Issue #142: Kraken’s Crypto Payments Bet, Bud’s AI Move And PIX's Continued Expansion
Your weekly fintech rundown
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Fintech Ramp lands Eagles’ Saquon Barkley as investor and Super Bowl commercial star, Techcrunch
🏃♂️ The Rundown: Ramp has secured Philadelphia Eagles running back Saquon Barkley as both an investor and the face of its first-ever Super Bowl commercial. The 15-second ad, produced in just seven days, highlights Ramp’s mission to simplify expense management—depicting Barkley buried under a pile of receipts before breaking free with Ramp’s help.
🥡 Takeaway: As competition in the SME neobanking space heats up, Ramp is turning to more traditional media channels to build brand awareness—and nothing is more traditional than a Super Bowl ad.
The kicker? This wasn’t just a standard influencer deal. According to Ramp, Saquon Barkley actually reached out about investing in the company, creating a convenient media storyline behind the campaign. Tying in an NFL star playing in the game with an equity deal is a clever way to maximise exposure.
That said, does a Super Bowl ad really make sense for an SME-focused fintech? Hard to see the immediate ROI. Big-budget brand plays are common for consumer fintech (Coinbase, Robinhood, eToro have all gone down this route), but B2B startups typically take a more measured approach. It feels a bit ZIRPy, but then again, what else are VC dollars for?
Kraken launches crypto payments service, Finextra
🏃♂️ The Rundown: Kraken has launched a new crypto payments service, allowing businesses to accept digital assets for transactions. The service will enable merchants to accept crypto payments and convert them to fiat, aiming to bridge the gap between traditional commerce and digital assets.
🥡 Takeaway: Another major crypto exchange is making a push into payments. While Coinbase, Binance, and others have already ventured into this space, Kraken’s entry suggests that crypto payments could be heating up again.
For a space that’s been relatively low-key for a while now, there’s been a noticeable uptick in activity from the big players. Stripe, for example, recently reentered the fray, looking to rebuild a business it first explored (unsuccessfully) in 2014. The market hasn’t stood still—plenty of teams have been quietly building (see the market map below).
Times are changing. Banks are slowly coming around, and with a US regulatory framework for stablecoins reportedly on the way, this could be the perfect storm for crypto payments to gain real traction. The big question: where to play in the payments stack. Consumer crypto payments still feel like a long shot, but as stablecoin settlement gains momentum, we may see more demand at the endpoints to integrate crypto.
Recurring Payments Feature to Draw $30 Billion in Payments to Brazil’s Pix, Pymnts
🏃♂️ The Rundown: Brazil’s instant payments system, Pix, is set to unlock a reported $30b opportunity with the launch of its new recurring payments feature. This upgrade allows users to set up automatic payments for subscriptions, utilities, and other recurring expenses, further expanding Pix’s dominance in the country’s payment ecosystem.
🥡 Takeaway: Pix has already reshaped Brazil’s payments landscape, but adding recurring payments further evolves the payment rail. This moves Pix deeper into territory traditionally dominated by cards, making it an even bigger threat to incumbent networks like Visa and Mastercard.
Recurring transactions are a cornerstone of modern payments infrastructure—once a customer sets one up, it’s sticky. If this takes off, expect more merchants and businesses to double down on Pix, potentially accelerating its adoption beyond one-off P2P and retail payments.
Bud launches financial transaction search engine, Finextra
🏃♂️ The Rundown: Open banking startup Bud has launched a financial transaction search engine aimed at helping banks and fintechs unlock deeper insights from transaction data. The new tool enables institutions to quickly search, categorise, and analyse transaction patterns using AI-powered enrichment, making financial data more actionable for personalisation, risk assessment, and lending decisions.
🥡 Takeaway: One of open banking’s biggest promises has always been making sense of messy transaction data, and Bud’s new search engine is another step toward realising that vision.
Banks sit on mountains of raw data, but extracting meaningful insights—especially in real-time—remains a major challenge. AI-driven tools like this could be a game-changer for sharpening underwriting, improving fraud detection, and delivering smarter customer experiences.
Given the broader AI push in fintech, it’ll be interesting to see if open banking players shift some focus away from A2A payments (which, let’s be honest, is still their biggest long-term play) toward more AI-powered functionality. I’d be surprised if others don’t follow suit.
Klarna considers cryptocurrency integration, The Payers
🏃♂️ The Rundown: Klarna is reportedly exploring cryptocurrency integration, potentially allowing users to buy, sell, or transact with digital assets directly through its platform. While details are scarce, this would mark Klarna’s first foray into crypto and align with broader fintech trends of embedding digital assets into payments and financial services.
🥡 Takeaway: Sebastian’s tweet sparked some interesting responses—unsurprisingly, lots of infra plays centred around stablecoins. Given Klarna’s banking licenses and focused strategy, I’d be shocked if they went too deep down the rabbit hole.
