Finance is having a nervous breakdown

Weekly Rant 📣

Finance is having a nervous breakdown

During the Oscars, Timothée Chalamet famously said, "I'm really in pursuit of greatness. I know people don't usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats. I'm inspired by the greats." This moment stood out and resonated precisely because its so contrarian to everything else happening in the world. 

We’re in an era where it's everyone for themselves. Every country for itself. A multi-polar world, with high inflation, where each successive generation is more pessimistic about its future than their parents. What I see in the finance industry is similar. Aggressive pricing, consumer financial nihilism, and wild risk-taking in markets. 

In finance, I see the opposite to Tim’s energy. Instead of pursuing greatness, we're pursuing individual advantage. Instead of being inspired by what's possible, we're adapting to what feels inevitable. And in that adaptation, something essential is getting lost.

The trust in finance is cracking and about to burst

I want to tell you three stories that might seem unrelated on the surface. A bank charging fees. A company going public. An AI buying stocks. But they're the same story, told in different languages. They're all responses to the same underlying reality: the systems we built to manage trust and risk are breaking down, and we don't know what comes next.

1. JP Morgan laid out their position for why they’re charging fees for open banking. 

2. I saw a demo of an Agentic browser given $500 to pick stocks for the user, and 

3. The largest IPO of the year was a company that sells shares to buy Crypto. 

1. JP Morgan’s Villain Arc completes.

It’s back to Fintech vs Big banks again or “everyone for themselves” in open finance.

In case you missed it: JP Morgan announced they’re going to implement fees for any Fintech company or aggregator using open finance to access its data. Because Fintech companies “massively tax their systems.” This followed the

1. CFPB vacating its ruling on 1033 (open banking).

2. In counter, the Fintech Association had filled a Motion to Intervene in a Kentucky court.

3. Only for the CFPB (back from the dead) to file a motion to stay, because “in light of recent events” they are going to do new rule making.

So what was JPM’s argument to do this in the first place?

Alex Johnson had a great summary of the 5 arguments he saw JP Morgan offer

1. We need to cover our costs. I think banks should get paid. There should be a price for running infrastructure, protecting data, and dealing with the risks that come with it. There’s no API market in the world where the vendor gives you free if they’re running infrastructure. But scratch deeper: how much of that infrastructure is truly necessary? How much hasn’t been updated because they don’t know how it works? How much is cross-subsidizing the business model of physical branches?

2. We need to price in our liability. They are ultimately the most responsible actors in the industry. U.S. regulation demands they ensure the safety and soundness of the system, consumer privacy, and much more. They have the highest bar. They're the most regulated entities in the entire industry. I think they overplay this hand, but it’s valid. There’s also a lot of fraud and AML risk in Fintech companies. It’s getting better, but a few years ago (the BaaS heyday), the bar was pretty low. 

3. We need to discourage abusive secondary data use. If it’s free you don’t think about the cost. JP Morgan claims up to 90% of API calls were not consumer-initiated, but that’s a horrible consumer experience. If I had to authorize to update a PFM app every time, that would suck. 

4. We need to get a cut of the value being created. This paraphrasing makes it sound like they’re running a protection racket. Alex notes that data access seems to bother JPM execs pn a philosophical level. If the APIs stayed free, I get that. If they’re not free, then live and let live.

5. We need to fight back against the competition. JP Morgan is the most alive to the threat Fintech companies present, and that is to their credit. As a big bank they’re not saying these companies are irrelevant, or small, or downplaying. They can and should compete. But as a major market player, they shouldn’t use their market power to distort competition either, and with this market positioning, they’re sailing close to the wind on that one for my tastes. 

Timing is everything. 

To me, it was immediately obvious that this was taking advantage of a moment in time when the regulator—the CFPB—was on its knees. It was being gutted by the administration, and the opportunity would never be better to set out a negotiating position. That’s fundamentally how I’m viewing what they’re doing. It’s a negotiation strategy. They’re intentionally going for something so unbelievably ridiculous that when the lawsuits inevitably come from the folks who’ve spent the past seven or eight years building a framework—while imperfect—that was regulated open banking, with a rule and statute under law, it throws away their work and their leverage.

