Hey, fintech fam 💜

It’s been a long winter — and I am so ready to celebrate together on Monday in NYC. We’ve got icons in the room, and I’m genuinely looking forward to real, quality time with this community.

What excites me most isn’t the live band and bar (though… yes). It’s not even the stage or our fabulous moodboard.

It’s the conversations. The ideas that spark. The quiet “we should build that together.” The partnership meetings happen because trust already exists in the room.

If you’ve been meaning to join us, this is your moment. Grab your ticket while you still can — and I’ll see you on the dance floor.

Let’s get into the news. ✨

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#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.

On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Stripe — now valued at $159 billion — was exploring a potential acquisition of some or all of PayPal, the payments giant it has spent the last decade disrupting.

The rumor cycle moved fast.

The same day, Stripe released its 2025 annual letter.

Businesses running on Stripe generated $1.9 trillion in total payment volume last year, up 34% year-over-year and equivalent to roughly 1.6% of global GDP.

More than 5 million businesses now run on Stripe directly or through platforms. Ninety percent of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and 80% of the Nasdaq 100 use Stripe. Twenty-five percent of all Delaware corporations are created with Stripe Atlas.

Stripe remained robustly profitable. It shipped more than 350 product updates in 2025. Its Revenue suite is approaching a $1 billion annual run rate. It acquired Privy (110 million programmable wallets) and Metronome (usage-based billing infrastructure used by OpenAI and NVIDIA).

In other words: Stripe is not playing defense.

Then came the Bloomberg headline suggesting Stripe was considering buying PayPal.

On Thursday, Semafor followed with an exclusive: PayPal is not currently in talks to sell itself and has been preparing for a potential activist campaign or unwanted takeover bid amid its share decline (PayPal stock fell more than 4% on Thursday after the report). Executives have reportedly been working with bankers for months to avoid vulnerability.

Translation: there is no deal.

And yet, the narrative took on a life of its own.

Let’s zoom out.

As Semafor pointed out, the mechanics are daunting: Stripe, as a private company, can’t use stock as acquisition currency and would need major debt financing — plus PayPal’s cooperation — to pull off a deal of this scale.

Because headlines in fintech do more than inform. They shape perception.

Stripe buying PayPal would symbolize something bigger than M&A — it would mark the formal transition of power from legacy digital payments to programmable financial infrastructure. It would be narrative closure: the disruptor absorbing the incumbent.

But here’s the discipline required in moments like this: speculation is not strategy.

Fintech moves quickly. Media moves faster. And markets react fastest of all.

We’ve seen this before — a well-placed report becomes a thesis. A thesis becomes a talking point. A talking point becomes “inevitable.”

But nothing has happened.

Stripe’s annual letter is arguably the bigger signal. It shows a company scaling beyond payments into tax compliance, embedded finance, treasury management, fraud prevention, billing infrastructure, and wallet orchestration. It shows a company becoming a financial operating system for the internet.

That evolution may put it in competition with PayPal in new ways. It may create overlap in enterprise clients. It may even prompt strategic conversations down the line.

But rumor is not reality. Not every report signals imminent action. Not every headline deserves amplification.

The more interesting story is not whether Stripe buys PayPal.

It’s that Stripe’s scale is now large enough for the idea to feel plausible.

When a private company processing $1.9 trillion annually can be credibly mentioned as a potential acquirer of a payments incumbent, that tells you something about how much the center of gravity has shifted.

The power isn’t just in the deal. It’s in the possibility.

And in fintech, perception can move markets long before paperwork ever does.

Anthropic this week launched its first wealth management–specific plugins for Claude, signaling that AI’s newest battleground isn’t consumer chat — it’s the advisor desktop.

Peter Nolan, Anthropic’s Head of Asset and Wealth Management, announced the rollout on LinkedIn, positioning the tools as foundational building blocks for RIAs, broker-dealers, custodians, and TAMPs (turnkey asset management platforms). Firms can build private plugins powered by their own data and governed by their compliance teams.

“They own what they build,” Nolan wrote.

Anthropic also announced expanded integrations with LPL Financial and Orion. LPL alone supports more than 30,000 financial advisors — making this less a proof of concept and more a distribution strategy.

