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Mollie is offering €50 million to build banking for AI agents

Mollie Launches €50M AI Challenge

Hey FinTech Fanatic!

Most companies post a job opening when they want to build something new. Mollie is offering €50 million in equity instead.

The European payments FinTech is looking for a founding team to build a banking and financial layer for AI agents. And it’s not asking them to start from scratch: the team would get access to Mollie’s existing infrastructure, a budget and 350,000 customers from day one.

Mollie founder Adriaan Mol says the goal is to build an intelligence platform on top of the company’s banking infrastructure, what he describes as Mollie’s biggest bet yet. The €50 million equity package is tied to achieving specific milestones, with the team given full ownership of the project.

It’s a pretty unconventional way to build a new business. But as AI agents move from answering questions to making purchases and handling transactions, the financial infrastructure they need could become a major opportunity. Mollie clearly doesn’t want to wait around to find out.

Think your team has what it takes? Apply as a team here

Plenty more happening in FinTech today.

Let’s get into it 👇

See you tomorrow!

Cheers,

Marcel

FINTECH NEWS

🇫🇷 Worldline helps establish first global ISO standard for sustainable digital services. The standard sets 32 practices to measure, reduce and manage digital emissions. Worldline led the project, and the standard covers the entire lifecycle of digital services, from design to retirement.

🇺🇸 JPMorgan Chase blocks outside AI agents, like Muse and Instinct, from directly accessing accounts. CEO Jamie Dimon told analysts on Tuesday that external agent access is too risky for clients and the bank.

🇺🇸 Ramp launches Glass, an AI workspace, after spending $1.5 million on AI model tokens in a single week in May. The tool turns internal knowledge and workflows into reusable AI skills, with more than 350 already available. Ramp built it to get more out of every dollar as its model bills climbed.

🇺🇸 Fiserv has surpassed 5 million Clover devices shipped worldwide. The milestone follows the 4 million mark in 2025 and the first 1 million devices shipped in 2018. Clover combines payment acceptance, software, hardware and services on a single platform for businesses.

PAYMENTS NEWS

🇬🇧 Pliant secures FCA authorisation as an Electronic Money Institution, granted to its UK subsidiary Pliant Payments Limited. The approval lets the B2B payments company issue payment products and serve UK customers directly through its own regulated entity. It follows an extensive FCA review of onboarding, risk management, safeguarding and financial controls.

🌐 iSX Financial partners with Mastercard to scale global account-to-account payments. The partnership combines Mastercard’s Open Finance connectivity with PaidBy’s payment orchestration and settlement infrastructure, aiming to make cross-border account-to-account payments work at scale.

🇨🇱 XTransfer launches its cross border payment service in Chile, after XTransfer Chile SpA completed registration with the country's Unidad de Análisis Financiero. The platform serves SMEs in international trade, and its payment collections from Chile rose 79% YoY in 2025. Bilateral trade between China and Chile reached US$66.905 billion in 2025.

🇪🇺 Vivid selects Wise Platform for international SME payments. The business banking provider is partnering with Wise to offer international transfers in more than 40 currencies. Demand is growing fast: Vivid Business customers making international payments monthly increased more than fivefold over the ten months to May 2026, driving the expansion of its cross-border payment offering.

🇿🇦 Wise secures a remittance licence in South Africa, as the Reserve Bank appointed Wise Payments South Africa (Pty) Limited a Category Two Authorised Dealer in Foreign Exchange with Limited Authority. The appointment gives Wise a licensed footing inside the exchange control system. It covers bureau de change services and money remittance offered with external transfer operators.

🇿🇦 Nuvei secures a license to offer local payment acceptance in South Africa. The approval from PASA expands Nuvei's local acquiring network to 52 markets, allowing merchants to process payments domestically, potentially improving authorisation rates, reducing costs and strengthening fraud management through a single global platform.

