Lending & Credit

Last week's Lending & Credit coverage across fintech newsletters centered heavily on Stripe's expansion into lending. Linas's Newsletter published a post titled "Stripe bought its way into lending on payments it doesn't process," addressing the company's move into credit activity beyond its core payments business. Fintech Radar's Issue #178 similarly flagged this theme, noting in its roundup that "Stripe Doubles Down On SMB Credit," alongside other items in the same issue covering Visa and Mastercard backing a stablecoin and Robinhood enabling agents to trade.

Connecting the Dots in FinTech ran two posts focused on MNT-Halan. One covered the company's plans around a $150M IPO, titled "MNT-Halan Sets Its Sights on a $150M IPO." The other addressed an $82M debt raise by the company, described in the title "MNT-Halan's $82M Debt Raise: Scaling Egypt's Credit Machine," tying the raise to the scaling of credit operations in Egypt.

Linas's Newsletter also published a second post last week, titled "Did AmEx and Perplexity just launch an AI CFO for small businesses?", raising the subject of AmEx and Perplexity's involvement in small business financial tools without further elaboration in the title itself.

Payments Culture covered the broader theme of credit-based purchasing in a post titled "Everything for sale (on credit)," though the title does not specify further detail on the subject matter.