The Quarterly Review: Wise’s Scott Viohl Wins Audiences Through Humor and Creator-Led Marketing
Wise’s North American marketing lead, Scott Viohl, has spent the last four months scaling the fintech’s regional footprint through its largest TV campaign to date, reaching over 80% of adults in key U.S. markets and 60% in target Canadian regions. The campaign delivered double‑digit lifts in brand awareness and a measurable increase in new customers and transaction volume. Simultaneously, Viohl introduced a creator‑led effort featuring the fictional “Don T. Overpay,” demonstrating that entertainment‑first content can generate stronger organic engagement than traditional product ads. He also refined performance measurement frameworks to better evaluate campaign effectiveness.
Affirm’s Full-Stack Ambition Is Bigger than Consumer Finance Alone
Affirm kicked off 2026 with a flurry of strategic announcements, including a rent‑payment partnership with Esusu, a bank‑charter filing, and a debit‑card‑embedded BNPL solution via Fiserv. The firm also secured default checkout status with Bolt and integrated its BNPL service...
Truist’s Dontá Wilson: ‘Innovation without Empathy Is Empty’
Truist’s Chief Consumer and Small Business Banking Officer, Dontá Wilson, highlighted the need for banks to blend digital excellence with genuine human empathy. He explained Truist’s multi‑year growth plan, which leverages AI to enhance both its 20,000‑person workforce and its...
How Embedded BNPL Optimizes Cash Flow for SMBs: Inside the Intuit-Affirm Partnership
Intuit has teamed with Affirm to embed a Buy‑Now‑Pay‑Later (BNPL) option directly into QuickBooks invoices, letting small‑business owners split customer payments while receiving the full amount upfront. The move turns QuickBooks from a bookkeeping tool into an actionable financial operating...
Citizens’ CIO on the Ethos that Led the Bank Into the Cloud and Beyond
Citizens Bank’s Chief Information Officer Michael Ruttledge outlines how the institution’s "Next Gen Technology" initiative has driven a full migration of its legacy mainframe workloads to public cloud platforms Azure and AWS. Since joining in 2019, Ruttledge has overseen a...
Open Banking’s Paywall Era – and What It Means for Banks, Fintechs, and Policy in 2026
J.P. Morgan now handles nearly two billion API requests each month, but only about 13% stem from direct customer‑initiated actions. Historically, open‑banking data flowed freely, enabling budgeting apps, lending tools and countless fintech services. In 2025 the bank began negotiating paid...
Affirm’s Move to Become a Bank Signals a Reconfiguration for the BaaS Industry and Beyond
Fintech lender Affirm announced plans to obtain a U.S. banking charter, a move that could reshape the banking‑as‑a‑service (BaaS) landscape. The filing comes as charter applications have surged, with 21 submissions in the first eight months of 2025—more than double...
Why some Major Banks Are Bringing Embedded Finance In-House
Capital One is reshaping its business by bringing embedded finance capabilities in-house through two high‑profile acquisitions. The 2024 purchase of Discover gave the bank broader credit‑card reach, payment rails and consumer data, while the January 2026 acquisition of Brex adds...
The ‘Discovery’ Problem in Embedded Finance – and How OMB Bank Found the Right Fintech Partner
Community bank OMB Bank struggled with a slow, manual process to locate fintech partners, relying on static PDFs and endless email threads. The bank’s breakthrough came when it discovered Backpack, a university‑payments fintech listed on Treasury Prime’s AI Marketplace, which...
Pathward’s Anthony Sharett on Why Sponsor Banking’s Future Is About Evolution, Not Revolution
Sponsor banking, the bridge between fintechs and regulated banks, is under intense regulatory scrutiny but remains a vital conduit for expanding financial access. Anthony Sharett, President of Pathward, argues that the model’s future lies in gradual evolution rather than radical...
The Quarterly Review: Wise’s Lauren Langbridge Expands Domestic Payment Network Capabilities and Celebrates Partnership Wins
Wise’s Commercial Director for the Americas, Lauren Langbridge, drove two domestic payment network expansions—Direct Pix in Brazil and Zengin in Japan—while laying groundwork for additional connections. She secured new partnerships with Wealthsimple and Interactive Brokers (IBKR), extending the Wise Platform’s reach into retail...
UBS’s US Charter: From a Global Wealth Powerhouse Into a Full-Service US Bank
In January 2026 UBS Group AG secured conditional approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a national bank charter, allowing it to accept deposits, open checking accounts, and extend traditional loans. Historically a wealth‑management‑focused operation...
January in Review: When Partnership Becomes the Product
Fintech‑bank collaborations are moving beyond simple feature swaps toward embedded financial infrastructure. In January 2026 three high‑profile deals illustrated this shift, with partners designing services that sit invisibly inside everyday workflows such as taxes, shopping and rent payments. The PayPal‑April...
