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Hey Fintech Nerds 👋

Greetings from Morocco 🇲🇦. I’ve had a restful week in the sun with family. Glad to be back at it.

It seems in my absence all of the Fintech happened, Capital One + Discover is officially a go 👀, Revolut posted $4.1bn of revenue (a jump of $1.6bn) with $1bn of net profit. crypto companies want to be banks, and Circle wants to be SWIFT 👀.

And not to be outdone, the son of the commerce secretary is launching a Bitcoin fund via a SPAC, with SoftBank and Tether. If that doesn’t win high-risk bingo, it’s at least a line.

In all of this noise, the EU is “going to launch a Visa competitor” (which made me 📣 Rant this week), and is worried stablecoins cause systemic risk (feels like next weeks).

Don’t forget you can support this newsletter by checking out the Tokenized Podcast, or getting yourself to our event, Fintech NerdCon on the 19th and 20th November.

Here's this week's Brainfood in summary

📣 Rant: Europe doesn’t need a card scheme; it needs dynamism.

💸 4 Fintech Companies:

1. Cardamon - Compliance and Regulatory Mapping AI

2. Figg Wealth - The AI Wealth Dashboard - I tested it (UK)

3. Sats Terminal - The Bitcoin native DeFi aggregator

4. Wealthyhood - Robinhood with more automations (EU)

👀 Things to Know:

1. Circle launches a SWIFT competitor

2. Capital One/Discover is a go.

📚 Good Read: Fixing stablecoins: A central bank for stablecoins.

Weekly Rant 📣

It’s time for a new approach to EU Fintech Innovation

Europe doesn't need a government-made Visa competitor. It already has something better: a generation of Fintech companies that are quietly ready to take on their American counterparts, with global ambitions.

If you missed the news, apparently, the EU will launch a competitor to Visa and Mastercard to reduce its reliance on the US-based card networks. Europe has tried and failed at this multiple times. Instead of top-down, government driven mandates, Europe needs to embrace and lean into its burgeoning private sector dynamism. 

European dynamism is the untold story of 2025. European Fintech is back. 

Here’s the pattern, the pivot, and the playbook.

• The Pattern – 20 years of top‑down coordinated efforts to build a public alternative to Visa / Mastercard.

• The Pivot – Draghi & von der Leyen lighting a bonfire for simplification of regulation.

• The Playbook – Fintechs proving Europe’s not just back; it’s profitable.

The opportunity and timing is ripe for Europe’s comeback. Led by public/private partnership. Less deregulation, more simplification. 

Europe's Latest Grasp for a Card Network

This keeps happening.

The comments from Christine Lagarde that Europe will launch a competitor to Visa and Mastercard to reduce its reliance on the US-based card networks is the latest in a string of such announcements.

This story appears once every 5 years or so when the EU feels like the US is threatening its interests. And while it makes headlines, it's also doomed to failure. The bureaucrats who brought you GDPR, PSD2, and SEPA can enforce paperwork but struggle to deliver tangible outcomes.

So no, the Top-Down European policy-led approach to financial services infrastructure won't threaten Visa, Mastercard or even Alipay any time soon.

Europe once had its own Visa and Mastercard competitor

Ever wondered what the E in EMV stands for?

If you're unfamiliar with EMV, it is the global standard Mastercard and Visa to define how the chips work in debit and credit cards (or your iPhone).

The M is Mastercard, the V is Visa, but the E? Stands for Eurocard.

Eurocard is the credit card story lost to history. Launched in 1964 and dominant in Northern/Central Europe by the 1980s. It was a credit card introduced by Marcus Wallenberg Jr. of the Wallenberg family as an alternative to American Express.

During the 1980s, Europay was arguably driving innovation in card payments. France had deployed the first smart card payments (Carte Bancaire with chips) back in 1986, and by the early 2000s most European countries adopted "chip-and-PIN" cards ahead of the rest of the world.

Europay International merged with Mastercard in 2002, ceding Europe's independent stake in the future of global card payments.

Today EMVCo is governed by six global payment firms (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, JCB, UnionPay, Discover) with no single European-owned company in charge. The 

"E" in EMV remains in name only, symbolizing how European initiatives can fade into global systems when not backed by lasting strategic autonomy.

The strategic rationale for a sovereign card network is solid. 

What happens if Visa/Mastercard blocks European transactions during a US-Europe disagreement?

Well, that’s already happened.