🇦🇪 Ant International obtains key licenses from the Central Bank of the UAE to support digital payments. The Retail Payment Services and Card Schemes license paves the way for Antom to offer merchant acquiring services, while the Stored Value Facilities license enables WorldFirst to provide cross-border financial services in the UAE.

🌐 Movere launches an AI-native payments platform to fuel business growth in new markets. Movere lets businesses go live in as little as 15 minutes through AI agent onboarding. It connects to 500+ payment methods across 100+ countries.

🇺🇸 Zip plans to launch Zip Cash in the U.S., a same day cash loan product that extends its installment experience beyond checkout. Eligible customers may access loans of up to $500, with funds deposited as soon as the same business day. More than 100,000 customers have joined the waitlist ahead of an initial launch in eligible states this holiday season.

INSIGHTS

💻 Yapily: Spotting Vulnerable Borrowers Before a Missed Payment

Yapily brings together experts from Serene, Finclusion and NatWest to discuss how lenders can spot early signs of financial vulnerability, support customers and meet FCA Consumer Duty expectations. The panel features Jason O’Shaughnessy (Yapily), Savanna Price (Serene), Christopher Bosworth (Finclusion) and Tom Layzell (NatWest). Register for the webinar.

📅 Tuesday, 3 November | 2 pm

DIGITAL BANKING NEWS

🌐 Splitit launches the Splitit World Mastercard for midsize banks and credit unions. Cardholders set a spending threshold in the app, so larger purchases automatically split into predictable monthly payments while everyday spending is paid in full within 30 days. Splitit powers the installment technology and an AI enabled mobile experience that banks embed in their own apps.

🇬🇧 Starling Bank builds an AI model on UK sovereign cloud infrastructure. The bank is training a transactional foundation model on more than 15 billion anonymised transactions, using Civo’s UK cloud infrastructure. The aim is to build its own AI layer for banking services, starting with capabilities such as fraud detection.

🇬🇧 NatWest and NVIDIA improve AI speech recognition for UK banking customers. Testing across regional accents and everyday banking language reduced misheard words by 20%, helping make voice-driven financial tools more accurate. The work supports NatWest’s conversational Spending Insights experience.

🌍 Mollie offers €50 million in equity to build banking for AI agents. Under the offer, a founding team gets Mollie's infrastructure, a budget and access to 350,000 customers from day one. The equity is tied to milestones, and the team keeps full project ownership.

🇩🇪 Revolut launches Revolut Mobile in Germany, in partnership with telecom provider 1GLOBAL. The plan offers unlimited calls, texts and data for €14.99 a month, with the first 120 GB at full speed and 2 Mbit/s afterwards. The offer rolls out gradually to more than 3 million customers over the coming weeks.

🇧🇩 bKash accelerates lending expansion to reach its 85 million customers. The SoftBank backed mobile financial services provider plans a shift from payments toward credit. CEO Kamal Quadir expects lending to deliver stronger performance as it scales.

🇺🇸 Bank of America faces a $1.2 billion penalty over money-laundering control failures. US regulators say the bank failed to report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions and fell short on anti-money-laundering safeguards. The penalty includes a record $750 million assessment from the OCC, alongside a separate sanctions settlement. The action puts financial crime compliance back in focus for major banks.

BLOCKCHAIN/CRYPTO NEWS

🇺🇸 Polymarket weighs an IPO and a native token, as its valuation could top $20 billion. The company's valuation climbed from $9 billion to $15 billion and beyond, with investment talks said to be underway. Annualized revenue is well above $1 billion, while preparations for CFTC oversight and Polymarket US continue.

🇺🇸 BNY completes a tokenized U.S. Treasury triparty repo workflow with Citadel Securities. A two year Treasury note settled within minutes on BNY's private digital ledger, then served as collateral in an overnight triparty repo. It marks the first use of tokenized assets on a major triparty repo platform.

