vibes — all pointing to the same thing: fintech is in a moment of reckoning.

👋 Webull's Quarter Slaps. Revolut Taps to Pay in Doge. CFSB's AML Problem Is Everyone's Problem.

Webull just posted its best quarter ever and nobody was paying attention — $24 billion in customer assets, self-clearing approval, and a PDT rule change coming June 4 that could rewrite retail trading. Revolut went full meme economy with a Dogecoin-themed crypto debit card that actually solves a real payments problem. And CFSB just got hit with an OCC consent order that should have every fintech riding a sponsor bank charter quietly sweating through their hoodies. It's Memorial Day weekend — we kept it tight.

🤖 Plaid Builds the Stack. Klarna Moves Up the Funnel. OpenAI is Reinventing the Insurance Quote.

Yesterday three companies quietly signaled where all of consumer finance is headed. Plaid dropped a guaranteed payments product and a cash-flow credit score at its annual Effects conference — and if you don't know why that matters, this episode will fix that. Klarna stopped building AI for itself and embedded its entire merchant network inside ChatGPT. And Liberty Mutual tested getting you auto insurance quotes without you ever leaving a chat window. We break down all three and what they mean for the fintech stack you already own.

🍑 Intuit's AI Ate 3,000 Jobs. Mercury's Worth $5.2B Now. SoFi Picked the Peach.

Intuit beat earnings yesterday and then announced it's cutting 17% of its workforce in the same breath — classic AI-era move. Mercury raised $200M at a $5.2B valuation and is on the doorstep of a full bank charter. And SoFi quietly acquired Peach Finance to keep stacking its lending infrastructure empire. Plus: Trump dropped a fintech executive order that's either great news or a payday lender's dream — we break it all down.

👀 Chime Eyes a Charter. NMI Swallows Dwolla. Monzo Proves the Neobank Model Still Works.

Chime's CEO just called a bank charter "a when, not if" — and the fintech world is paying attention. We break down what that means for the freshly public neobank, why NMI's acquisition of Dwolla is the most important payments infrastructure deal nobody's talking about, and how Monzo just posted $2.15 billion in revenue while quietly exiting the US. Today's episode is a masterclass in what disciplined fintech strategy actually looks like.