"No one is disrupting banks." Yes, that's the topic of this week's Popular Fintech article. Please don't hate me. The link is in the reply 👇🏻

PayPal wants to be everywhere Can they stay focused this time? PayPal $PYPL reported its fourth quarter and full-year 2024 results this week. Braintree payment volume growth decelerated to 2% YoY (from 29% YoY a year ago). International payment volume growth decelerated to 7%

Robinhood $HOOD has quietly built one of the largest crypto marketplaces in the U.S. Although they are still smaller than Coinbase $COIN, they can leverage their loyal brokerage customers to scale this business quickly. And the pending acquisition of Bitstamp will further help

Is there any hope for Block? Yes, if Jack Dorsey lets his team deliver Block’s $XYZ fourth-quarter shareholder letter was disappointing. Square has fallen behind the competition in terms of growth. Cash App’s user growth has stalled. Yet, Jack Dorsey prioritized building

PayPal's fresh bid for relevance Notes from PayPal Investor Day 2025 $PYPL On his very first earnings call as the CEO of PayPal, Alex Chriss raised a concern: “We are doing a lot of things, but are we focused enough with our resource allocation?” PayPal just held its investor

Embedded lending: the next big opportunity or a niche play? The opportunity in embedded lending is largely untapped. Who's going to capture it? I have written a lot about embedded payments, which refers to the integration of payments into software platforms. Companies like

The many faces of Affirm Affirm is more than just a point-of-sale lender. But what exactly are they? Remember the phrase, “It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s Superman”? That’s what comes to my mind every time I think about Affirm $AFRM. Is it simply an online lender with a

From Faster Payments to PIX: Wise’s infrastructure play Why Wise is building a global payment network I’ve been planning to write about Wise $WISE.L for a long time. Wise is a UK Fintech company (founded by two Estonians) that enables individuals and small businesses to send and

Adyen’s got company Notes from Shift4 Investor Day One of my main takeaways from Shift4 Investor Day is that the company has outgrown the restaurants and hospitality segments. Over the years, they experimented with serving customers from other segments, which culminated with the

It's still Day 1 for Nubank Brazil was only the beginning Nubank $NU is objectively one of the most successful Fintech companies out there. In Brazil, they have reached the scale of the incumbents and yet maintain the growth rates of a startup. Innovative, highly profitable, and

Adyen’s platform play $ADYEN Adyen nailed the enterprise. Now it wants to conquer SMBs. 👇🏻 popularfintech.com/p/adyen-for-pl…

Marqeta is back What Stripe and Adyen did in acquiring, Marqeta could do in issuing FIS $FIS is buying Global Payments’ $GPN issuing business for $13.5 billion, which will make it the second-largest issuer processor after Fiserv $FI. Based on the deal’s valuation multiples,

There's more to Fiserv than Clover Fiserv’s growth engine runs deeper than Clover I have been planning to research Fiserv $FI for a while. My perception was that the market loved this company purely because of Clover, a modern POS solution for small businesses. Clover has been

Small business, big opportunity Where will small businesses bank in the future? Small business banking is quietly changing. Square and Shopify now offer small businesses everything from payment acceptance to corporate cards and savings accounts. Spend management platforms like

Shopify's second act Targeting the opportunity beyond SMB e-commerce Originally built to support a snowboard shop, Shopify $SHOP has grown into a leading global commerce platform. It now powers millions of merchants across 175 countries, processes hundreds of billions in GMV,

How Mercado Libre built a Fintech empire From solving checkout to rewriting financial services in Latin America I went down the rabbit hole of researching commerce platforms with Fintech arms, and Mercado Libre might be the most impressive example out there. What started as the

Coinbase is quietly taking on Visa and Mastercard The company's new protocol brings stablecoins closer to everyday commerce On Tuesday, the U.S. Senate passed the GENIUS Act, a new law that sets clear rules for stablecoins in the U.S. It allows not just banks and Fintech

It started with a game Sea didn’t start as a Fintech, but it sure became one I continue to explore companies that aren’t traditionally seen as Fintechs, but have quietly built sizeable Fintech businesses along the way. This week, it’s Sea Limited $SE. Headquartered in Singapore,

How Coupang missed the Fintech opportunity It won in e-commerce, but lost the wallet war Coupang $CPNG, the “Amazon of South Korea”, controls close to 40% of the country’s e-commerce market and serves almost half the population. Even with its dominant position, Coupang continues

Published my regular This Week in Fintech column on publicly traded Fintech companies: Summer earnings, winter vibes In my previous column in June, I warned that under the surface, public fintechs were not OK. The second quarter earnings season has proved me right, only it’s turning out