The company, now valued north of $380 billion, is methodically inserting Claude into financial services workflows spanning wealth management, investment banking, equity research, and private markets — industries that collectively generate roughly $500 billion in annual revenue.

The possibilities are real. The upside is enormous.

Deploying AI inside wealth management is not the same as launching a chatbot and watching users experiment. And any firm experimenting with models like Claude has to confront the most sensitive question of all: how do you leverage AI without compromising client data, confidentiality, or regulatory obligations?

This is a sector built on fiduciary duty, regulatory scrutiny, and client trust. Advisors don’t just generate content — they interpret markets, allocate capital, and manage generational wealth. The tolerance for error is effectively zero.

To be clear, that doesn’t mean AI can’t work here. It means the bar is higher.

Gallup’s June 2025 report found that while 44% of employees say their organization has begun integrating AI, only 22% report a clear plan or strategy. Just 16% strongly agree the AI tools they’ve been given actually help them do their jobs.

The gap isn’t technical. It’s cultural.

Ahead of the Fintech Is Femme AI Summit in San Francisco last fall, I spoke with two fintech leaders who are treating AI not as a feature, but as infrastructure: Luan Cox, Founder & CEO of FinMkt, and Anna Joo Fee, Co-Founder and CEO of Goodfin.

Both operate in trust-heavy environments. Both are scaling platforms where precision matters. And both agree on one thing: AI adoption doesn’t start with tools. It starts with people. 

If you want the full breakdown of how Luan and Anna are actually making AI work inside their companies, read more here.

Manny Pacquiao — yes, that Manny Pacquiao — has launched Manny Pay, a new digital payments platform operating under 7th Pillar Integration Systems Corp., entering the fast-moving and highly competitive digital payments market in the Philippines.

At launch, Manny Pay functions as a payment gateway, with ambitions to expand further into digital finance.

On the surface, this reads like another celebrity-fintech crossover. We’ve seen athletes and entertainers attach their names to crypto platforms and neobanks before.

But zoom out — and this story is less about celebrity and more about geography.

The Philippines is one of Southeast Asia’s most dynamic digital finance markets. A young, mobile-first population. One of the largest and most globally distributed diasporas in the world. Tens of billions of dollars in remittances flowing home annually. A government actively pushing financial inclusion.

And fierce competition.

Players like GCash, which has become one of the country’s dominant digital wallets, and regional super-app Grab (which just announced its acquisition of Stash) have already built enormous distribution across payments, lending, and financial services. The digital wallet ecosystem in the Philippines isn’t emerging — it’s accelerating.

That’s what makes Manny Pay interesting.

Pacquiao isn’t just a national icon — he’s a global one. His reach mirrors the migration patterns of Filipino workers and families across the U.S., Middle East, and Asia. If Manny Pay leans into cross-border payments or remittance flows, it could tap into something far more strategic than domestic checkout transactions.

Remittances are not a niche. They are economic lifelines.

Reducing friction, cost, and settlement time in those flows isn’t just a product decision — it’s infrastructure.

Of course, this is a crowded market. Brand recognition alone won’t win against platforms with deep regulatory relationships, distribution partnerships, and embedded ecosystems.

But fintech history teaches us something important: local trust matters.

In emerging markets, especially, adoption isn’t just about features. It’s about cultural fluency. Recognition. Credibility.

And this is where I think U.S.-centric fintech media (myself included) sometimes misses the bigger picture.

We obsess over Stripe, PayPal, AI infrastructure, and enterprise wealth stacks (all important, don’t get me wrong). But while we’re focused on optimizing mature markets, entire financial systems are being leapfrogged in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

This story was reported back in October 2025 — but I only recently came across it at a time when I’ve been zooming out and thinking more globally about fintech opportunities.

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

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

Award-winning rapper, songwriter, and actor Megan Thee Stallion is making her Broadway debut next month in the Tony-winning Moulin Rouge! — and I, for one, won’t be missing it. Also… her lyrics are really hitting for me this week — all about growing, scaling, and betting on yourself.

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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 💜