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Hey, fintech fam 💜

Do you feel the momentum picking up, too? I’m still riding high from the FEMMYs… but we’re not slowing down.

Fintech Meetup is just a few weeks away, and we’ve got something special cooking on March 31 — one event in the morning, one in the evening — as we return with our Fintech Penthouse Series at Mandalay Bay.

We’ll also be recording LIVE episodes of Humans of Fintech on the show floor and in the penthouse.

And yes — you still have a chance to join us. We’re giving away VIP tickets and live podcast spots — nominate yourself here.

Then there’s the big one.

New York Fintech Week.

Today, our team did a site visit at our stunning venue — your new home for NYFTW — The Penn District by Skylight. I cannot tell you how exciting it is to walk the space.

I’m so proud to be building this alongside Fiat Growth, Frances Zelazny, and AscaleX.

Curating this agenda. Designing this stage. Bringing this ecosystem together in the global capital of finance.

It’s a career joy.

And our community bundle tickets? They’re flying.

Can’t wait to share more about what we’ve got in store for you and the partners we’re doing it with.

In the meantime, let’s get into the news. ✨

For the first time ever, Humans of Fintech is hosting the premier podcast booth on the Fintech Meetup show floor — putting the spotlight on the people building the industry.

We’re opening up a special nomination contest just for the Fintech Is Femme community.

That means:

✨ Nominate yourself (yes, really), or someone you think deserves the mic

✨ Two winners — the nominator and nominee — score FREE VIP passes

✨ The selected nominee records a live episode of Humans of Fintech with me

✨ Their story gets distributed to 100,000+ fintech leaders across our network

Translation?

If you’ve built something, learned something, or are shaping where fintech is headed — this is your moment.

🔗 Nominate now and put yourself (or someone brilliant) in the spotlight:

Already know you’re going?

🎟 Lock in your Fintech Meetup ticket here (prices go up at the end of this week):

#TRENDING

Every Thursday, I break down the fintech stories that matter most—grounded in my reporting, interviews with industry leaders, and what I’m seeing unfold across the industry.

Revolut has officially applied for a U.S. national bank charter. The news itself isn’t surprising. The timing is.

The UK-based fintech — now serving 70 million customers across 40 markets — has filed with the OCC and FDIC to become a national bank in the United States. If approved, Revolut would move off partner banks, gather insured deposits, issue credit cards, fund lending with its own balance sheet, and control the full economics of its U.S. business.

Founder and CEO Nik Storonsky called the U.S. “a key pillar” in Revolut’s plan to reach 100 million global customers.

And they’re putting real capital behind that ambition: the company is expected to invest $500 million in the U.S. over the next three to five years, covering regulatory capital, marketing, and hiring. Sid Jajodia, Revolut’s outgoing U.S. CEO, will step into a global chief banking officer role, while former Visa executive Cetin Duransoy takes the helm in the U.S.

And Revolut isn’t alone.

Nubank secured U.S. charter approval in late January. European fintechs including Bunq and OakNorth have also entered the race for national banking licenses.

Which raises the bigger question:

If Chime and SoFi are already scaling aggressively, why are global fintech giants pushing so hard to unlock the U.S.?

Because in this market, scale earns customers — but legitimacy earns permanence.

Revolut and Nubank are not early-stage challengers.

Nubank serves more than 130 million customers across Latin America. Revolut has built a global footprint across Europe and beyond. They’ve already proven they can scale across fragmented regulatory systems and complex FX environments.

But the U.S. remains the most competitive, brand-sensitive, regulator-heavy banking market in the world.

Win here — and you’re not just a fintech.

You’re a global financial institution.

Domestically, we talk about the neobank race like it’s settled:

Chime. SoFi. Current. Varo.

But zoom out.

The largest digital banks in the world are increasingly non-U.S.

And they are now circling.

Nubank is awaiting full approval for its U.S. license — while simultaneously running the American brand playbook. It recently secured naming rights to Inter Miami’s new stadium.

The U.S. opportunity itself is obvious. As Nubank Junqueira put it, “Texas alone has a larger GDP than Brazil.” But Nubank isn’t walking away from its core markets.

Sound familiar?

SoFi did the same with SoFi Stadium.

This isn’t vanity marketing.

It’s trust acquisition, as SoFi’s Kelly Keough shared in a recent interview on Humans of Fintech.

Because in the U.S., scale alone doesn’t win. Brand familiarity does. And that trust is everything.

For Revolut, a national bank charter means:

It also means scrutiny.

But if approval comes, it shifts the competitive landscape.

These companies aren’t entering as startups.

They’re entering as scaled, global operators with refined land-and-expand playbooks: start as a secondary account, win on payments and FX, layer in subscriptions, then lending, then credit.

They’ve run this before.

For years, American fintech dominated the narrative. But the fastest-growing digital banks in the world are now international.

And once they unlock the U.S., they don’t just add customers.

They complete the loop.

Global fintechs that win abroad, earn trust in America, and then compete everywhere.

Revolut just made its move.

Now we see whether U.S. regulators — and U.S. consumers — are ready to let a global player become a national bank.

This week’s partnerships are about rails.

First: SoFi and Mastercard.