In 201,1 Visa and Mastercard, under US political pressure, blocked payments to WikiLeaks, and Europe could do little about it. Europe has typically allied closely to the US on sanctions but remains cautious of US big tech dominance.

Since then, Europe has tried multiple times to build more sovereignty in its digital payments infrastructure. But the solution is always government, bureaucratic, over-engineered, and slower than a slug trying to climb Mount Everest.

Top-down European Card Initiatives haven't worked.

There have been multiple attempts to build payments infrastructure and a sovereign alternative to Visa or Mastercard (quotes below thanks to Deep Research, sources Wikipedia, ECB)

Other Attempts: Several smaller initiatives emerged but haven't gained traction, e.g. PayFair and EUFISERV.

All were ultimately discontinued. In short, every EU-wide card scheme initiative of the 2000s failed to achieve scale – national banks were reluctant to invest heavily without quick returns, and incumbent US networks remained entrenched.

Top-down card programs worked in China; why not in Europe?

Yes, China built UnionPay top‑down. But Brussels isn’t Beijing, and the EU can’t flip Tencent off if its network gets too big. Europe has to win with dynamism, not decrees.

The European perspective is rational just not realistic.

With a regional GDP larger than the United States, the EU finds itself surrounded by globally dominant payment networks from the East and West it does not control. Europe has seen itself at effectively being the worlds regulator (with GDPR and PSD2), and has been very successful at some institutional payments networks (see the next section). 

But it’s the wrong solution to todays balkanized world, where dynamism wins. The real risk from Chinese and US based payments companies is in the private sector.

Why the graveyard matters today.

There's some crucial context about payments in Europe. This is a market where some local payment methods regularly out-compete cards. IDEAL in the Netherlands, Vipps, Swish in Scandinavia, and even the BNPL providers make Europe a much more fragmented payments ecosystem.

The goal of consumer payments integration is a sensible one in principle. Difficult in practice. It's easier when you force the banks to cooperate, as with SEPA and TARGET2.

But Europe has been better at Instant and Institutional Settlement.

Europe's SEPA and TARGET2 have successfully provided a Europe-wide set of payment systems on top of disconnected national systems.

Think of TARGET2 like FedWire for Europe.

Think of SEPA as like FedNow for Europe, except with way more adoption, and it came much earlier.

Is the future of Europe top down? Digital Wallets and the Digital Euro.

It’s complicated.

Europe is trying to build a "digital euro" to replace physical cash that would be universally accepted (vs. card schemes that only get accepted where you see the logo mark). The digital euro, if launched, would be a top-down deployment of a retail payments infrastructure by the central bank – akin to how TARGET2 and SEPA were mandated, but directly offering a consumer-facing instrument.

This is markedly different from the US administration's view that there will be no central bank digital currency (CBDC) and its strong support for stablecoin regulation. Aligned with its attempt to build a digital identity wallet, you could see the digital euro in a few ways.

1. Good for strategic autonomy: It's further EU-wide integration, a necessary counterweight to the US and China in a polarized world. Europe is at its best when it integrates successfully.

2. Bad for nation-state growth/autonomy: It's an attack on the nation-state level sovereignty and is unhelpful for states like Poland who’s autonomy helps their growth.

3. Pragmatically challenging: Central governments aren't known for the ability to roll out consumer tech.

(In a lot of ways, the state vs federal level debate in Europe rhymes with the one you see in the US).

Europe's primary route to sovereignty has been through regulation. The net effect of this has been some "wins." These successes tend to happen when its European integration (TARGET2, SEPA, PSD2), but fail when its intended as a geopolitical pushback (GDPR, AI Regulation, card networks).

When your primary motivation for anything is strategic autonomy, the private sector either gets left behind or help back by red tape.

The Pivot: Simplification and the Draghi Report

The penny might have dropped in Brussels.

In February of 2025 the Commission table‑flipped its rulebook, promising a 25 % paperwork haircut or 35 % if you’re an SME, potentially saving businesses approximately €37.5 billion in compliance costs by 2030.

In September 2024 the Draghi report dropped with findings that would have been unthinkable even two years earlier. The report runs to nearly 300 pages and addresses everything from energy, raw materials, digital, auto, defense, space and pharma.

My interest skews to digital, and especially growth companies.

The report aims for simplification to unlock growth.

• The European Commission aims to reduce reporting obligations by 25% for all companies and 35% for SMEs, 

• More than 50% of SMEs identify regulatory obstacles as their greatest challenge

• A European Investment Bank survey indicates that 61% of companies view excessive regulation as a significant long-term barrier to investment.

