Citi announced plans to become a custodian and tokenizer for Switzerland’s SIX Digital Exchange (SDX). The bank aims to tokenize the equity of venture backed, late stage companies on the digital exchange, with plans to go live in the third quarter of 2025. The aim is to reach eligible private and institutional investors. SDX consists of both a regulated DLT-based central securities depositary (CSD) and a marketplace, with Citi becoming a CSD member alongside several other Swiss and international banks. Standard Chartered joined in March. “This initiative will distinguish itself in the industry by using SDX’s regulated blockchain based technology to enable the efficient distribution of shares in mature international private companies, which are expected to generate strong investor interest,” said David Newns, Head of SDX. tokenization on its own won’t create demand. Hence, Citi and SDX are collaborating with Swiss digital asset bank Sygnum and Singapore’s SBI Digital Markets to help to drive demand from their client investors. SIX has a separate joint venture with SBI. “Switzerland’s regulatory framework and SDX’s infrastructure allows Citi to bring a new solution to market using technology to solve for challenges in private markets for issuers and investors,” said Marni McManus, Citi Country Officer & Head of Banking for Switzerland, Monaco & Liechtenstein. “Private markets is a major and growing opportunity and our work with SDX promises to simplify and digitize what is essentially a manual and paper-driven industry today.” SDX currently operates mainly on a permissioned blockchain under conventional regulations. Hence, it does not deal directly with private investors and always goes via brokers. To date most of its activities have been in digital bonds and cryptocurrencies. This partnership with Citi represents a significant step toward modernizing private market transactions, potentially creating new opportunities for liquidity and investment in late-stage private companies while maintaining regulatory compliance
CFPB won’t enforce 2024 interpretive rule that classified BNPL loans as credit cards, which put them under the purview of the Truth in Lending Act’s Regulation Z
The CFPB said it would not prioritize enforcement actions stemming from a 2024 interpretive rule that classified Pay in 4 loans as credit cards, which put them under the purview of the Truth in Lending Act’s Regulation Z. “The Bureau will instead keep its enforcement and supervision resources focused on pressing threats to consumers, particularly servicemen and veterans,” the announcement said. “The Bureau takes this step in the interest of focusing resources on supporting hard-working American taxpayers, servicemen, veterans, and small businesses. The Bureau is further contemplating taking appropriate action to rescind [credit card classification] for Buy Now, Pay Later.” The CFPB also recently said it would not enforce its payday lending rule at the end of March, just days before it was set to go into effect. The pullback marks a continuation of efforts by a more fintech-friendly administration. “I think fintechs can breathe another sigh of relief knowing that they may not need to ‘fit a square peg in a round hole’ with the imposition of credit card protections on BNPL products for which they may be at least somewhat ill-fitted,” Eamonn Moran, a partner at Holland & Knight said. Some BNPL loans, specifically Pay in 4 loans, live in a nebulous area of regulatory oversight. Installment loans with four or less payments are exempt from the Truth in Lending Act, meaning BNPL lenders are not required to provide customers with disclosures about the terms and costs of credit like credit cards and other installment loans with four-or-more payments. The CFPB’s interpretive rule, which former Director Rohit Chopra put forth in 2024, was an attempt to close that loophole. The CFPB’s research in January found that most BNPL loans were made to subprime consumers with high credit card balances and multiple loans, a segment of consumers that are particularly exposed to predatory lending. “Our members are focused on ensuring that consumers have access to responsible financial services like BNPL and often implement industry best practices long before being directed by regulators. We look forward to continuing our work with the CFPB and regulators across the country to enable responsible financial innovation without sacrificing consumer protection,” said Phil Goldfeder, CEO of the American Fintech Council,
loanDepot’s Q1 revenue jumps 23% powered by a multichannel sales model, proprietary mello tech stack, and a wider product array
