August 30, 2026
Stripe PayPal bid talks are over. The consortium of Stripe and private equity firm Advent International has abandoned its pursuit of PayPal, according to Bloomberg, ending months of speculation over what would have been one of the largest leveraged buyouts on record. PayPal shares fell as much as 16% in premarket trading Friday, after closing
August 29, 2026
Affirm Q4 earnings blew past Wall Street on the headline metric by a margin that should make anyone suspicious. Earnings per share came in at $4.62 against a consensus of $0.85, a surprise of roughly 443%. Revenue landed at $1.17 billion versus a forecast near $1.11 billion. The stock closed the regular session at $77.49
August 29, 2026
Affirm Australia is back, and the word doing the work in the announcement is return. Affirm and Shopify are launching Shop Pay Installments in the market, extending a partnership that has run in the U.S. since June 2021, reached Canada in April 2025 and the UK in December 2025. Shopify merchants across Affirm Australia territory
August 29, 2026
Experian ChatGPT app launches now number four in a single year. The latest, announced August 27, is a Credit Cards app that lets consumers browse and compare card offers, annual fees, introductory bonuses, rewards rates and APR ranges without leaving the chat window. Anyone who wants to go further leaves the Experian ChatGPT app and
August 29, 2026
Helcim Series C funding closed at $53 million CAD in August, led by BDC Capital's Growth Venture Fund. The Calgary payments company builds for small and mid-sized merchants, and the round lifts its valuation to $250 million CAD from $97 million CAD at the 2024 Series B. Total equity raised since the 2022 Series A
August 29, 2026
BitGo NYDIG acquisition terms became public on August 27, when BitGo Holdings (NYSE: BTGO) completed its purchase of the institutional trading business of NYDIG. The deal covers the derivatives, structured products and financing desk that NYDIG built for hedge funds, asset managers and family offices over the past several years. About 30 NYDIG staff moved
August 28, 2026
Revolut PRAGMA now has a division behind it. The bank launched Revolut Research on August 25 from London. It is a dedicated unit inside the AI department, built to develop proprietary machine learning models rather than buy them. Revolut PRAGMA figures are specific enough to check later, which is more than most bank AI announcements
August 28, 2026
Vanilla Safe entered beta on August 25. The estate planning platform is used by advisors at firms including Vanguard and Mariner Wealth Advisors. Vanilla Safe gives a client's whole household organised access to documents, contacts and guidance during a death or medical emergency. An advisor sets it up with a single invite. It is free
August 27, 2026
Parafin SpotOn Capital results were published on August 25 from San Francisco. Operators who refinanced into the programme paid 35 percent less on average for their financing. Those figures come from SpotOn's own data. Parafin runs underwriting, servicing, compliance and programme operations for SpotOn Capital. Its models weigh restaurant revenue and cash flow rather than
August 27, 2026
Grove Centrifuge stake news landed on August 25. The onchain credit protocol allocates institutional money into tokenized real-world assets. It has taken an initial position of 37.8 million CFG tokens in Centrifuge, the tokenization platform underneath its deployments. Scale matters here, and the token count alone does not convey it. CFG trades around $0.1391 against
August 27, 2026
ExpressoPay One-Click launched on August 25 from Coral Springs, Florida. Nordis Technologies built it on statement and balance data clients already supply. Most people have never heard of the company, despite it touching plenty of the bills they pay. The mechanics are simple. The system generates a unique payment URL for each consumer, pre-populated with
August 27, 2026
Morningstar PitchBook Gemini integrations were announced on August 25 from Chicago and Seattle. Both companies join Google Cloud as launch partners for the preview of Gemini Enterprise for Financial Services. Model Context Protocol carries public and private market intelligence into the product. Note the word preview. This is not general availability. The integrations themselves are
