Fintech Recap: No-KYC Cards and Political Bank Charters Aplenty

**Alex Johnson** (0:00)
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Hello, and welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. Today, as we always do at the beginning of every month, we have a episode of Fintech Recap with a friend and the publisher of Fintech Business Weekly, Jason Mikula. Jason comes back as he always does to help us recap what's been happening in Fintech and banking over the last month or so. Stories we covered today include a really wild and complex story that Jason wrote about in his newsletter. We do our best to recap it briefly and then to talk more broadly about what it means for the current state of policy, politics, and how it affects the way that banks and Fintech companies are thinking about their business and planning for the future and why that's become a little more complicated. We also talk about banking as a service, one of our all time favorite topics. A new banking as a service bank has just come online and I think it tells us a lot about where the industry is today versus where it was even a couple of years ago and where we might be going and the viability of banking as a service as a business overall moving forward. Then finally, we cap things off with some really nerdy talk about Fed Master Accounts and the Federal Reserve. I apologize if this section of the podcast is a little esoteric. It's an esoteric topic, but it also is very, very important because as Jason and I and our friend, Ea Haslett and others have been writing about recently, what the Federal Reserve does and how the Federal Reserve is organized, matters a lot to banks and to fintech companies and crypto companies and stable coin issuers and really anyone who has a stake in the way that our sort of essential financial services infrastructure works in this country. So we spend some time trying to untangle the knot that is Fed Master Accounts. And we end, as we always do, with some rants, including on a topic that Jason brought to me, a little tidbit of news that caused me to absolutely lose my shit. So make sure to stick around for the very end of the podcast. And as always, I hope you enjoy a great episode of Fintech Recap with Jason Mikula.
This is Fintech Takes, the podcast keeping you in the loop on all the latest Fintech trends, news and ideas. I'm Alex Johnson, creator of the Fintech Takes newsletter, your host and self-confessed Fintech nerd. Let's go.
Okay, well, crawling through the muck and the AI slop and all the nonsense out there, our friend and intrepid Fintech reporter, Jason Mikula is here. Jason, good to see you, buddy. Good to see you too. This is actually by the time this comes out, I will ostensibly be on vacation in rural France assuming it has not burned down because we also have widespread fires in Spain and in France at the moment. But I think the friends we're going to, I think their region, I believe, is safe. So hopefully, I'm drinking a nice glass of red wine and relaxing for once. Excellent. Excellent. I wish that for you. I will tell you that I similarly find myself in kind of late stage summer forest fire-ish range now. It hasn't been too bad in my neck of the woods. And by the time this comes out, I will be just a couple of days away from the annual Sweet Pea Festival in Bozeman, Montana, which is like, it's kind of our Woodstock, but we do it every year and there's music, there's art, there's theater, there's really delicious food that I only get one time a year. So this is like my summer, summer happy time festival right around the corner when folks listen to us. That sounds, that sounds lovely. Have to send me some, send me some picks. I will send you some pictures. I will, I will post a picture of what a sweet pea is in case people don't know it is a type of flowering vine that is able to be grown in Montana, which is not something that we can always say about everything, but that particular flower thrives here. And Jason, I feel like on this podcast, sort of complicated, intricate, but important Fintech news and recaps thrive here. So would you like to start us off with, I think, what is by far like the hardest story maybe ever we've had to try to unpack on the podcast? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is as a side personal note, this is why I love writing because despite our friend Kia's encouragement to keep it below 5,000 words, I can just go on as much as I want to. And when you and I speak, we have to try to keep it to like a reasonable length. So I did debate deleting this from the outline altogether, given just how convoluted of a story it is. So it will be difficult to do justice, but I will try. Also standard disclaimer that this is not a political podcast. You and I are not talking about politics. And I will do my best to stick to the banking, fintech, crypto and policy pieces of this story. Yes, I am talking about Alt5 Sigma, also known, also known, sorry, I'm laughing already, as AI Financial Corp, as well as its banking as a service-esque subsidiary, M-Swipe, which is also known as StrataCart or StrataCartee. There are so many names already, Jason. It really was torture to try to even write about this because everything changed names multiple times. Okay, so given our time constraints, I'm going to try to keep this summary high levels so that we can actually discuss it. Folks who are interested in all the nitty-gritty details, I would suggest that they give the full story a read and I will drop the link in the show notes.