The tone has shifted, especially since the US election.

• Feb 2025: At the AI Action Summit (the one where JD Vance said things), von der Leyen announces a €200 billion investment plan to bolster AI development in Europe

• March 2025: The European Commission is looking at proposals to simplify GDPR to reduce the burden on businesses.

Look.

All of this is nice, and I'm glad the policymakers have woken up to the urgency to build a new generation of European Dynamism.

But the best thing we can possibly do is look to the existing entrepreneurial spirit, the talent, and the people who are doing this stuff already and help them accelerate.

And here, Europe has a story to tell. If anything its like a coiled spring.

The Playbook: Why Founders Aren’t Waiting

Draghi’s 25 % paperwork haircut is the first time Brussels has admitted regulation ≠ innovation. Policy tailwinds are nice, but Europe’s Fintech companies aren’t waiting for permission.

Europe is making a comeback. Driven in part by competitive pressure from the US and, frankly, the frustration of the local population, we've seen several things that would have been unthinkable 2 years ago become a reality.

Europe drew $50 bn VC across 6 600 deals in ’24, overtaking Asia.

If you include the UK (I do), Europe is already an AI powerhouse.

• Loveable: From $0 to $40 m ARR in 4 months.

• Mistral: The first frontier model to go open‑weight.

• DeepMind & Gemini London hub: spawning spin‑outs almost weekly.

• Granola (London): my favorite note‑taker that is actually magic

• Project Europe: Famous VC/podcaster Harry Stebbings, which is a sort of "Thiel Grant" for high-potential founders

The vibe has shifted.

This sits with a generational vibe shift, where 67 % of EU 18‑35s say they’d rather build a startup than join Big Tech or stick with malaise (Atomico 2024 survey), and more than ever have global ambitions.

If you zoom all the way out to macro Europe looks pretty good these days.

And perhaps most excitingly, it appears European Fintech is like a coiled spring.

European Fintech is having a moment.

In the mid-2010s, folks from the US would say Europe was ahead on Fintech. We had more supportive regulation (like PSD2 for open banking), and Fintech was a major growth story 

Then in 2021, it all changed. With COVID, US Neobanks exploded in popularity, Robinhood capitalized on the memestock craze, and the US VC ecosystem supercharged a generational shift in finance. Unquestionably, the US became a global center of gravity for Fintech innovation. 

Quietly, in the background, European Fintech continued to grow. Europe now has a list of fully licensed banks and Fintech lenders that are profitable (or near-profitable) and growing sustainably. These names might not get as many headlines as their US equivalents but you should pay attention. The numbers do a lot of talking.

Allica Bank is the fastest-growing startup in Europe. Period. 

• They doubled profits to £29.9m ($39.6m) from £4bn customer deposits. A fast growing bank that is growing sustainably. Named by Deloitte, Sifted and The Times as fastest growing.

• They’ll have 10% market share before the end of the decade at even close to this growth rate.

• This is the story everyone is not talking about in Fintech circles. Quietly executing with a great product. If ever there was a case study for why we its worth giving licences to smaller banks, this is it. 

Revolut posted a profit of over $1 billion, with much of its growth driven by new product launches and its strength in the growing Eastern European markets.

• They hold bank licenses in the UK, EU, and Mexico, and are currently in the process of applying for one in the US. 

• They do commercial, SMB, payment acceptance, stock trading, eSIMs, and are about to launch credit cards

• Revolut is the case study in Bitzscaling, and if they get a charter in the US, don’t bet against them. 

Payhawk and Capital on Tap are the Brex / Ramp of Europe. 

• Payhawk grew ARR by 85% in Q1 2024, and claims a net revenue retention of 141%

• Payhawk has 2.6m business customers in 32 countries. They just launched their first US credit card and are poised to support European growth companies with US market entry.

• Capital on Tap provides credit cards and working capital to UK businesses. It has largely bootstrapped, and just secured a £750m credit facility.

• Capital on Tap delivered £313m of total income, £15m loss before tax, and has 200,000 small business customers.

Then the more well-known names, Klarna is poised to IPO and is head-to-head with Affirm as a category leader in BNPL. Monzo just announced it has 12 million UK customers (1 in 5 UK adults), and Bunq is profitable in Europe, securing licenses for its US market entry.

Europe’s Fintech Spring

For a long time, Europe was a byword for bureaucracy.

A social safety net, a nice place to live, but no dynamism and high taxes. 