loanDepot reported that its first-quarter 2025 revenue increased by 23% annually to $274 million, while its adjusted revenue was up 21% to $278 million on higher mortgage sales volumes and stronger margins. Revenues also increased on a quarterly basis, growing from a baseline figure of $257 million and an adjusted figure of $267 million in Q4 2024. loanDepot‘s origination volume for Q1 2025 was $5.2 billion, an increase of $0.6 billion or 14% annually. Purchase loans accounted for 59% of originations during the first quarter, down from 72% in Q1 2024. The company touted that its preliminary organic refinance consumer-direct recapture rate increased to 65%, compared to 59% in Q1 2024. The first quarter also saw the return of loanDepot founder and executive chairman Anthony Hsieh to the day-to-day operations at the California-based lender. Current CEO Frank Martell is set to transition to a board advisory role on June 4, and Hsieh will assume the interim CEO role at that time. “These investments will allow loanDepot to take advantage of our marketplace differentiators in this and upcoming cycles, as well as to continue to deliver a best-in-class customer experience.” Martell characterized Q1 2025 as a “quarter of positive momentum” before turning the call over to Hsieh. “As we go forward, the team and I will focus on capitalizing upon the things that already make loanDepot great,” Hsieh said. “Our multichannel sales model, proprietary mello tech stack, wide product array, powerful brand muscle and our servicing business are foundational places in which loanDepot can win. “By leveraging this unique constellation of assets, plus adding to our arsenal with new and emerging technologies and platform refinements, I believe we are well positioned to regain profitable market share and scale our business.” loanDepot’s first quarter saw solid mortgage revenue growth, which more than overcame the loss of $20 million in revenue tied to 2024 bulk sales of mortgage servicing rights (MSRs). As a result, loanDepot’s net loss of $40.7 million was down 43% compared to its $71.5 million loss in Q1 2024. Chief financial officer David Hayes said “Our strategy for hedging the servicing portfolio is dynamic, and we adjust our hedged positions in reaction to changing and straight environments. Our total expenses for the first quarter of 2025 increased by $12 million, or 4%, from the prior year quarter.” “The primary drivers of the increase were for higher volume-related commission, direct origination and marketing expenses. Our non-volume-related expenses decreased $7 million [during] the same period, … reflecting our ongoing cost management discipline and lower cyber-related costs,” Hayes said. loanDepot’s expectations for Q2 2025 include an origination volume of $5 billion to $7.5 billion. It estimates a pull-through weighted rate-lock volume of $5.5 billion to $8.0 billion, along with a pull-through weighted gain-on-sale margin of 300 to 350 basis points. “Because we service loans in-house, we directly interact with our customers, strengthening our brand and awareness loyalty and providing important self-serve opportunities throughout our customer portal,” Hsieh said. “This improves our recapture rates, which deepens our customer relationships and drives profitability by saving marketing expenses, avoiding much of the customer acquisition costs.”
Merger will combine Global Payments’ strength in SME segment and vertical-specific solutions with Worldpay’s enterprise and eCommerce capabilities, creating a comprehensive commerce solutions platform
TSYS-parent Global Payments is betting big on its $600 million synergy target as it pushes forward with the $22.7 billion acquisition of Worldpay, a move that is expected to shake up the competitive dynamics in merchant services and payments technology. The acquisition will see Global Payments divest its Issuer Solutions business to FIS for $13.5 billion, sharpening its focus as a pure-play merchant solutions provider. The combined entity will serve more than 6 million customers in 175 countries, processing $3.7 trillion in annual payment volume and 94 billion transactions — a scale that positions the company among the world’s largest payment processors. Central to the strategic rationale is an ambitious plan to realize $600 million in annual run-rate cost synergies within three years of closing. According to Global Payments, roughly a third of these savings will come from consolidating technology infrastructure and eliminating duplicative vendor and software spend. Additional synergies are expected from streamlining operations, integrating product offerings, and leveraging the expanded global footprint. The company also projects at least $200 million in annual revenue synergies from cross-selling opportunities enabled by the complementary merchant, enterprise and eCommerce capabilities of the two firms. On the company’s Q1 earnings call, CEO Cameron Bready emphasized the transformative nature of the deal: “We have a tremendous opportunity to drive substantial revenue and cost synergies from the transaction as we amplify our collective go-to-market strengths and simplify our business to become a pure-play merchant solutions provider with significantly expanded capabilities, extensive scale and greater market access. The transaction will drive an enhanced financial profile for the combined enterprise and unlock long-term value for our shareholders.” The merger will combine Global Payments’ strength in small and mid-sized businesses and vertical-specific solutions with Worldpay’s enterprise and eCommerce capabilities, creating a comprehensive commerce solutions platform that spans the full merchant spectrum.
