Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z crypto arm suggests that blockchains could guide artificial intelligence towards user ownership and open standards. The report suggests that core context and agent passports should be stored in self-custodial wallets, allowing instant access to preferences without repeated training. A chain-based identity layer would allow agents to carry verifiable records of owners, capabilities, and payment details across platforms. Proof-of-personhood systems could help screen bots as generative models proliferate. The report also promotes decentralized physical infrastructure networks, on-chain synchrony layers, micropayments, and immutable ledgers for managing intellectual property. It also suggests smart contract licensing and wallet-based zero-knowledge proofs for advertising. The report concludes that intertwining blockchains and machine learning could preserve an open internet by embedding incentives, provenance, and governance directly at the protocol layer.
‘Fintech 3.0’ to be shaped by adaptive and inclusive financial tools that would address the needs and challenges of growing federal debt, income inequality, poverty and rapid job loss due to AI
Founder of early-stage venture firm Inspired Capi, Alexa von Tobel says that while Inspired is a generalist firm, she said she feels both “urgent and optimistic” about fintech. “We think of this wave as fintech 3.0,” von Tobel said. “The next wave of innovation won’t come from superficial tweaks but from fundamental deep product reinvention — tools that meet the needs of a changing economy and a more diverse, digitally native population. The growing federal debt, rising income inequality, and increasing poverty — especially among older Americans — underscore the need for more adaptive and inclusive financial tools. Not to mention the rapid job loss due to AI. This moment presents a major opportunity for startups to reimagine financial products from the ground up. We think of this wave as fintech 3.0. The next wave of innovation won’t come from superficial tweaks but from fundamental deep product reinvention — tools that meet the needs of a changing economy and a more diverse, digitally native population.
AmEx targets Gen Z with card refresh noting the cohort’s spending growing at a swift clip and their tendency to revolve balances less often
American Express is announcing major updates coming to its U.S. Consumer and Business Platinum Cards® later this year. With these updates, the company is making its largest investment ever in a Card refresh. More information will be released this fall. “Platinum Card benefits and services resonate across generations, particularly with Millennial and Gen Z who accounted for 35% of total U.S. consumer spending last quarter,” Howard Grosfield, group president for U.S. consumer services at American Express (Amex), said. “We’re going to take these cards to a new level, not only in what they offer in travel, dining and lifestyle benefits, but also in how they look and feel, to meet the evolving needs of our customers,” Grosfield added. “Our millennial and Gen Zs are performing significantly better both from a FICO perspective and from a delinquency perspective than the industry,” American Express Chairman and CEO Stephen Squeri said. While these younger consumers tend to spend about 20% less overall than older generations, their spending is growing at a swift clip, especially in international markets, with the company reporting a 22% year-over-year jump in overseas spending. Amex also noted that younger consumers tend to revolve balances less often, though that trend does not appear to be hurting revenue.
U.S. Bank expands suite of embedded payments solutions offering a for-benefit-of (FBO) account structure that supports unlimited virtual accounts for tracking funds
U.S. Bank has launched an expanded suite of Embedded Payment Solutions, enabling businesses to integrate secure, real-time payment capabilities into their websites, apps, and enterprise systems. The offering includes a for-benefit-of (FBO) account structure that supports unlimited virtual accounts for tracking funds, along with streamlined customer onboarding, verification, and support across various payment types, including instant payments. “Today’s finance leaders are under increasing pressure to optimize liquidity, reduce friction in payments, move quickly and enhance the customer experience,” said Kristy Carstensen, head of U.S. Bank Treasury and Payment Solutions. “Our expanded embedded payments suite empowers organizations to embed secure, real-time payment capabilities directly into their platforms—streamlining operations and strengthening financial control.” Through its subsidiary Elavon, U.S. Bank combines merchant processing and treasury management to serve sectors like fintech, insurance, healthcare, and auto retail. “We are leveraging our comprehensive range of services – from merchant processing to treasury management – to deliver integrated, embedded solutions that provide efficient and secure transactions tailored to the dynamic needs of businesses,” said Elavon CEO Jamie Walker. Basefund CEO Robert White noted, “Our customers value how easy it is to use our platform to make their transactions secure. With U.S. Bank Embedded Payment Solutions, we can now process those transactions in the application while also providing the risk, security and compliance expertise of one of the nation’s leading banks.” Rain COO Fred Choquette added, “U.S. Bank has been an exceptional partner, providing a robust payments and banking platform that enables Rain to deliver real-time earned wage access to millions of employees each month. We look forward to deepening this collaboration, driving innovation together, and setting a new standard for how earned wage access is delivered across the market.”