European Fintech companies prove that categorically wrong, and a Generation of entrepreneurs are kicking the entire economy into high gear. 

If 2024 was the year of US Fintech companies coming to Europe, the next 12 months will see movement the other way. Unlike the late 2010s when N26, Monzo and Revolut all failed to gain traction in the US, we now have different case studies.

Adyen and Klarna have shown US market entry is expensive, but entirely possible. 

For every major US Fintech category leader, there will be a European competitor. If you haven’t looked this side of the atlantic for growth in a while, maybe now is the perfect time. 

Europe is stable, well governed, increasingly able to access US VC dollars, and is going through a wave of regulatory simplification. I think this has several implications: 

• Europe can’t regulate its way into having a Visa, but it can build. Lean into this much more aggressively with simpliciation, not de-regulation

• For global investors: Look again at Europe, there has never been a better time with a new generation of second-time founders coming to the fore.

• European banks: The vast majority do not have their act together, but after a period of high rates, have an opportunity to capitalize on simpliciation and partnerships with Fintech companies.

European Fintech has succeeded in spite of regulators for the past 5 years. But now the opportunity is for a best of both. The next 5 years will be defined by

• Europe increases its infrastructure spend in data centers and energy, unlocking a more competitive AI market.

• Europe radically simplifies regulation to unlock innovation, without going all the way “de-regulation” and deleting agencies, making it a credible and consistent market to do business in.

• We see generational companies born and come to market, many of whom may even consider listing this side of the atlantic.

Fancy seeing it live? I’ll be at Money 20/20 Europe. Beer is on me if you still think Europe’s asleep.

I’ll show you what all the fuss is about.

ST.

4 Fintech Companies 💸

1. Cardamon - Compliance and Regulatory Mapping AI

Cardamon aims to draw a straight line from regulation to new product launches in minutes. It evaluates obligations, creates an impact assessment, and recommends controls. Users can assign a person to "own" the mapping, which supports UK, EU, and US regulations, focusing on digital assets and brokerage requirements.

🧠 Every workflow will be an AI company. Compliance from regulation to product to control is a schlep perfectly suited for an AI if it never hallucinated. Training an LLM to create consistent outputs, building an audit trail, and ensuring a human is accountable is the unlock here. The skill of automating a workflow with AI is often underestimated. But again, if AI is making it easier to make new businesses and companies, and these regs are in the public domain, what's to stop you from building this? Well. You didn't. It has always been true you can build anything. The skill of selling something, is to make it easy to consume for a given audience. Cardamon has done that well.

2. Figg Wealth - The AI Wealth Manager (UK)

Figg helps users aggregate their assets in a single app—cars, property, bank accounts, savings, stocks and even crypto. The app can value items like handbags from photos, cars, and properties through APIs and give insights into your overall portfolio.

🧠 I've not seen someone combine financial and physical assets this way before. I immediately went to download this app as soon as I saw it. Life is messy. The open banking connections are a little slow, the app and dashboard could use a little work, but for an early effort, this is really solid. Sadly, it only supports Coinbase and Binance in the UK (I use other apps and DeFi), and the brokerage support is limited. Still, it's a promising start.

3. Sats Terminal - The Bitcoin native DeFi aggregator

Sats Terminal provides a single hub to trade, bridge or stake assets on the Bitcoin blockchain. It's competitive with a 1-inch or DeFillama on the Ethereum and Solana ecosystems.

🧠 Bitcoin native DeFi could end up having a moment. The conversation has been dominated by Eth, EVM-compatible chains, and Solana so far, but with Bitcoin becoming a treasury asset (since the accounting rule SAB 21 was repealed), things could change.

4. Wealthyhood - Robinhood with more automations (EU)

Wealthyhood lets users buy UK, EU and US stocks and ETFs, users also get a 4.38% interest rate on cash, and zero comission on trades. It can automate investments (cost averaging), auto re-invest dividends, and rebalance a portfolio automatically.

🧠 The name is cheeky, I like. There's a clever "portfolio builder" that helps people build that portfolio of diversified assets if they don't know where to start. There's no obvious moat here, Robinhood does most of this stuff and is in the EU. But I applaud someone new, taking a risk and trying to re-imagine the UX and UI for doing so.

Things to know 👀

1. Capital One and Discover Merger done.

14 months since announcing the deal, Capital One has announced it has received all regulatory approvals to proceed. Capital One’s CEO Richard Fairbank, said the combination will create “something really special.” Also highlighting how the network will help compete given “the thin margin nature of their business” as they look to offset the cost of branches.

