The regulatory momentum around stablecoins has led to the first tangible piece of successful crypto policy in the U.S., the GENIUS Act which President Trump signed into law. The GENIUS Act gives stablecoins legal legitimacy, so long as they play by traditional financial rules of 1:1 reserve backing, anti-money laundering (AML) compliance, and dual charter options through state or federal regulators. For enterprise users, the evolving landscape signals a new era of trust. It means the digital dollars they’re using to pay contractors in Venezuela or settle trade balances in Nigeria may no longer be Wild West tokens but federally recognized financial instruments by the world’s leading economy. But at the same time, for businesses leveraging stablecoins, whether for global B2B payments, instant invoice payments, or even payroll, the irrevocability of the mechanism, and the new-ness of its end-user experience, could create a new battleground. Instead of routing through correspondent banks or relying on volatile forex pairs, companies can denominate invoices in stablecoins, settle within hours and avoid the friction of legacy payment rails. It’s not about replacing Swift but about skipping it when firms can. Similarily, through USDC or other compliant coins, firms can also pay their employees or contractors in dollar equivalents, settled in minutes, recorded on-chain. Workers are happy when they get paid in a currency that holds value, while employers can benefit from predictability and ease of reconciliation. The dollar now has an internet-native payment rail that is fast, frictionless, and free of middlemen. This groundbreaking technology will buttress the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency, expand access to the dollar economy for billions across the globe.
J.D. Power’s Mortgage Servicer Satisfaction Study | Rocket Mortgage ranks highest; Guild Mortgage ranks second and Regions Mortgage ranks third
With the average 30-year mortgage rate in the United States continuing to hover near recent highs of 6.8%,1 homeowners might be expected to feel some tension with their mortgage company. However, high rates alone do not explain why customer satisfaction scores for mortgage servicers are significantly lower—and declining—than they are for mortgage originators. According to the J.D. Power 2025 U.S. Mortgage Servicer Satisfaction Study, customer satisfaction with mortgage servicers has plummeted in 2025, with an average satisfaction score that is now 131 points (on a 1,000-point scale) lower than the average score for mortgage originators. Increasingly, the difference between the two comes down to effective communication and customer service. Rocket Mortgage ranks highest among mortgage servicers with a score of 685. Guild Mortgage (677) ranks second and Regions Mortgage (656) ranks third. Key findings of the 2025 study:
- A fragmented customer journey: Overall customer satisfaction with mortgage servicers is 596, which is down 10 points from the 2024 study. Customer satisfaction with mortgage servicers declines across all dimensions year over year. This decline stands in stark contrast to customer satisfaction with mortgage originators, which reached a score of 727 in the J.D. Power 2024 U.S. Mortgage Origination Satisfaction Study.SM
- Service quality and responsiveness play major role in customer loyalty: While better interest rates and lower costs and fees are cited most frequently by customers as a reason to switch mortgage providers, service quality and responsiveness can be equally powerful drivers of customer loyalty and retention. Customers cite better/improved customer service (51%); easy access to loan information (36%); and flexible ways to make a mortgage payment (27%) among the top reasons to switch mortgage companies.
- Communication breakdown: Despite industry efforts to deliver more effective communications, just 31% of mortgage servicer customers gave an excellent or perfect rating to their servicer for messaging that got their attention. Attention-getting is rated higher when there is a level of personalization added to the communication. Among those who have received personalized communications, account alerts are the most frequently recalled form of communication at 46%. Just 32% of customers give their mortgage servicer a high overall communication rating, down 5 percentage points from 2022.
- Satisfaction decreases as escrow costs rise: Escrow costs—the fees typically rolled into a mortgage to pay annual property tax and homeowners insurance bills—are rising nationwide, with 57% of mortgage servicer customers experiencing an increase in escrow costs this year. Overall satisfaction is 67 points lower, on average, among those who experienced an escrow cost increase than among those who experienced no change.
PNC Bank announces integration with Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP for embedded banking enabling seamless connectivity and effectively managing cash positions
PNC Bank announced the integration of its embedded banking platform, PINACLE Connect®, with Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP. PNC corporate and commercial banking clients now have seamless connectivity to key banking services directly within Oracle Cloud ERP, helping streamline financial operations and enhance overall efficiency. The new embedded banking experience, which uses the Oracle B2B offering to provide turnkey connectivity, helps optimize business processes by reducing the need for clients to navigate between multiple platforms to retrieve balance and transaction information, initiate and approve payments and reconcile accounts —automating manual processes and helping save valuable time. Oracle Cloud ERP offers a comprehensive set of enterprise finance and operations capabilities, including financials, an accounting hub, procurement, project management, enterprise performance management, risk management, subscription management, and supply chain and manufacturing. Howard Forman, executive vice president and head of PNC’s Commercial Digital Channels says “By embedding our services within Oracle Cloud ERP, our clients can more effectively manage their cash position and spend more time running their businesses, while spending less time establishing bank connectivity and handling manual financial tasks.”
