Mercury national bank charter 🏦, Visa + Aldar voice agentic payment 💲, State of Fintech 2026 🔮

Business banking startup Mercury has applied for a national bank charter, a move that would let it offer core banking services ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR Together With TLDR Fintech 2025-12-22 Payment programs that scale. Customer experiences that inspire. (Sponsor) Don't sacrifice one for the other.  Choose a payments provider who can deliver on both. Choose Marqeta.  📱 News & Trends Fintech Firm Mercury Applies for National Bank Charter (5 minute read) Business banking startup Mercury has applied for a national bank charter, a move that would let it offer core banking services directly rather than relying on sponsor banks. The company has submitted applications to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., positioning itself to operate like a traditional lender while retaining software-driven revenue streams. If approved, Mercury plans to expand into lending and believes the charter would remove a lingering trust hurdle as fintech regulation loosens under the current administration. Visa and Aldar complete end-to-end voice-enabled agentic payment (5 minute read) Visa and Aldar today announced a strategic collaboration that marks the first live implementation of Visa Intelligent Commerce in the region, introducing end-to-end, voice-enabled agentic payment experiences. Blackstone holds early talks with Revolut on wealth partnership (2 minute read) Blackstone is exploring a potential partnership that would make its private-market funds available through Revolut's emerging private-banking platform. The talks are still preliminary, but they signal Revolut's push upmarket as it hires bankers and private capital specialists to serve high-net-worth clients. If finalized, the tie-up would underscore how firms led by executives like Jon Gray are increasingly using fintech distribution to reach wealthy and retail investors, following similar moves by players such as Trade Republic, Apollo, and Robinhood. 🚀 Deep Dives & Reports State of Fintech 2026: The Fintech Compounders (10 minute read) What a year 2025 has been. The GENIUS Act passed, Agentic Commerce became a thing, and prediction markets exploded onto the scene. Banks had another record year, but a handful of neobanks are now compounding and breathing down their neck. Against all of this, consumers in the West are still spending but quietly suffering from a cost-of-living crisis and the rise of financial nihilism. BNPL use linked to poorer mental health, study finds (2 minute read) A Johns Hopkins University study found that adults in the US who report symptoms of depression, anxiety, or PTSD were significantly more likely to use buy now, pay later loans, raising concerns that BNPL may be associated with impaired financial decision-making among people with mental health challenges. How banks learned to stop worrying and love stablecoins (4 minute read) Properly regulated stablecoins complement rather than threaten banks by increasing competition, improving efficiency in payments and settlement, and ultimately strengthening the traditional banking system instead of draining deposits. Fireside chat with Layer on rebuilding SMB accounting through vertical SaaS (10 minute read) Embedded, AI-native accounting inside vertical SaaS platforms can replace QuickBooks by owning distribution, automating bookkeeping end to end, and turning platforms like POS and invoicing systems into the financial home for small businesses. 💻 Launches & Products Taking months to implement FP&A tools should be illegal…(Sponsor) There is a new rising star that is setting the bar for what "time-to-value" should be for FP&A  software. Hint, it's measured in hours, not months. Aleph is an AI-native FP&A platform that seamlessly connects your cross-system data, spreadsheets, and strategy at the speed of startups with the power to support enterprises. TLDR readers can try out Aleph right now for free. SoFi launches the first bank-issued stablecoin for enterprise payments (2 minute read) SoFiUSD is a US dollar stablecoin issued by its FDIC-insured national bank and backed 1:1 by cash at the Federal Reserve. It offers faster, lower-cost settlement and white-labeled stablecoin infrastructure for banks, fintechs, and enterprises. Klarna Launches 'Agentic Product Protocol' to Make 100m Products Readable by AI (3 minute read) Klarna has introduced an open standard that structures product data so AI-powered shopping agents can discover, compare, and recommend items with live pricing and availability. The new protocol gives AI systems access to over 100 million products and hundreds of millions of price points across multiple markets, while letting merchants integrate once using existing catalog formats like Shopify, Google Merchant, or CSV feeds. The move positions Klarna as core infrastructure for agent-driven commerce, betting that conversational AI will increasingly replace traditional search and ads as the front door to online shopping. 🎁 Miscellaneous Digital assets have vanished from government "vulnerability" list, officially ending a three-year regulatory chokehold on US banks (5 minute read) The Financial Stability Oversight Council quietly removed digital assets from its list of systemic financial vulnerabilities in its 2025 annual report, signaling a decisive shift away from treating crypto as a contagion risk. Instead, digital assets are now framed as a market development to monitor, reflecting rising institutional participation through spot ETFs, tokenization, and regulated stablecoins. Monzo to acquire digital mortgage broker Habito (3 minute read) Monzo says the acquisition of Habito will turn its app into a fully end-to-end mortgage broking experience, moving beyond basic tracking into advice and applications. Monzo already supports more than 450,000 users through its Homeownership feature, which connects any mortgage, shows live balances and estimated home values, and surfaces better deals. Mesa shuts down credit card that rewarded cardholders for paying their mortgages (3 minute read) Fintech startup Mesa has abruptly closed its Homeowners Card, ending a short-lived experiment that let users earn points on mortgage payments and everyday home-related spending. Launched in late 2024 with $9.2 million in funding, the product aimed to reframe credit card rewards around homeownership rather than travel or dining, but cardholders began reporting widespread transaction declines before accounts were fully shut down. The closure highlights how difficult it remains to sustainably align credit rewards with large, low-margin payments like mortgages, even as competitors like Bilt prepare to enter the space. ⚡ Quick Links Inside the VC roll-up craze reshaping Silicon Valley (6 minute read) Venture firms from General Catalyst to Thrive and Lightspeed are borrowing private equity playbooks to roll up traditional service businesses and remake them with AI, betting that automation-driven efficiency can unlock outsized returns despite PE-like risk profiles. Interactive Brokers Applies for National Trust Bank Charter (1 minute read) More than 30 companies have filed applications to become banks in the US this year, highlighting a broader push by fintechs and financial platforms to gain tighter control over regulated infrastructure. Informed.IQ raises $63m for AI-powered fraud prevention and loan verification (2 minute read) Informed.IQ company's AI agents analyze billions of lending data points to rapidly confirm borrower information. Love TLDR? Tell your friends and get rewards! Share your referral link below with friends to get free TLDR swag! https://sparklp.co/328608df/12 Track your referrals here. Want to advertise in TLDR? 📰 If your company is interested in reaching an audience of fintech professionals and decision makers, you may want to advertise with us. Want to work at TLDR? 💼 Apply here, create your own role or send a friend's resume to jobs@tldr.tech and get $1k if we hire them! TLDR is one of Inc.'s Best Bootstrapped businesses of 2025. If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email! Thanks for reading, Rachita Kumar, Matt Cheung & Gabriel Sundaram Manage your subscriptions to our other newsletters on tech, startups, and programming. 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