Hey Toaster Readers,

This week is sponsored by our friends at Spinwheel.

Last week, NerdWallet announced Q2 earnings. Revenue came in at $197.3 million, up 6% YoY, beating Wall St’s expectations.

But, Adjusted EPS came in at $0.06, 67.8% below consensus.

And the stock went up.

Last quarter, they beat and the stock got hammered.

But this is a marketing newsletter, not an investing newsletter, so we’ll stay in our lane.

Below are the nuggets we think a marketer at a credit card issuer or personal loan company would care about.

Let’s get toasting!

Summarizing NerdWallet’s Q2

From the Q2 press release (quarter ended June 30th, reported August 6th):

Sponsored by Spinwheel

Now that you have the headline numbers, let’s get into our top observations.

1. Credit cards fell another $8.6M year-over-year

To us, that means the bleeding hasn’t stopped.

“...partially offset by an $8.6 million decrease from consumer credit cards primarily due to continued pressures in organic search traffic that have persisted for multiple quarters.” — Q2 press release

The former flagship business is a declining category, and NerdWallet hasn’t provided clear signs on how it’ll turn it around.

Why you should care: If you’re a card issuer, you need clarity on NerdWallet’s go-forward expectations for the card business. That’ll help you with forecasting, but will also provide clues regarding whether your declining volumes on the platform are because you’re losing market share, or whether you’re holding share in a declining market.

2. NerdWallet is leaning into the insurance agency business

The CEO’s quote at the top of the press release was telling:

“We’re reaching an inflection point in our business. The success of our vertical integration strategy now gives us the conviction to make incremental investments underwritten on a multi-year payback, with compelling returns. We expect to grow this incremental investment fivefold in 2026 versus 2025 as we deepen our owned audiences and build durable, direct relationships with our customers.” — Tim Chen, Q2 press release

Incremental investments underwritten on a multi-year payback.

Our translation?

We like the insurance business. It pays annuities over time vs. the one-shot payouts we get from the cards and loans affiliate businesses.

Why you should care: NerdWallet is deploying spend towards category with multi-year paybacks (our read: insurance, maybe financial advisors). If your product monetizes once at conversion, you might be competing for a shrinking share of their attention.

3. The Personal Loan biz is growing, probably due to expansion in subprime

From the press release:

“...increases of $12.3 million from personal loans as we expanded our marketplace offerings to serve a broader range of borrowers...”

Broader range of borrowers.

Our read?

NerdWallet is leaning into subprime loans.

Why you should care: If you’re a personal loan lender, especially in subprime, and you don’t partner with NerdWallet, now may be the time to lean in. And, bring your best conversion rate. With their focus on paid media vs. SEO, we bet they’ll be ruthlessly prioritizing the offers that convert best (and have the best CPAs).

Which, bring us to our next takeaway.

4. As sales & marketing spend grows, their focus on conversion rate will amplify

S&M spend of $145.4M grew 14% YoY while revenue grew 6% (press release).

We flagged this dynamic in Q1, and the Morgan Stanley concern we quoted then — elevated performance marketing intensity pressuring incremental margins — is now on display.

NGOI margin nearly halved YoY, from 11% to 6%.

When NerdWallet paid ~$0 (on the margin) for an SEO visitor, a “so-so” partner funnel was annoying.

But, when they’re paying market CPCs (which I assume are climbing due to SEO’s decline) and relying on multi-year paybacks, a “so-so” conversion funnel is a total disaster.

Why you should care: Expect tougher bounty/CPA negotiations, and less patience for application flows that perform below the category benchmarks. Your image of NerdWallet should be shifting from content-machine-SEO-gods to math wizards trying to squeeze every dollar of return out of their paid media spend. And there are questions around their strategy around paid media.

In their August 7th research note, Morgan Stanley analysts shared some great insight into this. Rather than summarize, we’ll quote directly. Emphasis added by us, not MS.

“NerdWallet grew revenue $10mm y/y in 2Q26 (to $197mm, +5.6%) on $17mm of incremental sales and marketing (to $145mm, +13.6%), taking S&M to 73.7% of revenue from 68.5% in 2Q25, while performance marketing grew $26.5mm y/y to $116mm, or 58.8% of revenue and 79.8% of total S&M (vs. 47.8% and 69.9% in 2Q25).

These results, coupled with the recent trends on revenue and performance marketing, reinforce our view that sustaining growth may require structurally higher spend as organic distribution erodes. These results, together with the recent rise in performance marketing intensity, reinforce our concern that growth is becoming increasingly dependent on paid acquisition as organic search remains pressured in parts of the business.

Management has said it is investing against internal IRR targets and accepting longer payback periods where recurring relationships can support attractive returns. Yet the company has not publicly disclosed its IRR hurdles, expected payback periods, or realized cohort returns.”

5. Some quick hits before we wrap up

Deposits are booming. Consumer revenue increased year-over-year with “$9.6 million from deposit accounts as partners expanded budgets” (press release). We’ve noticed this a little with my agency, New Market Growth. We’re getting inquires from banks who need help with affiliate marketing for deposits, even though my shop is lending only.

Insurance is stable, but not back to the highs. The carrier concentration issue that tanked the stock in Q1? Tim Chen said that the largest auto insurance carrier relationship “has stabilized but has not yet returned to levels seen earlier in the year”.

SMB is still shrinking. It’s down 11% YoY to $22.1M on organic search declines, “partially offset by an increase in business loan originations” (press release).

The LLMs bring high intent traffic, but low volume. Tim Chen on the call, via GuruFocus: “The traffic is converting well, with extremely high intent from users coming through an LLM wanting to transact in the marketplace. It remains a small part of the business today.”

Last plug. Spots are filling up fast.

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Catch you next week,

The Free Toaster Team

Carlos Caro, Founder at NMG, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster
Nick Madrid, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster and Uncovered Media

P.S.: If you’d like to sponsor or host an event in the consumer lending community in 2026, we’d like to hear from you. Reply to this email or write us at info@thefreetoaster.com.

Hey Toaster Readers,

This week is sponsored by our friends at New Market Growth.

Capital One reported Q2 on July 21. We read the press release, listened to the earnings call, the 10-Q, and four research notes, so you don’t have to.

Most coverage focused on the $3.0 billion in net income. We pulled out the five things marketers should actually take from the quarter.

Let’s get toasting!

Carlos Caro, Founder at NMG, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster
Nick Madrid, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster and Uncovered Media

BUT FIRST, A TOASTER EVENT ALERT 👀

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Capital One runs one of the biggest acquisition budgets in consumer lending. Once a quarter, its executives explain what that budget is doing.

Here are the five takeaways from this quarter, in their own words.

1. One of the biggest marketing budgets in lending grew by 23%

The Discover acquisition is only half the story.

CEO Richard Fairbank walked us through the marketing line item on the earnings call:

“Total company marketing expense in the quarter was about $1.7 billion, up 23% year over year, driven by the addition of Discover as well as higher legacy Capital One direct marketing in our domestic card and consumer banking businesses, increased media spend, and continuing investments in premium benefits.”

What we found interesting?

👉 Legacy Capital One direct marketing is up, independent of the Discover acquisition.

We’ve tracked Capital One as a mail and media heavyweight since well before the Discover deal.

If you compete with them in channels like Direct Mail, affiliates, paid search or paid social, it sounds like the competition is getting more intense.

2. Consistent with their ‘heavy spender’ strategy, spend is increasing more than balances

The Q2 numbers, side by side:

• Total card purchase volume: $253.8 billion, up 26% year over year.

• Legacy Capital One volume (including Brex and corporate cards): up about 14%, mostly organic, per CFO Andrew Young on the call

• Domestic credit card balances at period end: up 2.6% year over year

Spending up 26%. Balances up 2.6%.

Fairbank described their target as “an enduring franchise with heavy spenders at the top of the domestic credit card market,” fed by premium benefits, lounges, and the travel build-out.

3. Consumer deposit growth is a first class citizen for the marketing organization

Consumer banking was mentioned specifically in Fairbank’s description of the 23% growth in marketing spend. In Fairbank’s words, Capital One wants to “to grow checking accounts on a national scale.”

He continued to say consumer banking now has “an increasing impact” on the total marketing line.

Digging into that statement a little bit, we found:

• Capital One pays 3.0% on its online savings account, the lowest in the peer set BofA tracks

• Bread Financial pays the most at 3.95%

• Average deposits still grew 1.4% sequentially, per the press release

• Rate paid fell 9 basis points, from the same press release

So deposit volume is up and rates are down, in the same quarter.

And, they’re growing deposits with the lowest interest rate in the BofA peer group.

From our 30,000 foot view, it sure seems like they have cracked the code on marketing in the consumer deposit segment. We suspect the money they spend on the brand side of the house could be a big part of their success.

4. Discover’s acquisition marketing is restarting, on a published schedule

Discover pulled back originations starting in late 2023, and Capital One trimmed further after the deal closed. Fairbank calls it “the Discover brownout.”

The result this quarter, per the call: the legacy Discover card book shrank 1.5% year over year while the rest of the book grew about 5.3%. BofA and Morgan Stanley both put the bottom around Q4.

On the earnings call, Capital One walked through the timeline of the re-boot:

• Half of new Discover originations already run on Capital One’s stack

• The rest land “by the end of the third quarter”

• The existing book migrates “in waves: a wave in July, a wave in October, a wave in January”

And they’ve already started ramping up:

“Marketing is mostly a front-book thing. So we are, as we speak, leaning more into the marketing so that we can now generate some very good flow of applicants.”

That’s Discover’s national prime card brand, gone quiet for roughly two years, and now re-entering acquisition channels with Capital One’s models and budget behind it.

If you buy digital media, mail, or affiliate placements in the card segment, this is worth keeping an eye on.

5. Credit is strong, but the rate of improvement may be slowing

The headline numbers, from the press release and the June credit-metrics 8-K:

• Domestic card charge-offs: 4.71%, down 54 basis points from a year ago

• Delinquencies: 3.39%, also down

• Reserve release: $662 million, including $705 million in domestic card reflecting “continued favorable observed credit in the quarter and a modest decrease in the consideration given to economic uncertainties,” per CFO Young on the call

Fairbank on the consumer:

“We don’t, in our own numbers, see this K-shaped economy that a lot of people talk about, although to be fair, we don’t really participate in the lowest end of the marketplace.”

The sell side split on what it means.

Morgan Stanley, in its July 22nd earnings note, read the reserve release as “a sign of confidence in the consumer” and thinks Capital One might have the strongest credit in its coverage.

BofA’s July 22nd note flagged the June data: delinquencies “followed normal seasonality after outperforming seasonality in most earlier months of 2026,” which “at a minimum suggests the rate of improvement in credit is slowing.” Morgan Stanley’s own Consumer Credit Activity Tracker, published July 27th, shows industry card delinquencies still improving through June.

The practical takeaway: Capital One publishes credit metrics monthly in 8-K filings. If your second-half budget assumes credit keeps improving, the 8-Ks may show the pacing before any earnings call does.

Consider checking it monthly.

TOASTER’S TAKE

• Watch the mailbox and affiliate shelves for Discover. The migration waves are July, October, and January, and management says acquisition marketing is ramping “as we speak.”

• The deposit growth results deserve a spot in every neobank’s board deck. Lowest rate in the peer set, deposits still growing. That’s evidence that an industry-leading brand can convince a consumer to take a rate that isn’t at the top of the comparison charts.

• Track the monthly 8-Ks. One issuer’s June seasonality proves little on its own, but it’s the first data point that could put doubt on the “credit keeps getting better” narrative.

Other News

• CFPB late fees, round two. The Bureau has reportedly sent a late-fee Request for Information to interagency review. Synchrony fell 9.6% and Bread Financial 8.3% on the headline. BofA’s exposure math: roughly 12% of Synchrony’s revenue, an estimated 20%-plus at Bread, about 5% at Capital One. An RFI is a question, and the last $8 cap died in court. (BofA Global Research, “Late fee redux,” July 9)

Catch you next week,

Carlos Caro and Nick Madrid

P.S.: If you’d like to sponsor or host an event in the consumer lending community in 2026, we’d like to hear from you. Reply to this email or write us at info@thefreetoaster.com.

Hey Toaster Readers,

This week is sponsored by our friends at Spinwheel.

This one is mostly an editorial, and we're putting a prediction on record: we think there will be a Claude Card and a ChatGPT Card. The road there starts with this week's news, Samsung's new Galaxy Card and its too-good-to-be-true rewards program, runs through who really pays for it and why, and ends with the one question that matters for every card issuer: whose card does your AI agent swipe by default?

First section is straight news. Everything after is opinion, and we'll label the line. Oh, and be sure to hold us to the prediction.

Let's get toasting!

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The Galaxy Card Is Samsung’s Answer to the Apple Card

Samsung is getting into the credit card business.

This week the company announced the Samsung Galaxy Card. Its first credit card, issued by Barclays and running on the Visa network (American Banker). Applications opened July 22, right before Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked event (Wired, CNET).

The card lives natively inside Samsung Wallet. You apply there. You service the account there. You redeem rewards there. You never leave Samsung’s ecosystem.

The number to know: 3% cash back on eligible purchases made through Samsung Wallet, no spend caps. That's a full point above Apple Card's blanket 2% Apple Pay rate. Apple only pays 3% at Apple and a short list of partner merchants (Apple). Samsung pays it on everything in the wallet.

