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<div style="display: none; max-height: 0px; overflow: hidden;">Venture investment into fintech rebounded in 2025 after a four-year slump, driven largely by a surge of capital flowing into prediction markets </div>
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<h1><strong>TLDR Fintech <span id="date">2026-01-05</span></strong></h1>
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<strong>Polymarket and Kalshi hit it big on 2025 fintech funding surge (5 minute read)</strong>
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Venture investment into fintech rebounded in 2025 after a four-year slump, driven largely by a surge of capital flowing into prediction markets amid growing interest in regulated online wagering. Polymarket and Kalshi alone raised $3.7 billion, securing two of the largest US fintech rounds of the year and signaling a sharp concentration of funding among perceived category leaders. The trend reflects a broader shift in venture behavior, with investors favoring scaled winners like Ramp as fintech funding remains far below its 2021 peak despite improving regulatory tailwinds.
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<strong>How bots, banking, and stablecoins will dominate fintech in 2026 (5 minute read)</strong>
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Fintech leaders expect 2026 to mark a shift as more companies pursue bank charters, expand stablecoin-based payments, and deploy AI agents that can complete purchases on consumers' behalf. With a more permissive regulatory backdrop in the US, firms like Coinbase, Stripe, Mercury, Visa, and Mastercard are positioning for a future where fintechs operate closer to the core banking system while stablecoins and agentic commerce move into the mainstream.
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<strong>Cathie Wood's ARK fintech ETF gains 30% in 2025 by leaning into AI (4 minute read)</strong>
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Cathie Wood's ARK Blockchain & Fintech Innovation ETF returned about 29% in 2025 by broadening its definition of fintech and adding AI-linked stocks such as Palantir and Roku, while traditional payments and crypto names lagged. The strategy helped ARK outperform rival fintech ETFs during a down year for payments and digital assets, though investor flows into the fund remained largely flat despite the strong performance.
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<h1><strong>Deep Dives & Reports</strong></h1>
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<strong>Fintech grows up: The great race to become a bank (7 minute read)</strong>
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Fintech's surge in OCC charter applications marks a coming-of-age moment as companies like Mercury, Stripe, and Circle move from sponsor-bank dependency to owning the rails for better economics, control, and legitimacy. At the same time, others like Ramp, Brex, and Navan are opting out, betting that the real value sits in software and workflow layers, creating a sharp split between vertically integrated financial institutions and asset-light “software wrappers” that risk turning banks into commoditized pipes.
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<strong>QED investors shares AI and fintech outlook for 2026 (4 minute read)</strong>
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QED Investors sees 2026 as a turning point where AI shifts from experimentation to execution across fintech, with dynamic credit scoring, workflow automation, and disciplined growth moving to the forefront. The firm expects alternative data and continuously updated underwriting models to expand access to credit, while warning that early AI traction is often mistaken for defensible advantage as competition rapidly compresses margins. Looking ahead, QED believes valuations will normalize as AI unit economics become clearer, rewarding companies that own deep workflows, integrations, and trust rather than those relying on “AI magic” alone.
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<strong>Six fintech startup predictions for 2026 (6 minute read)</strong>
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Alex Lazarow argues that fintech's next phase will be defined less by hype and faster scaling, and more by depth, discipline, and hard trade-offs. He predicts slower global expansion but faster copycat replication, rising AI-driven capital efficiency that reshapes early-stage funding norms, and an overdue reckoning as AI churn exposes fragile revenue models and inflated valuations. Looking ahead to 2026, winners are likely to be companies that prioritize local execution, valuation restraint, M&A-led growth, and hybrid tech-plus-services models over noisy growth-at-all-costs strategies.
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<strong>Open standards will unlock agentic AI's next breakthrough in fintech (7 minute read)</strong>
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Agentic AI has begun reshaping fintech operations, but the industry's fragmentation with divergent APIs and data formats risks locking in siloed solutions unless stakeholders adopt open standards that let AI agents work across systems. The formation of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) and growing protocols like the Model Context Protocol (MCP) are early steps toward interoperability that could unlock richer cross-platform workflows and more meaningful automation. With shared schemas and governance frameworks, next-generation agentic systems could orchestrate tasks across payroll, banking, payments, and forecasting, leveling the playing field for smaller fintechs and enabling innovation beyond proprietary stacks.
