🦃 Happy Thanksgiving (TWIF 11/28)

Hello Fintech Friends,

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Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below.

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U.S. Bank tested issuing bank-grade stablecoins on the Stellar network, exploring features such as asset freezing and transaction reversals for regulatory compliance.

Mastercard launched a new “Access Pass” programme that overlaid digital card art and exclusive perks onto existing debit, credit, or prepaid cards for enhanced customer engagement.

The Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) rolled out generative-AI technology from Amazon Web Services to streamline its development workflows and reduce time spent documenting software tests by as much as 80%.

Swiss banks switched on open banking via the bLink API from SIX Group, enabling customers to consolidate accounts from multiple banks into a single app.

Major U.S. banks got hit by a cyber breach at mortgage-tech supplier SitusAMC, which exposed corporate and possibly customer mortgage data while the company began investigating the scope of the attack.

"If we could build housing as fast as we build data centers, our country would be in phenomenal shape." – Andrew Reed

Robinhood launched a new futures and derivatives exchange — through a joint venture — to expand its prediction-markets business and offer customers a broader set of event and derivative contracts.

Cross River Bank launched a unified payment platform that enables both stablecoin and fiat flows through a single interoperable system to support on-chain finance and traditional rails.

Klarna announced plans to launch a U.S. dollar–backed stablecoin named KlarnaUSD built on Stripe's Tempo blockchain, focused on offering cheaper, faster payments and cross-border transactions.

Maxio and Anrok partnered to integrate tax-compliance automation into Maxio’s billing engine, so that finance teams could automate global tax calculations and compliance directly within their billing workflows.

Tether saw its stablecoin USDT downgraded to “weak” by S&P Global Ratings after the firm found that reserves had shifted toward riskier assets and that disclosure remained insufficient.

Telcoin received final regulatory approval to launch the Telcoin Digital Asset Bank — the first fully chartered U.S. “digital asset bank” — positioning itself to issue a bank-backed U.S. dollar stablecoin on-chain.

Monzo surpassed 14 million total individual and business customers after adding about two million users over six months.

Tether is attracting attention as a “gold whale,” as commentary revisited its role in currency markets amid gold’s recent all-time high.

Robinhood Markets, led by Vlad Tenev, leaned into its core base of high-risk retail traders — boosting its revenue by catering heavily to crypto, options, and prediction-market trading

Checkout.com adopted the open-standard Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), enabling merchants to offer instant checkout via AI agents inside platforms like ChatGPT.

Binance faces a court complaint alleging it facilitated payments to Hamas and other U.S.-designated terrorist organizations, including moving more than $50 million (and allegedly over $1 billion in total) through accounts tied to those groups.

Green Dot broke up its operations by selling its fintech business to a private equity firm and its bank unit to a separate lender, thereby splitting its embedded-finance and traditional-banking arms into separately owned entities.