On The Ground

Anthropic's IPO had a bad week. The Nasdaq fell 5.5% on Thursday, its worst day since April 2025, and The Wall Street Journal reports that three would-be investors think the proposed $1.5 trillion valuation needs to come down, one closer to $1 trillion. The updated filing shows third-quarter revenue just under $17 billion, a $23.3 billion net loss that is almost all a non-cash charge, and about $895 billion of compute commitments. Does the IPO still happen this month?

Visa gave 22 AI models from 12 labs 15 shopping jobs, and 42.8% of the test runs failed, with more than half of the failed runs still ending in a purchase. Wells Fargo's new online banking terms say using an AI agent is at your own risk and that a customer who switches one off must keep evidence of it, while JPMorgan, Citi and Bank of America blocked outside agents and Chime says it is building connections for the agents its customers choose. Who pays when an agent gets it wrong?

We also talk to Sam Aarons, co-founder and CTO of Modern Treasury, about its application to the OCC for a national trust bank charter, stablecoins and instant payments, and to Amr Mohamed, founder and CEO of Neumetria, about reading transactions to show a customer's real spending room, who owns the customer when agents arrive, and the EU AI Act's rules for credit scoring.

Hosts: Sam Boboev and Otabek Nuritdinov. New episodes every Monday. Everything discussed is our own opinion and is not investment advice. Figures are as reported at the time of recording.

Anthropic filed to go public on Nasdaq, showing $16.3 billion in first-half revenue and an $80.7 billion net loss, $72.4 billion of it not cash. One special share gives its seven co-founders 50.1% of the vote on general matters, and The Wall Street Journal reports a valuation of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion. Would you buy at that price?

Microsoft offered about 60,000 employees, about 27% of its full-time staff, a voluntary way out, and a spokesperson told Seattle's KUOW that AI isn't driving it. Kalshi raised $1 billion at a $40 billion valuation on the day its rival Polymarket paused trading after a hack, while Utah filed 14 criminal counts against Kalshi and its two founders, which are allegations. Is it finance or gambling?

We also cover Shopify bringing Shop Pay to AI agents and Mastercard's pushback on one-time virtual cards, Revolut's new UK personal loans and a reported Bank of England review of how it approves products, and Ripple's final OCC approval for a national trust bank whose charter doesn't allow deposits or commercial lending.

Hosts: Sam Boboev and Otabek Nuritdinov. New episodes every Monday. Everything discussed is our own opinion and is not investment advice. Figures are as reported at the time of recording.

Our guests are James Broadhead, CTO of Taktile, and Sadra Hosseini, co-founder and CEO of Ryft. Taktile builds AI decisioning software that lets banks and insurers automate loan, fraud and claims decisions. Ryft is a Manchester payments company that handles split payments for marketplaces and platforms.

In the news, Barclays announced on October 22 that it will cut about 5,000 jobs, around 5% of its workforce, and expects more than £1.1 billion in extra savings in 2027. Security firm Calif, using an OpenAI model, found two critical PHP flaws nicknamed PHP2Shell, and cloud security firm Wiz found them independently. PHP shipped emergency patches on October 21, and Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says exploit attempts reached the millions. Stripe has agreed to buy Parafin, a lender that has extended over $3 billion in credit to some 60,000 small businesses in the US and Canada.

James Broadhead joined Taktile in September as its new CTO. He says its agents work inside fixed decision flows and pass unclear cases to a human team. Allianz Partners lifted straight-through claims processing by 30% in a production pilot, and Taktile raised a $110 million Series C led by Goldman Sachs in June.

Sadra Hosseini says platforms outgrow Stripe, so Ryft lets them earn on their own payments. Ryft's £20 million Series B was led by Gresham House Ventures, and he says the company is still burning cash and expects the round to get it to profit. He has a loan product ready but is putting expansion first, and sees no customer demand for stablecoin payouts.

Barclays CEO C.S. Venkatakrishnan says AI is only the icing on the cake. Unite general secretary Sharon Graham says the bank is using AI as an excuse. About 1,000 of the roles are already gone, and the other 4,000 are due by year end.

PHP2Shell (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619) has a 9.2 severity score and affects PHP versions back to 5.4. PHP runs about 70% of websites whose server language is known. Cloudflare saw tens of thousands of attempts within 45 minutes of the announcement, and Amazon's honeypots caught an exploitation attempt four days before the flaws were disclosed.

Sam also reports from Nvidia GTC Berlin on OpenShell, Nvidia's open-source runtime for keeping AI agents in bounds.