And Barclays is doing something no issuer has done before: extending its servicing APIs all the way into Samsung’s operating system.

“Rather than going to our app or our website, you’re now servicing it within Samsung’s ecosystem completely,” Doug Villone, Barclays’ head of US cards and partnerships, told American Banker.

If the Apple Card comparison feels familiar, it should. We covered the messy end of that program’s first chapter in January, when JPMorgan Chase took over the portfolio from Goldman Sachs at a discount of more than $1 billion (Apple Card’s Next Chapter Starts at JPMorgan).

That’s the story.

Sponsored by Spinwheel

Now here’s our Toaster Take.

Samsung Is Paying Barclays’ Rewards Bill To Handcuff You To Your Phone

It's a retention product wearing a rewards costume.

Start with the number that doesn’t add up: 3% cash back on every purchase made through Samsung Wallet. No spend caps.

That doesn’t work on a lender’s margins. Interchange doesn’t cover it.

Neither company has said who funds the gap. But we don’t think there’s much mystery here. Samsung is likely writing the check.

Look at where the richest rate points. Apple pays 3% at Apple. Samsung pays 5% at Samsung: Samsung.com, the Shop App, its stores (terms).

Same playbook, two points richer. The top of the earn table always aims back at the house.

And once you see the subsidy, the rest of the product snaps into focus.

The physical card works anywhere, at 1%. But the 3% only pays when the card sits in Samsung Wallet. And Samsung Wallet only runs on Samsung devices.

Switch to an iPhone? Your everyday spend drops to 1%.

(Technically the 5% on Samsung.com purchases survives the switch. But you just bought an iPhone. You’re not making many of those.)

The math makes it rational. Every Samsung phone is a $1,000+ sale, followed by years of ecosystem revenue. And Samsung is fighting uphill in the US. Roughly 6 in 10 US smartphones sold are iPhones, and Samsung sits second at well under half of Apple’s share (Counterpoint Research via AppleInsider).

Against that, funding a couple points of cash back on a cardholder’s spend is cheap insurance.

There’s a quieter prize too. And Amazon showed everyone how it works.

A co-brand card doesn’t just drive loyalty inside your store. It shows you every purchase your customer makes outside it. That data is worth a lot to a company deciding what to build, stock, and sell next.

Keep that thought. It’s about to become the whole story.

“First In Wallet” Just Changed Meaning

Card issuers have spent decades fighting to be first in the physical wallet. The card you reach for without thinking.

Our take: that fight is moving. And some lenders haven’t noticed.

The fight that matters now is first in the digital wallet. Because the default card in the wallet is the card your AI agent is going to swipe.

Agentic commerce is early. But it’s not hypothetical.

About 31% of US AI users already use AI to find product links. One of the highest-usage AI behaviors across age cohorts. Shopify reports AI-referred shoppers convert at roughly 50% higher rates than organic search, with AI-referred orders up ~13x year over year in Q1. Only 6% of consumers have actually completed a purchase through an LLM so far, so the bottom of the funnel is still nascent. (All per BofA Global Research, “Latest on Agentic Commerce vs Traditional eCommerce”)

But when those purchases happen, the agent isn’t going to deliberate over which of your cards to use.

It will use the default.

Whoever holds that slot gets the transaction.

Chase already owns that position across the Apple ecosystem. As of this week, Barclays owns it across Samsung’s.

Neither bank has framed it this way publicly. We are.

Which brings us to the lesson.

And this part is advice: If you’re a card issuer trying to grow a co-brand business, stop only calling retailers.

The classic playbook is retailers, retailers, retailers. The new call list is technology companies with a vested interest in keeping consumers inside their world.

They’ll do two things a retail partner never could:

1. Hand you distribution inside a platform people touch every day

2. Subsidize terms you could never offer on your own economics

Samsung just showed everyone the template.

Our Prediction: There Will Be A Claude Card And A ChatGPT Card

Now we’re going to speculate. None of what follows has been announced by anyone (that we know of). But we’d rather be on record.

Though one thing was announced: on Tuesday, OpenAI seated Nubank founder David Vélez on its board (OpenAI).

We can only speculate why and here’s what got us there.

We asked ourselves which companies fit the profile we just described: technology platforms with daily usage, deep customer context, and a reason to lock users in.

The answer wasn’t another phone maker.

It was the LLMs.

The scale is already there. The Google Search app’s share of daily active users versus AI apps has fallen from 87.5% in January 2025 to 72.5% in June 2026. And ChatGPT did more than $260MM in revenue in June alone (BofA Global Research, “Apple Inc.: F3Q26”.

ChatGPT counts 441MM global mobile daily active users. Claude is at roughly $59MM a month in revenue, growing daily users at 1,200%+ year over year. It’s momentum BofA attributes to “Claude Code and agentic features” (BofA Global Research, “AI Wars: Claude & Gemini momentum continues, with stable Google growth,”).

These are daily habits at consumer scale, with real willingness to pay.

A daily habit plus a payment credential is exactly the position Samsung just monetized. And the LLMs are further along the daily-habit curve than Samsung Wallet ever was.

Here’s the thing: the incentive is even stronger than Samsung’s.

Anthropic and OpenAI are in the business of monetizing intelligence. The more context they have on you, the more valuable that intelligence gets. The compounding is the point.

The biggest missing context? What you do offline, away from the chat window.

A card is the window.

Samsung wants your purchase data to sell you more Samsung. An LLM wants it because it makes the core product better.

Picture what that unlocks.

You’ve told Claude you’re saving for a house. Claude also issues your card. One morning it opens with: “You spent $300 at Starbucks last month. Want me to block Starbucks until you hit your goal?”

That’s a hypothetical. But that’s the conversation a card makes possible. No bank’s app has ever come close.

Or take the offer side. You ask about rental cars for a trip. Alamo happens to be a card partner. The answer comes back: “cardholders get 20% off, say yes and it’s booked.”

A daily product with full context doesn’t serve ads. It serves outcomes.

The rewards get interesting too. We pay for Claude Max. Offer us extra usage limits as a card perk and we’d chase it. Hard.

Cash back is a commodity. Model access is a loyalty currency no incumbent issuer can mint.

The privacy question is real, so let’s answer it head-on: will consumers want their AI to know this much?

In finances, we think yes. It’s simply going to be too useful not to.

One more thing nags at us.

Google has owned search and a wallet for over a decade and has never issued a consumer credit card. Its closest attempt, the Plex banking project, was scrapped in 2021 before launch, despite a 400,000-person waitlist (CNBC).

We’re surprised the seat is still empty.

Maybe the LLMs Never Need To Issue A Card

The counterargument is Plaid.

We wrote in May about ChatGPT’s Plaid integration making it a distribution channel for personal finance. Permission your accounts, and the LLM gets the spending intelligence with zero plastic. No bank charter. No credit risk. And the consumer can revoke access anytime.

Why issue a card at all?

Add to that: the LLMs are currently retreating from the transaction, not grabbing it. OpenAI has reportedly pulled back from “Instant Checkout” toward retailer-controlled checkout after finding users research in ChatGPT but buy elsewhere (The Information, as cited in BofA Global Research, “OpenAI may shift Agentic Checkout”).

And Google is monetizing its agentic surfaces through ads rather than commissions (BofA Global Research, “The dog days of AI”).

Maybe the LLMs settle in as discovery layers and never touch the payment credential.

Then we argued ourselves back in.

Plaid access is something a user has to grant, account by account. And it can break without warning.

A card is zero friction. One instrument that captures everything, funds its own rewards through interchange, and monetizes through sponsored offers.

And precisely because the LLMs are ceding checkout to retailers, the payment credential is the one durable position left in the stack. Samsung’s logic applies with full force: you issue the plastic because you want the whole picture.

Where we land today: the cards happen.

Ask us again in six months.

A footnote on rails, filed under questions we can’t answer: does a Claude card launch on Visa or Mastercard? Or on stablecoin infrastructure?

Programmable money is the more natural fit for agentic commerce: smart contracts, near-instant settlement. It might be blockchain’s actual consumer use case.

Our guess is boring: launch on traditional rails for acceptance, migrate agentic flows later.

But we don’t know. And neither does anyone else yet.

What Do You Think?

We’d be surprised if Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google haven’t already gamed this out internally.

If you’re working on anything in this space, or you know who is, we want to hear from you. This piece is us thinking out loud, and we’d love to learn more from operators in the space.

Catch you next week,

The Free Toaster Team

P.S.: If you’d like to sponsor or host an event in the consumer lending community in 2026, we’d like to hear from you. Reply to this email or write us at info@thefreetoaster.com.

Hey Toaster Readers,

This week is sponsored by our friends at Fintel Connect.

Quick housekeeping first. The last few weeks have been a slow news cycle, so we’ve been trying something new: taking a single story from the week and going deeper than we normally would. Please let us know if you like this format or not by replying to this email.

We want to hear from you.

This week’s story is “Oportun and Column Announce New Lending Partnership to Expand Access to Responsible Credit.”

At first glance, not that exciting. Just a new partner bank.

Then we dug into the filings and found something strange: for the past nine months, Oportun had a bank partner that wouldn’t hold a single one of its new loans. Pathward originated them, and Oportun bought back 100%. Meanwhile, a growing acquisition machine in consumer lending (referrals in Q1 2025 up 352% year over year) sat idling with nowhere to run.

This is why the Column deal is more than a routine bank partner transaction. It might be the moment Oportun’s marketing team finally got the green light.

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Backstory: A Phantom Bank Partnership 👻

Here’s an arrangement that should make any marketer queasy.

Under a September 2025 amendment, Pathward stopped retaining Oportun’s loans. From October 1, 2025, Oportun bought 100% of everything Pathward originated. Then it bought back Pathward’s existing book too, $115.0 million on October 3, 2025, with the remainder acquired on February 4, 2026.

Oportun was renting a charter from a bank partner who wouldn’t hold a single loan.

The impact of carrying all of that shows up in the numbers:

• Originations fell 11% Y/Y in 1Q26 under what the company calls a “tight credit posture”

• FY26 originations guidance sits at just mid-single-digit growth

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Column N.A. Jumps In To Save The Day

Last week’s announcement reads like a funding story.

Column N.A., the nationally chartered bank spun up by Plaid co-founder William Hockey (he acquired and re-charted Northern California National Bank), with clients like Brex, Bilt, and Wise, will originate Oportun’s unsecured personal loans and put its own balance sheet to work through debt financing and loan purchases.

This is great news for Oportun.

And it shows they just overcame a growth blocker many fintechs learn the hard way:

Bank or capital markets partnerships, not media buying, are often the real cap on growth.

Oportun Is Operating With Two Partner Banks At Once

Oportun’s own state-licensing page now tells consumers in 32 states that their loan “may be originated by Pathward®, N.A. or Column N.A.”

Seven states remain Pathward-only (GA, IL, NH, NJ, PA, RI, SD).
NM and WI stay on Oportun’s own licenses.

The 8-K adds the fine print. The agreement “includes certain exclusivity provisions with respect to specified loan products and certain future financial products, subject to existing bank partner rights and other exceptions.” That last clause looks like a direct carve-out for Pathward.

And the deal has “an initial term of four years and renews automatically for successive one-year periods.”

Things got a little more interesting when we learned what business lines each partner bank is supporting.

Secured Personal Loans (SPLs) Will Stay In An 8-State Footprint

Here’s something we didn’t realize about Oportun’s SPL business.

Secured personal loans grew 30% Y/Y in 1Q26 with substantially lower losses than unsecured. A deck from 4Q24 helps put that in context: approximately 500 bps lower 2024 losses and approximately 75% higher 4Q24 revenue per loan than unsecured.

It seems like SPLs are Oportun’s best-performing asset.

And the Column agreement covers unsecured loans only. Column “will originate certain unsecured personal loans for consumers in select states”. SPL is live in eight states (AZ, CA, FL, IL, NV, NJ, TX, UT), and its expansion path to roughly 33 more states runs contractually through Pathward.

One door is already written into the contract: the exclusivity provisions cover “certain future financial products,” which is exactly where an SPL program at Column would live.

SPLs will survive. Whether its national expansion goes through Column, Pathward, or nobody is the open question. The timeline to an SPL program beyond 8 states is the other unknown.

Oportun’s Marketing Metrics Were Looking Good…Until They Hit A Wall

Here’s what Oportun’s acquisition engine was doing while originations shrank:

• CAC fell to $117 in FY2025, from $125 the year before, after touching a public-company low of $111 in 4Q24

• Referral-driven originations grew 352% Y/Y to $35M in 1Q25

• Instant prescreen launched in 1Q26

The machine seemed to be working.

But their bank partner didn’t want to keep funding the loans.

Now we need to watch Oportun’s Q2 earnings.

Will they raise FY26 originations guidance? That would tell us that Column’s capacity has given the marketing team the green light.

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• New Market Growth

Now They Can Lean Into National Channels, Like Affiliate Marketplaces

Lenders with big geographic gaps cost the marketplace real money. Between state-level eligibility logic they need build and maintain, unserved customer segments, and potentially wasted impressions, regional lenders aren’t exactly what publishers dream about.

A national bank program makes Oportun’s offer easier to integrate, easier to promote, and more valuable to publishers like Credit Karma, Experian, and NerdWallet.

The national footprint makes life easier in other channels, too.

Direct mail, prescreen lists, digital targeting, telesales licensing, and retail distribution locations were all limited by geographic constraints.