IBM’s study finds about one-quarter of the organizations surveyed reported having a CAIO, up from 11% in 2023 and are seeing an average of 10% greater return on investment in AI spending and 24% greater innovation compared to their peers
A growing number of organizations are appointing chief AI officers and seeing an average of 10% greater return on investment in AI spending and 24% greater innovation compared to their peers — but most organizations remain stuck in pilot mode and struggle to scale AI initiatives more broadly. Those are among the findings of a new study by the IBM Institute for Business Value with the Dubai Future Foundation and Oxford Economics. The survey reveals that organizations with CAIOs see positive returns but face strategic, technical and organizational obstacles to optimizing the role’s value. Improved metrics, teamwork and cultural modifications are needed. About one-quarter of the organizations surveyed reported having a CAIO, up from 11% in 2023. Two-thirds of respondents expect most organizations will have a CAIO within the next two years. Organizations that have appointed CAIOs say the primary drivers are to accelerate AI strategy and adoption. AI spending increased 62% as a share of information technology budgets over the past three years, and CEOs expect 31% annual increases through 2027. Nevertheless, 60% of organizations are still investing primarily in pilots, and only 25% of AI initiatives have delivered the expected ROI since 2023. The report delineates a clear shift in operating models as AI projects scale. Initial efforts tend to be decentralized, but advanced organizations shift to centralized hub‑and‑spoke models. That approach moves twice as many pilots into production compared to a decentralized structure and realizes 36% higher ROI. That’s because centralization provides clearer ownership, according to Mohammed Al Mudharreb, CAIO of Dubai’s Road and Transport Authority. The study found that the factors that separate high-performing CAIOs from their peers are measurement, teamwork and authority. Successful projects address high-impact areas like revenue growth, profit, customer satisfaction and employee productivity. The most effective teams combine AI specialists, machine‑learning engineers and business strategists, with AI experts embedded across functions to avoid the emergence of shadow AI operations.
‘White-space’ opportunity for buying or originating fintech loans is estimated at US$280 billion over the next five years; banks are partnering with private-credit funds to originate and distribute loans off balance sheet expanding fee-based revenue while offloading credit risk
Fintech founders are facing a significant challenge as giant private-credit funds are lining up with term sheets so large they would have broken cap tables a year ago. A joint study from BCG and QED Investors puts the “white-space” opportunity at US$280 billion over the next five years: capital earmarked for buying or originating fintech loans. Private credit has grown nearly ten-fold since 2010 to roughly US$1.5 trillion of assets under management (AUM) in 2024, and consultants expect it to hit US$3.5 trillion by 2028, a compound annual growth rate north of 19%. Big banks are partnering with private-credit titans to originate and distribute loans off balance sheet, such as Citi x Apollo and Citi x Carlyle. The model is simple: banks keep the origination and servicing fees, funds take the credit risk, and regulators get comfort that risky assets live outside the deposit-backed system. Private-credit exuberance has pushed unitranche pricing down, but funds can lever those assets 1.5-2x and still net solid returns, making it an attractive asset class. However, many CEOs prefer a 14 percent cost of capital that preserves ownership over a 35% down round in an unforgiving venture market. The venture capital power-law reset threatens that maths, as private-credit recycling threatens that maths. Funds are aggressively scouring growth markets where banking pull-back is most acute, such as India, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, where dollar funding married to local-currency wallets is a tantalizing carry trade, provided FX hedges hold. However, there are several risks to consider, including credit deterioration, funding squeeze, regulatory shock, and FX blow-ups in emerging markets. To mitigate these risks, investors should monitor the spread compression Pace, Reg-Tech Build-Out, Private-Fund Reporting, Basel Endgame Final Rule, and Structured-Credit Revival.