We appeared to be heading back into that Mad Max world where banks can charge whatever they want, under the recognition that this is going to get settled at some point. We all know it—but we have to start somewhere.

So this ended up in the Kentucky court, with the Fintech Association filing a motion to intervene, and that’s where it stayed. 

But then. Just this week, the CFPB, back from the dead, CFPB's request to stay the litigation so the bureau can “reopen and revise the rule, in light of recent events.”

What recent events?

1. JP Morgan’s price move became headline news in the financial press

2. The entire crypto industry rallied around and started calling this “Operation Chokepoint 3.0”

The same crypto lobby that has been a major donor to the Trump campaign, and incredibly successful in getting laws like the GENIUS Act passed (and the incoming CLARITY Act), has been publicly pushing back. Crypto companies rely on open banking for access to payments and underlying customer account data for fraud prevention (among other things). 

Then suddenly the CFPB sputtered to life. Coincidence? Nope. The pattern is the Crypto lobby is consistently outgunning the bank lobby. 

Meanwhile, there are entire multibillion-dollar companies that rely on open banking infrastructure every single day. That’s now almost entirely threatened, because we don’t know what the fees will be tomorrow. 

• When will the new rule be ready, and what do we do until then?

• What’s that going to do to your margin—especially if you’re thinking about going public like it was rumored Plaid was going to do? 

• What does it mean for millions of Americans who rely on features like earned wage access? 

• What does it mean for the emergence of a new payment rail, like pay-by-bank?

It's hard to say how this plays out. 

One thing I do know: it’s frustrating. 

Economics matter.

Forcing banks to open up their systems while saying, “We’re going to take data, put massive load on your systems and not pay for it,” was always going to fail in the long run.

Now of course, it’s the consumer’s data—but still, it’s data the banks are legally on the hook to protect. That’s a reasonable argument on the surface. But those systems are old, the branch network is expensive, and do you really need 200,000 employees?

We need branches, they will say. Because we serve vulnerable customers. Not just digitally savvy ones. Fair enough. But who’s really serving the sub-$150k, sub-$100k income segments? Because most banks are not showing up in that segment unless the regulator forces it.

Now look—I think companies should be allowed to build whatever business they want, however they want, and serve whoever they want. But if you're positioning yourself as a universal bank with market-scale dominance, at some point you're a utility. And at some point, you should be capable of serving data like a utility-scale player. If your systems can’t cope, that’s on you. Yes, charge for it, but cope.

The Trump administration has proven it can act quickly when the crypto lobby is involved. Maybe we get a new, simpler rule. But where’s the fast-forward button? How do agree on a fee structure? Agree on SLAs the banks will honor? And get out of open banking purgatory.

Because it’s not in anybody’s interest.

This story isn't really about API fees. It's about what happens when the referee leaves the field and the players start making their own rules. If only there were a Dee Hock of open finance right now.

When there's no referee, the strongest players don't ask for permission.

2. A Bitcoin Treasury Company is the biggest IPO for the year.

The largest IPO of the year is a company that holds crypto 

That's all it does.

It dwarfs Circle, which was already one of the larger IPOs, and it's gaining a massive market cap. 

Weird things are happening again.

I get the surface-level logic. Public equities investors (like the funds you have in your 401k and pension) have no exposure to crypto. They see the devaluation of the dollar (which is falling relative to other currencies) and spot a real opportunity to gain access to crypto within their existing mandate. That mandate acts like a pair of handcuffs. It limits them to investing only in certain things—usually public stocks. 

No matter how much they might like other asset classes, they simply can’t touch them. As a result, they often miss out on high returns.

So, if someone builds a company that does nothing but buy crypto and sell its own shares, it creates a legal wrapper that public investors can access. For many, that’s their first real exposure to the asset class. It’s no wonder the demand is overwhelming.

Crypto is up right now. The macro environment is supportive. The Circle story was huge. Regulation seems to be getting clearer. And it looks like the use cases, at least for stablecoin-based commerce, have arrived.

