Issue #166: 140 Companies Launch A Stablecoin To Take On Tether, Plaid Weighs An IPO, And Nubank Buys A Bank To Become One

The week's biggest fintech moves, broken down and delivered to your inbox

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🪙 A 140-Company Consortium Launches Open USD To Take On Tether And Circle, Reuters

🏃 The Rundown: A consortium of more than 140 businesses, including Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock, Coinbase, BNY, Google, Shopify, and Western Union, launched a group called Open Standard last week to issue a dollar-pegged stablecoin, Open USD (OUSD), going live later this year. It’s led on an interim basis by Bridge co-founder Zach Abrams. Members can mint and redeem OUSD with no fees and no volume caps, and reserve earnings are shared among the partners after a management fee. Stripe said OUSD will become the default stablecoin across its platform.

🥡 Takeaway: The real driver here is that the companies actually using stablecoins, or planning to, have grown wary of, and in some cases plainly tired of, depending on Circle and Tether to do it. The two issuers have run a near-duopoly on dollar stablecoins, and they keep the prize for themselves: the yield on the reserves backing the coins, billions in T-bill interest, sits with the issuer, not the businesses generating the volume. For a Stripe or a Shopify moving serious money, that’s a lot of economics flowing to a middleman they don’t control. OUSD is those companies deciding to cut the middleman out and own the rail themselves, free to mint and redeem, no volume caps, and the reserve income shared back with the members instead of pooling at the top.

A quick reminder: Stripe bought Bridge for over a billion dollars in 2024, now has its co-founder in the interim driving seat, and made OUSD its default, which hands the coin a distribution base most stablecoin launches never get near. It also tells you where the card networks have landed. Having spent this year moving up the stack into settlement and tokenised deposits as core card growth flattens, Visa and Mastercard would rather help govern a shared standard than watch someone else own the layer running underneath them. To be fair, being part of a consortium is probably more in their wheelhouse.

Also, it’s a consortium, and consortiums tend to be unstable equilibria. A hundred and forty companies will cooperate happily while Circle and Tether are the “common enemy”, but the incentives that align them now are the same ones that pull them apart once the thing has scale: whose governance, whose economics, and whose commercial priorities win. The obvious precedent is Libra, the last time this many heavyweights lined up behind a stablecoin, and Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and PayPal all walked within a year once the politics turned. Several of them are back at the table here. The consortium game is hard, and they rarely stay consortiums for long. Lest we forget, Visa and Mastercard themselves started as bank-owned cooperatives before spinning out into independent companies, and these arrangements tend to resolve one way or another, either by fragmenting or by one party taking control. Whether OUSD becomes a genuine third pole or a transitional step on the way to something more concentrated will likely come down to how long it can hold its shape.

💳 Activist Investor Forager Raises Its Hostile Bid For Repay To $1.4B, Payments Dive

🏃 The Rundown: Forager Capital Management, the largest shareholder in US payments processor Repay Holdings (Nasdaq: RPAY), made an unsolicited all-cash offer last week to take the company private at $5.25 a share, valuing it at around $1.4B. Repay said it would review the proposal with its advisers.

🥡 Takeaway: The more interesting question is why Repay is worth buying in the first place. It doesn’t chase the whole payments market. It sits inside specific verticals, embedding card and ACH payments into the software that lenders, credit unions, healthcare providers, and B2B businesses already run on. The money it moves is the unglamorous, non-discretionary kind: loan repayments, supplier invoices, and healthcare bills. That’s exactly the sort of embedded, recurring flow that’s hard to rip out once it’s wired into a vertical’s systems, and it’s the reason an acquirer would want it.

Two things turn that into acquisition appeal. First, these verticals are still mid-migration from cheque and ACH to cards and instant rails, so the volume Repay earns on keeps growing structurally even as headline card growth in retail flattens. Loan repayments and B2B accounts payable are among the last big money flows to digitise, and owning the rails into them is a long runway. Second, Repay has the vertical relationships and the embedded distribution but not the scale to compete on cost with a Fiserv or a Global Payments, and scale is most of the game in processing. A valuable position that’s too small to fully exploit is precisely what makes a company a bolt-on, worth far more inside a bigger processor’s network, or rolled up by private capital, than as a standalone the public market has quietly stopped paying attention to.

🏦 Plaid Is Weighing A US IPO, Bloomberg

🏃 The Rundown: Plaid, the account-connectivity network that plugs thousands of fintech apps into users’ bank accounts, has held early talks with banks about a US IPO, Bloomberg reported last week. No timeline, size, or price range has been set, and the discussions were described as preliminary.

🥡 Takeaway: Plaid is the plumbing a huge slice of consumer fintech quietly runs on, the connection between your budgeting app, your neobank, or your brokerage and the account where your money actually sits. An IPO has been speculated about for years, and “held preliminary discussions” is a long way from a filed S-1, so I wouldn’t read a date into it. But the conversation happening at all is worth noting.

Plaid raised at $13.4B in 2021, walked away from a $5.3B Visa acquisition after the DOJ sued to block it, and has spent the years since pushing beyond raw account linking into identity, fraud, and payments. What makes a listing interesting now is what that data layer enables: the shift I’ve written about where you no longer build a personal finance product from scratch, you pipe account data into a model and get a personalised view on the fly. Put simply, it’s AI, and Plaid sits underneath that whole movement on the financial data side in the US. A public Plaid would be the clearest signal the market has ever had on what open banking is actually worth, if it lists at all rather than letting the rumour do its work for another year.

