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British payments startup SumUp has raised 285 million euros ($306.6 million) in an investment led by Sixth Street Growth and Bain Capital Tech Opportunities. SumUp Chief Financial Officer Hermione McKee said the fresh capital gives the company "more firepower to act on opportunities" including acquisitions and new country launches. SumUp confirmed the company is worth more than it was when it raised 590 million euros ($635.3 million) at an 8 billion euro ($8.6 billion) valuation in summer 2022. Read more about their lending products: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/11/sumup-defies-fintech-funding-slump-with-307-million-fundraise.html

Plaid’s revenue reportedly rose more than 25% in 2024 as more consumers encountered its tech. In fact, at least half of all Americans used the company’s services in some way, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday (Jan. 14), citing a source familiar with the matter. The report notes that the company’s growth occurred despite an otherwise harsh funding and borrowing environment for FinTechs after interest rates rose following the COVID pandemic. Use of Plaid’s identity verification product jumped more than 400% last year, the report said, while use of its payment product more than tripled. “There’s just this truly renewed sense of optimism going into 2025,” Plaid CEO Zach Perret told Bloomberg. “It’s way more fun to operate in FinTech spring than it was to operate in FinTech winter.” The report notes that banks — after years of only grudgingly working with FinTech rivals — have now seen the benefit of collaborating with the likes of Plaid as their customers seek financial products online. In fact, Plaid last year teamed with PNC to let that bank’s customers more securely share their data with third-party financial apps and services. The data access agreement between the companies allows PNC customers to safely and securely grant their financial data to Plaid-powered apps and services. Plaid, which recently opened a new office in Raleigh, North Carolina, said the number of banks that became customers surged by 50% last year, the Bloomberg report said. The news comes as the world of bank-FinTech partnerships faces some upheaval, as PYMNTS wrote last month, with the potential for a new regulatory regime in Washington. In an interview with PYMNTS’ Karen Webster on the topic, Ingo Payments CEO Drew Edwards said the main drivers prioritized by investors and startups in this space have been “the customer experience and customer acquisition.” The key strategy has focused on taking down barriers to growth while making it quick and easy to set up accounts, with less of a focus on the principles of safe banking. Full Story: https://www.pymnts.com/news/payment-methods/2025/report-half-of-us-consumers-use-plaids-payments-tech/