The new partnership with Column unequivocally provides oxygen to Oportun’s growth effort.

But, a separate question remains unanswered about all of this.

Why Isn’t Oportun Part Of The Bank Charter Craze?

Last week, we wrote about the parade of fintechs filing for their own bank charters and moving away from the bank partner model.

Oportun might have been too early to the party.

Oportun began its OCC application for a de novo national bank in November 2020, seeking, in its own words, to “offer additional products and services, provide us with new sources of lower cost funding and give our business regulatory clarity”. It withdrew in October 2021 with a stated plan to refile.

It never did refile.

While Klarna, Affirm, and Upstart took what seems to be the popular path, Oportun chose a different road.

We wonder if it’s because Oportun’s business has historically focused on thin files/credit invisibles, with a focus on underserved hispanic audiences, and a products that were north of 36% APR before 2020.

All of these factors could influence a regulator’s likelihood to approve a bank license.

None of those real-life considerations are easy to talk about, but they lurk in the shadows of this new partnerships between Oportun & Column.

Put differently, is Oportun seeing a strategic advantage to sticking with the bank partner model while others move to secure their own charters, or were there structural reasons that took this option off the table?

If you have a POV on this, we’d love to have you on our News Pod to discuss. Reply to this email if you have a hot take you’d like to share.

Catch you next week,

The Free Toaster Team

P.S.: If you’d like to sponsor or host an event in the consumer lending community in 2026, we’d like to hear from you. Reply to this email or write us at info@thefreetoaster.com.

Hey Toaster Readers,

Klarna wants to be a bank. So do 9 other fintechs. In 7 months, many fintech consumer lenders have headed for a regulator’s door, and the partner banks they’ve been renting for a decade should be nervous.

Inside: who’s filed, why the window opened, whether it stays open, and why bank and fintech marketers should be paying close attention.

This week is sponsored by Bulldog Media Group.

The Year Fintech Lenders Stopped Renting Banks

On July 6, Klarna announced in a press release (and disclosed in a Form 6-K filed with the SEC, with American Banker reporting the same morning) that it had filed applications with the Utah Department of Financial Institutions and the FDIC to establish Klarna Bank USA, a Utah-chartered industrial bank. “Banking is built on trust,” CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said in the announcement, calling a U.S. license “the natural next step” for a company that says 30 million Americans use its products every year and that has extended more than $91 billion in credit to U.S. consumers since 2019, all of it through partner banks.

Interesting timing, we think, given that just a few weeks ago, we covered Klarna launching an FDIC-insured high-yield savings account through WebBank and that Pagaya is suing the BNPL provider for allegedly stealing its underwriting model.

And Klarna is not an outlier. Since December 2025, it’s the ninth major fintech to file for (or buy its way into) a U.S. bank charter. Insured deposits and direct access to the payment rails, the banking industry’s forbidden fruit, are being handed out application by application. The companies queuing up are the same brands that already sit between banks and tens of millions of consumers.

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So…who’s filed for Bank Charters?

The filings cluster into three routes: the industrial loan company (ILC) charter favored by balance-sheet-hungry lenders, the full national bank charter, and, in one notable case, a charter type nobody had touched in two decades.

The OCC saw 18 de novo charter applications in 2025 (that’s nearly equal to the previous four years combined). Klaros Group co-founder Michele Alt expects roughly 25 novel applications in 2026. Approvals are flowing too. The FDIC has conditionally approved ILC bids from Ford, GM, Stellantis and Edward Jones since January; the OCC has granted conditional charters to Mercury and Nubank’s U.S. unit, alongside a wave of crypto-focused national trust banks.

OppFi took a different route, acquiring BNC National Bank in April rather than filing de novo.

And while we have zero insider knowledge of impending applications, we wouldn’t be surprised to see a number of other fintechs join them. Chime is the most obvious contender, their leadership basically pre-announced it in April. Then there’s Robinhood and Wealthfront, two giants wearing software costumes while a bit portion of their revenue is interest income.

The fence is getting increasingly crowded. Walmart-backed OnePay is expanding aggressively, Dave and Current face the exact same partner-bank margin pressures as Chime, and SMB powerhouses Ramp and Rho are feeling the heat after Mercury’s conditional approval. Even Cash App is a wildcard. This could be a now-or-never regulatory window, and few want to be left behind renting someone else’s banking license.

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Why are they all filing now?

Three factors converge to make this window imperative.

Funding: insured deposits are the cheapest, most stable money in finance, and a lender that funds receivables through securitizations and warehouse lines can cut its cost of funds materially by taking deposits. “You get access to low-cost funding in the form of insured deposits. That’s pretty cool,” Michele Alt puts it.

Control: a charter removes the sponsor banks that currently sit in the middle of every loan, with their fees, their oversight and their concentration risk. Affirm’s Max Levchin framed his company’s Nevada ILC application as a long-term play for “regulatory clarity” rather than near-term growth.

An Open Door: “Many fintechs and blockchain companies especially did not really have a hope or a prayer of obtaining a bank charter during the Biden administration,” Alt told The Financial Brand. “But they are thinking strategically now and trying to go for the window of opportunity now that it’s open.”

Will regulators keep saying yes?

Credible arguments run both ways, and the outcome will likely be decided application by application.

The argument for continuity is strong. Comptroller Jonathan Gould has called the application boom “a return to the norm for the OCC,” arguing the surge “signals healthy competition, a commitment to innovation and should be encouraging to all of us,” and has blamed years of “anemic chartering” for gaps in credit access. FDIC Chair Travis Hill unfroze the ILC pipeline his predecessors had left dormant and has said a fintech holding deposits inside a regulated bank may pose less risk to the insurance fund than one scattering deposits across complex partner arrangements. Ford, GM, Stellantis and Edward Jones approvals establish live precedent that the FDIC will insure new ILCs, the very question that stalled the class for 15 years.

But there’s a case for caution, too. The Independent Community Bankers of America and the Bank Policy Institute jointly urged the FDIC to reject Affirm’s application and to freeze all ILC approvals until Congress closes what they call the “ILC loophole,” arguing such banks escape consolidated Federal Reserve supervision while leaning on nonbank parents. Senators John Kennedy and Andy Kim have reintroduced the Close the Shadow Banking Loophole Act (S. 3734) to do exactly that. And the OCC itself fired a warning shot in June, publicly reminding applicants it can return filings as “materially deficient.” “The OCC has been getting bad applications from applicants who assume, in the current environment, they don’t have to do the hard work of designing a credible business plan,” Alt said. These reviews routinely run 12 to 18 months, meaning applications filed today may be decided by a differently constituted FDIC board, in a different political moment — and the picture sharpens: the window is real, but it is neither unconditional nor guaranteed to outlast the administration that opened it. Well-capitalized, mono-line lenders with seasoned portfolios and experienced bank management are positioned to get through; thinner applications may simply run out the clock.

Mission Lane: the most interesting filing of the year

Klarna got the headlines, but Mission Lane’s April 2026 filing is also interesting. The Virginia-based issuer, spun out of LendUp in 2018, now serves more than three million cardholders with credit lines of $300 to $3,000 for near-prime and subprime borrowers. Mission Lane applied to the OCC for a CEBA credit card bank charter. It was the first credit card bank charter application in roughly 20 years, according to Michele Alt, whose firm advised on it.

The CEBA charter, a 1987 creation, is a limited-purpose national bank that can issue credit cards nationwide but cannot take demand deposits or deposits under $100,000 (except as secured-card collateral) and cannot make general commercial loans. Its parent escapes Federal Reserve holding-company supervision, and more importantly, it can export its home state’s interest rates to customers in every state.

This is favorable timing for Mission Lane, specifically, due to four factors:

1. Regulatory receptivity to novel charters. A charter type dormant for two decades only gets dusted off when agencies are visibly approving unusual structures. In 2026, they are.

2. This limited charter fits the business. Mission Lane does one thing: credit cards. It doesn’t need (and doesn’t care to be examined for) the full universal-bank toolkit an ILC or national charter implies. A limited charter means a narrower application and, plausibly, a faster path.

3. Its partner-bank model is under structural pressure. Mission Lane originates through Utah’s TAB Bank and WebBank, exporting Utah rates to other states. This is the very “rent-a-bank” architecture that state legislatures and consumer advocates keep attacking. A national credit card bank exports rates under the National Bank Act in its own name, taking that legal risk largely off the table.

4. Funding economics. Subprime card books are expensive to fund through securitization. Large time deposits, which CEBA banks may accept, are cheaper and steadier — a durable margin advantage in a segment where funding cost is the whole game.

There’s also a layer of competitive necessity worth noting. If Klarna and Affirm become banks while Mission Lane remains a borrower in the wholesale markets, it fights the next decade at a structural cost disadvantage.

Why is Upstart taking the harder road with a de novo filing?

While Mission Lane plays the specialized CEBA angle, Upstart went the other direction entirely. In its March 2026 de novo filing for Upstart Bank, the company applied for a full national charter under a traditional Bank Holding Company framework, voluntarily signing up for OCC, FDIC, and Federal Reserve oversight all at once. That’s the most supervision available in Washington, and Upstart asked for it.

We covered the filing when it landed in March, and the economics explain the choice. Upstart currently operates through 248 state licenses and roughly 100 bank partners, an infrastructure Morgan Stanley estimates costs $200 million a year, or about $135 per loan. A single federal charter cuts that to roughly $50 million. That’s $150 million in annual savings before Upstart changes anything else about how it operates.

The funding side is the bigger prize. Upstart keeps about 14.6% of originated loans on its balance sheet, funded through warehouse lines and securitization, the most expensive money in the room. Swap that for deposits and Morgan Stanley models another $67 million in net interest income versus 2027 consensus. Combined, savings plus income reach $217 million, roughly a 50% upside to 2027 adjusted EBITDA. The BHC route also gives Upstart something the ILC path chosen by Affirm doesn’t: a broader product set and deposit funding as a backstop when securitization markets seize up, the same playbook LendingClub has been running since 2021.

Then there’s the narrative layer. Pure fintech lenders trade at compressed, cyclical lending multiples, and a tech-driven deposit engine gives Upstart a story to tell about being a technology ecosystem rather than a balance-sheet-exposed lender. Klarna is attempting the same repositioning by calling itself a spend-centric business. But unlike the pure story stocks, Upstart filed with $217 million of modeled EBITDA improvement attached. Whether analysts reward the narrative or just price it like a bank, the cost savings clear either way.

Key takeaways for marketers in lending

At face value, this uptick could seem like a dry regulatory development. But for marketing and growth leaders at fintechs and non-bank lenders, it could become a looming distribution shakeup. Here’s what to prepare for:

• Affiliate and comparison channel crowding: Expect immediate deposit-side pressure. While Klarna, PayPal, and Upstart spin up native, chartered savings products, they will likely begin aggressively marketing them into the exact same affiliate networks and financial comparison channels you buy traffic from.

• Near-prime segment encroachment: As chartered specialists like Mission Lane leverage their newfound regulatory advantages to go after the 70 million underserved Americans traditional banks abandoned after 2008, non-bank lenders face a formidable competitor holding a native compliance moat.

• Sponsor bank disruption and tenant churn: Anticipate a shakeup across legacy partner networks as their largest anchor programs migrate to native charters. As historic fee income dries up, these sponsor institutions could be forced to either absorb early-stage programs or pivot to building competing direct-to-consumer lending brands of their own.

A final word of wisdom from Michele Alt: against roughly 4,000 incumbent banks, the new entrants are “tiny,” and will not “go toe-to-toe with the megabanks” immediately. “The thing to watch for is how they grow over the next, say, five years.” The brands filing this year already own the customer’s phone screen. Now they’re coming for the balance sheet. The (maybe) five-year window to respond on brand, trust and relationship starts closing now.

Please support our Newsletter by sharing this edition with a colleague!

And, consider checking out our sponsors:

• Need an affiliate marketing platform/network? Chat with Fintel Connect

• Need to improve application page conversions? Chat with Spinwheel

• Need help with performance marketing? Chat with Bulldog Media Group

• Need to grow in big marketplaces like Credit Karma? Chat with New Market Growth

• Need to hire top-tier talent in fintech or lending? Chat with CTB1

Catch you next week,

The Free Toaster Team

P.S.: If you’d like to sponsor or host an event in the consumer lending community in 2026, we’d like to hear from you.

Sources

• Klarna press release: Klarna submits application for U.S. banking license (Jul. 6, 2026)

• Banking Dive: Mission Lane applies to become a bank (Apr. 22, 2026)

• American Banker: Credit card issuer Mission Lane applies for bank charter

• Affirm: Affirm submits applications to establish industrial loan company (Jan. 23, 2026)

• PayPal Newsroom: PayPal submits applications to establish an industrial bank (Dec. 15, 2025)

• Revolut: Revolut files U.S. bank charter application (Mar. 2026)

• American Banker: Dutch neobank bunq reapplies for a U.S. bank charter (Jan. 2026)

• Banking Dive: Charter application boom a ‘return to norm’ for OCC: Gould

• Banking Dive: FDIC conditionally approves Ford, GM ILC charters (Jan. 2026)

• BPI & ICBA: Comment on Affirm Bank’s application for deposit insurance (Feb. 25, 2026)

• ICBA: ILC loophole advocacy and Close the Shadow Banking Loophole Act (S. 3734)

• Bloomberg: Fintechs call Klaros Group when they want bank charters (Jan. 2026)

• Marketplace: Why fintech firms like Klarna want to become banks (Jul. 7, 2026)

• Future Nexus: OCC hints at trouble for charters (Jun. 18, 2026)

• Banking Dive: Inside the explosion of banking charter applications

• The Financial Brand: Fintech banking suddenly advances on multiple fronts

• FinTech Futures: OCC conditionally approves Mercury charter application

Hey Toaster Readers,

This week is sponsored by New Market Growth.

