AI

American Banker Fintech covered artificial intelligence's mixed effects on registered investment advisor staffing, citing Cerulli research on how AI both encourages and discourages hiring plans, and separately raised the question of whether banks need a "nutrition label" for AI model data. AI for FIs reported on a security incident in which an attacker used AI to steal thousands of credentials in under six hours.

Several newsletters focused on AI agents and payments infrastructure. Connecting the Dots in FinTech covered Alipay's work building a payment layer for everyday AI agents and reported that Grok can now see users' finances through Plaid. Payments Wrap Up covered a partnership among Visa, Mastercard, and Ant International on an AI agent trust framework, as well as Anthropic's debut of a Commerce Agent Blueprint with Visa and Mastercard. Fintech Radar covered Anthropic's move toward its own payments stack, India's introduction of agents on UPI, and X turning payouts into deposits. Fintech Futures addressed the question of trusting AI agents with money, framed as "the blue shirt problem," and covered Georgie & Cog's positioning as "the agentic bank."

Linas's Newsletter covered a range of items, including Chime's $590M purchase of Stride Bank with a stated intent not to grow it, Meta's purchase of the remaining half of Agentic Commerce, and Robinhood's decision to stop renting its prediction market. The same newsletter also covered Meta Muse's bet that the AI agent race against Grok Bot and Gemini will be won on trust, Circle's $400M acquisition of Tazapay described as aimed at owning USDC float rather than payment fees, and a piece on using GPT-6