Subscribe for weekly interviews with fintech founders and CTOs, plus the AI, banking and security stories that move payments.

Hosts: Sam Boboev and Otabek Nuritdinov. Everything discussed is our own opinion and is not investment advice. Figures are as reported at the time of recording.

We sat down with Shah Ramezani, founder and CEO of Noah, a London company that moves money across borders on stablecoin rails in more than 150 markets. We also spoke with Pav Gill, founder and CEO of Confide, the Wirecard whistleblower whose company now builds one platform for governance, risk and compliance that governs AI agents as well as people.

Our news segment covers two stories. JPMorgan is blocking outside AI agents that log in to customer accounts with a customer's banking details, and Jamie Dimon warns there could be thousands of rogue agents. Ramp raised $1.85 billion at a $60 billion valuation, four months after it was valued at $44 billion, and early investor Keith Rabois says it will compete with Anthropic.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• Shah Ramezani says Noah's revenue is up 538% and explains where the demand comes from: payroll providers and businesses paying abroad in Western markets, and people in emerging markets who want to bank in dollars.
• Shah calls Open USD, the new stablecoin from Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase and Shopify, another stablecoin Noah can run on its network, and says anyone big entering the market "raises everyone".
• Why AI agents may pay in stablecoins: one wallet with keys split between the agent, its owner and the payment company, so an agent that goes wrong cannot move money alone. Shah also explains why tokenized deposits and stablecoins are not interchangeable, and why euro stablecoins are still a tiny share of the market.
• Pav Gill on going from Wirecard's head of legal for Asia-Pacific to building Confide, and why he says data fragmentation is one of the biggest enablers of corporate governance failures.
• Pav explains Confide's agentic governance platform, how teams can ask Claude or Copilot about their audit data, and why he expects AI agents to bring more regulation, not less, because they don't have morals.
• JPMorgan still supports open banking providers like Plaid, but agents can only see balances, not send money or pay bills. We ask whether Dimon is protecting his customers or his bank.
• Ramp makes more than $2 billion a year in revenue across 85,000 businesses. We ask whether it is worth 30 times revenue when rival Brex sold to Capital One for $5.15 billion.

CHAPTERS: 0:00 This week on On The Ground 0:24 Shah Ramezani of Noah: stablecoin payment rails 1:26 Noah's $38 million raise and 538% revenue growth 1:49 How big the stablecoin market is 3:12 Who wants stablecoins, West and emerging markets 4:10 Open USD goes live: competitor or partner? 4:51 Can Noah compete with Stripe and Mastercard? 6:18 Why AI agents would pay in stablecoins 8:44 Tokenized deposits vs stablecoins 10:25 Can euro stablecoins compete with the dollar? 12:52 Will AI agents replace banks? 14:18 Will Noah apply for a banking license? 15:02 Stablecoins in 2027 16:10 Pav Gill of Confide 16:27 From Wirecard whistleblower to founder 17:32 One platform for governance, risk and compliance 19:50 Confide's agentic governance platform 22:11 Bring your own AI model 23:49 An AI agent investigates a sanctions hit 25:50 Should AI labs be liable for harm? 27:01 A safe way for engineers to speak up 29:00 The US vs the EU on AI rules 30:29 Agents without morals 31:40 JPMorgan blocks outside AI agents 33:45 Who owns the agent? 35:19 Ramp raises at a $60 billion valuation 36:25 Is Ramp worth 30 times revenue? 37:46 Ramp vs Anthropic on token spend

Revolut is reportedly discussing a new incentive package for CEO Nik Storonsky tied to a future $500 billion valuation. With the company already valued at around $115 billion in a secondary transaction, we discuss how far Revolut can go and what could happen when it eventually enters the public markets.

Visa is spending $2.4 billion to acquire BioCatch as AI makes scams, account takeovers and digital fraud easier to scale. We look at what behavioral biometrics adds to Visa’s fraud stack and whether the technology will remain as useful as payments move toward AI agents.

Google is making major changes inside its AI business. Demis Hassabis is moving away from the day-to-day leadership of DeepMind and taking a broader role across Alphabet. We discuss why Google has struggled to dominate the AI conversation despite its research, infrastructure, distribution and talent.

Then there is the stablecoin race. Visa and Mastercard have joined Circle’s Arc while also participating in other stablecoin initiatives. Their strategy increasingly looks like being present across the infrastructure regardless of which network wins.

We also get into OpenAI’s legal fight with Apple over former employees and alleged trade secrets, OpenAI’s decision to publish private communications from the dispute, and the growing competition around AI hardware.