With the slow news cycle and the July 4th holiday, we decided to reflect a bit more on one story that recently dropped. We think it was easy to skip but there there is something deeper at play that others might appreciate.

Last Tuesday, LendingClub officially ceased to exist and rebranded to Happen Bank. We covered the initial announcement in April, but the dust has settled and we wanted to dig into the strategy underneath. This is one of the clearest examples we have seen of a lender picking a specific customer segment, the “Motivated Middle,” and engineering every product and reward around them. If you market lending or deposit products, you will want to spend five minutes unpacking how Happen ties its rewards directly to profitable customer behaviors.

Let’s get toasting!

(Don’t miss our First big Toaster Summit)

Affiliate Marketing Summit for Lenders and Publishers

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We have a new site! And our Day 2 experience (which has much smaller capacity) is selling faster than we anticipated.

LendingClub Became Happen. The Real Story Is Who It’s Chasing.

Last Tuesday, Scott Sanborn rang the Nasdaq opening bell and LendingClub officially ceased to exist. The company now trades as Happen, Inc. under the ticker HAPN, having completed both a full rebrand to Happen Bank and a stock listing switch from the NYSE to Nasdaq. [American Banker]

We covered the announcement when it dropped in April. So why come back to it now that the paint is dry? Because to us, there’s a more interesting story layered under the rebrand.

This is one of the cleanest examples we’ve seen of a lender picking a customer segment first and then engineering every product, reward, and dollar of funding around that one person. If you market lending or deposit products for a living, this is worth 5 minutes unpacking.

First, what Happened to Lending Club?

Quick scale check: Happen reports 5M+ lifetime members and $100B+ in lifetime originations (sourced from their 2025 10-K).

For readers who know LendingClub as “the P2P lending pioneer”: that company hasn’t existed for years. Happen is a nationally chartered digital bank running a marketplace bank model with two revenue engines.

The first engine is the balance sheet. Deposits fund loans held for investment, generating net interest income. The second engine is the marketplace. Happen originates loans and sells them to investors, collecting origination fees, servicing fees, and gains on sale capital-light fee income.

The loan book is overwhelmingly consumer: unsecured personal loans (debt consolidation is the core franchise), auto refinance, point-of-sale financing, and a newly launched home improvement vertical. A small commercial book focuses primarily on active SBA lending, while existing commercial real estate loans and equipment leases have ceased origination and are being retained to maturity.

In Q1 2026, originations were split roughly down the middle, 52% sold to marketplace investors and 48% retained, which matters for the strategy below. Both engines get stronger when the same borrower gets cheaper to fund and safer to underwrite.

Happen focusing on the “Motivated Middle”

Happen’s own words: it’s a bank built for “high-FICO, high-income, digitally savvy consumers actively managing their financial lives.” Not the underbanked. Not private-banking clients.

Prime borrowers who still actively use credit.

Look around the industry and you see why this lane was open.

Chime and Dave built their businesses on low-to-moderate-income consumers — overdraft protection, early wage access, interchange-funded economics. SoFi staked out high earners with student loan refi, wealth management, and premium lifestyle branding. Chase, Citi, and BofA sit on trillions in near-zero-cost deposits but don’t always succeed in securing the consumer’s lending business.

The middle, the person with a 740 FICO who carries a $25K consolidation loan and a real savings balance, was nobody’s primary target. Happen is planting a flag there.

The sequencing question (Chime in reverse)

Chime did the hardest thing in consumer banking first: winning the direct deposit relationship, then expanding into credit. Happen is running the opposite play, and it’s the same one SoFi, Capital One, and Amex ran before it. Lend first, because that’s where the money is (and, frankly, because a lending license is far easier to get than a bank charter). Then use the loan relationship to earn your way into deposits and checking.

Loan-first is the more logical sequence for profitability.

But it leaves Happen with a real challenge: it doesn’t own the primary banking relationship yet, and the deposit market is brutally crowded. Which distribution channels it picks to close that gap is the thing to watch over the next few quarters.

But first, a quick note from our sponsor:

New Market Growth

New Market Growth helps lenders build and scale affiliate marketing programs on channels like Credit Karma, Experian Marketplace, Lending Tree, Bankrate, Credible, and many more. NMG clients spend $50-$100MM per year in affiliate channels, and the founding team (one of whom is Free Toaster co-founder Carlos Caro), have advised in excess of 50 lenders over the course of their corporate and agency careers.

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The flywheel: rewards that pay for behaviors, not balances

This is where the strategy gets concrete. Happen’s two deposit products are engineered so that every reward dollar buys a behavior that improves Happen’s own bottom line.

LevelUp Savings (launched August 2024) pays a higher APY (currently 4% APY) to members who deposit at least $250/month, rewarding the growth behavior instead of the raw balance. It’s built 80K+ accounts and $3.5B in deposits, and savings customers visit 30% more often than the prior product’s.

LevelUp Checking (launched June 2025) pays 2% cash back on on-time personal loan payments made from the account, plus 1% back on gas, grocery, and pharmacy debit purchases. It simultaneously pulls low-cost deposits in, moves loan servicing inside Happen’s ecosystem, and pays the borrower to do the exact thing that keeps charge-offs down. Since launch, account openings are running 6x the prior checking product, and 60% of accounts come from existing members. The cross-sell is seemingly working.

Now the number that left us scratching our heads a bit.

Happen discloses that 70% of LevelUp Savings holders, representing ~95% of balances, hit the $250 monthly threshold. Do the basic math they invite: 95% of $3.5B spread across 70% of 80K accounts works out to an average balance near $59K among threshold-meeting savers. (The disclosed account and balance figures are as of March 31, 2026)

That’s not a mass market audience.

That’s an affluent saver earning 4.00% APY, which raises a question Happen hasn’t answered: why is that customer with $59K in savings taking out a $20–30K personal loan? Either the savers and the borrowers are different pockets of the member base, or the “prime borrower who still borrows” is wealthier than the debt-consolidation stereotype suggests.

TOASTER’S TAKE

The rewards program is designed thoughtfully for the audience (and the P&L). Every Happen incentive pays for a behavior tied to a P&L line (deposit cost, on-time payment, balance growth).

The deposit business doesn’t reduce CAC, it raises the CAC you can afford. When 60% of new checking accounts come from existing borrowers, the lifetime value of a new loan customer goes up. That lets you bid more for media and buy growth on the margin. At scale, the Fortune 500 banks of the world happily push CAC up as long as the marginal customer is profitable. The question for Happen: is that what the next two quarters of marketing spend will show?

The metrics we want to understand this better: checking account volumes (they gave us savings, why not checking?), cross-hold rates, and blended CAC. Until then, we have a number of questions: How many of those affluent savers came from the loan base versus straight rate-shopping on 4.00% APY? Does the flywheel actually convert borrowers into primary banking relationships, or just into high-yield deposits?

Happen’s bet?

That the most overlooked customer in consumer finance is the prime saver who still borrows — and that you win them by paying them to behave in ways that improve your deposit base, your loss curves, and your cross-sell rates all at once.

Only time will tell and the proof will show up in the CAC and cross-sell numbers.

Please support our Newsletter by sharing this edition with a colleague!

And, consider checking out our sponsors:

• Need an affiliate marketing platform/network? Chat with Fintel Connect

• Need to improve application page conversions? Chat with Spinwheel

• Need help with performance marketing? Chat with Bulldog Media Group

• Need to grow in big marketplaces like Credit Karma? Chat with New Market Growth

• Need to hire top-tier talent in fintech or lending? Chat with CTB1

Looking for a new role?

The Free Toaster Jobs Edition tracks where fintech teams are actually investing across marketing, product, data, credit, risk, and partnerships.

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By Toaster Media

Catch you next week,

The Free Toaster Team

P.S.: If you’d like to sponsor or host an event in the consumer lending community in 2026, we’d like to hear from you. The Free Toaster will be organizing & hosting curated events this year, and we’d love to work with you as a sponsor.

Hey Toaster Readers,

This week is sponsored by our friends at Fintel Connect.

The news cycle was light this week so we dropped an exclusive editorial on why personal finance algorithms are about to make traditional landing page optimization completely obsolete. The punchline? Consumers are going to stop choosing their own loans and let AI agents handle decisions for them. Is your lending brand optimized to pitch a machine reader instead of a human brain?

Plus, home equity card startup Trovy just locked down a cool $25M and SoFi rolled out new AI tools to be your financial coach and to automate retail investing.

There’s a lot to unpack. Let’s get toasting!

Carlos Caro, Founder at NMG, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster
Nick Madrid, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster and Uncovered Media

PS: To support us, please subscribe or forward this email to 1 of your colleagues!

Mark Your Calendars For September 23rd!

Affiliate Marketing Summit for Lenders

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So far, we have senior leaders from the following organizations registered: Experian, Engine by Gen, Credit Karma, Bankrate, LendingTree, Credible, QuinStreet, Bulldog Media Group, Lending Club, SoFi, Pagaya, One Main Financial, Perpay, Happy Money, Atlanticus, LendingPoint, SuperMoney, Debbie, Portola, PrismData, FICO, and more.

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What happens when consumers delegate financial decisions to agents?

Last month, we tracked how ChatGPT is becoming the new distribution channel for personal finance, with Plaid unlocking transactions and Credit Karma plugging in approval odds. We felt a shift like this required an editorial to unpack the ripple effects it’s creating.

The biggest change in personal finance isn’t the AI technology itself. It’s the fact that consumers are going to hand the keys over to AI, letting algorithms choose their loans based on pure data, goals, and constraints. The psychological game of human persuasion is out. The new job is convincing a rational, data-loaded machine to pick you as the best option.

The lending funnel isn’t dying, but your buyer is changing completely as more consumers trust agents to act on their behalf.

Will consumers actually hand over their bank data to a machine? History says yes. Mint hit 20 million users at its peak just by putting spreadsheets in the cloud. When people see value, they share. The question is who’ll be there to earn the trust when agents are eventually adopted by the average consumer.

If you keep optimizing for human emotion, you’re tuning a radio nobody is listening to. Read the full editorial to learn how to set up your brand for the machine era.

Hint: the key is building trust with the consumer before they prompt the agent.

[How Lenders Win When AI Calls the Shots]

Sponsored by Fintel Connect

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Most financial institutions are under pressure to prove which channels drive funded accounts, loans, deposits, and long-term customer value. Yet new research from Cornerstone Advisors and Fintel Connect found that more than half of U.S. bank and credit union executives still determine marketing budgets based on the previous year’s spend.

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Home equity credit card startup Trovy closes $25m raise

Trovy closed a $15 million Series A funding round, bringing its total capital to $25 million and boosting growth for the financial technology platform that replaces expensive consumer debt with home equity-backed financing. Left Lane Capital led the investment, while existing seed investors Kleiner Perkins, DCM Ventures, and Camber Creek also jumped back into the mix. The startup aims to address a "record" pile of US household debt by helping homeowners tap into their existing equity instead of paying high interest rates. By operating as a licensed lender, Trovy bypasses traditional bank partnerships to give consumers direct ownership of their borrowing experience. Their home equity-backed credit card runs on the Mastercard network via Cross River Bank, and the team plans to launch a flexible loan product called 1Loan this summer. They are also building a comprehensive homeowner hub to manage everything from maintenance reminders to insurance policies. [Fintech Global]

SoFi Launches AI Tools to Coach Your Finances and Automate Your Investments

SoFi, the everything app for digital financial services, recently rolled out new AI tools to help users get a better grip on their money. The company launched SoFi Coach, a chat-based assistant that gives you personalized advice on budgeting, saving, and tackling debt. Users securely connect their accounts from more than "12,000" financial institutions to receive real-time answers about their spending habits and payoff options. During early testing, the tool helped users take "tens of thousands" of financial actions, and "nearly 70%" of engaged testers took meaningful steps to improve their finances. Beyond basic budgeting, SoFi also introduced Composer by SoFi to help retail investors build and automate rules-based trading strategies. You just describe your investment idea in plain English or browse "over 2,000" community-built options, and the platform turns it into a fully functioning plan in minutes. Instead of drowning in spreadsheets or paying a pricey advisor, you can let these straightforward assistants do the heavy lifting for your financial future. [SoFi Coach] [SoFi Composer]

What’s up with banking’s marketing ROI gap?

Banks, credit unions, and lenders are under pressure to acquire more customers, grow funded volume, and prove marketing’s impact. But when attribution is unclear, it becomes harder to know which channels are driving real growth and which ones are simply getting the credit.

If your marketing channels are struggling to perform against a changing market, it’s time to revisit how you measure success. Join Carlos, along with a panel of industry experts on July 13th at 10 AM PST / 1 PM EST to decode the marketing ROI gap in banking. Carlos, alongside leaders from Fintel Connect, Peak Bank, and Pagaya, will debate which channels are actually driving funded growth, why lead quality matters more than volume, and how to make smarter budget decisions.

When: July 13, 2026 | 10AM PST/ 1PM EST
Where: Register here.

