Arrested Development’s Will Arnett Stars In RBC Ad Dismissing Fintechs As a Trend 🇨🇦
We're also covering Monzo CEO ousted over listing fight 🇬🇧, Coinbase boss manipulating markets for fun 🇺🇸, Pakistani stablecoin kiosks 🇵🇰 & Dutch neobank Bunq entering the US 🇳🇱
🇨🇦 Arrested Development’s Will Arnett Stars In RBC Ad Dismissing Fintechs As a Trend
RBC, Canada’s largest bank, released a one-minute ad featuring Netflix’s Arrested Development star Will Arnett that dismisses digital banks as mere trends. In the commercial, the Canadian actor walks past a street vendor wearing a sandwich board for “Kule Bank” who tries to hand him promotional material, to which the actor responds “Nah, I’m good.” The ad concludes with Arnett pointing to the RBC logo inside a branch, declaring “track record, not a trend.”
The ad sparked immediate pushback from two Canadian neobank founders. Neo Financial co-founder Jeff Adamson responded with humour in a LinkedIn post: “I’m super flattered that RBC is thinking of Neo Financial and other ‘trends’, so this year for Halloween, I’m going as ‘Kule Bank.’” KOHO founder and CEO Daniel Eberhard corrected the bank’s spelling: “It’s pronounced KOHO, not KULE.” Michael Fox, Chief Risk Officer at KOHO, added that “Fintechs like us will take the extra publicity here. Thanks to RBC for creating extra awareness.”
Source: Global Fintech Insider
🇬🇧 Monzo Replaces CEO After Board Clash Over London vs NYC Listing
UK neobank Monzo is replacing CEO TS Anil with former Google executive Diana Layfield in a surprise shake-up. Layfield spent nine years at Google as general manager of search, international, and growth.
Anil, who led Monzo for nearly six years, will step down in February after clashing with the board over where to list as the company weighs a stock market float. The board favours London while Anil pushed for New York, according to the Financial Times.
In a LinkedIn post, Anil called the move “bittersweet,” saying he and the board had initially searched for a UK chief executive to report to him. But during the process, they decided Layfield should replace him entirely.
Under Anil’s leadership, Monzo grew from a startup to a major player, reaching 13 million customers and posting over £1 billion ($1.3 billion) in annual revenue for the first time in March 2025.
Source: Financial Times
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🇺🇸 Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong Manipulates Prediction Markets Live On Earnings Call
During Coinbase's quaterly earnings call last week, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong admitted he was “a little bit distracted” because he’d been tracking prediction markets about what words he would say during the call, then deliberately blurted out “Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain, Staking, and Web3”.
By intentionally saying these words, Armstrong caused bettors who had wagered against him mentioning them to lose their positions. Brian Armstrong later explained on X that manipulating prediction markets while on a quarterly call was not something he prepared: “lol this was fun – happened spontaneously when someone on our team dropped a link in the chat.”
The response on X was harsh, with one bettor replying “Brian, I lost around $10,000 on all of these words. Do you still think this was fun?”. Others were wondering whether Armstrong’s employees benefited from his spontaneity: “Did you investigate if that team member had any positions open??”, one X user asked him.
Sources: Global Fintech Insider
🇲🇽 Jack Ma’s Ant Group Pumps Cash & AI Technology Into Mexican Startup R2
Chinese billionaire Jack Ma’s Ant International invested an undisclosed sum in Mexican embedded-lending startup R2, one year after raising $59 million from other investors. As part of the deal, Ant International will equip R2 with AI-powered tools to lower credit costs and improve underwriting accuracy. R2 allows its clients, like food delivery and ride-hailing platforms Rappi and InDrive, to offer loans to their gig workers, with repayments automatically deducted as a percentage of their earnings.
Source: Bloomberg
🇺🇸 Western Union Plans to Launch Stablecoin on Solana to Cut Global Transfer Costs
US-based money transfer giant Western Union is preparing to issue its own US dollar–backed stablecoin, dubbed the USDPT, on the Solana blockchain.
Western Union is partnering with San Francisco-based crypto bank Anchorage Digital, which will handle the stablecoin’s issuance, custody, settlement, and treasury operations.