Finally, Klarna is expanding its US distribution through JPMorgan Payments, giving merchants access to its Buy Now, Pay Later product through JPMorgan’s commerce platform. We discuss what this partnership says about the relationship between fintech companies and the banks they were once expected to disrupt.

A $16B AI hedge fund lost two-thirds of its value in ~72 hours this week and got sold overnight. That's where this week's episode starts. Six stories:

1/ Situational Awareness — @leopoldasch's AI fund — fell 67% as chip and tech equities pulled back. Facing margin calls from @GoldmanSachs, @jpmorgan, @BankofAmerica and @Citi, he moved a $16B equity book to Ken Griffin's @Citadel at a steep discount in a single 24-hour negotiation. Outbid @JaneStreet and @Millennium. The fund is still +80% YTD. It's abandoning bank leverage entirely and keeps a $5B @AnthropicAI stake. The lesson isn't "young manager blew up." It's short-duration prime broker debt.

2/ @elonmusk launched X Money on @X. 6% yield on deposits ($1k min), 3% cashback, real-time transfers, a @Visa debit card. Not a bank — it runs on @CrossRiverBank rails. Nobody has explained who funds the 6%.

3/ @Meta raised full-year capex guidance to $72B, with $17B in the quarter. Multi-gigawatt clusters. $14.3B for 49% of @scale_AI, plus @alexandr_wang and researchers poached from @OpenAI and @GoogleDeepMind at up to $200M a package. He said he wouldn't rent the data centres out. He's renting them out.

4/ @circle bought @IBM's blockchain patent portfolio — ~1,000 patents, 680+ families. Goes from near-zero to America's largest holder. IBM backs Open USD, the rival standard. It just sold its patents to USDC.

5/ Visa cut ~7% of staff — roughly 2,600 roles, mostly tech and product — citing AI. Same quarter: revenue up 14%, beating estimates. Not cost-cutting. Reallocation. @Mastercard, @PayPal and @Block all cut this year too. Real displacement, or AI-washing a post-COVID correction?

6/ An early @stripe engineer bought a bank. Darragh Buckley's @increase acquired Twin City Bank in Longview, WA — $114.6M in assets, single branch — and rebranded it Increase Bank. His infra already processes ~$500B/yr for clients including @tryramp and @GustoHQ. @Klarna applied for a charter. @Wise got rejected. Buckley just bought one instead.

Stripe is reportedly bidding $10B for OpenRouter, 8x its valuation from two months ago. Alphabet beat Q2 estimates across the board and the stock still fell. And Revolut just hit a $115B valuation in a secondary sale, worth more than Barclays. Otabek and Sam break down what's actually driving these moves.

In this episode:

Stripe's reported $10B bid for OpenRouter, and what it says about the AI billing land grab

Alphabet's Q2 earnings beat, and why the stock fell anyway on the back of a raised capex outlook

Revolut's $115B valuation and what it means for the IPO timeline

Wise's US banking application rejected by the OCC, and its Genius Act plan B

Nvidia's Jensen Huang breaks his social media silence over open-weight AI models

The Clarity Act's stalled path through Congress

This week on On The Ground, we sit down with Anthony Soohoo, CEO and Chairman of MoneyGram, to talk about MGUSD, MoneyGram's new native stablecoin, and why the company is betting on digital assets to make cross-border payments faster, cheaper, and more transparent. We dig into why MoneyGram built its own coin instead of relying solely on USDC or USDT, how it plans to vertically integrate its network (with an Apple silicon analogy), what role MoneyGram's 500,000+ agent locations still play in a digital-first world, and his take on OpenUSD's 140-company alliance and Swift's new blockchain ledger pilot.

Then Sam and Otabek break down the week's biggest fintech and payments news:

- Stripe and Advent International's $53B+ bid for PayPal, and why PayPal's board says the offer is "inadequate"

- Monzo founder Tom Blomfield leaving Y Combinator to join Anthropic's compute team

- Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, the 2.8-trillion-parameter open model rattling OpenAI and Anthropic

- The European Central Bank's 36-firm CBDC/stablecoin pilot, and whether Europe can catch up to the dollar-backed stablecoin market

Subscribe for weekly conversations with the people building the future of payments, banking, and stablecoins.

#fintech #stablecoins #moneygram #payments #crypto

OpenUSD launched with 140 backers. Bitget Wallet crossed 100 million users. US banks are trying to buy their way around Durbin. And Swift just went live with a blockchain-based shared ledger for tokenized bank deposits. This episode covers all four.