News Pod #23 - Pagaya Sues Klarna for (Allegedly) Stealing Its Underwriting Model

Pagaya filed a lawsuit against Klarna for (allegedly) stealing is underwriting. Carlos & Nick discuss the implications for fintech marketers that share their underwriting policies with affiliate marketing platforms.

Catch us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Substack, or your favorite player.

Please support our Newsletter by sharing this edition with a colleague!

And, consider checking out our sponsors:

• Need an affiliate marketing platform/network? Chat with Fintel Connect

• Need to improve application page conversions? Chat with Spinwheel

• Need help with performance marketing? Chat with Bulldog Media Group

• Need to grow in big marketplaces like Credit Karma? Chat with New Market Growth

• Need to hire top-tier talent in fintech or lending? Chat with CTB1

Looking for a new role?

The Free Toaster Jobs Edition tracks where fintech teams are actually investing across marketing, product, data, credit, risk, and partnerships.

The Free Toaster Jobs

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Spot something worth sharing with your team? Drop this week’s edition in their inbox.

Catch you next week,

The Free Toaster Team

P.S.: If you’d like to sponsor or host an event in the consumer lending community in 2026, we’d like to hear from you. The Free Toaster will be organizing & hosting curated events this year, and we’d love to work with you as a sponsor.

Hey Toaster Readers,

This week is sponsored by our friends at Spinwheel.

Pagaya just sued Klarna for allegedly stealing its AI underwriting model, building a competing one with four years of proprietary data, then dropping Pagaya the moment it no longer needed them. Partnership teams, take notes.

Also this week: Visa hooks into OpenAI, Experian moves loan shopping into ChatGPT, Klarna launches a high-yield savings account, and Visa and Mastercard take aim at Circle’s stablecoin dominance.

There’s a lot to unpack. Let’s get toasting!

Carlos Caro, Founder at NMG, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster
Nick Madrid, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster and Uncovered Media

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Learn more about the event here!

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Pagaya Sues Klarna Over Alleged Trade Secret Misappropriation

On IPO day, September 10, 2025, a reporter asked Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski directly: when assessing loan risk, you’re doing that yourself? Not outsourcing it?

“Nope,” he said.

According to a lawsuit filed in Delaware federal court, that was false. And page 5 of the complaint shows exactly where Pagaya intends to prove it.

Pagaya Technologies, the AI underwriting firm that powered Klarna’s subprime point-of-sale lending since 2022, filed suit on May 13, 2026 alleging trade secret misappropriation and breach of contract. The core claim: Klarna used Pagaya’s proprietary ML credit model and the years of real borrower performance data it generated to build competing underwriting capabilities internally, then terminated the partnership once it no longer needed Pagaya.

The market Klarna wanted access to is not small. Per TransUnion data cited in the complaint, 128 million Americans used BNPL in 2025, up from 86.5 million the year before. The majority are subprime or deep subprime, exactly the segment Klarna could not profitably underwrite before Pagaya.

Before the partnership, the complaint states plainly, Klarna lacked the technical capability to underwrite this borrower segment. Pagaya invested over $100 million developing the model. By May 2025, it had launched a $1B+ securitization program with Klarna as the sole originator. By March 2026, Klarna had quietly signed a deal with a new financing partner and pulled the plug, reportedly while still telling Pagaya and WebBank the existing deals were “good to move forward.”

What Pagaya is actually fighting to protect breaks into three categories, laid out clearly on page 16 of the complaint.

The model itself, the data it generated across four years of live lending decisions, and the operational and structural knowledge required to package subprime POS loans into rated ABS deals. That third category is the one people underestimate. Getting investment-grade ratings from Kroll on a subprime consumer ABS requires having actually done it. Pagaya had. Klarna, allegedly, learned how by watching.

The ending was abrupt. Page 37 shows how fast it moved.

On March 25, 2026, Klarna notified Pagaya it was terminating the license and commitment agreements on 180 days’ notice and would not enter any new financing arrangements. No transaction-specific explanation. Klarna had already signed with another counterparty before making the call.

A few things worth thinking through for partnership and lending teams:

• The complaint calls Klarna’s alleged conduct “unlawful distillation,” a concept borrowed from AI/ML, where using model outputs to train a competing model exceeds the scope of a limited license. Expect this framing to show up in future fintech data-sharing agreements.

• The fintech that signs the merchant deal isn’t always the one doing the underwriting. Klarna owned the Walmart relationship. Pagaya owned the credit intelligence.

• Klarna’s IPO filings described its underwriting as proprietary. That disclosure question isn’t part of this lawsuit, but it won’t stay invisible.

• Pagaya is asking for injunctive relief that could force Klarna to stop using any model built with Pagaya’s data. If granted, that hits Klarna’s U.S. lending business directly.

Early days here. Klarna called the suit “without merit” and says termination was contractually permitted. No answer filed yet, and discovery hasn’t started. The internal communications around model training are where this gets interesting. [Court filing] [Banking Dive]

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Visa Partners with OpenAI to Power the Next Generation of AI Commerce

Visa plugged its payment network directly into OpenAI. The partnership, announced at the Visa Payments Forum in San Francisco, gives OpenAI access to Visa’s global network, tokenization infrastructure, and real-time fraud monitoring to support agent-initiated purchases. Transactions run within user-defined spending limits and merchant category controls, using tokenized credentials with real-time authorization. Visa is building the checkout layer for a world where consumers stop browsing and start delegating purchases to AI agents.

The more pressing question is what happens to affiliate marketing, paid search, and comparison sites if AI agents become the primary way consumers discover and buy financial products. Visa’s Chief Product Officer said AI will transform commerce more profoundly than the internet or mobile ever did. Card issuers and lenders have spent years optimizing for Google and Credit Karma. The next distribution problem may be getting your product surfaced, compared, and recommended by an AI agent before a human ever sees it. [VISA]

Klarna Launches High-Yield Savings Account, Turning Everyday Spend Into Everyday Savings

Klarna just launched a high-yield savings account in the U.S. The product is FDIC-insured through WebBank, carries no minimum deposit, no monthly fees, and opens at 3.28% APY. Klarna already holds over $12.3 billion in deposits across eleven European markets, so the U.S. launch is a proven model in a new geography, not a product experiment.

The savings account is the third piece of a product suite we’ve been watching come together in real time. In March, we covered Klarna‘s card hitting 5 million active users globally, pacing at roughly 270,000 new cardholders a month. Around the same time, Klarna reported scaling past $17 billion in U.S. volume. Now comes savings. BNPL built the top of the funnel. The card deepened the daily relationship. Deposits take it further, giving Klarna a reason to be in the app on days when nothing is being purchased. Together with the Klarna Card and Klarna Balance, the savings account is designed to create one place to manage the full picture of everyday financial life. That’s the full-stack consumer finance playbook, and Klarna is executing it faster than most competitors expected. [Klarna]

Visa, Mastercard $38B Swipe Fee Settlement Wins US Judge’s Approval

A federal judge granted preliminary approval to Visa and Mastercard‘s $38 billion settlement with merchants on June 9, resolving a case grinding through courts since 2005. The deal cuts swipe fees by 0.1 percentage points for five years and caps standard consumer rates at 1.25% for eight years. Swipe fees totaled nearly $119 billion in 2025 alone, so even modest rate adjustments move serious money across the ecosystem.

The headline number isn’t the $38 billion. It’s the “Honor All Cards” rule dying. Merchants can now decline premium rewards cards at checkout while still accepting standard credit and debit. That’s a direct hit on the interchange economics that fund co-brand programs, cashback offers, and acquisition campaigns. Issuers built entire customer acquisition machines on the assumption that rewards cards would always get accepted. That assumption just got a lot less certain. The Electronic Payments Coalition, which includes Bank of America, Capital One, Chase, and Citibank, backed the settlement, but the National Retail Federation remains opposed and plans further challenges. A fairness hearing still needs to happen before Judge Cogan grants permanent approval, so the uncertainty hanging over interchange economics isn’t going away anytime soon. [Reuters]

News Pod #22 – JD Power Sues Chime, Plus the Big Questions Facing Affiliate Marketing

In the latest The Free Toaster News Pod, we break down JD Power’s lawsuit against Chime over its “America’s #1 choice for banking” campaign and what the case could mean for fintech marketing claims, brand partnerships, and customer trust.

Carlos and Nick also preview the upcoming Affiliate Marketing Summit for Lenders, discussing the future of search, AI-native brands, human signal in a world flooded with content, lender unit economics, cross-channel attribution, and whether AI strengthens or replaces the partnership function.

Catch us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Substack, or your favorite player.

Please support our Newsletter by sharing this edition with a colleague!

And, consider checking out our sponsors:

• Need an affiliate marketing platform/network? Chat with Fintel Connect

• Need to improve application page conversions? Chat with Spinwheel

• Need help with performance marketing? Chat with Bulldog Media Group

• Need to grow in big marketplaces like Credit Karma? Chat with New Market Growth

• Need to hire top-tier talent in fintech or lending? Chat with CTB1

Why Visa And Mastercard Are Building The Stablecoin That Could Sink Circle

Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard are reportedly building a shared stablecoin platform to take on Circle and Tether, which together control roughly 80% of the $325 billion stablecoin market. The moves have been telegraphed for over a year. Stripe paid $1.1 billion for stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge. Mastercard spent up to $1.8 billion acquiring BVNK. Visa is already settling across nine blockchains at a $7 billion annualized rate. These aren’t exploratory bets. They’re the pieces of an issuance stack being assembled in real time.

The threat to Circle isn’t technical. Circle already solved the engineering. The problem is distribution, and that’s the one thing Visa and Mastercard have spent six decades perfecting. Visa runs more than 130 stablecoin-linked card programs across 50+ countries. Mastercard has direct bank and merchant relationships at a scale Circle‘s IPO couldn’t buy. The GENIUS Act (the federal stablecoin regulatory framework enacted in 2025) makes this worse for Circle: once a compliant dollar token becomes a commodity any licensed issuer can mint, the contest shifts entirely to who can place it in front of the most merchants and consumers. That’s not a race Circle is equipped to win. [Forbes]

Looking for a new role?

The Free Toaster Jobs Edition tracks where fintech teams are actually investing across marketing, product, data, credit, risk, and partnerships.

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The Free Toaster Team

P.S.: If you’d like to sponsor or host an event in the consumer lending community in 2026, we’d like to hear from you. The Free Toaster will be organizing & hosting curated events this year, and we’d love to work with you as a sponsor.

Hey Toaster Readers,

This week is sponsored by our friends at Bulldog Media Group.

J.D. Power is suing Chime over its recent marketing campaign, arguing that the data does not support the bank's advertising claims. Citi stopped accepting applications for its Custom Cash Card. We are also tracking new ways to borrow, with Experian launching a loan shopping tool directly inside ChatGPT and Pagaya expanding its point-of-sale loans alongside Upgrade. Plus, we look at how the CFPB worked with Bilt to make sure consumers were refunded for fees caused by a recent bank transition.

Carlos Caro, Founder at NMG, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster
Nick Madrid, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster and Uncovered Media

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J.D. Power Sues Chime Over Marketing Campaign

J.D. Power sued Chime on June 2 in federal court in New York over Chime’s “America’s #1 Choice for Banking” campaign and the line backing it up: “#1 ranking based on J.D. Power survey.” The complaint covers breach of contract, trademark infringement, and false advertising.

The whole fight is about whether the data says what the ad says. Chime says the claim is supported by publicly available J.D. Power data showing it had more new checking account openings than any other listed institution. J.D. Power says that study just tracks new account openings by category, not overall preference or who’s anyone’s primary bank, and that Chime led only in checking, with about half of those openings being secondary accounts. Chime is fighting it, calling the complaint selective and incomplete and saying it’ll defend vigorously, pointing to other accolades like Time’s #1 banking brand.

A few things worth chewing on if you do fintech marketing:

• One strong category metric isn’t a market-wide superiority claim. The space between “most new checking accounts” and “America’s #1 Choice for Banking” is basically the lawsuit.

• There’s a difference between public data and licensed-for-advertising data. J.D. Power runs a paid licensing program and says Chime’s deal was internal-use-only. That contract question is the sleeper issue here.

• Can a footnote save a headline? J.D. Power argues the disclosure contradicted the claim rather than qualifying it.

• Claims travel. The same line showed up on the homepage, in paid social, in SEC earnings materials, and in a trademark filing. Each surface is its own exposure.

• How will courts assess willfulness? Chime allegedly kept going after a cease-and-desist, and that could unlock bigger damages. (And at time of publication, Chime hasn’t changed their website).