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<h1><strong>Launches & Products</strong></h1>
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<strong>CARF activates global crypto tax reporting across 48 countries (3 minute read)</strong>
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As of January 1, the OECD's Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF) requires crypto service providers to report user transaction data annually, bringing crypto under a coordinated global tax transparency regime. Starting in 2027, participating jurisdictions will automatically exchange this data cross-border, significantly reducing the ability to hide assets in crypto and aligning digital assets with traditional financial reporting standards.
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<a href="https://tracking.tldrnewsletter.com/CL0/https:%2F%2Fwww.paymentsdive.com%2Fnews%2Ffintech-mercury-apply-occ-national-bank-charter-fdic-fed-jon-auxier-sofi%2F808491%2F%3Futm_source=tldrfintech/1/0100019b8e7b994f-498f8c4d-987d-4859-adeb-26aee56689b7-000000/9pKBeFiizBW7BfBHNiCMzRZKzWaAYN2yjt544fdzuIw=438">
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<strong>Mercury applies for OCC bank charter as fintech pushes deeper into regulated banking (3 minute read)</strong>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;">
Mercury has applied for a national bank charter with the OCC and appointed former SoFi Bank CFO Jon Auxier as CEO of the proposed bank, signaling a major step toward becoming a fully regulated financial institution. If approved, the charter would allow Mercury to hold deposits directly, operate as an FDIC-insured bank, and expand product innovation while reducing reliance on partner banks.
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<div style="text-align: center;"><strong><h1>Miscellaneous</h1></strong></div>
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<strong>AI will demolish 200,000 jobs according to expert (3 minute read)</strong>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;">
Morgan Stanley estimates that the adoption of artificial intelligence could eliminate about 200,000 banking jobs across the European Union by 2030, especially in back-office, middle-office, compliance, and risk roles, highlighting AI's potential to reshape work in established sectors. While some leaders stress that AI will also create new opportunities and support work-life improvements like shorter work weeks, the looming cuts underscore broader debates over automation's dual impact on job displacement and economic productivity.
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<strong>Sovereign funds push into tech as assets swell to $15 Trillion (3 minute read)</strong>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;">
Global sovereign wealth funds grew assets to a record $15 trillion in 2025 as strong markets and a heavier push into technology and AI boosted returns. Funds collectively invested $66 billion into AI and digital initiatives. The US emerged as the top destination for state-backed capital, drawing $131.8 billion, underscoring how sovereign investors are becoming increasingly influential backers of American tech and innovation ecosystems.
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<strong>The biggest fintech trends of 2025 (8 minute read)</strong>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;">
With the advantage of hindsight, the financial landscape of 2025 can be characterised by the enforcement of transformative payment regulations, the rise in support for stablecoins, and the moment the rubber hit the road for artificial intelligence.
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<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 36px;">⚡</span></div></div>
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<h1><strong>Quick Links</strong></h1>
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<a href="https://tracking.tldrnewsletter.com/CL0/https:%2F%2Fwww.linkedin.com%2Fposts%2Fsytaylor_america-stopped-making-banks-for-15-years-activity-7413226760596516864-9fvP%2F%3Futm_source=tldrfintech/1/0100019b8e7b994f-498f8c4d-987d-4859-adeb-26aee56689b7-000000/A7DHnqJ_ZP3AHmG-q8uGaXUvKDg6LK7M5pEBwmubzGs=438">
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<strong>America stopped making banks for 15 years, that just changed (2 minute read)</strong>
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For nearly 15 years, the US effectively stopped creating new banks - now fintechs are rushing back to bank charters.
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<strong>AI's trillion-dollar opportunity: Context graphs (5 minute read)</strong>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;">
AI agents won't replace systems of record but will create a new, more valuable category by capturing decision traces, the exceptions, approvals, and precedents that live outside databases today.
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<strong>Crypto is dead, and that's why it finally wins (8 minute read)</strong>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;">
Blockchains, stablecoins, and on-chain rails will succeed precisely by becoming invisible infrastructure behind real products in payments, markets, and commerce.
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<strong>When Payments Became Infrastructure: The Irreversible Shift of 2025 (8 minute read)</strong>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;">
By the end of 2025, what changed was not the availability of technology but the cost of absence.
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