TLDR Fintech 2025-09-25

Recent laws like the Corporate Transparency Act now require fintechs to verify business customers through Know Your Business (KYB) processes. Implementation is non-trivial - and can lead to painful onboarding friction, compliance gaps, and up to 5% of revenue lost to fraud.

This guide by Persona shows you how to build an effective KYB process that integrates with KYC, covering:

• Key components and considerations for KYB implementation
• How WeTravel reduced business verification time from weeks to hours
• Compliance requirements for AML and beneficial owner identification

↗️ Download: The practical guide for building a highly effective KYB process

Stripe's valuation has surged to $106.7 billion, surpassing its prior 2021 record of $95 billion. Despite speculation about an IPO, Stripe continues to stay private.

AppZen raised $180M in a funding round led by Riverwood Capital to accelerate the adoption of its agentic AI platform, which automates finance workflows like expense management and accounts payable for over 500 global enterprises. The company aims to turn standard finance tasks into digital co-workers, helping CFOs cut costs, reduce fraud, and scale without adding headcount.

Fidelity National Information Services (FIS) has acquired Chicago-based Amount, a fintech spun out of Avant in 2020, to strengthen its digital deposit and loan origination capabilities. The move expands FIS' portfolio with modular, cloud-native solutions for banks and credit unions, though financial terms were not disclosed. This deal continues FIS' streak of acquisitions and underscores its strategy to accelerate digital transformation across financial institutions.

There's an open secret in fintech: many of the “from scratch” disruptors didn't start from scratch at all. They launched on borrowed rails. Chime, Current, and SoFi built on top of Galileo's platform (with SoFi then buying out the company). AngelList, HoneyBook, and Wix chose Unit's platform to integrate financial products into their core businesses. Not all rails are created equal. Some offer speed with little control. Others promise full ownership but at a steep cost.

Agentic AI is already beginning to redefine how payments are made and the ways in which we can manage our money. The infusion of intelligence, automation, and decision-making tools in real time to the financial landscape can bring far greater benefits to support modern working trends in the future.

Expense management platform Navan has filed its S-1 with the US SEC. Navan's revenue climbed 33% year-over-year to $537 million in fiscal 2025, compared to $402 million in fiscal 2024. However, the company is far from profitable. Its net loss narrowed by 45% year-over-year to $181 million in fiscal 2025 compared with $332 million in fiscal 2024.

Join PayPal's VP of Risk & Core Platforms Wook Chung and unitQ CEO Christian Wiklund, for a conversation on how customer feedback fuels all aspects of business at PayPal. Learn how PayPal captures feedback at scale, how it influences business priorities, and ways to connect customer insights to growth. Join live on October 14

Adyen has finished integrating its unified payments platform across nearly 50 LVMH Maisons, covering 1,000+ stores worldwide in fashion, beauty, hospitality, watches, and jewelry. The rollout includes mobile terminals and Tap to Pay, reducing manual reconciliation while giving sales staff more time to focus on customer service. The project, Adyen's largest luxury retail deployment, positions the Dutch fintech as a primary payments partner for global high-end retail operations.

Revolut is investing $13 billion to accelerate its push into new markets, with plans to serve 100 million customers across 100 countries by 2030. CEO Nik Storonsky, unveiling the strategy from Revolut's new London headquarters, emphasized that global reach has always been core to the company's mission. The move cements Revolut's ambition to transform from a leading fintech into the world's first truly global bank.

American Express introduced a dedicated travel app that combines booking, rewards redemption, and real-time lounge wait times into a single mobile hub. The app also includes a digital passport that issues NFTs tied to destinations, giving travelers a modern collectible layer to their journeys.

Mastercard has unveiled its latest Start Path cohort, which features 11 startups innovating across card processing, AI-driven credit access, treasury management, and agentic commerce. Several members, including Pentatonic, Circulae, and Circulayo, are spotlighting circular commerce solutions during Climate Week NYC, aligning fintech innovation with sustainability.

San Francisco-based credit card fintech Cardless has raised $60M in a round led by Spark Capital, bringing total funding to $170M. The company, which powers co-branded cards for clients like Coinbase, Qatar Airways, Alibaba, and Bilt, plans to double its ~50-person team and launch new programs within the next year. With $15M in annualized revenue today and a target of $150M by mid-2026, Cardless is betting on software-driven card infrastructure to compete with banks in the $200B co-branded credit card market.

PayPal is committing $100 million to expand digital commerce in the Middle East and Africa following the opening of its new Dubai hub.

UK-based fintech Tide has become a unicorn with a $120M round led by TPG's Rise Fund, valuing the company at $1.5B.

Citigroup has begun a 5,000-person pilot of “agentic” AI capabilities within its proprietary Stylus Workspaces platform, enabling staff to complete multi-step tasks across internal systems with a single prompt.