Issue #141: X Partners with Visa, Wise’s LatAm Push, And Australia Tightens BNPL Rules
The week’s biggest fintech moves, broken down and delivered to your inbox ✉️
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X teams with Visa on new digital payments tool, Payments Dive
🏃♂️ The Rundown: X has partnered with Visa to roll out digital payments within the app. The feature will allow users to hold funds, make payments, and transfer money directly through X, marking a significant step in Elon Musk’s broader vision to turn the platform into an “everything app.”
🥡 Takeaway: Ok, I know this is just a partnership announcement (read as: X is using Visa as a vendor), but I’m still fascinated by this whole idea of X as a super app.
WeChat is the obvious inspiration (and Musk has said as much), but turning X into a payments powerhouse is an entirely different challenge—especially in the US, where incumbents like Venmo, Apple Wallet, and Cash App dominate.
The Visa partnership is a step, but the bigger question remains: will users actually want to store and move money within X. Given Musk’s often unpredictable decision-making and X’s reputation for, let’s say, “speaking his mind”, will consumers feel safe keeping their funds there? It’s an ambitious play, but if there’s one thing we know, it’s that betting against Musk has historically been a bad bet.
NAB Introduces PayTo for Amazon Australia customers, The Paypers
🏃♂️ The Rundown: NAB has introduced PayTo for Amazon Australia customers, allowing them to authorise and manage payments directly from their bank accounts. This marks a significant step in embedding Australia’s real-time payment infrastructure into mainstream e-commerce, offering an alternative to card payments with greater control and security.
🥡 Takeaway: PayTo’s uptake in Australia has been sluggish, with few retailers jumping on board. But this could be the year it shifts from an “oh, that’s interesting” curiosity to a “damn, we need to add that”—perhaps even having its BNPL-style breakout moment for A2A payments.
One merchant doesn’t make a payment rail, but Amazon's adoption of PayTo gives the fledgling method a much-needed credibility boost. As I’ve noted in past issues of FR, the real challenge is at scale merchant adoption and, equally, improving the user experience. That said, with merchant fees on card transactions continuing to climb, we may be approaching the tipping point A2A payments need to gain real traction in Australia.
Wise Expands to Mexico, Finextra
🏃♂️ The Rundown: Wise has launched in Mexico, marking its latest push into Latin America. The move allows Mexican consumers and businesses to send and receive international payments more efficiently, leveraging Wise’s low-cost, multi-currency infrastructure. The expansion comes as remittances to Mexico hit record highs, making it a key market for cross-border payments.
🥡 Takeaway: This is a logical and long-overdue move by Wise, given that its first foray into LatAm was in 2016. Since then, the company has issued 2m multi-currency cards in the region and struck a partnership with neobank powerhouse Nubank—clear evidence of strong demand for its offerings.
What I’m most curious about is Wise’s go-to-market strategy in Mexico. The country’s remittance landscape is highly competitive, with well-entrenched players like Western Union and Oxxo dominating cash-based transfers. Wise’s challenge (and ironically, its biggest opportunity) will be to drive adoption in a market where 68% remain unbanked and digital banking is still evolving.
Australia tells BNPL providers to apply for credit licences, Finextra
🏃♂️ The Rundown: Australia is set to bring BNPL under tighter regulation, requiring providers to apply for credit licences and comply with responsible lending obligations. The move aligns BNPL more closely with traditional credit products, ending its status as an “unregulated” alternative.
🥡 Takeaway: The regulatory hammer was always going to drop—it was just a matter of when. Australia was one of the early BNPL hotspots, but with rising consumer debt concerns, stricter oversight was inevitable.
In the short term, this clearly favours the incumbents—Afterpay and Zip—who will have no trouble navigating the new requirements (and probably have their applications ready to go). The real question is whether this creates just enough of a barrier to entry to keep the next wave of “Afterpay for X” startups from flooding the market—or if, despite the added friction for providers, it ultimately brings long-term legitimacy to the sector.
Fintech startup Cushion shuts down after 8 years and over $20 million in funding, TechCrunch
🏃♂️ The Rundown: Cushion, a fintech startup that initially launched as a bill negotiation tool before pivoting to credit building, has shut down after eight years and over $20m in funding. Despite multiple product iterations, the company ultimately struggled to find sustainable traction and failed to secure additional funding to continue operations.
🥡 Takeaway: RIP Cushion. Not through a lack of effort, but this shutdown is a stark reminder of how hard it is to hit (and maintain) product-market fit in the consumer financial data space. As their founder notes in his LinkedIn post, the company started as an automated bank fee negotiation tool before pivoting to building the “Plaid for BNPL”—both of which sound like classically solid fintech ideas: picks and shovels and all that.
The reality is that selling alternative data sets is much more complex than it sounds. Even in a red-hot BNPL market, most players still just want the basics.