JPMorgan hikes Sapphire Reserve fee to $795 in card overhaul; offers eight points per dollar on Chase Travel, integrates acquisitions like cxLoyalty, The Infatuation, Figg, and Frosch, along with new Chase airport lounges to create an end-to-end travel experience
JPMorgan Chase is raising the annual fee for its popular Sapphire Reserve credit card from $550 to $795 and will launch a similarly priced business version, marking a major revamp aimed at premium travelers. The changes include new annual credits—$500 toward JPMorgan’s “The Edit” hotel collection and $300 for exclusive OpenTable reservations, in addition to the existing $300 travel credit. “It’s the culmination of five years of investment that we’ve made across Chase in completely uplifting and repositioning what we mean for premium travelers in the premium-card space,” said Allison Beer, JPMorgan’s head of card and connected commerce. Cardholders will now earn eight points per dollar on Chase Travel, four points on direct flight and hotel bookings, and three points on dining. The overhaul integrates acquisitions like cxLoyalty, The Infatuation, Figg, and Frosch, along with new Chase airport lounges. “This is about having the best-in-class travel assets and an end-to-end travel experience,” Beer added. At JPMorgan’s 2022 investor day, consumer banking chief Marianne Lake said, “Travel is at the center of our card business.” She reaffirmed in 2024 that travel volume had more than doubled since 2021 and remains “a massive opportunity.” Beer noted the card plays a key role in broader customer engagement: “Customers eventually deepen with the rest of the ecosystem, so they start with the Sapphire Reserve card and then they open a self-directed account, or they open a Chase wealth-management account, and they continue to deepen.”
Comerica Bank will become an early adopter of TCH’s revised rules for domestic On-Behalf-Of (OBO) payments- RTP transactions originated by a sender to make a payment for another person
Comerica Bank will become an early adopter of The Clearing House’s revised rules for domestic On-Behalf-Of (OBO) payments on the RTP® network. Comerica Bank, and its client Monex USA, a leading provider of international payments, corporate FX and currency risk hedging services, took part in one of the first OBO payments under the revised rules, reinforcing Comerica’s dedication to delivering instant payment solutions designed for speed, efficiency and flexibility for both direct and indirect customers. OBO payments are RTP transactions originated by a sender to make a payment for another person (i.e., on behalf of that other person). The sender is the titled owner of the account from which the RTP payment is sent. The new rules replace existing requirements for Payment Service Providers and apply more broadly to intermediated RTP activity, introducing a consistent framework focused on payment transparency, due diligence, risk management and fraud reporting obligations. “Introducing this new capability is a testament to Comerica’s commitment to providing our customers seamless, on demand access to funds, both for themselves and their own customers,” said Allysun Fleming, Comerica Bank Executive Director of Payments. “RTP OBO payments unlock real-time disbursement use cases at scale, such as payroll and benefits, marketplace payouts, embedded payments, and more. We are excited to participate in an ecosystem that enforces transparency of funds.” A comprehensive risk management framework for OBO payments on the RTP network broadens the benefits of RTP payments through enhanced oversight of intermediary payments providers. Through the new requirements, the RTP network strengthens participants’ ability to manage risk for growing payment use cases and will increase momentum for the 24/7 real-time payment network that already processes more than one million transactions per day for more than 950 banks and credit unions. RTP OBO payments for domestic transactions will enable Monex USA to facilitate instant payments at scale, greatly simplifying their operational process and providing enhanced transparency end to end.