Early days; Chime hasn’t formally answered yet and nothing’s been tested. But it’s a good one to watch for how hard ratings firms will push back on “#1” claims built on their numbers. [ American Banker][US District Court, Southern District of New York]

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Experian Brings Personal Loan Shopping to ChatGPT with New AI-Powered Experience

Experian launched a new personal loan shopping application inside OpenAI's ChatGPT platform, combining conversational tech with its marketplace data to streamline how consumers explore borrowing options through the credit reporting and financial services giant. Instead of forcing users to hop across multiple websites, this tool lets people chat their way to finding a loan. The application pulls criteria from a network of partners to simplify debt consolidation or major purchases. Lending partners like Avant expect the setup to connect users with personalized options in a far more accessible way. To lock down specific rates, users can hop from the chat window over to Experian’s main site to view pre-qualified offers without hurting their credit score. This rollout expands the firm's push to deploy financial tools at "scale", adding to an AI roster that already includes integrations on Snapchat. [Experian]

Pagaya Builds on Multi-Year Partnership with Upgrade to Expand Point-of-Sale Loans

Pagaya is teaming up once again with Upgrade. This expanded partnership is notable given the fact that the duo moves beyond basic personal loans and tackles the buy now, pay later world. Upgrade plans to plug Pagaya’s AI credit decisioning brains right into Flex Pay, its point of sale payment solution. This setup lets the companies offer flexible monthly payments to a "broader" range of shoppers right when they hit the checkout button. They plan to kick things off in the travel sector, a space where Flex Pay already partners with "thousands" of top brands. By using real time underwriting, Pagaya gives Upgrade the power to greenlight more customers quickly and responsibly. Both teams clearly want to help people make thoughtful purchases without stressing over upfront costs. [Business Wire]

Citi Surprises Cardholders by Halting Custom Cash Credit Card

Citi just surprised cash-back fans by halting new applications for its popular Custom Cash Card. For nearly five years, this card automatically helped users with up to 5% cash back on their highest monthly spending category, capping the premium perk at a $500 limit. Instead of releasing a formal public announcement, the bank simply replaced the card's product page with a brief redirection notice. Internal rumors leaked right before the shutdown, but the sudden move still caught eager applicants completely off guard. While existing cardholders can keep using their benefits for now, Citi currently funnels new shoppers toward its alternative Double Cash card. This unexpected shift leaves people wondering if the financial heavyweight plans to force product transfers down the road. [The Street]

In Case You Missed It (Weekly News Pod)

We've been writing about Cash Flow Underwriting lately. On this News Pod, we expand on what we wrote in last week’s in newsletter: Did ChatGPT Just Fix The Cash Flow Underwriting Distribution Problem?

Catch us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Substack, or your favorite player.

Please support our Newsletter by sharing this edition with a colleague!

And, consider checking out our sponsors:

• Need an affiliate marketing platform/network? Chat with Fintel Connect

• Need to improve application page conversions? Chat with Spinwheel

• Need help with performance marketing? Chat with Bulldog Media Group

• Need to grow in big marketplaces like Credit Karma? Chat with New Market Growth

• Need to hire top-tier talent in fintech or lending? Chat with CTB1

The CFPB Works To Ensure Bilt Consumers Are Made Whole

The CFPB stepped in to make sure users of Bilt avoided financial headaches during the company's recent bank transition. A bumpy handoff to a new banking partner triggered technical glitches and annoying fees for a "limited" number of accounts. Instead of launching a slow, multi-year investigation, the watchdog group worked directly with corporate leadership to clean up the mess efficiently. Bilt proactively offered to cover any surprise overdraft or late fees tied to the digital shakeup. Recent documentation indicates that the fintech firm successfully resolved the technical bugs and got its platform back on track. The team expects to return cash to more than 500 newly identified consumers following the agency's push. Government officials will continue monitoring the cleanup until the company delivers full financial redress to every single impacted user. [CFPB]

Looking for a new role?

The Free Toaster Jobs Edition tracks where fintech teams are actually investing across marketing, product, data, credit, risk, and partnerships.

The Free Toaster Jobs

The Free Toaster Jobs curates real openings across credit, risk, product, data, and growth, with a focus on consumer fintech and lending. No noise. Just roles that signal where budgets and priorities are moving.

By Toaster Media

Spot something worth sharing with your team? Drop this week’s edition in their inbox.

Catch you next week,

The Free Toaster Team

P.S.: If you’d like to sponsor or host an event in the consumer lending community in 2026, we’d like to hear from you. The Free Toaster will be organizing & hosting curated events this year, and we’d love to work with you as a sponsor.

Hey Toaster Readers,

This week is sponsored by New Market Growth.

The way people find and use credit is changing fast, and AI is driving the shift. This week, we look at how large language models are becoming the ultimate distribution channel for cash flow underwriting by turning apps like ChatGPT into personal finance super apps.

We also dive into two new industry reports. Marqeta reveals that consumers are building their own custom portfolio of credit products, while a study from BCG and FT Partners shows fintech hitting a major revenue resurgence driven by real profitability. Plus, we look at Sezzle’s latest super app expansion, including a new Pay-in-5 option that is boosting order values.

There’s a lot of data to unpack. Let’s get toasting!

Carlos Caro, Founder at NMG, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster
Nick Madrid, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster and Uncovered Media

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Will LLMs Solve Distribution For The Cash Flow Lenders?

(read the full version in our latest editorial here)

We Were Wrong About Cash Flow Underwriting’s Distribution Problem

A year and a half ago, I (Carlos) wrote a piece called Where’s The Consumer Demand For Cash Flow Underwriting (CFU)?

Cash flow underwriting has always had one problem: nobody can sell it. The moment a consumer hits “give us your bank login,” they bail. Application rates tank, throughput drops, and the affiliate marketplaces route volume to bureau-only lenders instead.

I used to think that was a dead end. I don’t anymore.

Second-look is quietly working. Lenders are using CFU not as a primary decision, but as a second chance. Customer gets declined on bureau data. Instead of killing the lead, you offer: share your bank data and we might approve you. The person who just got told “no” is the most motivated to say yes. You monetize dead leads, your approval rate climbs, you pay higher affiliate bounties, and the flywheel spins.

But the real unlock is the LLM.

As we wrote in a recent Free Toaster edition, 200 million people already come to ChatGPT every month to ask financial questions. With Plaid now fully integrated, those questions aren’t abstract anymore — they’re grounded in real transaction data. Perplexity built the same thing. Credit Karma is plugging approval odds directly into the ChatGPT experience.

Think about what that means: a user asks about credit cards. ChatGPT reviews their actual spending via Plaid, identifies $8,000 in annual United flight spend, surfaces the United card, checks approval odds through Credit Karma, and prompts them to apply. Product discovery, underwriting match, and conversion funnel — all inside a chat window.

That’s the distribution channel CFU has been waiting for. Not a lender begging you to log into your bank. An AI you’ve already handed your financial life to, pointing you toward better rates and smarter products. The data plumbing for cash flow underwriting is getting laid down by consumers themselves (voluntarily) because the more context they give the model, the better it serves them.

We called it the personal finance super app. The flywheel is already rolling: more data makes smarter recommendations, smarter recommendations build more trust, more trust unlocks more data. At 200 million MAUs, that flywheel has serious momentum.

The open question isn’t whether CFU gets mass distribution anymore. It’s who owns the consumer relationship when it does — ChatGPT, your bank’s AI layer, Credit Karma’s approval odds infrastructure, or someone we haven’t met yet.

But the path from “I’m asking my AI about groceries” to “I’m taking out a better loan” is shorter than most people think. The natural next move after understanding your money is optimizing it. And optimizing it is exactly what lenders sell.

[Check out our full-length editorial here]

Marqeta’s State of Credit: Credit Is Now a Portfolio Consumers Assemble Themselves — and Most Issuers Aren’t Built For It

Marqeta dropped its 2026 State of Credit Report, a survey of 4,000 consumers and 1,000 SMBs across the US and UK, and the through-line is one every growth and product lead should internalize: customers no longer “have” a credit product, they assemble a portfolio of them and switch by transaction. 85% of consumers weigh multiple factors before picking a payment method, 59% used both debit and credit in the last 90 days, and 79% of BNPL users keep using BNPL even when they have a card. BNPL isn’t cannibalizing cards, it’s a parallel rail people toggle into on purpose.

Here’s the why for operators. The report quantifies the single most under-exploited leak in the funnel, the decline. 63% of denied card applicants were never offered an alternative product, yet 60% would have taken a credit-builder, and 76% of denied credit card applicants surveyed would undergo a credit check to upgrade to revolving credit when their profile is ready.

That’s a population you already paid CAC to acquire and then showed the door. The strategic answer Marqeta is selling, “flexible credentials” (one card that flips between debit, credit, and BNPL) plus co-brand-debit-with-BNPL, is really a retention-and-graduation play: keep the relationship through the credit transition instead of re-acquiring the customer later at full price. 48% of 18 to 44s want flexible credentials, rising to 71% among multi-card holders, and the demand skews toward people most comfortable with non-bank providers, which is exactly where a Marqeta-powered issuer wants the wind blowing. [Business Wire] [Marqeta]

The caveat: this is research from a company that profits if you believe it, and it’s a press release, not a filing. But the declined-applicant numbers are the kind of thing you can validate against your own data this week.

Sponsored by New Market Growth

New Market Growth helps lenders build and scale affiliate marketing programs on channels like Credit Karma, Experian Marketplace, Lending Tree, Bankrate, Credible, and many more. NMG clients spend $50-$100MM per year in affiliate channels, and the founding team (one of whom is Free Toaster co-founder Carlos Caro), have advised in excess of 50 lenders over the course of their corporate and agency careers.

If you’re a Free Toaster Reader at a lender that spends over $500K per month in affiliate marketing, we’re offering a free, 90-minute audit of your affiliate marketing program. After research we’ll conduct on our side, we’ll book time to share the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities we observe in your program.

Outside eyes could help unlock the growth you’re looking for in H2 2026.

Email carlos@newmarketgrowth.com with subject line “90-minute audit” and we’ll contact you to get the preliminary information we need to get to work.

Sezzle Expands the Super App: New Rewards Currency, Pay-in-5, and AI Across the Stack

Sezzle pushed its super-app strategy further: the Earn tab now carries a new rewards currency (Sezzle Points, earned via cashback, surveys, and receipts, redeemable for gift cards) alongside AI-powered shopping. The distribution data point worth stealing is Pay-in-5, a no-cost five-installment option where April average order values ran 44% higher than Pay-in-4, a direct lever on basket size and merchant economics, not just a UX tweak. Sezzle is running Klarna’s playbook, converting a one-and-done BNPL checkout into a recurring engagement surface . [GlobeNewswire]

Fintech Resurgence. The Next Cycle Belongs to Operators Who Own Distribution and the Balance Sheet

BCG and FT Partners put out their Global Fintech Report 2026, “From Recovery to Resurgence,” and it’s a must-read. The top line: sector revenue hit $504B in 2025, up 22% year over year, growing roughly three times faster than incumbent financial institutions. The bigger shift is quality of growth. Among the 85 largest public fintechs, 74% are now profitable, and average EBITDA margins climbed 400bps to 20%. The “growth at all costs” era is closed. Capital is being priced on durable unit economics, not GMV.

Here is the why for operators, and it runs across distribution, underwriting, and the balance sheet.

First, distribution is being rewired by AI.

The report calls out the move from search to answers, generative engines and AI overviews intercepting intent before a user ever reaches a comparison page, plus agentic commerce where AI assistants execute checkout. For any lender that buys leads or ranks for “best personal loan,” this is the affiliate funnel eroding in real time. The defensible play is owning the customer relationship and the re-engagement loop, not renting clicks.

Second, the bank-charter wave.

Charter applications and approvals jumped more than fivefold, with names like Revolut, Nubank, and crypto-native players pursuing charters and banking licenses. Owning the charter means owning deposits, cheaper funding, and the ability to keep lending economics in house instead of renting a sponsor bank. That is a direct lever on loan margins.

Third, neobanks are graduating into credit.

The scaled digital banks are pushing past deposits and interchange into lending, where the real net interest margin lives, which puts them on a collision course with incumbent card issuers on exactly the underwriting and acquisition terrain this audience operates in. M&A is consolidating the winners, deal volume rose to 659 transactions, with scaled fintechs like Capital One buying their way into capability and reach.

The strategic takeaway is consistent across the report: revenue resurgence is real, but the operators who compound through the next cycle are the ones who control distribution as AI eats search and who control the capital and the charter behind their loans. [BCG + FT Partners]

Please support our Newsletter by sharing this edition with a colleague!

And, consider checking out our sponsors:

• Need an affiliate marketing platform/network? Chat with Fintel Connect

• Need to improve application page conversions? Chat with Spinwheel

• Need help with performance marketing? Chat with Bulldog Media Group

• Need to grow in big marketplaces like Credit Karma? Chat with New Market Growth

• Need to hire top-tier talent in fintech or lending? Chat with CTB1

Looking for a new role?

The Free Toaster Jobs Edition tracks where fintech teams are actually investing across marketing, product, data, credit, risk, and partnerships.

The Free Toaster Jobs

The Free Toaster Jobs curates real openings across credit, risk, product, data, and growth, with a focus on consumer fintech and lending. No noise. Just roles that signal where budgets and priorities are moving.

By Toaster Media

Spot something worth sharing with your team? Drop this week’s edition in their inbox.

Catch you next week,

The Free Toaster Team

P.S.: If you’d like to sponsor or host an event in the consumer lending community in 2026, we’d like to hear from you. The Free Toaster will be organizing & hosting curated events this year, and we’d love to work with you as a sponsor.

Hey Toaster Readers,

This week is sponsored by our friends at Fintel Connect.

Are AI agents about to take over our wallets? It certainly looks like it. Robinhood just dropped the first mass-market consumer credit card built explicitly for AI agents, while Catena Labs snagged $30M and filed for a national trust bank charter to act as a regulated fiduciary for bots. If your product roadmap didn’t account for non-human spenders yet, it definitely does now.