Making Payments Part of the Workflow: Embedded Finance in 2026
Embedded finance is becoming the connective tissue for large enterprises, allowing payments to flow directly within existing workflow applications such as travel booking and expense management. In an interview, Eva Reda, Executive Vice President of Global Commercial Services Products at...
Inside Bank of America’s Plan to Own the Small Business Relationship
Despite a tough macro environment and recent White House policy shifts, U.S. small‑business applications are still climbing, according to Census data. Bank of America reports that 75 % of SMBs are feeling supply‑chain strain and foreign‑exchange volatility. To counteract these pressures,...
Morgan Stanley’s Crypto ETF Move – and the Risk of Getting ‘Institutional Crypto’ Wrong
Morgan Stanley has filed to launch a spot Bitcoin ETF, a Solana ETF that includes staking exposure, and an Ethereum Trust that offers staking rewards. This marks a departure from the bank’s traditional role of merely distributing third‑party crypto funds...
Micro Case Studies: The Feud over Interest Rate Caps and the Murky Future of Agentic Commerce
President Trump’s proposal to cap credit‑card interest rates at 10% for one year sent bank and issuer stocks tumbling, prompting fintech CEOs to publicly back the idea. Fintechs such as Bilt and Affirm are rolling out capped‑rate cards and new...
Loyalty in Banking Is Now Fragmented: How Chime Is Winning the Era of Soft Switching
Customers are increasingly opening secondary checking accounts and quietly shifting their primary banking relationship to new providers, a behavior dubbed “soft switching.” JD Power data shows that in Q3 2025, 52% of new checking accounts were additional accounts, with 72% of those...
Deposits Vs. Payments – What Drives More Value for Banks Today?
Banks are reassessing the drivers of sustainable value, weighing the traditional strength of deposit balances against the growth potential of payment services. While deposits continue to deliver stable net interest income, fee‑based payment volumes and emerging blockchain solutions offer higher‑margin...
Crypto Made a Comeback in 2025 – This Time with Banks Testing the Waters
In 2025 banks began issuing deposit tokens and settling transactions on public blockchains, marking a shift from speculative crypto to institutional use. A regulatory framework under the GENIUS Act now governs stablecoins, giving treasurers confidence to employ tokenized instruments for...
How TruStage Ventures Built Connective Tissue Between Fintechs and Credit Unions
TruStage Ventures, the corporate venture arm of $5.5 billion insurer TruStage, has deployed $400 million into 50 fintech startups since 2016 and brokered more than 3,000 partnerships between those firms and U.S. credit unions, which serve roughly 140 million members. The fund’s hands‑on...
The Financial Evolution of 2025: AI, Crypto, and Regional Banking
In 2025 artificial intelligence transitioned from a back‑office utility to a strategic decision‑making partner across the banking sector. Crypto assets rebounded, shedding much of the skepticism that plagued them in prior years and re‑establishing a foothold among institutional investors. Meanwhile,...
How FIS Is Helping Financial Institutions Evolve Loyalty Beyond Rewards
At its Emerald 2025 conference, FIS outlined a new loyalty playbook for banks, urging a shift from chasing share of wallet to capturing share of mind first. The firm promotes "embedded loyalty," weaving rewards and engagement directly into the customer...
Simplifying Small Business Finances: Inside U.S. Bank’s Award-Winning Approach
U.S. Bank was named Tearsheet’s Best Bank for SMBs, recognizing its Business Essentials suite that unifies checking, payments, payroll, and spend controls into a single digital platform. The bank’s data shows growing adoption of these tools, with small‑business owners consolidating...
Banks Reclaim Commercial Lending Through Technology and Strategic Partnerships
Traditional banks are accelerating technology investments and forging strategic partnerships to reclaim commercial lending from fast‑growing private‑credit markets and AI‑driven fintech rivals. They are shifting resources toward complex loan products, adopting originate‑to‑distribute models, and deploying unified platforms that span front‑...
Goldman Sachs Moves Into Predictable Growth with Innovator Acquisition
Goldman Sachs announced on Dec. 1 that it will acquire Innovator Capital Management, adding 159 defined‑outcome ETFs and roughly $28 billion in assets under management. The acquisition gives Goldman a foothold in the fast‑growing buffered‑ETF niche, which uses options to limit downside...
The Power of One: How Citizens’ New Open Banking API Framework Came to Life
Citizens Bank unveiled a unified open‑banking API in mid‑2024, earning the Best New Embedded Finance Platform award at Tearsheet’s Big Bank Theory Awards 2025. The platform, built on FDX standards with a multiplexing engine, serves consumers, small businesses, and large...