Citizens Bank stays with strategy of approaching open banking as an “enterprise” or business project, irrespective of the fate of the 1033 regulation
The Trump administration is doing away with a regulation designed to promote data sharing between banks and third parties. But for Citizens Financial, the move isn’t hindering its bullishness on the broader concept. “This doesn’t change our strategy,” Eric McCabe, Citizens’ head of embedded finance, told. “1033 was focused more on consumers,” McCabe said, adding Citizens has approached open banking as an “enterprise” or business project, combining people from a wide range of departments. That doesn’t directly relate to the 1033 regulation but more about the general market demand for improved data sharing, and how internal collaboration can streamline project management. “Most banks have their own staff for corporate and consumers,” he said. Citizens built its open banking application programming interface to enable clients to have secure and seamless access to their Citizens data from their external platforms of choice, McCabe said. “We then pursued our development in a manner that would comply with 1033, but it wasn’t the driving factor,” McCabe said. The bank has spent more than two years working on its open banking project and has suggested banks continue their own work on open banking and other forms of data sharing. Citizens’ open banking service enables businesses to link their Citizens’ accounts to a third-party platform through an API. Businesses use the API to support permissioned data sharing without using an older practice called screen scraping that has long raised security and privacy concerns among banks. Citizens says its API has reduced screen-scraping usage by more than 90%. “The impetus was to get away from screen scraping. Banks don’t like that. So the APIs give an alternative,” McCabe said. While no one knows exactly what will come next, open banking is here to stay, Kiernan Hines, principal banking analyst at Celent, said in a research note about the uncertainty of the 1033 rule. More than 25% of banks in the U.S. say open banking-led product innovation is one of their three leading technology investment priorities for 2025, according to Celent, though Hines noted that survey was taken before the CFPB’s recent suit. While the CFPB’s recent move to eliminate the 1033 rule will cause the development of open banking to “take a hit,” open banking will continue to grow and has already had a huge impact on financial services, Hines said. “Many financial institutions now view open banking as a genuine opportunity to sit on the other side of the value chain and enhance their own workflows and customer-facing services,” Hines said. “While the rules of the road will continue to evolve, if not formulate, the open-banking toothpaste is out of the tube; customers expect to be able to leverage account data without friction”.
Frontier models are multimodal, capable of zero-shot learning, display agent-like behavior, offer real-time inference and are characterized by massive data sets, compute resources, and sophisticated architectures
You can intuitively apply the word “frontier” to know that these are the biggest and best new systems that companies are pushing. Another way to describe frontier models is as “cutting-edge” AI systems that are broad in purpose, and overall frameworks for improving AI capabilities. When asked, ChatGPT gives us three criteria – massive data sets, compute resources, and sophisticated architectures. Here are some key characteristics of frontier models to help you flush out your vision of how these models work: First, there is multimodality, where frontier models are likely to support non-text inputs and outputs – things like image, video or audio. Otherwise, they can see and hear – not just read and write. Another major characteristic is zero-shot learning, where the system is more capable with less prompting. And then there’s that agent-like behavior that has people talking about the era of “agentic AI.” If you want to play “name that model” and get specific about what companies are moving this research forward, you could say that GPT 4o from OpenAI represents one such frontier model, with multi-modality and real-time inference. Or you could tout the capabilities of Gemini 1.5, which is also multimodal, with decent context. A team of experts analyzed what it takes to work in this part of the AI space and create these frontier models. The panel moderator, Peter Grabowski, introduced two related concepts for frontier models – quality versus sufficiency, and multimodality. Douwe Kiela, CEO of Contextual AI, pointed out that frontier models need a lot of resources, noting that “AI is a very resource-intensive endeavor.” “I see the cost versus quality as the frontier, and the models that actually just need to be trained on specific data, but actually the robustness of the model is there,” said Lisa Dolan, managing director of Link Ventures.