Gyan is an alternative AI architecture built on a neuro-symbolic architecture, not transformer based, to create hallucination-free models by design
Gyan is a fundamentally new AI architecture built for Enterprises with low or zero tolerance for hallucinations, IP risks, or energy-hungry models. Gyan gives businesses full control over their data, keeping it private and secure — making it the trusted partner for enterprises in situations where reliability and accuracy are mandatory. Unlike with LLM’s, with Gyan, businesses can use an AI model without worrying about it making things up. Built on a neuro-symbolic architecture, not transformer based, Gyan is a ground-up hallucination-free model by design. “If the cost of a mistake is high, you certainly don’t want your AI causing it,” says Joy Dasgupta, CEO, at Gyan. “We built Gyan for companies and processes with zero tolerance for hallucination and privacy risks, with compute and energy requirements orders of magnitude lower than that of current LLM’s.” Gyan’s State of the Art performance in two key life sciences benchmarks (PubMedQA and MMLU) is proof of efficacy of its language model. Every inference by Gyan is traceable with full reasoning to exact ideas and arguments in the result, making them readily verifiable. This is not the case for any of the others on the Leaderboard. Gyan provides precise and accurate analysis which users can depend on.
Five critical gaps in banks’ CX delivery — The communication gap; The service gap; The personalization gap; and The feedback gap
The Amdocs Studios research identified five core categories that systematically undermine customer experience efforts. Understanding these gaps is essential for companies looking to move beyond the illusion of good CX: The CX perception gap; The communication gap; The service gap; The personalization gap; and The feedback gap. The report outlines five strategic approaches for companies to move beyond the illusion of good CX and create authentic, value-driven customer experiences: 1. Relentlessly reveal reality: Organizations need to implement comprehensive voice-of-customer programs that penetrate beyond surface-level satisfaction metrics. This means collecting feedback across all touchpoints, analyzing patterns in customer behavior, regularly benchmarking against competitors, and critically examining the entire customer journey without corporate bias or filtered interpretations. 2) Understand CX is a perspective — not a set of projects” : As the AmDocs team suggests, improving the customer experience isn’t a project that needs completing, it’s the foundation of everything, emphasizing the need for companies to integrate customer-centric thinking into their organizational DNA. This requires aligning incentives, metrics, and priorities across departments, breaking down operational silos, and ensuring that every employee — regardless of their role — understands their impact on the customer experience. 3) Find the real gaps before chasing solutions: This approach requires companies to investigate customer pain points methodically, prioritize improvements based on customer impact rather than internal convenience, and validate solution concepts with real users before full implementation. By starting with clear problem definition rather than predetermined solutions, organizations can ensure their investments deliver meaningful customer value . 4) Give customers more to believe in — not just more to buy: With 85% of loyal customers considering alternatives after repeated bad experiences, companies need to focus on building connections, not just transactions. “Customers don’t stay for what you sell — they stay for how you make them feel,” the report states. This emotional dimension of customer experience often receives less attention than functional aspects, yet it frequently determines customer loyalty. Companies that excel at CX build relationships grounded in consistent value delivery, transparent communication, and demonstrated understanding of customer needs. 5) Build what solves, not just what sells: The best companies don’t chase features or flood the market with options — instead, they focus on building what actually matters to customers. This solution-oriented mindset requires ruthless prioritization, focusing development resources on addressing genuine customer needs rather than internal agendas or competitive feature parity. “Better CX starts with solving, not selling,” the report reads, pointing to the sustainability advantage companies gain when they align their offerings with customer problems worth solving.