But we’ve seen this movie before. We’ve seen the hype, the rallies, and the collapse. This already feels strange. It’s one of those moments where, in hindsight, we’ll say, “It was kind of obvious we were in a bubble, wasn’t it?”

My fear is that this is only the beginning. It could get much weirder from here.

When you can't access an asset class directly, you wrap it in something familiar. When you can't trust institutions, you create new ones. But what happens when the wrapper becomes more valuable than what's inside?

In the lead-up to 1929 and 2008, as regulators got gradually eroded, new products came to market, promising low risk, high returns, and everyone wanted in.

Maybe this time it’s different, but what if it’s not?

See this weeks Good Read “Bitcoin TreasuryCos: Lessons From The 1929 Crash” below for more.

3. Letting your Agentic Browser pick stocks for you

What could possibly go wrong?

This low key terrifies me. Twitter user Savthik tells AI to research ETFs and buy stocks with $500 of their actual money. The AI took control of Twitter user Sathvik's browser, picked the stocks, navigated to Robinhood, and executed the trades, all while they watched. 

How?

Meet Perplexity Comet. My new default browser (like Chrome or Safari), that can take control of your browser tabs. I love this thing, but I'm not sure I'm ready to let it lose picking and buying stocks just yet. What Savthik is doing something that should make every fintech exec's blood pressure spike:

• User says: "Use $500, research ETFs and pick stocks for today"

• AI researches tech and healthcare ETFs

• User says: "Now take over my tab and buy these on Robinhood"

• AI navigates to Robinhood, searches tickers, submits buy orders

• Done. Money moved. Positions opened.

(They could have done all of this with API calls, but the fact that its visual makes it so much more visceral)

My Three Reactions (In Order)

First thought: This could go catastrophically wrong. What happens when the agent hallucinates and dumps your life savings into some penny stock? Or misinterprets "diversified portfolio" as "100% meme coins"?

Second thought: Actually... this might be better than most people's current strategy. Which is doing nothing. The average person under-invests, over-thinks, and procrastinates their way to financial mediocrity. An AI that actually executes beats paralysis every time.

Third thought: Wait. Who the hell is liable here?

When this inevitably goes wrong, watch the finger-pointing:

• Perplexity: "We're just a browser tool. The user gave the command."

• Robinhood: "We processed a legitimate order from an authenticated user."

• User: "But I didn't mean to buy $10K of GameStop!"

The legal framework assumes human intent at every transaction, but when AI becomes the decision-maker, that assumption breaks down.

We're sooo not ready for this.

• Should brokers detect and flag AI-driven trading patterns?

• Do we need new consumer protections for AI financial agents?

• What happens to market stability when millions of AIs start trading simultaneously IN RETAIL?

Given the current White House just released a public policy document that states:

I don’t think we’re going to get new regulation any time soon. But that leaves fintech operators, you, with a dilemma. How the hell do you adopt this stuff without seriously harming customers, or some edge case that comes back to bite you under a new administration in 3 years’ time?

The technology is racing ahead of regulation, business models, and common sense. Every time I think I'm scared of AI, I keep re-learning that 90% of the time, its better to let go and trust it.

It's the 10% that gets you.

We're handing decisions to systems that can process information faster than us but can't bear responsibility for the consequences. That gap, between capability and accountability, is where everything interesting and terrifying happens.

Automated trading contributed to Black Monday in 1987, but those were simple algorithms. Now we're handing actual decision-making to systems that learn and adapt. It's 1929 + 1987 + AI acceleration.

Rational Individual Moves Create Systemic Risk

Each of these stories have valid subjective rationale individually, but each also feels like a moment in time. While the market is mania, the CFPB has been brought to its knees, and we’re so blinded by the spectacle of AI we don’t want to look at the risks just yet.

Every era of financial innovation follows the same pattern: new technology + regulatory gaps + human greed = systemic risk.

But AI changes the timeline. What used to take decades now happens in months.

We might get incredible breakthroughs, but the path won't be a straight line up.

And yet, I can’t help but think we don’t have to be victims of this. 

Just as Timothée chased greatness, I see that in our industry, day in and day out. 