But it’s not just the bots making big moves. Fintechs and regulators are shaking things up, too. SoFi just scooped up Peach Finance to supercharge its lending technology stack alongside Galileo and Technisys, while a new executive order from President Trump could completely rewrite the embedded finance playbook by exploring direct Fed payment access for non-banks.

Plus, we’re diving into a slick new co-branded card from Fanatics and American Express and breaking down Q1 direct mail trends that show credit card marketers are still flooding mailboxes, while somehow largely ignoring 20-somethings.

Lots to break down. Let’s get toasting!

Carlos Caro, Founder at NMG, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster
Nick Madrid, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster and Uncovered Media

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Robinhood Launches an Agentic Credit Card and Agentic Trading

Robinhood launched an agentic credit card and agentic trading this week (May 27). Users instruct AI agents to make purchases using the Robinhood Gold card. Each agent gets a separate virtual card number, not the consumer’s actual card, which can be deleted at any time. Optional monthly spending caps and per-transaction notification thresholds. Agent purchases earn 3% cash back. Robinhood is the first major consumer brand to offer an agentic credit card natively. Stripe and Ramp offered virtual cards for agents, but those are B2B. This is the first mass-market consumer credit product explicitly built for AI agents. For card product managers: rewards programs, fraud logic, and co-brand economics are all built around human transactors. AI agents disrupt every assumption in that stack. Robinhood just made this everyone’s near-term roadmap problem. [Fortune] [CNBC] [American Banker]

Fanatics + American Express Launch First Co-Brand Credit Card (Issued by First Electronic Bank, Managed by Imprint)

American Express and Fanatics announced the Fanatics American Express® Card, launching later in 2026, issued by First Electronic Bank and managed by Imprint. The card earns FanCash (Fanatics’ loyalty currency) redeemable for merchandise, tickets, collectibles, and experiences. AmEx Membership Rewards cardmembers can transfer AmEx points into FanCash. AmEx becomes the Official Payments Partner across Fanatics online/retail locations and is the presenting sponsor at Fanatics Fest NYC (July 16–19). The three-party card structure (AmEx network + First Electronic Bank as issuer + Imprint as card manager) is becoming the template for specialty co-brand plays. Imprint is worth watching as a fintech stack-in-a-box for co-brand card programs. The FanCash-to-Membership Rewards bridge is an easy-to-use rewards exchange that pulls existing AmEx cardholders into the Fanatics ecosystem. [CNBC] [Bloomberg] [BusinessWire] [AmEx]

Trump Signs Executive Order on Fintech Innovation — Fed Must Review Non-Bank Payment Access

President Trump signed “Integrating Financial Technology Innovation into Regulatory Frameworks” on May 19. Key provisions: (1) Federal regulators must complete a review of their fintech regulations and application processes within 90 days (~August 17) and take pro-innovation steps within 180 days; (2) The Federal Reserve is directed to evaluate access to Fed payment accounts and services for non-bank financial companies, including fintechs and digital asset firms. This is the policy backdrop for the wave of bank charter applications (Upstart, Mercury, Catena Labs, Mission Lane). If non-banks can access Fed payment rails directly, the sponsor/partner bank model underpinning embedded finance changes structurally. For BaaS operators and embedded finance platforms: the 90-day regulatory review clock is now running. Watch for OCC, FDIC, and Fed guidance by August. [White House] [Consumer Finance Monitor] [Sullivan & Cromwell]

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(Webinar) From Budget Guesswork to Provable ROI: What Bank and Credit Union Marketing Leaders Need to Change in 2026

Ron Shevlin, Chief Research Officer at Cornerstone Advisors and Senior Contributor at Forbes, is sitting down with Nicky Senyard, Chief Executive Officer of Fintel Connect, for a quick but impactful 30-minute conversation on how banks and credit unions can move from budget guesswork to provable marketing ROI.

Join us on June 4 at 10 am PST/ 1 pm EST, as they uncover real-world examples of how leading financial institutions are reducing the ROI gap and implementing more effective, trackable strategies to connect marketing spend to real growth outcomes.

You’ll learn:

• Why many financial institutions still struggle to measure true marketing impact

• Where banks and credit unions may be overspending or underinvesting

• How affiliate marketing is becoming a scalable, trackable acquisition channel

• What leaders need to change to better defend budgets and connect spend to growth outcomes

If you’re responsible for growth, acquisition, or marketing accountability, you won’t want to miss this session.

Save your spot now

SoFi Buys Peach Finance to Boost Enterprise FinTech Platform

SoFi just acquired Peach Finance to beef up its enterprise technology stack. Peach Finance provides software-as-a-service for loan servicing and processing, making it a natural fit for SoFi's growing backend ecosystem. SoFi will integrate the startup into its Technology Solutions segment alongside existing fintech infrastructure players Galileo and Technisys. Before the deal, Peach Finance raised around $27.5 million from venture capital firms and grew to a team of about 54 employees. This move represents an expansion for SoFi as it creates a vertically integrated system for other financial institutions looking to modernize. The acquisition supports SoFi's broader expansion strategy, which already helped the company reach 14.7 million members in early 2026. Beyond managing loans, the platform is also scaling its capital markets and blockchain capabilities to let enterprises handle both fiat and cryptocurrency. [PYMNTS]

Catena Labs Raises $30M, Files for National Trust Bank Charter for AI Agents

Circle co-founder Sean Neville’s Catena Labs raised $30M (a16z Crypto, Acrew Capital) and filed for a national trust bank charter from the OCC. Catena would be a regulated fiduciary for AI agents. A bank account where the account holder is an AI agent, not a person. Operators can set spending limits, define approved recipients, and cap holdings before handing off financial execution to agents. This is the infrastructure layer that resolves the liability, fraud, and compliance gaps blocking broad agentic commerce deployment. [Fortune] [PYMNTS]

Direct Mail Volume & Trends Report: Q1 2026

Direct mail hit 7B+ pieces in Q1 2026, and credit card brands led the charge with 1.35B pieces, more than any other category. Mortgage and loan marketers held steady at 1B+, while financial services posted modest gains after the holiday season pullback. Key creative trends: 2/3 of all mail was personalized, and 70%+ went out in envelope formats — a sign that marketers are doubling down on scalable, cost-efficient executions. One audience gap worth noting: ages 20–29 made up just ~1% of total mail volume, while 40–69-year-olds captured 2/3 of all pieces. If you're targeting younger borrowers, the mailbox is wide open. [Franklin Madison Direct]

News Pod 19 - With The New Plaid Integration, ChatGPT is Now a Distribution Channel for Personal Finance

Catch us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Substack, or your favorite player.

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Hey Toaster Readers,

This week is sponsored by our friends at Spinwheel.

ChatGPT is now a distribution channel for personal finance. OpenAI launched a feature that allows users to connect their bank accounts using Plaid. They also partnered with Intuit to integrate tools like Credit Karma’s approval odds. This means ChatGPT can review a user's actual spending data, determine their approval odds, and recommend personalized financial products.

We explore how this new setup impacts traditional search traffic and affiliate sites like NerdWallet, and how this changes the affiliate marketing landscape in the lending industry.

Plus, we drop details on our upcoming September event in San Francisco, the Affiliate Marketing Summit For Lenders.

Lots to break down. Let’s get toasting!

Carlos Caro, Founder at NMG, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster
Nick Madrid, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster and Uncovered Media

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ChatGPT Is Now a Distribution Channel For Financial Products

OpenAI launched a personal finance experience inside ChatGPT.

Perplexity did a similar thing a month earlier.

This marks the early innings of consumer attention shifting away from Google and the traditional affiliate listing pages and into the LLMs (for financial products).

What Actually Happened

200 million people already come to ChatGPT every month to ask financial questions.

Previously, ChatGPT was answering personal finance questions in the abstract. It would give high-level answers loaded with assumptions, or it forced the customers to answer a pile of detailed questions.

Now, with Plaid fully integrated into ChatGPT, it answers those questions based on the customer’s real financial data.

How it works (for users in the “Pro” tier):

• Connect bank accounts through Plaid

• ChatGPT gets read access to balances, transactions, investments, and liabilities

• Users get a financial dashboard, the ability to ask freeform questions, and personalized product recommendations built on their financial profile

Perplexity built the same thing with Plaid, while also layering in investment-grade data from FactSet, Coinbase, Nasdaq, and S&P Global.

ChatGPT and Perplexity both seem to appreciate the power of answering personal finance questions for their customers in the specific, not just the abstract.

Intuit’s Role In All Of This

In November 2025, Intuit announced a new $100M+ multi-year contract designed to accelerate its AI-driven expert platform strategy. TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp now live directly inside the ChatGPT experience.

Intuit’s CEO Sasan Goodarzi said: “For us, it doesn’t matter whether a customer comes directly to using our platform or we are where they are within an app, in this case ChatGPT.”

From OpenAI’s perspective, one of the unique things Credit Karma brings to the table is their approval odds models. The ability to tell a user, based on their real credit profile, how likely they are to get approved for a given card, loan, or mortgage. That’s roughly 2 decades of data infrastructure across 130MM+ members.

Imagine this: A user asks about credit cards. ChatGPT reviews their spending (enabled through the Plaid link), identifies $8,000 in annual United flight spend, surfaces the United card, checks approval odds through Credit Karma, and prompts them to apply. No new tab. No search results page.

That’s product discovery, validation of an underwriting match, and (potentially) a conversion funnel. And this can happen in a few key strokes inside ChatGPT.

Who Should Feel Threatened?

Traditional content affiliates should be very worried.

Specifically, sites that rank for terms “best travel credit card 2025,” serve generic display ads, and collect referral fees when users click through and apply.

That static webpage listicle couldn’t possibly know you spent $8,000 on flying on United last year. ChatGPT does. And, going further, it can tell you how many incremental rewards you’ll earn by moving your spend and confirm that the issuer will approve you if you apply.

Sites like NerdWallet have great content. But, OpenAI already consumed that data. What sites like NerdWallet don’t have is approval odds models with the scale and fidelity of a giant like Credit Karma.

Consumers chase convenience and utility.

The utility of an adviser with the context of Plaid’s transaction data, the certainty layer of Credit Karma’s approval odds, and the intelligence of OpenAI’s best foundational models is hard to beat.

Game, set, match for the LLMs. RIP Google’s pile of blue links.

The New Competitive Landscape

Credit Karma’s position is strong.

They are in a position to be the largest-scale approval odds provider for the ChatGPT ecosystem. OpenAI has no incentive to replicate that in-house. Building credit bureau & lender relationships, selecting attributes, and predicting approval odds across dozens of lenders is two decades of infrastructure work.

Experian’s position is also very interesting.

While a smaller-scale consumer marketplace than Karma (at least for now), they’re a credit bureau, too. So while Karma has to worry (at least a little bit) about existential risk tied to their credit bureau relationships, Experian can control their destiny across the value-chain.

OpenAI will happily outsource the challenge of predicting approval odds, especially knowing the total market for affiliate marketing spend in consumer lending is in the ballpark of $6B per year. That’s peanuts for a giant like OpenAI.

There’s an opening for the banks, though.

Karma’s models aren’t perfect. Based on their relationship with lenders & the bureaus, they can assert with high confidence that you’ll be approved, but they don’t guarantee it with 100% certainty. (To their credit through, they’ve gone as far as to offer consumers up to $50 when they get declined on offers with the Credit Karma Guarantee badge).

If a lender like Wells Fargo or Capital One built a direct integration with OpenAI, they could in theory deliver 100% certainty, something the likes of Karma and Experian would have a very hard time replicating. (And, to be clear, we’re not saying that 100% certainty is easy for the banks, it’s just that they have an advantage over the affiliates).

That’s because the lender could run their underwriting model with their own decisioning data in the background.

The affiliate marketplaces and the lenders have slightly different credit bureau datasets and they pull the data from the bureaus at different points in time, and those nuances could make the difference between ChatGPT saying “your chances for getting this product are really, really great” and “I can 100% guarantee it.” That’s a subtle, but important difference in consumer lending.

As the LLM surface proves it ability to secure consumer attention and transaction flow to lending products, OpenAI will have to decide if they want their approval odds coming through affiliate marketplaces like Credit Karma or Experian, directly from the lenders, or some combination of the two.

If OpenAI builds an open interface where any lender can plug in their own underwriting signal, the approval odds layer becomes a infrastructure race between institutions. And OpenAI will arbitrate whose signal it trusts most.

I’m guessing that’s something the executives at Credit Karma, Experian, and the other organizations positioned to play this role (companies like Free Toaster sponsor Spinwheel) are thinking about.

What Distribution Channels Survive The LLM Disruption

Direct mail is off-line. The AI overloads won’t be controlling what envelopes land in your inbox anytime soon. This will continue to be a bread and butter channel.

Social is structurally separate. It’s entertainment and education oriented. People don’t go to TikTok to ask financial questions. The issue with social is that approval rates tend to be lower due to the lack of credit-bureau-based targeting at the top of the funnel.

Podcast, YouTube, out-of-home. Owned media channels will stay as powerful mediums to get brand messages across, but will be tough to crack as direct-response channels because they lack credit bureau data signal at the marketing stage.

Google-based search intent will be swallowed whole. That slice of attention maps almost perfectly onto what ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and the LLMs are now racing to capture.

Closing Thoughts

The LLMs are in the early days of constructing a personal finance super app.

The super app will accumulate context across your cards, deposit accounts, savings accounts, and use it to inform the answer to every question.