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From Bloomberg Law The Trump administration appears to be preparing to transfer employees from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency as part of a broad reshaping of bank supervision. The OCC has created email distribution lists for FDICTransferees@occ.treas.gov, CFPBTransferees@occ.treas.gov, and CFPBTeam@occ.treas.gov, according to Outlook templates obtained by Bloomberg Law from multiple sources at different agencies who were granted anonymity to prevent retaliation. The potential reshuffling comes as President Donald Trump and his team purge the FDIC and CFPB workforces—part of a broader campaign to slash the federal bureaucracy. The Trump administration is mulling whether to consolidate the bulk of bank supervision inside the OCC, The Wall Street Journal reported. The national bank regulator is nominally housed inside the Treasury Department, although the National Bank Act—the 1863 law that created the OCC—says the comptroller should be independent of the Treasury secretary. Trump hasn’t announced any plans to relocate the FDIC and CFPB employees or to push for a broader overhaul. But even creating a list for transferees without congressional approval would be an unconventional move, said Graham Steele, the former assistant Treasury secretary for financial institutions in the Biden administration. “That would strike me as a highly unusual thing,” Steele, an academic fellow at Stanford Law School and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, said. The OCC and representatives for the Office of Management and Budget, which is handling media requests for the CFPB, didn’t respond to requests for comment. The FDIC declined to comment. Workforce Reductions The FDIC on Feb. 17 laid off around 170 probationary employees and last week lost around 500 workers to the Trump administration’s deferred resignation “buyouts.” Those losses represent around 10% of the agency’s staff. The FDIC will be smaller when the job cuts are finished, acting Chairman Travis Hill told a Feb. 14 agency town hall, but he brushed off the consolidation talks as premature, according to an agency spokesperson. Acting CFPB Director Russell Vought has already fired 70 probationary employees, including enforcement attorneys working active cases, and 70 to 100 “term” employees, including technologists investigating Big Tech’s push into consumer finance, fellows, and participants in the director’s financial analyst program. Vought is also planning to fire up to 95% of the CFPB’s staff, the National Treasury Employees Union—which represents CFPB workers—said in a Feb. 13 court filing. Those plans are now on hold as part of the union’s lawsuit to block the terminations. ‘Pretext to Combine’ The Trump transition team has long been working on bringing bank regulators under a single roof, as first reported in December by The Wall Street Journal. Hollowing out their workforces could be used as “pretext to combine them” without a change in law, said Todd Baker, a senior fellow at Columbia University’s Richard Paul Richman Center for Business, Law, and Public Policy. “The justification, said with a straight face, would be that there aren’t enough people left in the individual agencies to do their jobs after all the firings/resignations and that ‘management consolidation’ without agency merger will allow the acting leader to ‘efficiently’ allocate people from multiple agencies where needed without new hires,” Baker said in an email. Trump this month nominated Jonathan McKernan to lead the CFPB and Jonathan Gould as the OCC’s chief, but notably he didn’t name his pick to lead the FDIC full-time. The administration will also likely cite duplication of responsibility and “the miracle of AI” in justifying the consolidation, Baker added. ‘Byzantine’ Accident The idea of consolidating federal banking regulators is hardly new. Most community banks are supervised by the FDIC. The OCC oversees national banks, while the Federal Reserve oversees some community banks and all bank holding companies. All of those determinations are required under federal law. In addition, the CFPB oversees consumer compliance at banks with $10 billion or more in assets plus other nonbank companies. In short, it’s an area ripe for reform, said Steven Kelly, the associate director of research at the Yale School of Management’s Program on Financial Stability. He noted that the CFPB itself is housed in the former headquarters of the Office of Thrift Supervision, which was folded into the OCC in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act that also created the CFPB. An earlier, now-shuttered financial regulator was in that space before the OTS, Kelly said. “The banking regulatory system is byzantine and a historical accident.” So far, banks seem to be sanguine about the potential regulatory changes. FULL STORY https://news.bloomberglaw.com/banking-law/trump-gets-ready-to-move-bank-regulators-after-workforce-purge

Yelp reports that the amount of new businesses started in the US increased 20% year over year in 2023. "In fact, each month in 2023 set a new all-time high in business openings for its respective month since 2019", the report states. The total new businesses started for the year 2023 was 762,227. With more than 33 million businesses and growing, this report should give you some insight into the market for the near future. Read the full report here: https://data.yelp.com/business-openings-report-2023

Small business loan approval percentages at big banks dipped from 13.5% in April to 13.4% in May, according to the latest Biz2Credit Small Business Lending Index™. Meanwhile, approval ratings at small banks remained at 18.7%. Essentially, bank lending to businesses has stalled. Banks are having a hard time getting new deposits, and when they do they have to pay higher interest rates to get deposits. The banks are getting hit on both sides of the equation, so they are not lending. They began to tighten their lending parameters last year, and then the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank raised concerns about liquidity throughout the industry earlier this year. Small and midsize banks are losing deposits to big banks in the aftermath of the multiple bank failures. A recent study by the Federal Reserve reported lending policies tightened for commercial and industrial (C&I) loans to large, midsize and small firms in the first quarter of 2023. Meanwhile, banks reported weaker demand for all commercial real estate (CRE) loan categories, according to the Fed’s Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey (SLOOS) on Bank Lending Practices. Why have the banks become stingier? According to the Fed, they cited an uncertain economic outlook, reduced tolerance for risk, deterioration in collateral values, and concerns about banks' funding costs and liquidity positions. The banks also reported concerns about funding costs, liquidity positions, and deposit outflows as reasons for tighter lending standards for the rest of 2023. CONTINUE READING 👇