People wrestling with hard questions like “How do you keep your code secure if 95% of is AI generated,” “what’s our fraud liability if an AI moved funds to the wrong account,” or even more simple “which tools are enterprise ready for my engineers and workforce.” 

This week's Rant is a Rant in the truest sense of the word. The market is weird and we need to be building for the long-term world we want to see, not the short-term advantage we can get. 

Because in the end, the question isn't whether we'll get through this transition - it's what kind of system we'll build on the other side.

ST.

4 Fintech Companies 💸

1. Resilience Logic - Proactive Intelligence for Fraud

Resilience Logic promises proactive fraud detection, with AI Agents that can coach the team, real-time detection of new fraud patterns, and full explainability / audit trails on every decision made.

🧠This is the right pitch to fraud teams. Traditional vendors in this space were backward-looking; they’d set up rule sets, and some even charge you to make config changes. So let's say a criminal network figures out how to break your payments flow. You’d have to pay your vendor to implement new logic to combat that. I don’t know how their product works, but if its like Sardine*, when we spot a new attack pattern, our Agentic AI will suggest new rules or logic to detect and manage that risk, show you its effectiveness against historic tests, and let you go-live with one click. This should be table stakes. Kudos for making this pitch so clean and clear.

2. Ekho - The end to end vehicle finance platform 

Ekho is a SaaS platform that assists OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and dealers with everything from sales to servicing. It helps bring dealers online, with high margin sales, it helps OEMs sell direct to consumer and gets to 50 state coverage in months instead of years. Modern features like vehicle configuration, financing options, paperwork, pick up and delivery can all be managed online. They even upsell online marketing and compliance services. 

🧠As more boutique vehicle brands enter the market, the online solutions are often lacking. The dealership world was historically very analogue and independent. Some OEMs are big enough that they’ve been able to top-down, brute force this tech into dealers and on to their sites to go direct to consumer. But packaging this all for the mid-sized OEMs makes complete sense. As ever more niche brands are born, and software eats manufacturing, fintech would inevitably follow.

3. Eventual Climate - Rate Lock for your Insurance Premium 

Eventual helps homeowners lock in their home insurance premium rate with any carrier for $7 a month for 3 years. Users submit their information, and Eventual predicts their future premium price and if renewals are more expensive than the prediction users are eligible for a payout. 

🧠 We need insurance for insurance now. American homeowners have seen premiums rise by as much as 3x since 2020. Much of this due to large payouts by carriers with climate risk, inflation, but also an insurance industry taking advantage of the situation. It’s hard to imagine a world where premiums don’t go up (if anything, this just creates a prize for that happening). But I wonder what would happen if we saw deflation and insurance started to come down. 🤷‍♂️

4. Credibur - Structured Credit Operating System (EU)

Credibur helps non bank lenders (like BNPL or asset finance companies) connect with funding sources like banks or private credit funds and manage the entire lifecycle. Lender firms can automate drawdowns from their funding source, track covenants and gives far more visibility to both the fund and the lender. 

🧠 Managing private credit is hard, especially in Europe. Since 2008, EU banks have pulled back from lending hurting productivity. Life as a non bank lender is hard, with plenty of demand but limited supply of credit. We need to streamline the relationships between lenders and funding sources to unlock more credit. In this category, I find Fence Finance* a fascinating alternative. They’re able to make drawdowns and repayments real-time and automated with smart contracts instead of SaaS. 

Things to know 👀

1. Ramp Raises $500m at $22.5bn - 45 days after its last round.

Ramp raises $500M at $22.5B valuation just 45 days after its last round according to the Wall St Journal. In their Blog Ramp noted finance teams at Notion, Webflow, and Quora have autonomos agents running 24/7 solving finance tasks in treasury and fraud. Their vision is that by 2028 finance teams will have an entirely new org chart.

🧠 Most startups take 18+ months between rounds. Ramp did it in 6 weeks. Either VCs have lost their minds, or sees something we don't. My guess is that thing is the autonomous agent adoption by the beta clients (webflow, notion etc).

🧠 Do the metrics justify this? $55B payment volume (up from $10B in Jan 2023), $700M revenue (vs Brex's projected $500M), unprofitable (burning $2m to scale). ~30x revenue isn’t as crazy as some things you see (e.g. Circle).

