LOOK! It’s my sponsors again, yay!

Build products that move money. moderntreasury.com.

It usually starts with a customer request. Can you support RTP? FedNow? Push-to-card? Stablecoins? Then comes the next one. Because new ways to move money don’t replace what came before. ACH, wires, and even checks are still part of the mix.

Without the right foundation, every new rail means another vendor, integration, and more time before you can ship. Modern Treasury changes that. With one unified API, you can build across today’s payment methods and be ready for whatever comes next.

So as the way your customers move money evolves, your product can evolve with them.

Trusted by Procore, Navan, Morse, and companies of all sizes. Powering $600B+ in payments.

Start building today: moderntreasury.com

1. The SEC gives tokenized stock-trading venues a five-year exemption as CLARITY stalls

The SEC granted five-year conditional exemptions on September 17 for qualifying venues and liquidity providers trading tokenized US stocks through automated market makers and liquidity pools. Shares must preserve equivalent shareholder rights, including dividends and voting rights. Synthetic products that track a stock price are excluded. Trading access must be permissioned, with limits on securities and volumes and at least 30 days’ public notice before a venue starts operating. The decision came two days after CLARITY failed to advance in the Senate.

🧠 Institutions are getting ready for tokenized stocks. DTCC and Nasdaq have their own projects underway. This exemption opens another route, letting qualifying venues use AMMs and liquidity pools to trade US stocks.

🧠 The SEC is also letting companies test a different way to run a stock market. Automated Market Makers (AMMs) like Uniswap are alternatives to centralized exchanges and, with liquidity pools (LPs), use software to allocate capital. Perhaps these tools are less useful for onshore brokerages, but much more so for extending the reach of US stocks to the Global South. They’re also a petri dish for innovation.

🧠 Preserving shareholder rights is a useful constraint. There’s been a very public spat between AMC Theatres' CEO and the Robinhood CEO, whose synthetic stock tokens do not allow stockholders to vote in AGMs, etc. To qualify for this exemption, stock tokens must give holders the same rights as the underlying shares.

🧠 Congress stalling no longer means the product roadmap has to stall with it. The SEC has opened a defined route for tokenized equities. The broader questions CLARITY was meant to settle remain unresolved.

🧠 Five years gives a team time to build and find customers, but institutions will also want to know what follows the exemption. Which brokerage will turn this into a product people use, and what will it offer that their existing account doesn’t?

2. Mercury launches Mercury Books, double-entry accounting inside the bank account

Mercury Books puts full accrual and cash basis accounting inside the Mercury account. It costs $35 a month, is free until the end of 2026, and includes unlimited accountant seats. Mercury says you need no other accounting software. Ramp is going after the same workload with Stack, which does the work inside existing accounting systems.

🧠 The account is eating the accounting software. Which is fascinating.

🧠 Will every corporate account also become an accounting platform? Both Ramp and Mercury followed their users into the same pain. Closing the books is where founders and finance teams lose their weekends, so why not build it?

🧠 This is eating the ERP in reverse. Every company reaches a scale where they implement NetSuite or SAP. Those platforms started at the ledger and grew payments and treasury out of it over two decades. Mercury starts at the money movement and builds the ledger on top. Ramp connects to the ledger you already use.

🧠 Why does that work? Mercury says it treats banking data and the books "as one dataset, not two systems a person has to keep in sync." There’s less work reconciling the bank account with the books. Mercury handles more of it automatically.

🧠 Banks could have done this any time. They've held their customers’ banking data for decades and sold it back as a bank feed. Maybe they lacked the imagination, the ability or the ambition. This is why competition is good.

🧠 There’s a lot of customer stickiness here. Companies reach a scale where they go multi-bank. They rarely go multi-ERP. Mercury has 1 in 3 US startups, $650M in annualized revenue and a conditional OCC charter. If it completes the charter process, it could be both the bank and the system of record. That's a very hard thing to leave.

🧠 Should Intuit be more worried than JPMorgan?

3. Ramp launches in the UK with cards, bill payments and accounting automation

Ramp launched in the UK on September 15 after a summer beta, offering corporate cards, expense management, bill payments and accounting integrations, including Xero and QuickBooks. Its March acquisition of Billhop brought regulated payments capabilities in the UK and EU. Ramp names ElevenLabs and Attio among customers already using the platform. UK cards are issued by Stripe Payments UK Limited on Visa. The launch gives UK businesses access to the product with local payments infrastructure and a growing London team. Launch announcement

🧠 The market is fragmented. Qonto, Pleo and Spendesk have been around for a while, but none feels as dominant as Ramp does in the US. Payhawk looks like the most capable competitor to me.