Amazon introduces first robot with sense of touch
Amazon says that it has developed a new warehouse robot, Vulcan, that can “feel” some of the items it touches. The two-armed Vulcan, which can maneuver goods inside the storage compartments Amazon has in its warehouses, uses force sensors to help it know when it makes contact with an object. One arm rearranges items in a compartment, while the second arm — which is equipped with a camera and suction cup — grabs items. Amazon says that Vulcan was trained on physical data, including force and touch feedback to pick around 75% of Amazon’s stock, and that it’s capable of self-improving over time. The robot has been deployed in Spokane, Washington, and Hamburg, Germany, where it has processed half a million orders to date. The average robot is “numb and dumb,” particularly those operating in commercial settings, Aaron Parness, Amazon director of applied science, said. “They often don’t even know they have hit something because they cannot sense it.” Vulcan’s ability to grasp when and how it makes contact with an object — offers new ways for Amazon to bolster its operation-related jobs and facilities.
Bank of America and U.S. Bank top analyst Keynova’s CX best-practices benchmark evaluating leading issuers’ websites; key initiatives are tracking in-progress actions and enlisting cardholder engagement in account security
Keynova Group, the principal competitive intelligence source for digital financial services firms, announced the results of the 2025 Online Credit Card Scorecard, a customer experience best-practices benchmark evaluating leading issuers’ websites. Bank of America and U.S. Bank tied for first place in Keynova Group’s competitive evaluation of the 10 leading U.S. credit card issuers. The latest findings highlight issuers simplifying digital processes and tasks to drive a more engaging user experience, giving cardholders the information they need to directly monitor their accounts and coupling content and tools with the credit profile to support meaningful insights. Key Findings: 1) Streamlining Digital Processes for Cardholders: Issuers are driving positive outcomes for cardholders by integrating previously discrete actions and information to streamline tasks, reduce redundancies and lessen the need for live support resources. To help mitigate unnecessary transaction disputes, which can be costly and time-consuming for issuers to handle, nearly all issuers now supply expanded transaction details, including displaying the merchant address or a mapped location, listing an identified purchaser for multi-user cards, or providing a digital merchant receipt to help cardholders identify purchases. 2) Helping Cardholders Manage and Monitor Digital Accounts: Enabling cardholders to participate in directly monitoring their account activity and reduce customer servicing costs, issuers are also expanding tools that empower digital users. For example, U.S. Bank recently introduced a Status Dashboard allowing cardholders to track in-progress actions including transaction disputes, balance transfers, credit limit-increase requests, and changes to customer information. Enlisting cardholder engagement in account security is another critical initiative. Bank of America and U.S. Bank each offer an online account security indicator (and Wells Fargo supports a similar tool via its mobile app) highlighting personalized actions that cardholders can take to protect their account information. Nearly three-quarters of issuers furnish last login date and time details on the authenticated landing page, and last login device information is increasingly provided for timely verification by the cardholder. In addition, as more organizations gain access to credit card and card account details, issuers are supplying lists of merchants that are storing a user’s credit card number or of third parties with data-sharing access to a card account, enabling cardholders to proactively control the availability of their personal information. 3) Enriching Cardholders’ Credit Profiles: New features that couple credit scores and reports with expanded content and tools can help cardholders better understand and effectively manage their credit profiles. Though it has become table stakes for issuers to supply cardholders with complimentary single sign-on access to their credit profiles, some issuers are supporting more highly tailored content.
