African Fintech: The Players
Only 239 of 5,000 African fintechs raised venture capital, 992 are dead, and the player map looks nothing like the headlines.
What Happens When the US Settlement Layer Goes On-Chain
The Clearing House settles $2 trillion a day across 25 banks, and it just picked the vendor to put tokenized deposits on that network.
analysisThe Invoice Approval Is the Agent's Permission Slip
Agents can now pay supplier invoices through portals because the approved invoice already defines the payment, leaving the portal to check only who is asking.
analysisAmex Sees Both Sides of Every Transaction and Still Missed $13 Billion
The company with the most complete transaction picture in US payments aimed its AML program at the wrong product line for a decade.
analysisAfrican Fintech: The Map
African fintech raised $4.1 billion in 2025, but the opportunity moved from payments and lending to the infrastructure underneath both.
analysisTokenized Collateral Is Live and the Plumbing Is Already Splitting
BNY completed the first tokenized Treasury triparty repo with Citadel, and five other US institutions launched competing settlement platforms in the same quarter.
analysisThe Stablecoin Stack for Engineers
A dollar-backed stablecoin touches six layers of infrastructure between mint and redemption, and most of them have nothing to do with a blockchain.
analysisThe Ledger Is Becoming the Control Plane
Three companies approached fintech infrastructure from different directions and arrived at the same architecture: the ledger as the single enforcement point for financial constraints.
analysisThe Seam Where Instant Payments Stop Being Instant
FedNow settles the U.S. leg in seconds, but the foreign leg still runs through correspondent banks that settle in hours or days.
analysisOne Sentence, Twenty-One Charters
The entire crypto trust bank wave rests on a single sentence Congress added in 1978 to validate one charter for one estate trustee.
analysisThe Card Networks Split on How Agents Pay
Visa authenticates the agent per transaction. Mastercard bakes spending constraints into the token itself. The card networks are building two different answers to the same question.