🧠 International customers provide an obvious distribution route. A finance team that already uses Ramp in the US has a reason to consider it for its UK operation. These customers had a cut-down experience for their UK entities, and the goal now is to fix it and expand into Europe.

🧠 The UK and European markets run a little more on trust. A founder or CFO won’t work with you from a product demo; they want social proof first. Ramp’s ground game with communities will be key to adoption.

🧠 The UK is having a quiet renaissance of tech. DeepMind, ElevenLabs and Granola give you a sense of what’s being built here. Next week I’m attending a Robinhood event, Ramp meetup, and a Revolut product launch.

4. Monzo launches Aura, a £15 a month credit card that auto-invests your cashback

Monzo built Robinhood's Gold Card for the UK, then priced it like Amex Gold. Aura launched this week. It’s £15 ($20) a month, metal, 1% cashback on groceries and 0.5% on everything else, with the cashback auto-invested into Monzo Investments. Apple TV, Google AI Plus and two airport lounge passes are bundled in.

🧠 The cashback looks thin next to US cards until you remember domestic UK consumer credit interchange is capped at 0.3%. Interchange alone won’t cover 1% cashback on groceries. The £15 fee and lending income matter too, with a 29% variable annual interest rate.

🧠This is the Robinhood Gold Card play. That product had 3% cashback, metal, only for Gold subscribers paying $5 a month. Two years on Gold has 4.8m subscribers, 40% of new funded customers join on day one, and ARPU is up 24% to $187.

🧠 The Gold bundle gives affluent customers several reasons to move more of their money to Robinhood. Retirement assets crossed $30bn. The card is part of that pitch, alongside the brokerage, cash sweep and retirement account.

🧠 Monzo's version has the same shape. Buried in the terms, Aura waives the platform fee on all your Monzo Investments, including the ISA and GIA you already have. Fund management costs still apply. That is a consolidate-your-wealth-here pitch priced at £180 ($240) a year.

🧠 Distribution is baked in. Monzo's 16m UK customers are millennials getting older and more asset-rich. Flex customers can switch without a credit check. If 10% take Aura, that is nearly £300m ($400m) a year of subscription revenue before a penny of interest or AUM.

🧠 Monzo has tried paid bundles before. It stopped selling the £15 Premium plan to new customers in April 2024, although existing customers could keep it. Aura gives it another chance to get customers paying for more than their current account.

🧠 My worry is execution. The Monzo app is a brilliant everyday spend card, but try to manage savings, pots or investments in there and it creaks fast. Aura only works if the wealth side experience delivers. And I love Monzo, but right now, it’s not quite it.

🧠 Monzo is now firmly in Revolut’s shadow. It hasn’t expanded its products or countries nearly as fast. Aura is the best package I’ve seen from them. Get the wealth experience right and give customers a reason to keep more of their money there.

5. Proof launches a reusable digital identity for banks, one week after FinCEN said banks can accept one

Proof verifies you once to NIST IAL2, then issues you a certificate from its audited certificate authority, the machinery that gives websites a padlock. It lives on your phone, bound to a hardware key, and can be used to sign a wire instruction, a beneficiary change or an account recovery. Proof serves more than 8,000 businesses. The credential works with participating organizations that choose to accept it.

A week earlier, on September 8, FinCEN and the four federal bank regulators published two new CIP FAQs and amended a third. They define a verifiable credential (signed by the issuer, bound to a device, protected by a PIN or biometric), confirm a state mobile driver's license counts as documentary ID, and say banks may accept a credential from a private issuer if they check the issuer's authentication meets their own standard. No bank is required to accept any of it.

🧠 This is an old idea, finally getting momentum. I looked at verifiable credentials on a blockchain network at Barclays in 2014. The idea is old. Now US banks have explicit guidance on how these credentials fit into their identity checks.

🧠 What I like about this model is that it empowers the customer. You get a little packet on your phone that represents your ID, signed by the institution that checked it, and anyone you send it to can prove it's real and really from that issuer. No more re-uploading documents every. single. time.

🧠 The FAQ gives compliance teams something explicit to point to. A bank can accept the credential if the issuer’s checks meet its own standards. It still owns that decision, and the underlying BSA requirements haven’t changed.

🧠 The use case that sells it is a wire to a new account. You're closing on a house and an email arrives with new wire instructions. The usual defense is a callback to a number you already trust. A signed instruction adds a record of who supplied the account details and when.