🇦🇪 Standard Chartered unveils a cryptocurrency trading solution for affluent clients, the first such offering by an international bank in the UAE. Eligible clients can buy and sell Bitcoin and Ether directly through their existing bank accounts, with no separate wallet required. The VARA regulated solution was built with SC Ventures backed Zodia Markets.

🇵🇭 Coins.ph rebuts compliance allegations, saying customer assets are safe and its license remains intact. The exchange responded to claims over offshore gambling related transactions and the possibility of sanctions from financial authorities. It says it complies with Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas and AMLC requirements, and some services will soon be fully restored.

🌍 Coinbase joins U.S. and UK law enforcement to target West African scam networks. During a four day operation in London, its investigators traced illicit funds and supported efforts to freeze assets. The effort involved the DOJ's Scam Center Strike Force and the UK's National Crime Agency, targeting fake crypto investments and police impersonation schemes.

🌐 CoinShares launches an on-chain asset management business with Safe. The partnership with Safe Labs and Railnet, built on Kiln’s infrastructure, lets enterprise users allocate stablecoins from their existing Safe accounts to CoinShares-managed yield strategies. The strategies combine DeFi yields with returns from tokenised real-world assets, while users retain control of their assets.

STABLECOINS NEWS.

🌐 Noah goes live on Arc mainnet from day one. The open, EVM-compatible Layer-1 blockchain is built for financial markets and real-time money movement. Starting with USDC, Arc offers predictable, dollar-denominated transaction fees and deterministic settlement, while giving Noah another route to move money between stablecoins and local currencies.

🇳🇱 Qivalis secures a Dutch EMI license to launch a euro stablecoin backed by banks. The consortium, backed by 37 major European banks, received the license from the Bank of the Netherlands. It must still publish a white paper under MiCA before issuing its token in the coming months.

🌐 Bitso lists the Western Union USDPT Stablecoin with live price and chart data. The page also offers a USDPT calculator alongside the live chart. Bitso states its platform is not authorized to provide crypto services in Spain.

PARTNERSHIPS

🇺🇸 MassPay partners with Bottomline to add Paymode virtual card and Premium ACH. The integration lets MassPay customers pay U.S. vendors through Paymode's secure network inside the platform they already use. It aims to reduce fraud exposure and give businesses still paying by check a path to electronic payments.

🇧🇩 Pubali Bank partners with Mastercard to launch Bangladesh's first offshore debit card. The card links to offshore savings and current accounts in approved currencies. Eligible NRBs and foreign nationals also get airport lounge visits through LoungeKey.

🇺🇸 Selini Capital joins zerohash's network of institutional liquidity providers. Selini will provide continuous liquidity on zerohash's order book and stream quotes into its RFQ system. zerohash says partners gain deeper institutional liquidity and more efficient execution without added complexity.

🌍 EWG selects ClearBank to strengthen its digital payments infrastructure. The partnership gives EWG access to diversified payment rails and faster payments. EWG is working toward offering clients Jersey centric sort codes and EU IBANs.

🌐 Kayak for Business partners with Mesh Payments to unify travel booking and spend. Travelers book trips on Kayak for Business, while payments run on Mesh virtual cards issued locally in more than 40 countries. The setup lets finance teams see travel spend as it happens instead of weeks later.

🇬🇧 Visa details how Barclaycard Payments scaled with the Visa Acceptance Platform. The UK acquirer connected the platform to its own banking solutions, picking only the features it needed. The partnership helped it address the UK market and scale to Europe. Keep reading

🌐 SEON partners with Yuno to expand global fraud prevention and identity verification. Yuno customers gain direct access to SEON's tools through the same infrastructure they use for payments. Yuno connects businesses to over 1,000 payment methods in 190 countries via one integration. Read more

🇲🇾 Tourism Malaysia and Alipay+ partner to accelerate Malaysia's digital tourism transformation. The two signed an MoU to accelerate cross border commerce and digitalise merchant engagement across Malaysia's tourism economy. Alipay+ is the unified wallet gateway of Ant International.

