Issue #164: Amex Eats The Reservation Stack, Ripple Bets On Africa, And The Cheque Company Goes All-In On Payments
The week's biggest fintech moves, broken down and delivered to your inbox
š Welcome back to another edition of Fintech Radar!
If youāre new, here is a breakdown of what you can expect from each issue.
If you missed our recent editions, you can catch up here. Some previous issues you might want to check out if youāre new include āA Deep Dive Into The Cash App's Growth Machineā, āThe Future Of Payment Initiationā, and āCurrent: Doing It Differentlyā.
Your ad could be HERE!
Fintech Radar is a must-read for fintech founders, operators, and investors. If thatās your target audience, placing an ad right HERE is a cost-effective way to reach them.
If this sounds like a good fit for your brand, head to our sponsorship page for more details and to secure your advertising slot. Prices start at $100 per issue!
If you have any questions, reply to this email and ask away!
š³ American Express To Buy TheFork From Tripadvisor For $700M, American Express
š The Rundown: American Express agreed last week to buy TheFork, Tripadvisorās European restaurant-reservation platform, for $700M in cash. TheFork brings more than 50,000 restaurants across 11 European countries and joins Resy and Tock in Amexās dining stable.
š„” Takeaway: Amex isnāt really buying a reservations app. Itās buying the table. With Resy, Tock, and the in-venue payments outfit Rooam all folded in over the past few years, now run as a unit literally called Amex Global Dining, TheFork pushes the bookable network to roughly 75,000 venues and plants a flag across Europe. The logic is the same one Amex has run for years: the card is the least interesting part of the relationship. What keeps a premium cardholder paying the annual fee is access, the hard-to-get table on a Friday night, the pre-sale, the concierge that actually delivers. Owning the reservations layer means Amex controls that access directly rather than renting it.
Thereās a neat contrast with where Visa and Mastercard are spending their money. The networks are moving up the stack into fraud, identity, tokenisation, and agentic checkout, the plumbing of the transaction itself. Amex, with its closed loop, is moving the other way: up into the experience around the transaction. It owns the reservation rail outright now, and rents the rest of the access economy through partnerships, the AEG and AXS ticketing tie-up, the F1 and stadium deals. Either way it sees both sides of the spend, so a reservation isnāt just a booking, itās a signal it feeds back into rewards, merchant offers, and underwriting. Restaurants get demand, Amex gets data and stickiness, the cardholder gets the table.
The risk is integration. Resy and Tock both came with loyal restaurant bases that bristle at being folded into a card companyās marketing machine, and TheForkās European footprint adds a layer of local complexity. Whatās almost funny is that Amex, through its dining roll-up, has quietly become one of the largest restaurant-tech portfolios anywhere. And it all exists to defend the one thing that matters to Amex: a reason to keep the card at the top of the wallet.
š¦ Deluxe To Acquire Payments Processor Celero Commerce For $625M, Deluxe
š The Rundown: Deluxe, the 110-year-old company best known for printing cheques, agreed last week to buy Nashville-based SMB payments processor Celero Commerce for $625M in cash. Celero did more than $200M in revenue last year at a 28% adjusted EBITDA margin, putting the deal at roughly 7.4x trailing EBITDA. Deluxe is funding it with a $375M term loan and expects to close in the third quarter.
š„” Takeaway: Thereās a certain symmetry in the company that built its business on the cheque buying its way deeper into the rails that are killing the cheque. Deluxe has been managing this transition for years, and this deal more or less completes it. Once Celero closes, payments and data will make up around 57% of Deluxeās revenue, up from 31% in 2020. The cheque business funded the pivot away from the cheque business.
Itās also another tick in the SMB-acquiring consolidation column. The long tail of small-business payment processing has been getting rolled up for a decade now, and the logic keeps holding: distribution and merchant relationships are expensive to build and cheap to buy, and an incumbent with a balance sheet and an existing small-business base can bolt on a processor and cross-sell immediately. At 7.4x EBITDA, Deluxe isnāt paying a growth-tech multiple. Itās paying a āwe need to still be relevant in five yearsā multiple.