In an interview with Bloomberg last July, Western Union CEO Devin McGranahan said stablecoins could solve two key challenges in emerging markets, which are currency conversion and value preservation.
“Converting stablecoin into fiat currencies, particularly in harder-to-convert markets, is an opportunity for us. For many of our customers, a stablecoin presents a store of value that’s tough to achieve in their country,’’ he said in the Bloomberg interview, adding that about 60% of Western Union’s business is outside the United States.
Sources: American Banker & Bloomberg
🇵🇰 A16z Backs $12.9M Round to Make Stablecoins Available on Every Pakistani Street Corner
Venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is leading a new funding round for a Pakistani-based startup to make dollar-backed stablecoins as easy to access as mobile top-ups.
The firm is leading a $12.9 million funding round for ZAR, where the one-year-old startup plans to use local corner stores, kiosks, and money agents to let users swap cash for stablecoins stored in mobile wallets linked to Visa cards.
The model targets over 100 million unbanked adults in Pakistan, one of the world’s fastest-growing crypto markets. “Most people don’t need to understand blockchain to use stablecoins, they just need access,” co-founder Brandon Timinsky (left) said in an interview with Bloomberg.
Founded in 2024 by Timinsky and Sebastian Scholl (right), who previously sold their mobile wallet startup SadaPay to Turkey’s Papara, ZAR has now raised $20 million in total and plans to expand to Africa in 2026.
Source: Bloomberg
🇨🇦 WonderFi Sale to Robinhood Pushed to 2026 Over Regulatory, Tech Delays
Canada’s largest crypto-exchange WonderFi has announced that its sale to US trading platform Robinhood Markets has been delayed until the first half of 2026.
WonderFi attributed the delay to additional development work and regulatory approvals required for Robinhood to deploy its proprietary technology across WonderFi’s platforms.
The deal, first announced in May for $250 million CAD ($178 million) in cash, was initially expected to close in the second half of 2025. WonderFi, which trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange, has already secured shareholder and Competition Bureau approvals and received a final court order from the Supreme Court of British Columbia. WonderFi currently oversees $1.9 billion in client assets across regulated exchanges Bitbuy and Coinsquare.
Source: Betakit
🇺🇸 Startup Charter Space Wants to Break the Space Insurance Bottleneck with AI
San Francisco-based Charter Space is tackling a massive satellite insurance bottleneck with AI-powered underwriting that makes coverage faster and cheaper.
Founded in 2021 by former space lawyer Yuk Chi Chan, Charter connects satellite manufacturers’ engineering data directly to an underwriting platform linked with six major insurers. According to Chan, out of 13,000+ active satellites, fewer than 300 are insured due to complex and expensive risk assessments.
Source: TechCrunch
🇳🇱 Dutch Neobank Bunq Wins US Broker-Dealer License, Eyes American Expansion
Amsterdam-based neobank Bunq has successfully entered the US market after securing a broker-dealer license. The approval, granted by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), allows Bunq to offer securities trading and investment services to American customers. The neobank first applied for the license in April.
Founded in 2012 by Ali Niknam, Bunq had previously sought a US banking license under the Biden administration in 2023 but withdrew the application. With the Trump administration’s fintech-friendly stance, the company is now expected to revisit those plans.
Source: Bloomberg
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Who Am I?
Hi, my name is Julien Brault.
From 2017 to 2024, I was the CEO of Hardbacon, a fintech I co-founded, which reached 400,000 unique visitors at its peak.
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The ZAR model is fascinating because they're using Visa's existing card rails to make stablecoins feel like just another mobile wallet, which removes the crypto complexity for 100 million unbanked Pakistanis. What's clever is how Timinsky and Scholl are essentialy arbitraging the difference between Pakistan's capital controls and dollar-pegged stablecoins stored on Visa cards accessible at corner stores. The expansion to Africa in 2026 makes perfect sense because those markets have similar profiles with massive unbanked populations, currency instability, and existing mobile money infrastructure that can integrate with Visa cards. If they can replicate this in Nigeria or Kenya, they're positioning themselves as the physical on-ramp for the entire global south to access dollar-denominated digital currency.