Announcing Formance $21M Series A Funding Round, Formance Blog
🏃♂️ The Rundown: Formance, an open-source financial infrastructure provider, has raised $21m in a Series A round co-led by PayPal Ventures and Portage Ventures. The funding will help Formance expand its platform, which enables fintech and enterprises to build and scale complex financial workflows, including payments, wallets, and ledgers.
🥡 Takeaway: Building “from the ledger up” makes a lot of sense—it’s the foundation for so many financial products. Formance started with a strong focus on ledger infrastructure, but now it’s expanding well beyond that.
As co-founder and CTO Clément Salaün told TechCrunch in a funding announcement article, “We started preparing to move from a single ledger product to the Formance platform with other modules—the reconciliation part, for example, connectors to payment services, etc.”
Formance now offers five core products: its flagship ledger, a connectivity platform for integrating financial providers via a single API, payment orchestration to move money across wallets and providers, and reconciliation.
The ambition to become the “AWS of fintech infrastructure” is bold—it’s a slide in many financial services infrastructure pitch decks—but it’s not without merit. As companies look for more control over their financial operations without having to build everything from scratch, platforms like this become increasingly valuable. Now, the question is whether Formance can carve out a dominant position in this increasingly competitive space.
QED seeds $9.9M in Cedar Money, a stablecoin payment platform, Techcrunch
🏃♂️ The Rundown: QED Investors has led a $9.9m seed round in Cedar Money, a new stablecoin payment platform aiming to bridge the gap between traditional finance and digital assets. Cedar Money’s pitch? A compliance-first approach that makes stablecoin transactions more accessible for businesses and financial institutions.
🥡 Takeaway: Another bet on the growing institutionalisation of stablecoins. While the consumer-facing crypto hype has cooled (slightly), the push to make stablecoins a legitimate, regulated payments rail is only accelerating.
As I’ve noted before, it’s somewhat ironic that blockchains’ most promising use case so far isn’t creating new money but rather upgrading dollar-denominated rails. It’s less about reinventing currency and more about evolving how USD moves through the system.
With potential regulatory frameworks taking shape—especially as podcasters turned Crypto Czars advocate for a more structured stablecoin regime in the U.S. —2025 could (finally) be the year stablecoins go mainstream in a serious way.
How Jack Henry is Modernizing Banking Infrastructure with Ben Metz, In the Vault
In this episode of In the Vault, Jack Henry’s Chief Digital & Technology Officer, Ben Metz, joins the a16z team to discuss how Jack Henry is tackling the challenge of modernising banking infrastructure. From core banking evolution to the role of APIs and cloud adoption, Metz unpacks how one of the oldest players in financial services is rethinking tech for community banks and credit unions. If you’re into banking infrastructure (or love a deep dive into fintech plumbing), this one’s for you.
TS Anil, CEO Monzo: From Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS, to $1BN in Revenue, 20VC
In this episode of 20VC, Monzo CEO TS Anil dives deep into the neobank’s journey—how it navigated early struggles, scaled to profitability, and now eyes global expansion. He shares insights on Monzo’s unique approach to building financial products, why it deliberately avoided crypto, and how it’s balancing its mission with commercial success. Oh, and obviously, they discuss what “founder mode” means to TS.
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🙏 What did you think of this week's issue of FR?
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Re X + Visa: Will it go down the path of Apple + GS? As you said, don't bet against EM. Maybe he will bundle X+Starlink+Tesla with the top user getting a seat to the space station ...
Re Wise in LATAM: They have plenty-plenty of GTM experience in Asia and I am sure they can take a look at their India and Indonesia playbooks/learnings as references. And I would advise them to not go after the unbanked segment. (Maybe I should write a post about this)
Re NAB: Interesting NPP take-up is sluggish. Could it be due to the fact that Debit was already "cheap" for merchants and therefore when NPP came online it wasn't as compelling to merchants from the start?
Re Formance: V.Interesting. What I have observed in the market (so far) is that these middleware/orchestrators haven't scaled at all and those who have, evolved their biz models to become something very different. A big constraint is that, after building these connectors you still have to maintain them with the problem scaling with more geographies, use cases etc. Nonetheless, underlying costs are coming down and accessibility has improved so it may be a function of market timing! And VCs are investing in fintech infra in order to unlock upstream opportunities (?)
Re Monzo: Juxtapose that interview with Nik's and observe Harry's approach/energy with both. Lots of takeaways on the different approaches between the two leaders. I suspect investor pressure is going to be N.America; however... the more sensible pathway may be targeting the British diaspora in middle east, AUNZ, or SE Asia (?) Follow your customers they say...and more of them live in AUNZ+SE Asia versus USA. (TS, more than happy to work on your team again)...