🇺🇸 Stripe's Privy partners with Ripple to bring embedded wallets to the XRP Ledger. Developers can create XRPL wallets and sign transactions without building the infrastructure, with support for XRP and RLUSD. Server side wallets will let AI agents hold funds and pay for online services through the x402 protocol.

DONEDEAL FUNDING NEWS

🌐 Strive plans a $500 million raise to buy Bitcoin and other assets. The Bitcoin treasury company will issue 5 million SATS perpetual preferred shares at $100 each. SATS pays a fixed 15% dividend daily, and Strive's holdings now stand at 32,773 BTC, valued at about $2.7 billion.

🇹🇭 Salary Hero raises $7.6 million in Series A funding and expands into Malaysia. The Bangkok-based financial health platform will use its new funding and expanded $10 million credit facility to grow its earned-wage access business, giving employees a way to access wages before payday.

🇮🇳 RevRag AI raises $2.5 million in seed funding to build AI relationship managers. Led by Accion Ventures and Cedar Hill Capital, the round will fund product development, more enterprise deployments and expansion into the U.S. The startup builds multilingual AI agents that help banks and financial service providers handle customer onboarding, sales and support.

🇨🇳 Tencent raises $5.7 billion through a four-tranche bond sale. The offering included US dollar-denominated bonds and offshore yuan bonds, attracting more than $23 billion in investor orders despite concerns over rising AI investment costs. The proceeds will support general corporate purposes as Tencent continues to invest in AI infrastructure and products.

🇦🇺 Tidal Ventures leads a $5.3M seed round for RedOwl. The Melbourne FinTech uses AI to stop businesses losing money through billing and spending errors. The round values RedOwl at almost $40M and will fund further technology development and customer growth.

🇺🇸 Zaria raises $5.2M for bitcoin loan servicing. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the seed and pre-seed rounds. The startup monitors crypto collateral and provides backup loan servicing for structured finance deals.

M&A

🇺🇸 Polygon completes its Coinme acquisition, becoming a US regulated payments platform. The deal adds 37 state money transmitter licenses and coverage across 48 states. Tazapay, Mesh, Toku and Kira are among the first to use it for cross border payments and payroll.

🇪🇺 Payward agrees to acquire Saldo Bank, expanding its European banking ambitions. The Kraken parent is buying the Lithuanian-licensed digital bank to add regulated banking capabilities, including deposits, lending, card issuance and SEPA payments, bringing traditional banking services closer to its crypto platform. The deal remains subject to regulatory approval.

🇺🇸 Acorns acquires Frich, expanding its financial education community. The deal brings a 1.6 million person community and an organic network of financial education creators. Frich founders Katrin Kaurov and Aleksandra Medina join Acorns to jointly lead Education & Community.

🇸🇻 Linguard Labs acquires majority stake in El Salvador's Chivo wallet. It plans to relaunch Chivo with free remittances from the U.S. and credit access. The government stays a shareholder, and 4.5 million accounts keep their balances.

🇸🇻 FinTech Monetae obtains approval to acquire an electronic money provider, expanding its licenses in El Salvador. The SSF approved on September 29 renaming Transferencias de El Salvador as Monetae Pagos Integrados.

🇨🇾 FxPro agrees to sell its EU clients under its Cyprus entity to Capital.com. Chief Operating Officer Peter Aust said most recent growth has come from outside Europe. FxPro has held a Cyprus licence since 2007.

MOVERS AND SHAKERS

🇺🇸 Cross River appoints Evan L. Russo as President, effective October 1, 2026. The former Lazard Asset Management CEO and Lazard CFO will help lead the company's global expansion and report to Founder, CEO and Chairman Gilles Gade. Board member Shimshon Gross becomes Lead Independent Director.

🇺🇸 i2c appoints Angeline Tang to lead global client partnerships. The appointment strengthens i2c's focus on client relationships and strategic collaboration as the payments technology provider works to support its global customer base.

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Mollie is offering €50 million to build banking for AI agents