🧠 The goal is not to be a Visa ($V) or Mastercard ($MA) competitor. In earnings comments, the CEO was complimentary of both.

🧠 There’s a clear picture for putting the Discover credit card business on the Capital One tech stack. This is CapOne’s wheelhouse; they’ve invested heavily and consistently in their tech platform. Given the “razor-thin” margin, you have to imagine they see that taking costs out of the Discover card portfolio.

🧠 Transforming the network will be harder. Running a network is non trivial. Fairbank’s comments were “We want to go in there and see what we’ve got.”

2. Circle lines up bank partners for a SWIFT competitor

Stablecoin platform Circle is collaborating with Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank, Société Générale, and Santander to develop a cross-border payment network that rivals Swift. The “Circle Payments Network” is designed to help Fintech companies and remittance and payments companies transact across borders. This image from Efi explains it well.

🧠 This solves the biggest infrastructure gap in stablecoins. Their weakness was local liquidity and settlement. Circle fixes that by introducing a network. It’s similar to SWIFT in the sense that it helps route payments to the right destination.

🧠 It’s also a take on the second biggest gap in stablecoins: risk, fraud & compliance. Like SWIFT, it has a consistent set of rules on messaging and settlement flows. Circle is a US-regulated entity, so is subject to the full oversight of the US Government.

🧠 It is a direct attempt to build a new SWIFT. It connects payments companies, VASPs, and banks to offer real-time settlement via stablecoins. Unlike SWIFT its faster and cheaper.

🧠 There’s a demand to replace SWIFT. BRICS are attempting to connect their local payments networks, and stablecoins have emerged as a bottom-up solution for trade between the Global South and the Global North.

🧠 Let’s be clear, SWIFT still dwarfs stablecoins. SWIFT moves $5 trillion per day, that’s 40x the total supply of stablecoins.

🧠 Circle’s pitch is to be the tech upgrade for US dollar dominance. As the second-largest stablecoin, they’ve become known as a leader for on-shore (USA) regulatory compliance.

🧠 There’s an argument this is just re-centralizing stablecoins, but I don’t think it is. There’s a future where institutions need a network, liquidity and compliance. Circle is making a pragmatic attempt to build that.

🧠 We’re still so early. Finance has never been more in flux, so now is a great time to be in land-grab model. But in 5 years things

🧠 3 of the 4 banks are European. You have to imagine Europe’s MiCA regulation has given those banks a head start. How many more US-based banks will join when stablecoin regs land?

Good Reads 📚

1. Fixing stablecoins: A central bank for stablecoins.

One dollar, or ten dollars, is the same, no matter which bank it's held at. There's no price difference, its accepted everywhere. It is a dollar. There's no CitiDollar, or WellsDollar. In stablecoins we USDC, USDT, USDG, USDe, EURC, EURCV, and so on. This is a nightmare for users.

Stablecoin issuers are "narrow banks" that have a lower risk than banks (in theory) because they don't lend against the deposit funding. So there's an argument that we need to let banks issue stablecoins in order to avoid that narrow bank scenario. M^0 proposes an alternative. A central bank for the stablecoins.

🧠 M^0 has quietly been my favorite stablecoin project for years. The market wasn't ready for an on-chain central bank in 2023, but now we're experiencing some issues with stablecoins; I think that's changing.

🧠 What if the central bank for the internet was currency agnostic? With the recent fall of faith in the dollar, that's potentially a useful thing.

🧠 This project is still early, but I love how wildly ambitious and thoughtful it is. They have $170m in stables issued. Bigger names dwarf them, but that's not the point. I've known the founder from long before this company existed. This or something like it feels critical for how the world will function in 10 to 20 years.

Tweets of the week 🕊

That's all, folks. 👋

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(1) All content and views expressed here are the authors' personal opinions and do not reflect the views of any of their employers or employees.

(2) All companies or assets mentioned by the author in which the author has a personal and/or financial interest are denoted with a *. None of the above constitutes investment advice, and you should seek independent advice before making any investment decisions.

(3) Any companies mentioned are top of mind and used for illustrative purposes only.

(4) A team of researchers has not rigorously fact-checked this. Please don't take it as gospel—strong opinions weakly held

(5) Citations may be missing, and I've done my best to cite, but I will always aim to update and correct the live version where possible. If I cited you and got the referencing wrong, please reach out