Inside Isabella Casillas Guzman's plan to remake the Small Business Administration, to better serve all entrepreneurs. Update: The Small Business Administration finalized rules on April 12, 2023 lifting the cap on Small Business Lending Companies and removing its loan authorization requirement, among other changes. Long before Isabella Casillas Guzman took over at the Small Business Administration in 2021, while the agency was still pumping roughly $1 trillion of emergency aid into the heart of the American economy, she helped out her father as he grew his veterinary hospital in East Los Angeles into a small area chain. After school and during breaks, she checked in customers and their pets at the front desk while her siblings--all of whom became doctors--tended to tasks in the back of the house. Working among the menagerie of cats, dogs, birds, and the occasional iguana, she marveled at how her father juggled the dueling responsibilities of business owner and practitioner. "That was the experience of a lifetime," Guzman told Inc. in a recent interview. Watching him "being the veterinarian all day long and then having to manage staff and growth and multiple offices--that framed my interest in making sure that everybody has that opportunity to pursue their American dream." Read the rest of the article below: https://www.inc.com/magazine/202304/diana-ransom/the-sba-after-ppp.html

KEY POINTS • OpenAI’s ChatGPT can now “see, hear and speak,” the company said. • The update to the chatbot will roll out to paying users in the next two weeks, OpenAI said. • OpenAI’s big feature push comes alongside ever-rising stakes of the AI arms race among chatbot leaders such as OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and Anthropic. "OpenAI’s ChatGPT can now “see, hear and speak,” or, at least, understand spoken words, respond with a synthetic voice and process images, the company announced M(https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-can-now-see-hear-and-speak)onday. The update to the chatbot — OpenAI’s biggest since the introduction of GPT-4 (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/14/openai-announces-gpt-4-says-beats-90percent-of-humans-on-sat.html)— allows users to opt into voice conversations on ChatGPT’s mobile app and choose from five different synthetic voices for the bot to respond with. Users will also be able to share images with ChatGPT and highlight areas of focus or analysis (think: “What kinds of clouds are these?”). The changes will be rolling out to paying users in the next two weeks, OpenAI said. While voice functionality will be limited to the iOS and Android apps, the image processing capabilities will be available on all platforms. The big feature push comes alongside ever-rising stakes of the artificial intelligence arms race among chatbot leaders such as OpenAI, Microsoft,(https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/MSFT/) Google (https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/GOOG/)and Anthropic. In an effort to encourage consumers to adopt generative AI into their daily lives, tech giants are racing to launch not only new chatbot apps,(https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/11/anthropic-an-openai-rival-opens-claude-2-ai-chatbot-to-the-public.html) but also new features, especially this summer. Google has announced a slew of updates to its Bard chatbot, and Microsoft added visual search to Bing. " Full Article Below https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/25/chatgpt-speak-listen-process-images-openai.html

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The Financial Technology Association (FTA) has filed a lawsuit challenging the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) final interpretive rule on pay-in-four buy now, pay later (BNPL) products, saying the rule “oversteps legal bounds.” The CFPB ruled May 22 that BNPL vendors are credit card providers and must provide some key legal protections and rights delivered by conventional credit cards, such as the consumer’s right to dispute charges and demand a refund from the lender. “Unfortunately, the CFPB’s rushed interpretative rule falls short on multiple counts, oversteps legal bounds, and risks creating confusion for consumers,” FTA President and CEO Penny Lee said in a Friday (Oct. 18) statement announcing the lawsuit. “The CFPB is seeking to fundamentally change the regulatory treatment of pay-in-four BNPL products without adhering to required rulemaking procedures, in excess of its statutory authority, and in an unreasonable manner.” The CFPB did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment sent outside of normal business hours. When announcing the regulator’s interpretative rule in May, CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said: “Regardless of whether a shopper swipes a credit card or uses buy now, pay later, they are entitled to important consumer protections under longstanding laws and regulations already on the books.” In the Friday statement announcing the FTA’s lawsuit targeting this rule, Lee said the industry is committed to working with regulators to craft rules that fit the unique nature of pay-in-four BNPL products. https://www.pymnts.com/buy-now-pay-later/2024/fta-files-lawsuit-alleging-cfpb-bnpl-rule-oversteps-legal-bounds/