I’m pretty sure buying Solana in four easy payments is off the table (as is a Klarnacoin), but using stablecoins for settlement? That seems well within reach for the Swedish BNPL player. Stay tuned.
Reservoir Raises $14M to Unlock Token Trading On Every Chain, Reservoir Blog
🏃♂️ The Rundown: Reservoir, a liquidity aggregation protocol for NFTs, has raised $14m in a Series A round to expand its infrastructure for multi-chain token trading. The funding is led by Union Square Ventures with participation from Electric Capital, Coinbase Ventures and Polygon Ventures, amongst others.
🥡 Takeaway: NFT trading may not be at its peak 2021 hype, but the infrastructure play clearly has some notable investors excited. As is often said in crypto: most assets are non-fungible, so why not put them on-chain? That’s the bet Reservoir is making.
More specifically, Reservoir seems to be banking on a future where NFT liquidity isn’t fragmented across chains but seamlessly aggregated. This seems to continue the broader exchange everywhere trend in crypto, where liquidity moves beyond single marketplaces and into embedded experiences.
The big question: As the NFT market evolves (likely with fewer JPEGs and more RWAs), will cross-chain liquidity aggregation be the missing piece that finally makes NFTs go mainstream?
Superlogic raises $13.7M at a $200M valuation to help consumers use reward points toward cool ‘experiences’, Techcrunch
🏃♂️ The Rundown: Superlogic has raised a $13.7m round at a $200m valuation to help consumers redeem their reward points for unique experiences. The startup aims to make loyalty points more flexible, allowing users to convert them into tickets for concerts, sporting events, and other exclusive activities.
🥡 Takeaway: Loyalty programs have long struggled with redemption friction, and consumers increasingly prefer exclusive experiences over generic rewards. Superlogic is leaning into this shift, but its success will hinge on two things: securing the right merchant partnerships and achieving seamless point conversions.
This feels like a play in which a lot has to go right—both in curating desirable rewards and securing mass-market distribution—to get the flywheel spinning.
If they can crack distribution—by partnering with banks, airlines, and other major platforms—Superlogic could hit a cool sweet spot between culture and finance. But loyalty is a notoriously tricky space. While perks are great, points from major programs still dominate mindshare, and breaking through won’t be easy.
Rajarshi Gupta: Artificial Intelligence and Crypto at Coinbase, Generative Now
In this episode of Generative Now, Rushi Gupta, Head of Machine Learning at Coinbase, joins Anand Iyer to discuss how the company integrates AI across fraud prevention, customer experience, and internal operations. From AI-powered fraud detection to chatbots handling millions of customer queries, Gupta unpacks how Coinbase is leveraging AI to solve real problems at the company. He also shares his takes on the future of AI in crypto, including the role of autonomous agents and blockchain-based microtransactions.
Jack Henry: The $15B Giant Powering America’s Small Banks, Business Breakdowns
In this episode of Business Breakdowns, the team takes a deep dive into Jack Henry, “the gold standard in vertical software, " as Mark Leonard of Constellation Software once described them. The episode explores the company’s business model, competitive advantages, and long-term resilience—while also unpacking why its stock has plateaued in recent years despite decades of strong performance. If you’re a fintech infrastructure nerd, this one’s for you.
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Re: Consumer crypto payments: this is novel but what pain-point does it solve? The only entity incentivised is the exchange; it’s not sustainable in the long run. And to cross the chasm into the mainstream we need an external shock to change behaviour. e.g. COVID or de- monetisation.
Re: Pix recurring payments: right-on, this is extremely sticky especially for insurance, utility payments. If I was a bank product manager I would be concerned because I may see a dip in my card-renewal rates. The schemes do have tool-kits to keep these strategic merchants on card rails; rebates, lower interchange for merchant category codes, strategic deals. My question is whether the card schemes are positioned or interested to defend this use case?
Re: Bud on financial transaction data: “Banks sit on mountains of raw data”. Lots of opportunity here because it’s unstructured and misleading without context. Fundamentally, card transaction data is stripped to the bare bones to support real time processing at scale. Cloud-native core banking providers can build side cores to store the meta-data that can be used for other purposes like loyalty, expense claims, ESG reporting etc. The hinderance is that it’s (still) cumbersome & expensive to stand-up a side core. I believe we need to solve some of these fundamental issues before AI can have real utility on financial transactions/ workflows. Case in point, in SE Asia a lot of large merchants are mis-labeled because acquirers would list the owner of the business entity rather than the brand name. And for a large franchise biz like McDonalds that is owned by different franchises coupled with multiple acquirers…the card product manager doesn’t really know that Justin likes McDonalds. (Ramp is so-so well positioned to do some R&D on level 3 card data. Unfortunately, VC dollars doesn’t incentivise long-term sustainable differentiated advantages so it goes to Super Bowl commercials).
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