Sam sat down with Alvin, COO of Bitget Wallet, to break down OpenUSD's consortium stablecoin model, why it shifts stablecoin yield from the reserve layer to the distribution layer, and what Bitget's 100 million user milestone actually measures. We also get into why Bitget is betting on emerging markets over the US and UK, how the wallet works without a banking license, and where AI agent payments are headed.

Then Otabek and Sam cover the week's biggest infrastructure news.

JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and PNC are reportedly in informal talks to acquire Star and Accel, the debit networks owned by Fiserv, whose stock has fallen sharply this year. The real motive is the Durbin Amendment, which caps debit interchange fees for large banks when transactions route over an outside network, but exempts banks that own the network itself. It is the same loophole logic behind Capital One's acquisition of Discover, and we discuss whether this leads to more merchant and consumer costs, and whether the payments world is fragmenting instead of consolidating around a few big rails.

We also break down Swift's new blockchain-based shared ledger, now ready for initial use after nine months of development. Seventeen banks across six continents, including ANZ, BNP Paribas, Citi, DBS, HSBC, Lloyds, MUFG, Standard Chartered, and UBS, are piloting live transactions using tokenized bank deposits instead of stablecoins. We get into how this differs structurally from USDT and USDC, why it overlaps with a separate live initiative from Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, and NatWest, whether Swift's 11,500-bank network gives it a structural edge over consortium stablecoins like OpenUSD, and why smaller emerging markets, including Central Asia, are still missing from every major cross-border rail being built right now.

Subscribe for weekly conversations on payments, stablecoins, and fintech infrastructure. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

TIMECODES:

00:00 Cold open

00:54 Bearish on trading, bullish on stablecoins

01:31 Open USD: 140 companies, one stablecoin

02:45 Cathie Wood's warning: can OUSD beat USDT and USDC?

03:40 The three layers: reserve, distribution, network

06:29 Governance: getting 140 rivals to agree

07:38 Trading vs payments — two different games

08:56 Inside Bitget Wallet: 100M users, cards and QR

11:47 Why emerging markets, and the "borderless generation"

13:03 $177B settled, and no banking licence

14:15 Can AI agents make payments?

16:48 Will the wallet become your bank account?

18:48 First time ever: payments overtake trading

21:19 Why not the US, UK and Europe?

23:00 News desk: Otabek is back

23:29 Story 1: Big banks want to own a debit network

27:14 The Durbin loophole and the Capital One precedent

29:28 Story 2: Is SWIFT a monopoly?

30:25 SWIFT's blockchain ledger: 17 banks, tokenized deposits

33:09 Fragmentation — is anyone actually coordinating?

34:42 The corridors nobody serves

37:25 Wrap: the ground is shifting

140 companies just launched a stablecoin to take on Tether and Circle. Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, Amex, BlackRock, Coinbase, Ripple, Google, Shopify, and DoorDash are all behind Open USDT. Unlike USDC and USDT, most of the reserve income gets shared back with partners instead of kept. Stripe already made it the default for its businesses. Circle's stock dropped 17% on the news, and CEO Jeremy Allaire publicly pushed back, calling the model unsustainable.

OpenAI has reportedly proposed giving the US government a 5% stake worth $42.6 billion. Sam Altman wants Google and Meta to do the same, folding it into a sovereign wealth fund-style vehicle. Anthropic has refused any government equity arrangement. A regulator becoming a shareholder is a conflict of interest waiting to happen.

Europe's MiCA rules kicked in July 1, and Tether's USDT just got locked out of EU exchanges, including Coinbase, Kraken, and Crypto.com. Circle's USDC stays compliant. Tether says MiCA's reserve rules, which force issuers into smaller, less capable European banks, could hurt consumers more than protect them.

SpaceX reportedly showed investors an AI phone prototype sleeker than an iPhone, ahead of its IPO. Musk denies it. The device would run on a custom OS built around xAI, and could position SpaceX to take on Verizon and AT&T in wireless. AI hardware has a graveyard already, Humane and Rabbit both flopped.

Klarna just won nearly $2 billion from Google. A Swedish court found Google illegally favored its own shopping service over Klarna's PriceRunner for 15 years. It's the largest antitrust award in Swedish history. Google is appealing.

ElevenLabs doubled its valuation to $22 billion in five months. The AI voice startup holds under 1% of the broader AI voice market, and independent leaderboards rank Google's Gemini TTS and Inworld ahead of it. The valuation is being driven by enterprise distribution, not the best model.

Subscribe for weekly breakdowns of the news shaping fintech, crypto, and payments, and let us know what you think of the new format in the comments.