🧠This is really a bet on owning the AI growth curve. They're showing progress and traction with autonomous finance. They're live with Notion running large portions of a finance team's workload.

🧠 I love the roadmap they outline in the blog 

• By 2026: AI agents handle 85% of manual reviews

• By 2027: Finance runs in parallel (30x productivity)

• By 2028: Autonomous systems with human oversight

🧠 My favorite bit was the org chart for the future of finance 

🧠 We're in a weird timeline, maybe an AI bubble, maybe not. But Ramp has made it through a previous Fintech winter and kept growing. When you look past the valuation, what you see is a really clear articulation of the future of B2B finance.

2. JPM Partners with Coinbase to add Funding + USDC Rewards

The deal adds Chase card funding as a capability to Coinbase, point‑to‑USDC reward conversion, and direct bank linking for 80 million Chase customers. The service will go-live in 2026.

🧠 This is a great headline, but its essentially getting us back to a place where customers can use open finance and cards to fund Coinbase. 

• We used to have that.

• Chase blocked it.

• With valid concerns about fraud, and customers using credit to fund speculation.

• That second risk is still valid, even it Coinbase can solve the first.

🧠 Direct bank linking, you mean open finance? 

• They announced this in the middle of a scandal about their open banking fees, and the Crypto industry is annoyed about “Operation Chokepoint 3.0.”

• Makes me think this is how Chase wants things to be, bilateral, 1:1 negotiated deals.

• Nothing “open” about it.

• Reminds me of how the Telcos wanted the mobile internet to work in the early 2000s.

🧠 Remember, Chase blocked credit card funding for Crypto. 

• This is reopening that faucet one by one.

• I suspect this is because they’re comfortable with Coinbase’s fraud controls.

• Crypto fraud has historically been objectively bad

• Coinbase has consistently been an industry good actor here and good prove that

🧠 How many Chase customers will choose to get their credit card rewards as USDC?

• That seems like a weird offer?

• Funded by Coinbase marketing budget? (speculation on my part).

• Maybe there's a Crypto native user base who's also got Chase as their primary bank 🤔

More from LinkedIn:

• Robinhood SMASHED earnings by over $81m.

• FIS Partners with Circle for USDC.

Good Reads 📚

1. How Bitcoin Treasury Companies are like the Trust companies of 1929

In 1929 Trusts launched as often as once per day “as investors eagerly paid double or triple the value of their underlying “scarce” assets.” What’s different? Treasury companies are SEC regulated and need to disclose their holdings, but they trade at a significantly higher valuation than the cryptoassets they hold. They’re now raising nearly as much as SPACs did during 2021. There’s even a dashboard tracking them. 

They feature large founder allocations, incentive packages for promoters (and podcasters), and all of this is “disclosed” via SEC rules. But transparency doesn’t neutralize the risk. This piece argues it is actually a structured, speculative attack on fiat currency itself. The goal is to replace fiat, with Bitcoin.

🧠Transparency doesn’t neutralize risk. Louder for the folks at the back.

🧠Are these permanent capital vehicles for crypto, or get rich quick schemes? I think they’re both. Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathway was able to do much more with its permanent capital than fund managers could. Crypto needs that type of market actor. But the amount of leverage being applied to crypto by some of these companies is bonkers and the level of grift even more so.

🧠 Microstrategy is selling new shares to pay dividends. In other words, new money is paying for the old money. You could almost say in a pyramid-like structure.

🧠I’m a long term believer in onchain finance. I just find financialization hard to stomach. Maybe that’s why I write a newsletter and have a day job. Or maybe its because this looks too much like it will end badly. I could be (and often am) wrong here. But I don’t think we’ve seen the end of boom and bust cycles.

🧠There is a non zero chance Bitcoin plays a major role in the global financial order. In a multi-polar world, with a weakening dollar, Gold is already re-emerging. But when Ray Dalio is saying allocations of up to 15% in Bitcoin may be advisable, it could be that we have a long way to go yet.

While we’re on the topic, the first tweet is very relevant here…

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