New hires at PwC to be like managers, reviewing and supervising AI perform routine, repetitive audit tasks like data gathering and processing and focusing on “more advanced and value-added work”
New hires at PwC will be doing the roles that managers are doing within three years, because they will be overseeing AI performing routine, repetitive audit tasks, Jenn Kosar, AI assurance leader at PwC, told. “People are going to walk in the door almost instantaneously becoming reviewers and supervisors,” she said. PwC, one of the “Big Four” accounting and consulting firms, is deploying AI to take over tasks like data gathering and processing. This is leaving entry-level employees free to focus on “more advanced and value-added work,” Kosar said. AI has got PwC rethinking how it trains junior employees. Kosar said the technology meant PwC was changing how it trains its junior employees, adding that entry-level workers have to know how to review and supervise the AI’s work. Where the Big Four firm once focused on teaching young employees to execute audit tasks, it’s now focused on more “back to basics” training and the fundamentals of what an audit should do for a client, she said. There’s more time in the programming to teach junior employees deeper critical thinking, negotiation, and “professional skepticism,” she said, adding they previously would have been trained in these soft skills later in their careers. PwC’s “assurance for AI” product, which works with clients on ensuring the AI they use is operated responsibly, has only existed since June. For all its potential, AI is challenging the Big Four’s long-held business models, organizational structures, and day-to-day roles. Firms are having to consider outcomes-based pricing models based on results instead of billing clients by the hour. Alan Paton, a former partner in PwC UK’s financial services division who’s now CEO of a Google Cloud solutions consultancy, previously told that automation could increasingly cause clients to question why they should pay consultants big money when they can get answers “instantaneously from a tool.” Partners and managers will have to adapt to new types of requests from clients, who are asking how AI can fully take over certain business tasks, she added. Kosar acknowledged there was fear AI would reduce critical thinking capabilities and replace jobs, but she said she thought AI would lead to better-informed, faster-developing professionals.
Ai2 releases an open AI model that allows robots to ‘plan’ movements in 3D space
AI research institute Ai2, the Allen Institute for AI, released MolmoAct 7B, a breakthrough open embodied AI model that brings intelligence to robotics by allowing them to “think” through actions before performing. Ai2 said MolmoAct is the first in a new category of AI models the company is calling an action reasoning model, or ARM, that interprets high-level natural language and then reasons through a plan of physical actions to carry them out in the real world. Unlike current robotics models on the market that operate as vision language action foundation models, ARMs break down instructions into a series of waypoints and actions that take into account what the model can see. “As soon as it sees the world, it lifts the entire world into 3D and then it draws a trajectory to define how its arms are going to move in that space,” Ranjay Krishna, the computer vision team lead at Ai2. “So, it plans for the future. And after it’s done planning, only then does it start taking actions and moving its joints.” Unlike many current models on the market, MolmoAct 7B was trained on a curated open dataset of around 12,000 “robot episodes” from real-world environments, such as kitchens and bedrooms. These demonstrations were used to map goal-oriented actions — such as arranging pillows and putting away laundry. Krishna explained that MolmoAct overcomes this industry transparency challenge by being fully open, providing its code, weights and evaluations, thus resolving the “black box problem.” It is both trained on open data and its inner workings are transparent and openly available. To add even more control, users can preview the model’s planned movements before execution, with its intended motion trajectories overlaid on camera images. These plans can be modified using natural language or by sketching corrections on a touchscreen. This provides a fine-grained method for developers or robotics technicians to control robots in different settings such as homes, hospitals and warehouses. In the SimPLER benchmark, the model achieved state-of-the-art task success rates of 72.1%, beating models from Physical Intelligence, Google LLC, Microsoft Corp. and Nvidia.
Regulatory pullback heightens fintech risk: uncertain fee caps and federal delays force fragmented state rules, bilateral data deals, rising integration costs, and unpredictable bank data access
Last week, a federal court struck down the Federal Reserve’s Regulation II debit interchange fee cap, upending a framework that defined payment economics for more than a decade. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) paused its open banking rule under Section 1033 of Dodd-Frank and delayed small business lending data collection under Section 1071, both responding to litigation. The Supreme Court’s Loper Bright decision eliminated Chevron deference, sharply curtailing agencies’ ability to interpret ambiguous laws. From a distance, this looks like a deregulatory moment. For many fintech business models, it creates a high-risk period of uncertainty that can be more damaging than the rules themselves. The Regulation II ruling illustrates the problem. Companies that built their economics around debit interchange fees now face uncertainty. Some use those fees to fund rewards programs. Others share them with banking-as-a-service partners or use them to offer zero-fee accounts. The Fed could rewrite the rule to favor merchants, which would slash interchange rates. But that process could drag on for years, with appeals and maybe even congressional hearings. Meanwhile, companies are trying to plan budgets and investor presentations without knowing what their core revenue stream will look like. This pattern extends beyond payments. Credit card rewards, routing rules, and data rights all face similar risks. When a business model depends on a particular legal framework, and that framework gets sent back to the drawing board, companies operate in uncertainty until something new emerges. What’s likely to emerge is fragmentation. Private companies will cut bilateral data-sharing deals. Different states will write their own rules. Banks will use different technical standards depending on who’s asking for data. For fintechs that need bank data, the complications are significant. Integration costs increase. Product launch timelines extend. And there’s always the risk that key data sources will change terms or cut access entirely. Recent developments illustrate this risk, with major banks beginning to charge fintechs for customer data access through aggregators. Industry executives warn these fees could be devastating for early-stage startups and make certain financial transactions economically impossible for consumers. Without clear federal rules, banks can essentially set their own terms for data access.