🧠 AI agents make that urgent. When an agent moves money for me, the bank needs to know which verified human is behind it and whether that human authorized that action. x402 and MPP settle the payment, AP2 and ACP carry the mandate, and Proof says x401 carries the human underneath.

🧠 The same FAQ blesses the mobile driver's license already in Apple and Google Wallet in 21 states plus Puerto Rico. Proof's credential works where Proof's network is. A state license has the government's name on it and no vendor in between.

🧠 There’s quite a patchwork of “shared KYC” approaches coming. Proof issues credentials; Solo runs a FinCEN-observed pilot so one bank can rely on another's KYC work. While the big KYC vendors work with the banks, and Apple and Google work with the states. How does all of this come together?

🧠 Reusable identity in the US will be built by whoever gets the most banks to say yes.

1. Blend - Embedded yield for fintechs

Blend lets neobanks, payroll companies and treasury platforms offer yield on idle stablecoin balances under their own brand. Each customer gets a non-custodial account, while Blend routes the money across approved venues including Morpho, Aave, Compound, Spark and Pendle.

🧠 I like this as a time-to-market play, but is the middleman optional? Robinhood and Deblock have integrated Morpho directly, while Privy already packages it for fintechs. Blend’s first customer is the smaller team that wants DeFi yield without maintaining wallets, gas, sanctions checks and audit logs. The durable value has to be the boring stuff around the yield, because the yield itself is available from the protocols.

2. Sugar - Working capital for card programs

Sugar gives card programs, neobanks and payments companies up to $25m of credit to fund settlement and reserve requirements. It pre-positions dollars or stablecoins in the company’s bank account or wallet.

🧠 Card programs get stuck parking cash against settlement and chargeback risk. Faster funding with stablecoin settlement closes that gap, but a credit line still lets a new stablecoin neobank launch without locking up its own cash. Sugar says it can provide up to $25m, yet it doesn’t name the bank or warehouse funding the loans. I like the product; I just want to know who funds the funder?

3. Standard Metrics - Portfolio reporting for VC and PE firms

Standard Metrics collects financial data from portfolio companies and turns it into portfolio reviews, valuations, audits, and LP reports for VC and private equity firms. Companies can enter the data, connect an accounting system or upload documents, while the fund gets a standardized view across its portfolio.

🧠 Their first investor was also their first customer, and that’s how the logo wall started. Each fund pulls its portfolio companies onto the product; those companies already report to other funds, which brings the next buyer in. AI will make the analysis easier to copy. Once founders already use it, the next fund is much easier to win.

4. DOW Protocol - Amazon receivables on-chain

DOW Protocol turns short-term e-commerce receivables into on-chain vaults. Its current 90-day vault finances Amazon merchants against money they’re waiting to receive, while stablecoin investors earn from the repayments.

🧠 RWA tokenization makes sense when it funds working capital that merchants already need. DOW’s current vault is around $3m, runs for 90 days and appears basically full. When it matures, do merchants borrow again and investors roll their money? A successful rollover would show the demand is repeatable.

1. Federal Reserve on core providers’ treatment of community banks.

The Federal Reserve, FDIC, and OCC issued a joint statement addressing community banking organizations’ (CBOs) engagement with core service providers. The statement says a few large providers account for a significant share of the market. That leaves community banks with less negotiating power, and the report highlights concerns with limited transparency, a lack of enforceable SLAs, and punitive exit fees. It also notes a failure to invest in modernization.

🧠 There’s the potential for the regulator to intervene directly. The report notes that core providers may legally qualify as Institution-Affiliated Parties (IAPs) under the Federal Deposit Insurance Act (12 U.S.C. § 1813(u)).

🧠 This has been an open secret in the industry for a while. Community banks have complained they're being held hostage, and they lack leverage. We’ll have to wait to see if this joint statement turns into action.

2. Compute - The Next Trillion Dollar Futures Market

AI capex is projected to hit $765bn in 2026, overtaking oil and gas. Yet companies buying GPUs, building data centres or lending against hardware cannot properly hedge major risks. CME and Silicon Data plan to launch H100 and B200 compute futures on October 5. These would let AI companies lock in future compute costs, infrastructure owners secure future rental revenue, and lenders price collateral against a public forward curve. But there is no “WTI” standard.

🧠 The biggest thing happening in finance is the market structure being built around the compute economy. I wrote about this at length back in June.

Remember, if you're enjoying this content, please do tell all your fintech friends to check it out and hit the subscribe button :)

Want more? I also run the Tokenized podcast and newsletter.

(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