What makes business banking different from the consumer side is that very little of it runs on brand love. Deluxeās small-business customers donāt need to feel anything about the change (or not much). Put a better-priced, better-integrated product in front of them and theyāll switch, because the calculation is cost and outcome, not loyalty. Thatās the quiet advantage legacy firms still have: a book of business that moves on ROI, and the cash to go buy the product that improves it. They just have to make sure the ROI is actually there, which is easier said than done.
š Ripple Takes A Strategic Stake In Flutterwave At A $3.25B Valuation, TechCrunch
š The Rundown: Flutterwave, Africaās most valuable fintech, closed a Series E last week that values it at around $3.25B, with Ripple coming in as a strategic equity investor. The round size and the size of Rippleās stake werenāt disclosed. As part of the deal, Flutterwave will plug Rippleās RLUSD stablecoin and the XRP Ledger into its cross-border payments rails.
š„” Takeaway: Strip away the valuation headline and the interesting part is whoās on the cap table. Ripple taking equity is a distribution play. Flutterwave moves money across some of the hardest corridors in the world and, after years of grinding through regulators, holds one of the deepest licence stacks of any non-bank on the continent, including a Nigerian banking licence earned this year. Ripple has the stablecoin infrastructure and not much African distribution. You can see the shape of the trade.
It also looks like another step towards stablecoins becoming a real settlement layer for emerging-market payments rather than a pilot. The logic is mundane: moving dollars between Lagos, Nairobi, and SĆ£o Paulo is slow, expensive, and full of trapped liquidity, and a stablecoin rail collapses the settlement leg. Flutterwave isnāt doing this because crypto is interesting. Itās doing it because itās a cheaper pipe.
What Iād watch is the licence stack, not the token. Plenty of players can route a payment through a stablecoin; very few have spent the years and legal fees to earn direct access to local rails and central banks across dozens of African markets, which is no small feat. Thatās the part you canāt vibe-code. As I like to say, the magic in cross-border money movement is in the off-ramp.
š¦ Germany Refuses To Back UniCreditās ~ā¬39B Bid For Commerzbank, The Wall Street Journal
š The Rundown: The German government, which owns close to 13% of Commerzbank, formally refused last week to tender its shares into UniCreditās roughly ā¬39B (about $45B) takeover offer, calling the approach aggressive and the premium too low. UniCredit says it has already crossed the 30% threshold once derivatives are counted. A supplementary acceptance window now runs into early July, and Frankfurt prosecutors have opened a preliminary market-manipulation inquiry.
š„” Takeaway: The real story is that banking is still treated as a strategic national asset in a way almost nothing else in finance is. Berlin doesnāt want a Milan-headquartered bank owning one of its two big commercial lenders, so the government is sitting on its 13% stake and saying so out loud, premium be damned. A card network can buy a reservations platform and a cheque company can buy a processor in the same week without a politician blinking. Move to consolidate a systemic bank across a national border and the state shows up.
Europe has spent fifteen years talking about a banking union and cross-border champions that can rival the American giants, but the moment a real combination gets close, national interest reasserts itself. Payments are plumbing you can let anyone own. A big domestic bank is sovereignty, and governments guard it accordingly. This is a case in point.
š Revolut Secures Full UAE Payment Licences, Clearing It To Launch In The Middle East, Bloomberg
š The Rundown: Revolut secured full Stored Value Facilities and Retail Payment Services licences from the Central Bank of the UAE last week, upgrading the in-principle approval it won in 2025 and clearing it to launch in the Emirates. The licences cover multi-currency accounts, cards, and local and cross-border transfers, but not deposits, lending, or trading. Revolut says it will build out local operations before going live.
š„” Takeaway: The UAE is one of the most hotly contested fintech markets going, and itās easy to see why Revolut wants in. Dubai and Abu Dhabi have spent years pulling in wealthy expats and fund managers, and the country sits on one of the largest outbound remittance flows on the planet, with millions of workers sending money home to India, Pakistan, and the Philippines. That is FX and cross-border volume, the part of the business Revolut runs better than almost anyone.
