Tearsheet

After launching USDC in 2018 with Circle, Coinbase added USDC support to Coinbase Commerce in 2019, allowing merchants to accept the stablecoin directly. The bigger shift came in 2025, when the crypto exchange launched Coinbase Payments, a stablecoin payments stack that lets businesses and payment platforms integrate USDC payments into their existing systems. Now Coinbase is extending that infrastructure into traditional banking.

The weekly 10-Q newsletter is part of the Tearsheet Pro subscription, where I unpack the recent moves and strategies of leading banks and fintechs in the public space, coupled with stock market analysis. In your inbox every Friday! Message Sara Note: This week’s 10Q story is out today following Monday’s Columbus Day holiday. Last week, I wrote about Nubank reportedly eyeing Monzo to expand its financial relationships into another market. Now, that deal appears to be off the table.

Most AI startups chase breadth. They build a capable, general-purpose product and sell it across as many industries as are willing to buy it. Ari Malik, CEO of Salient, took the opposite approach. He picked one vertical, auto lending, and went deep enough that he eventually moved his company’s headquarters to Los Angeles to be closer to a single customer, Westlake Financial. Two years later, Salient is live inside roughly half of the top 20 auto lenders in the country.

What happens to a fintech’s operating model after it becomes part of a bank? Valley National Bank’s planned acquisition of Bluevine offers a window into that question, particularly how products are built, decisions are made, and technology teams operate.

This analysis tracks the top company developments and how markets absorbed them through Thursday’s close, focusing on where shifting narratives translate into price action. It is part of Tearsheet PRO’s weekly 10-Q Newsletter, where strategy meets market reaction. I track how leading banks and fintechs are evolving in public markets and how investors are pricing those moves.

The debate over whether banks should modernize their core technology is largely settled. The question now is how to do it without putting the systems customers depend on at risk. This evolution has shaped Temenos Regional Forum Americas in Orlando, where more than 350 customers, partners, prospects, and industry leaders gathered. “Institutions are no longer debating whether to modernize,” said Brian DuVal, President of Temenos.

A few years ago, “AI in banking” meant fraud models running quietly in the background and a chatbot that could reset your password. Now it’s resolving a dispute end-to-end, reasoning through a lending decision, carrying on a conversation that actually gets something done. This evolution happened bank by bank, fintech by fintech, each one solving a narrow, painful problem – a flood of dispute emails, a fraud model that couldn’t keep up, a customer assistant that kept routing people to a human.

Robinhood is giving AI agents more agency inside its brokerage. At its HOOD Summit on September 29, the firm introduced Robinhood Agents. Customers can build AI agents inside the app that can research markets, develop strategies, and execute trades. They can do so by choosing an AI model, giving the agent instructions and limits, and funding it through a dedicated agentic trading account.

Avant filed for a national bank charter on September 18, 2026, asking the OCC and the FDIC to approve Avant Bank, N.A. Al Goldstein, the co-founder and CEO, says the Chicago-based lender has facilitated access to more than $17.6 billion in credit and serviced more than 4.8 million customers across a personal loan product, a credit card, and Credit Builder. Avant has explored a charter for years, Goldstein tells me.

Most academic curricula do not yet include formal Gen AI instruction, so for many new hires, the first structured lesson in working with Gen AI happens on the job. At Bank of America, which has more than 200,000 teammates, the design of that lesson carries real weight. This responsibility is overseen by The Academy, the bank’s award-winning onboarding, education, and professional development organization. Michael Wynn, Academy Enterprise Learning and AI Strategy Executive, leads this work.