New data observability solutions are addressing the full lifecycle of AI/ML inputs as 42% of enterprises still don’t trust AI model outputs
Ataccama’s new report in partnership with BARC finds that while 58% of organizations have implemented or optimized data observability programs – systems that monitor detect, and resolve data quality and pipeline issues in real-time – 42% still say they do not trust the outputs of their AI/ML models. The findings reflect a critical shift. Adoption is no longer a barrier. Most organizations have tools in place to monitor pipelines and enforce data policies. But trust in AI remains elusive. While 85% of organizations trust their BI dashboards, only 58% say the same for their AI/ML model outputs. The gap is widening as models rely increasingly on unstructured data and inputs that traditional observability tools were never designed to monitor or validate. 51% of respondents cite skills gaps as a primary barrier to observability maturity, followed by budget constraints and lack of cross-functional alignment. But leading teams are pushing it further, embedding observability into designing, delivering, and maintaining data across domains. When observability is deeply connected to automated data quality, teams gain more than visibility: they gain confidence that the data powering their models can be trusted. The report also underscores how unstructured data is reshaping observability strategies. Kevin Petrie, Vice President at BARC said “We’re seeing a shift: leading enterprises aren’t just monitoring data; they’re addressing the full lifecycle of AI/ML inputs. That means automating quality checks, embedding governance controls into data pipelines, and adapting their processes to observe dynamic unstructured objects. This report shows that observability is evolving from a niche practice into a mainstream requirement for Responsible AI.”
Early Warning is partnering with Fiserv to expand Apple Pay rival Paze wallet nationwide, beyond the immediate distribution channels provided by its seven owner banks
Early Warnings Services wants a quick route to expand its Apple Pay rival Paze digital wallet by turning to the financial technology industry’s massive distribution networks. Early Warning, which operates the popular Zelle transfer app and the newer Paze digital waller, said this afternoon that it is partnering with bank technology company Fiserv to expand Paze wallet beyond the immediate distribution channels provided by its seven owner banks. Bank of America, Capital One, JPMorganChase, PNC, Truist, US Bank and Wells Fargo own Early Warning. “To get to scale and to get to 100% [market penetration] we have to expand outside of our owner footprint from a merchant services standpoint, and partner with companies that support merchants,” Eric Hoffman, Chief Partnerships Officer at Early Warning Services, told. Early Warning is hoping to take a page from the Zelle playbook as it expands beyond its owner-bank ecosystem. The partnership will enable Fiserv’s enterprise and small business clients to offer and accept the Paze digital wallet. Early Warning is currently working with Fiserv to onboard a handful of enterprise merchants before the holiday shopping season, Hoffman said, but acknowledged that many large merchants have long implementation roadmaps that cause the process to take longer than expected. “Paze isn’t going to scale overnight,” he said. “Strategic partnerships with companies like Fiserv [are] a long term project. To get to critical scale, it’s going to take more than 2025.” Early Warning is also looking to roll out Paze on Fiserv’s small business payments platform Clover before the end of the year. “That one is a little bit more straightforward, because they use a hosted pay page, which means that there’s a standardization of the payment types that all merchants accept,” Hoffman said. “Once they add Paze, then that portfolio will be mass enabled to tens of thousands of merchants.” Early Warning’s owner banks make up four of the five largest credit card issuers in the country – all of which are automatically enabled with Paze at issuance. And six out of the seven have merchant acquiring business lines, giving Early Warning a solid base to stand up its own e-commerce wallet. Still, Early Warning hopes to add more issuers to Paze, Hoffman said. “We plan on seeing five additional issuers from Fiserv supporting Paze this year.” Solving for merchant acceptance is a “necessary step” for widespread adoption of any new payment method, said Aaron Press, a senior research analyst at IDC. “The way they’re going to solve for the acceptance side is to make it available within the checkout pages that are controlled by the platforms and the acquirers,” Press told. This is the second such distribution partnership that Paze entered in June. Earlier this month, Early Warning inked a deal with Worldpay to bring its checkout option to Worldpay merchants. Early Warning was also working with GoDaddy in 2023 to help drive e-commerce adoption. But Paze’s new distribution partnerships could be too-little-too-late in a market that is currently being reshaped by agentic payments, said Richard Crone, CEO and founder of Crone Consulting. “Paze is still walking a cow path — this is a non-event without the support of major e-commerce merchants,” Crone told American Banker. “The biggest ecommerce retailers focused on agentic payments — they’re racing to prepare for disintermediation from AI-powered shopping, where checkout is collapsed into intent outside the retailer’s own branded platforms.