SoFi announced an expanded partnership to enable settlement using SoFiUSD, its fully reserved U.S. dollar stablecoin, across Mastercard’s global payments network.

A nationally chartered, OCC-regulated U.S. bank issuing a stablecoin — integrated into one of the largest global card networks.

SoFiUSD is expected to:

“SoFiUSD is at the heart of our strategy to make it faster, cheaper, and safer for people around the world to move money,” said CEO Anthony Noto.

This isn’t crypto experimentation.

It’s regulated stablecoin settlement entering mainstream payments infrastructure.

And that same shift toward tighter, smarter financial infrastructure is happening at the startup level, too.

Brex and Stifel Bank announced a partnership pairing Brex’s AI-native corporate card and finance platform with Stifel’s $10B+ venture debt practice.

On the surface: referrals.

Underneath: stack consolidation.

Brex owns the operating layer — spend management, corporate cards, automation.

Stifel owns the capital layer — venture debt, letters of credit, structured financing.

Brex also announced it is now available inside the ChatGPT app marketplace.

That means founders can check credit limits, look up expenses, review policies — directly inside ChatGPT.

AI-native finance, embedded in workflow.

Finance is no longer just a dashboard.

It’s becoming conversational. Contextual. Ambient.

And when you layer that into the Stifel partnership, you see the strategy clearly:

Brex wants to own the interface.

Stifel brings the capital.

Together, they extend across the lifecycle.

Put all of this next to Revolut’s charter application, and the pattern sharpens:

Different plays.

Same direction.

Fintech is entering its infrastructure era. Less “move fast and break things.” More regulatory convergence. More embedded finance. More ecosystem alliances.

If you want to understand why stablecoins are suddenly getting taken seriously by some of the smartest people and brands in fintech, talk to someone who has spent the last decade helping build the internet’s financial infrastructure.

That’s what stood out to me in my latest Humans of Fintech conversation with Sophie Sakellariadis, a longtime Stripe leader who helped expand the company internationally in its early years and now works on money movement, cross-border systems, and stablecoins.

What Sakellariadis made clear is that stablecoins are interesting because they solve painfully basic problems that traditional financial infrastructure still hasn’t fixed.

As she put it, “Stablecoins are really the first technology that I’ve seen since joining Stripe, which opened up a meaningful leap forward in our ability to provide services for entrepreneurs worldwide.”

That’s a big statement from someone who has spent more than a decade at Stripe.

In the interview, Sakellariadis explained stablecoins in refreshingly plain English: they are a type of crypto asset pegged to the U.S. dollar, which means they offer what she described as “all the good stuff and sort of the dream of crypto without the downside of crypto.”

In practice, that means they can be moved instantly, accessed from anywhere, and used at much lower cost — without the volatility problem that makes holding Bitcoin or other crypto assets a much riskier proposition for everyday business operations.

That distinction matters.

For many U.S.-based fintech people, stablecoins can still sound abstract or overly hyped. But Sakellariadis’s point was that this technology already makes immediate sense in places where the financial system is slower, more fragmented, and less forgiving.

She pointed to entrepreneurs in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and West Africa who already understand the value proposition because they live the pain every day.

“When you talk to entrepreneurs in places like Latin America or Southeast Asia or West Africa, they are in on the party,” she said. “They know what stablecoins are. They actively prefer to hold their funds in stablecoins.”

The most powerful moment in the conversation came when Sakellariadis told a story about her partner’s sister, who runs a graphic design business in Ghana.

A U.S. client sent her payment for a major project, and more than 15 days later, the money was still floating somewhere in the banking ether. Nobody knew where it was. To even receive the money in dollars, she had to open a U.S. dollar account in Ghana — a process Sophie described as taking six months and barely working once it was finally set up.

“It’s just wild that this is how she’s spending her time instead of building the business,” Sophie said.

That, to me, is the whole argument.

Stablecoins are not just about faster money movement. They’re about giving entrepreneurs their time back. They’re about removing friction from the basic act of running a business across borders.

The internet economy has always moved faster than the financial system built to support it. Stablecoins may be one of the first technologies that gives fintech a real shot at closing that gap.

For global founders, the unlock is obvious: 24/7 money movement, lower cross-border costs, faster access to revenue, and the ability to store value in dollars without waiting on broken legacy banking systems.

For Stripe, this is also a natural evolution of its original mission to grow the GDP of the internet. If businesses running on Stripe already power roughly 1.6% of global GDP, then making those businesses easier to fund, pay, and operate across borders is not a niche product move. It is a foundational one.

And for fintech more broadly, Sakellariadis’s point is the one worth remembering: stablecoins do not matter because the industry wants a new trend to talk about. They matter because too many entrepreneurs are still wasting time fighting the rails instead of building the future.

Watch the full episode on YouTube or tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

Let’s keep you booked and busy. Every Thursday, I share fintech events worth adding to your calendar— both IRL and online.

​This gathering is proudly hosted by Academy of Fintech member Viviane Tschanz, in partnership with Fintech Is Femme! In San Diego this week? Come through!

See you in New York! More updates, including our agenda, speakers, and partners, are coming soon.

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That wraps up today’s edition—thanks for reading! Until next week, keep innovating and challenging the status quo. See you Tuesday!

Love,

Nicole 💜