Tokenizing private equity unlocks a $15 trillion opportunity by enabling fractional, programmable ownership and broader investor access beyond 80% of retail exclusion barriers
Tokenization, a technology that has gained prominence in the cryptocurrency industry, has the potential to revolutionize finance by redefining access to capital. Currently, private markets remain less transparent, more expensive to access, and off-limits to over 80% of investors. Tokenizing private equity could remake capital formation, unlocking a massive new level of financial inclusion. Today’s system limits access to high-growth private companies to accredited investors and institutions, leaving retail investors locked out of early-stage growth opportunities. Blockchain infrastructure can represent ownership digitally and enable programmable transfers, making it possible to securely fractionalize, trade, and settle these assets without the friction of traditional intermediaries. This would lower the cost and complexity of fundraising while unlocking the door for everyday investors to participate in their growth. By the end of 2025, private markets will represent a projected $15-trillion-walled-off opportunity, dwarfing public equities’ growth potential. Enabling companies to tokenize shares before $300 million in revenues would give millions of people access to innovation-stage companies that have historically been the domain of VCs and hedge funds. Tokenization doesn’t mean throwing out safeguards; more transparency results in better outcomes, and blockchain technology offers that. Access is the ultimate asset, and tokenizing private equity could rewrite the rules of participation, opening a massive new addressable market for companies and dismantling a system where only accredited investors are trusted to take risks. It also creates a two-way unlock: startups can tap new global capital sources, and investors worldwide can participate in economic growth from day one. Tokenized private equity could be one of the biggest democratizations of wealth creation in history, shifting the center of gravity from a handful of gatekeepers to a global network of contributors.
Regions Bank’s improvements to its digital funnel drove 10% year-to-date growth in digital channel checking; in the wealth management segment in 2Q the bank earned a record nominal interest rate (NIR) during the quarter and grew its total number of wealth management relationships by 8.3%
Regions Financial Corp.’s investments in technology and talent drove 10% year-over-year growth in revenue in the second quarter, bringing the regional bank’s total revenue for the quarter to $1.9 billion. “We are very proud of our second-quarter performance as we continue to reap the benefits of the investments we’ve made across our businesses and the successful execution of our strategic plans,” Regions Financial Corp. Chairman, President and CEO John Turner said. Regions Financial Corp., whose Regions Bank subsidiary serves customers across the South, Midwest and Texas, has seen the benefits of these investments across its businesses. In its corporate business, the bank is using natural language processing and other technologies to screen public filings and evaluate product opportunities for large corporate clients. In its consumer business, Regions Financial reskilled and reallocated bankers to focus on opportunities with small businesses and key customer segments, conducted financial education workshops, and centralized processes to save over 200,000 hours and allow bankers to focus on serving customers. In addition, the bank’s improvements to its digital funnel drove 10% year-to-date growth in digital channel checking. Over the past two years, the bank saw its number of mobile banking active users rise 6%, the number of mobile banking logins gain 14% and the share of customer transactions conducted through digital channels increase from 74% to 78%. In its wealth management business, Regions Financial completed a new cloud-based portal to improve infrastructure for its current and future applications serving this segment, enhanced its advisors’ customer relationship management (CRM) systems and fully launched a social media program on LinkedIn. In the wealth management segment, the bank earned a record nominal interest rate (NIR) during the quarter and grew its total number of wealth management relationships by 8.3% compared to last year. Across the bank’s operations, the efficiencies delivered by technology and normal attrition among the workforce will help to pay for continuing investments in technology, Regions Financial Chief Financial Officer David Turner said. “We just have to continue to look for ways to become more efficient,” Turner said. “We and the industry have to do a better job of leveraging all the new technologies that are coming at us pretty rapidly and let our attrition, which is about 6% to 7% of our workforce every year, help pay for some of this technology.” Looking ahead, Regions Financial will continue to modernize its core technology platforms, Turner said.