In Discover, Capital One is getting “a great brand from a customer experience perspective”; financial performance too has improved with delinquency rate for credit card loans more than 30 days overdue dropping 17 basis points to 3.66%
Capital One is getting a cleaner and leaner Discover Financial Services than the one it agreed to buy 15 months ago as the Riverwoods-based company spent much of the intervening time resolving the issues that made it ripe for sale in the first place. As the firms move toward a May 18 closure date, the Discover brand — which analysts said was largely untainted in consumers’ eyes by its regulatory issues — and the company’s much-desired payment network are what’s left. “They are still getting a great brand from a customer experience perspective,” said Jordan Sternlieb, leader of the banking practice at Chicago-based consulting firm West Monroe. “I think they’re just so well known in that space. I hope that the Capital One team sees that as a valuable part of this acquisition and kind of takes the best of that forward.” Since the acquisition was announced, Discover’s stock has soared nearly 73%. Capital One’s has risen 44%, boosting the implied value of the all-stock deal to about $50.4 billion from $35 billion. After the deal closes, Capital One stockholders will own 60% of the combined company. Capital One has given no indications about its designs for Discover’s Riverwoods campus, which houses about 5,000 workers. But it has said it will remain committed to Discover’s plan for hiring 1,000 employees at its Chatham call center, a goal the company hit in October. Capital One’s executives highlighted the importance of Discover’s brand and personal attention it gives customers on a recent call with analysts discussing its first-quarter earnings. Much of the questioning revolved around Capital One’s plans for Discover. The credit card company’s payment network will allow Capital One to hold on to processing fees normally collected by rivals such as Visa and Mastercard. It also will serve as a key point for growth-spurring innovation. Despite the regulatory issues, Discover’s financial performance has improved since the Capital One takeover was announced. The company’s 2024 net income rose to $1.1 billion, or $4.25 per diluted share, compared with net income of $851 million, or $3.25 per diluted share, in 2023. And the company’s net charge-off rate, the amount of credit card debt it views as uncollectible, decreased 19 basis points to 5.47% during the same time period. Discover’s delinquency rate for credit card loans more than 30 days overdue dropped 17 basis points to 3.66%. The results show Discover’s long-standing regulatory problems are in the past, Morningstar equity analyst Michael Miller said. “When Capital One agreed to acquire Discover, Discover was facing quite a lot of regulatory uncertainty,” Miller said. “None of this ended up being too damaging for Discover. At the time we did not know what the actual end cost would be. Since that time we have gotten more clarity, specifically what the final cost of this was, and it ended up not being that substantial.” The deal, which was approved by shareholders in February, appears headed for closure later this month. Regulators from the Federal Reserve and the Office of Comptroller of the Currency gave their seal of approval April 18, and while Department of Justice staff were divided about whether the DOJ should challenge the tie-up, new antitrust division chief Gail Slater determined there was not enough evidence to try and block it.
Blackstone, Vanguard, Wellington to launch private markets fund; investors will be able to make quarterly withdrawals capped between 5% and a quarter of the fund’s net-asset value
Blackstone, Vanguard, and Wellington Management are launching an interval fund that will invest in public equities, bonds and private markets, as part of their effort to expand private-market offerings to retail clients. The firms have laid out plans for an interval fund, through which investors will be able to make quarterly withdrawals capped between 5% and a quarter of the fund’s net-asset value. The trio partnered up earlier this year, amid a rising trend of ventures between firms that typically manage public stocks and bonds and those that invest in alternatives. Wellington will manage the interval fund — the first from the partnership — and draw its investments from all three firms. It will allocate up to 60% in public equities, up to 30% in fixed income and as much as 40% in private markets investments, according to the filing, which did not disclose what fees clients will be charged. Traditional asset managers have been seeking ways to move beyond stock and bond funds into higher-margin businesses, including private equity and private credit. At the same time, alternative asset firms have been searching for ways to tap a bigger slice of the retail market. Many have resorted to interval funds which can offer exposure to assets ranging from real estate to direct lending for buyouts.