🚀 Nubank Bids For A Small Brazilian Bank To Finally Land Its Own Licence, Rio Times

🏃 The Rundown: Nubank, Latin America’s largest digital bank, filed a binding offer last week to buy Banco Caixa Geral Brasil, the small Brazilian subsidiary of Portugal’s state-owned Caixa Geral de Depósitos, in a deal worth roughly €42M including assumed debt. Nubank is one of four finalists for the asset. The prize is the target’s full Brazilian banking licence, which Nubank still operates without.

🥡 Takeaway: Nubank has well over 100 million customers and still doesn’t hold a full Brazilian banking licence, running instead on a narrower financial-institution permit and a set of partnerships. Buying a small, sleepy bank for its charter is the fastest way to close that gap. This is licence-by-acquisition, the move that keeps showing up in emerging markets: the hard part of fintech was never the app, it’s direct access to the regulated pipes, and the cleanest route to a licence is often buying an institution that already holds one rather than waiting years for a regulator to grant you a fresh one.

A full licence would let Nubank do things its current structure makes awkward, hold client money directly, broaden its lending, and lean less on partner banks that take a margin along the way. The €42M price is a rounding error at Nubank’s size and approvals could drag into next year, but the logic makes sense. When the licence is the bottleneck, you buy the licence.

📈 Webull Buys Thailand’s Pi Securities To Push Into Southeast Asia, PR Newswire

🏃 The Rundown: Webull (Nasdaq: BULL), the US-listed retail trading platform, agreed last week to buy Pi Securities, a 50-year-old Thai brokerage, from Country Group Holdings in a deal valuing Pi at around US$100M. The acquisition is subject to regulatory and shareholder approvals.

🥡 Takeaway: Two emerging-market acquisitions in one week, both about buying a licensed local foothold rather than building one. Where Nubank wants a Brazilian charter, Webull wants a way into Southeast Asian retail trading, and a half-century-old Thai brokerage comes with the local licence, the market access, and a client base you simply can’t replicate by launching an app and waiting.

For the uninitiated, Thailand has a young, mobile-first, increasingly investing population, and Webull’s play is to bring its low-cost trading tech into markets where the local incumbents haven’t modernised. Sound familiar?

The catch with this kind of expansion is that retail brokerage is intensely local. Regulation, listed products, language, and payment rails all differ market to market, and buying your way in doesn’t automatically make you good at operating there. Webull has been aggressive about geographic expansion since going public (in comparison to, say, Robinhood, which has taken a more measured approach), and Thailand extends a pattern of planting flags across Asia-Pacific through acquisition. Now let’s see if this compounds into a durable regional platform.

💰 Addi Raises $85M Series D For Consumer Credit In Colombia, BusinessWire

🏃 The Rundown: Addi, a Colombian consumer-credit and shopping app, announced an $85M all-equity Series D last week, led by Citius and BTG Pactual, with GIC and Monashees participating. The valuation was not disclosed.

🥡 Takeaway: Addi started as a buy-now-pay-later provider for Colombian online shoppers and has widened into a broader consumer financial app, credit, payments, and a shopping surface that keeps it in front of customers between purchases. The opportunity for modern financial services in the region is now clear enough that even the incumbents want in. One of the backers here is BTG Pactual, a traditional investment bank, not the sort of name that usually funds a consumer challenger. When the establishment starts writing these cheques, you know fintech has gone mainstream in a market. Whether that’s ultimately good for the challengers or the start of the incumbents moving to co-opt it is the part that remains to be seen. If you’re a long-time reader of FR, you know what I think of “strategic investors”.

Colombia has a large, under-banked, increasingly online population and far less fintech saturation than Brazil, where Nubank and its rivals have already fought most of the land war. Addi is betting the same consumer-credit playbook has a market’s worth of room left to run, and $85M of fresh funding might just be the jet fuel it needs to go to the next level.

💰 Nebex Raises $30M To Build Financial Infrastructure For The Space Economy, BusinessWire

🏃 The Rundown: Nebex, a New York startup building market infrastructure for the space economy, announced a $30M seed round last week led by GV, with a string of venture funds participating. Alongside the raise it disclosed a new banking relationship with J.P. Morgan. The valuation was not disclosed.

🥡 Takeaway: The pitch is interesting. Nebex wants to be the plumbing for the space economy, an exchange layer (Nebra Exchange) that connects space companies to the sovereign buyers and capital, and automates the cross-border payments and contracts between manufacturers and foreign governments. Put simply, it’s trying to make money move through the space industry the way it moves through every other market. Translation: it’s a verticalised payments business for the space industry, built by people who have vertical domain expertise.

The payments here are large, much like plenty of other B2B segments, big, lumpy, low-frequency flows rather than the high-volume streams most payments infrastructure is built for. The bet is simple: if the space economy really takes off (pardon the pun), the company that owns the rails for settling and financing those deals becomes the Stripe of the segment. It’s a genuinely fascinating vertical payments business, and $30M from GV buys a decent run at finding out whether the market grows into it.

🎧 Cross River’s Chief AI Officer On Agentic Commerce, Fintech Business Podcast (July 3)

Jason Mikula interviews Cross River’s Chief Data and AI Officer, Pravesh Rijal, on the bank’s expanded card-issuing partnership with Stripe for agentic commerce, and how you actually manage the risk of letting AI agents transact. A useful look at the plumbing and the controls behind letting software spend money on a customer’s behalf. Well worth a listen.

🎧 Why Full Autonomy Beats Co-Pilots For AI In Banking, Fintech One-on-One (July 2)

Peter Renton talks to Gradient Labs CEO Dimitri Masin, who ran data science and AI at Monzo before starting the company, on why he thinks fully autonomous agents beat human-in-the-loop co-pilots for customer operations in regulated financial services. Masin makes a sharper case than most for taking the human out of the loop entirely. Add this one to your playlist.

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