Itās a payments licence, not a banking one, so Revolut canāt take deposits or lend there yet. That matters less than it sounds: the wedge into a new market is almost always the multi-currency account and the cheap transfer, with deposits and credit layered on once the relationship exists. Revolut has run this playbook market by market.
The harder part is that the UAE isnāt greenfield. Local players and well-funded regional challengers already have the distribution and the regulatory relationships, and the remittance corridors are served by incumbents competing hard on price. Winning the expat who already has a Revolut account from London is the easy bit. Becoming the primary account for someone who lives and earns in Dubai is the real test, and thatās a trust and habit problem more than a licensing one. But itās one theyāve figured out before.
š° Festina Finance Raises ā¬25M To Modernise Pension And Insurance Core Systems, FinTech Futures
š The Rundown: Festina Finance, a Copenhagen-based provider of core administration and financial-planning software for pension funds, life insurers, and banks, announced a ā¬25M+ growth investment led by Birchway Capital, valuing the company at around ā¬200M.
š„” Takeaway: Core systems for pensions and life insurance are some of the least glamorous software in financial services, and some of the stickiest. These are decades-old platforms that insurers and pension funds are terrified to touch, because a migration gone wrong means mispriced policies and a regulator on the phone. That fear is the opportunity: it keeps the incumbents slow, and it makes a clean, cloud-native replacement genuinely valuable to anyone willing to do the unglamorous work of ripping out a mainframe. And thatās obviously the hard part.
Itās also a reminder that not all of fintech is consumer apps and stablecoin rails. A lot of the durable value sits in the boring middle (stitching the financial fabric, as I like to call it), the policy administration, the actuarial engines, the core ledgers the whole industry runs on. Festina is going after a real gap in the European pension space and the kind of customer that signs a ten-year contract and doesnāt churn.
š° Interchecks Raises $50M Series C For Instant Payments, PR Newswire
š The Rundown: Interchecks, a Brooklyn-based instant-payments infrastructure company serving sportsbooks, lenders, and fintechs, announced a $50M Series C led by Bettor Capital.
š„” Takeaway: When one of your lead investors is literally called Bettor Capital, you know where Interchecks cut its teeth. It moves money in and out for sportsbooks like DraftKings and FanDuel, and the same rails now run payouts for lenders, earned-wage-access apps, and fintechs like Credit Karma Money. The platform is two-sided: instant payouts on the way out, pay-by-bank funding on the way in.
The funding side is the underrated half, and gaming shows why. Cards are a bad fit for the category, between gambling declines, expensive interchange, and chargebacks, so pay-by-bank routes around all of it by pulling straight from the customerās bank account. Deposits that would have failed go through, costs drop, and in a business where a declined deposit is a lost bet and often a lost customer, thatās worth real money. Itās the same trick in lending, earned-wage access, and crypto funding: deposit-and-payout plumbing tuned for verticals the card networks find too hard, which is exactly what keeps the competition out.
š§ From Fannie Maeās First PM To Building At Pathward, Fintech Layer Cake (June 18)
Reggie Young talks to Pathwardās Suhas Reddy about building product in the most heavily regulated corners of financial services, from his early days as a product manager at Fannie Mae through to life at a sponsor bank. A good one if you care about how product actually gets shipped when compliance is in the room. Well worth a listen.
š§ A Deep Dive On Vertical Fintech With Increase And Tekion, Fintech One-On-One (June 18)
Peter Renton digs into vertical fintech with Matt Hennessy of Increase and Jamie Fox of Tekion, on why so much of the interesting stuff now gets built deep into a single industry rather than sold horizontally to everyone. Add this one to your playlist.
ā¤ļø Show Some Love For FR
š§Ā Feel free to reach out if you want to connect. I'mĀ @alantsen on Twitter, or you can D.M. me directly by clicking the button below ā“
Ps.Ā If you like what I'm doing with FR, please share it on your social disinformation network of choice. I'd also appreciate it if you forwarded this newsletter to a friend who might enjoy it.
š What did you think of this week's issue of FR?
I Love It!Ā āĀ I Like ItĀ āĀ Not BadĀ āĀ I Donāt Like ItĀ ā Itās Awful