Further, because people will arm these super apps with personal context, financial goals, and lifestyle preferences, the super apps will do an amazing job delivering personalized, proactive advice that will create utility for the customer.

We have a classic data-led product flywheel.

ChatGPT gets smarter and more useful as you connect more data and context.

Smarter recommendations build more trust and more users. More trust and more users unlocks more data. At 200 million monthly active users, that product flywheel is already rolling down the hill.

Plaid unlocks the transaction layer. Credit Karma (and other data-forward marketplaces like Experian) could plug in the approval odds layer. Those are some of the foundational layers of a personal finance super app.

And more are coming, because we still need to solve for fraud, identity, and transaction processing at scale to make the most out of the LLM surface for personal finance.

The organizations that notice this, and can build a business owning a layer inside of the LLM surfaces, will have compounding advantages over time.

The ones waiting to see how it plays may be left fighting over the consumer attention that doesn’t migrate to the LLMs. Or, they’ll have a heck of a time elbowing their way in when they realize they’re late to the party.

The questions for every consumer lender and publisher right now: Do you have proprietary data, a differentiated model asset, or a product or service worth plugging into the personal finance super app? Or, do you have the ability to create this super app yourself?

It’s not a given that OpenAI, Perplexity, or Anthropic will earn the trust of the consumer as the personal finance super app.

How many people will hand ChatGPT the user name and password to their bank accounts and/or their Credit Karma or Experian accounts?

That’s a big unknown right now.

But the answer to that question over the next 12-24 months could materially change the landscape of consumer lending marketplaces.

[OpenAI] [Perplexity]

Sponsored by Spinwheel

With a single call to our simple, dev-friendly APIs, Spinwheel offers the only comprehensive connection to your consumers’ financial accounts.

Spinwheel delivers PII, real-time, verified account data, and the ability to make payments across all major debt categories – all within your brand’s experience.

With many happy customers, including:

News Pod #18 - NerdWallet’s Q1’26 Earnings: Why Is The Stock Down 30%

Catch us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Substack, or your favorite player.

Please support our Newsletter by sharing this edition with a colleague!

And, consider checking out our sponsors:

• Need an affiliate marketing platform/network? Chat with Fintel Connect

• Need to improve application page conversions? Chat with Spinwheel

• Need help with performance marketing? Chat with Bulldog Media Group

• Need to grow in big marketplaces like Credit Karma? Chat with New Market Growth

• Need to hire top-tier talent in fintech or lending? Chat with CTB1

Looking for a new role?

The Free Toaster Jobs Edition tracks where fintech teams are actually investing across marketing, product, data, credit, risk, and partnerships.

The Free Toaster Jobs

The Free Toaster Jobs curates real openings across credit, risk, product, data, and growth, with a focus on consumer fintech and lending. No noise. Just roles that signal where budgets and priorities are moving.

By Toaster Media

Other News We’re Reading

(SEO) Google Search as you know it is over (TechCrunch)

(SEO) Google Search is getting its biggest changes ever (The Verge)

(Agentic Commerce) Would you let robots spend your money? Google is betting on it (The Verge)

(BNPL) Affirm seeks bank apps to build its BNPL empire (American Banker)

(BNPL) Google Embeds Klarna BNPL Into Gemini AI Conversations (PYMNTS)

(Banks) Fintech firm Mercury hits $5.2 billion valuation after funding round, up 49% in 14 months (CNBC)

Spot something worth sharing with your team? Drop this week’s edition in their inbox.

Catch you next week,

The Free Toaster Team

P.S.: If you’d like to sponsor or host an event in the consumer lending community in 2026, we’d like to hear from you. The Free Toaster will be organizing & hosting curated events this year, and we’d love to work with you as a sponsor.

Hey Toaster Readers,

This week is sponsored by our friends at New Market Growth.

Last week, NerdWallet announced earnings. The headlines all sounded great in the press release, but the stock is down ~30% since they shared earnings.

When we dug in, there was enough there for us to pause and wonder about the future of their business.

This week we’ll focus on what we learned from NerdWallet, and leave you with some additional news stories we think you should check out at the end.

Let’s get toasting!

Carlos Caro, Founder at NMG, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster

Nick Madrid, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster and Uncovered Media

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Breaking Down NerdWallet’s Earnings

NerdWallet (NASDAQ: NRDS) reported $222 million in Q1 2026 revenue on May 6, up 6% YoY. Non-GAAP operating income hit a Q1 record of $34 million.

The headlines were fine.

But the stock market’s reaction signals there could be reasons for concern here.

And the earnings call had at least 5 moments worth flagging.

One auto insurance carrier flinched and the full-year guidance changed.

CEO Tim Chen didn’t sugarcoat it: “We have a lot of concentration towards a few carriers currently and a few channels.”

A single large carrier pulled back in March. That alone was enough to ding Q1, is expected to hit Q2 harder, and force NerdWallet to lower the bottom of full-year NGOI guidance.

If one insurance partner can move the full-year P&L, maybe the recent gains they’d seen in insurance weren’t broad-based. Maybe one or two carriers were leaning in (read: had extra marketing budget NerdWallet happened to capture), and are now moving back to a more sustainable position.

From past earnings reports (we covered the previous one here), the data was showing their former flagship business - credit cards - has been on a steady decline since 2023.

The narrative was that insurance was rocket-shipping to save the day.

Now the question is whether insurance follows credit cards down once the carriers driving recent growth pull back.

SMB is down 15% and nobody on the call seemed to care.

SMB revenue dropped 15% YoY, to $25M. The reason given in prepared remarks was a single sentence: “Within our SMB vertical, we saw year-over-year declines driven by organic search headwinds.” Motley Fool

That was it. No turnaround plan. No timeline. No diagnosis of which SMB products are bleeding versus holding.

Then the Q&A opened up. Three analysts asked three questions, about vertical integration spend, NGOI guidance math, and LLM traffic. Zero on SMB.

Either the sell side has already written SMB off, or management has trained them not to ask. Neither is a good look for a category that, just a few quarters ago, was being talked about as a meaningful diversification story.

Worth noting: buried in the CFO’s prepared remarks was a note that the SMB decline was partially offset by growth in loan originations. That’s an interesting positive, small business loan demand showing up in the funnel, and not one analyst pulled the thread.

That gives you clues on where SMB sits in the priority stack right now.

“Organic search headwinds” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

That phrase shows up for both SMB and credit cards. It’s a polite way of saying Google and AI are eating our free traffic.

Tim’s LLM update, within the context of the insurance business: NerdWallet has dominant share of money-related queries inside LLMs, conversion is high, and it’s “a very small piece of our overall pie right now from a revenue perspective.”

Translation: the channel that’s growing isn’t material to the insurance business, yet. The old cash cow channel, SEO, is shrinking. That’s a scary reality for a business that depends on low cost, high-conversion traffic to thrive.

(For more on this dynamic, see our prior piece, The SEO Apocalypse Has Arrived.)

The margin beat had a Super Bowl-sized asterisk on it.

Q1 NGOI - at $34 million - looked great. Why? Per CFO Lauren StClair, the gain came from “lower other marketing expenses on lower brand spend, partially offset by higher performance marketing spend.”

In English: they didn’t run a Super Bowl ad this year, brand spend dropped, and they put more dollars into performance marketing.

Two takeaways:

• The margin lift is partially a one-time comp benefit, not a structural improvement. Q2 NGOI is guided down from $34M to $6M–$14M.

• A NerdWallet that buys more of its traffic each year is a NerdWallet that needs partners with elite conversion economics. Expect more pressure on bounty/CPA pricing, more A/B tests, and less patience for clunky application flows.

If your funnel is mid, we expect you’re going to feel the pressure. Best conversion rates will rise to the top, and the average/bad ones could effectively disappear.

“Vertical integration” sounded more defensive than offensive.

Morgan Stanley’s analyst directly asked Tim to walk through the ROI math on the new investments. The answer leaned on “our cost of capital is pretty high” and the idea that AI tools make it cheaper to build internally.

Building NerdWallet Insurance Experts, a branded agency routing calls to captive and independent agents, is a real pivot from their credit card content days.

NerdWallet is moving from lead-gen marketplace to operating their own customer-facing financial services business. That’s a different animal than referrals.

They’re entering it partly because the referral business is under pressure. Read into that what you want.

Furthermore, in a recent Morgan Stanley research report from May 7, 2026, analysts state their further conviction in the deteriorating business:

“We are more confident in our thesis that durable and profitable growth looks challenging for NerdWallet, with performance marketing intensity still elevated on both dollar ($122mm vs. $125mm in 4Q25) and percentage of revenue (54.9% vs. 55.5% in 4Q25) bases, which despite leverage on Other marketing in the quarter continues to suggest greater reliance on paid acquisition over time, which may continue to pressure incremental margins and ROIC.”

You partner with, or are considering partnering with NerdWallet. Now what?

NerdWallet still has the brand, the traffic, and the cash flow to be a top distribution partner, especially if you’re in deposits or personal loans (both growing). But this call had the texture of a company transitioning from a high-margin SEO business to a paid-traffic-and-services business. Both of which play outside of their historical competencies and could have a different margin profile.

Action items:

• Ask your NerdWallet rep how your specific category (let’s say credit cards), is trending, at the top of the house. You need to know if the decline you’re seeing is you losing market share or you preserving or building share inside a declining category.

  • Post publish edit: On May 14th we discovered, through a public filing on NerdWallet’s website (details here) that the credit card business declined 33% YoY from $38M in Q1 2025 to $25.5M in Q1 2026. They shared the last 7 quarters of revenue for Insurance, SMB, Loans and Emerging Verticals in that same report.

• Audit your conversion funnel. In a performance-marketing-led NerdWallet, conversion is placement. Double down here. The last thing you want is for NerdWallet to conclude that your offer doesn’t work when the traffic source moves from free (SEO) to $20 per click from Google or Meta.

• Diversify your affiliate mix, and work through what you’d do if a partner you currently count on for a good chunk of your volume were to create a shock in your lead flow.

At the highest level, we empathize with NerdWallet’s struggles.

We think their brand has an incredible amount of equity and trust in the category, and we’re rooting for them to get through this rough patch and back into sustainable, strategic growth in the lending category.

But, given the clues they dropped in this quarter’s earnings, we can’t help but be a bit worried about their future in a world where SEO continues to decline in importance.

Sponsored by New Market Growth

New Market Growth helps lenders build and scale affiliate marketing programs on channels like Credit Karma, Experian Marketplace, Lending Tree, Bankrate, Credible, and many more. NMG clients spend $50-$100MM per year in affiliate channels, and the founding team (one of whom is Free Toaster co-founder Carlos Caro), have advised in excess of 50 lenders over the course of their corporate and agency careers.

If you’re a Free Toaster Reader at a lender that spends over $500K per month in affiliate marketing, we’re offering a free, 90-minute audit of your affiliate marketing program. After research we’ll conduct on our side, we’ll book time to share the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities we observe in your program.

Outside eyes could help unlock the growth you’re looking for in H2 2026.

Email carlos@newmarketgrowth.com with subject line “90-minute audit” and we’ll contact you to get the preliminary information we need to get to work.

Earnings

Affirm (Q3 FY2026, ended Mar 31) — Revenue $1.04B (+33% YoY); operating income $103M (9% margin); net income positive for first time as a public company. Earnings release · IR Page

Oportun (Q1 2026, ended Mar 31) — Revenue $229M (−3% YoY); net income $2.3M (vs. $10M prior year); adjusted EBITDA $29M. Earnings release · IR Page

Pagaya (Q1 2026, ended Mar 31) — Revenue $318M (+10% YoY); GAAP net income $25M (8% margin); adjusted EBITDA $94M (+18% YoY). Earnings release · IR Page

Sezzle (Q1 2026, ended Mar 31) — Revenue $135.5M (+29% YoY); net income $51.3M (+42% YoY, 38% margin); adjusted EBITDA $71.1M (52.5% margin). Earnings release · IR Page

Chime (Q1 2026, ended Mar 31) — Revenue $647M (+25% YoY); net income $53M (8% margin); adjusted EBITDA $119M (18% margin, +13pp YoY). Earnings release · IR Page

Dave (Q1 2026, ended Mar 31) — Revenue $158.4M (+47% YoY); net income $57.9M (+101% YoY); adjusted EBITDA $69.3M (+57% YoY, 44% margin). Earnings release · IR Page

Upstart (Q1 2026, ended Mar 31) — Revenue $308M (+44% YoY); net loss ($6.6M); adjusted EBITDA $40.5M (13% margin, down from 20% prior year). Earnings release · IR Page

Other News We’re Reading and Listening to

Another Fintech Bankruptcy: SMB Banking & Credit Card Startup Parker Files Chapter 7 Fintech Business Weekly | Jason Mikula

Pagaya Announces New Affiliate Partnership with Experian® to Expand Access to Personal Loans Business Wire

PayPal Plans Job Cuts as Fintech’s New CEO Pursues Turnaround Strategy Bloomberg.com

Brazil’s Mastercard Rival Elo Taps Bank of America, Other Banks for US IPO Bloomberg.com

Catch you next week,

The Free Toaster Team

Note: If you’d like to sponsor or host an event in the consumer lending community in 2026, we’d like to hear from you. The Free Toaster will be organizing & hosting curated events this year, and we’d love to work with you as a sponsor.

Hey Toaster Readers,

This week is sponsored by our friends at Bulldog Media Group.

SoFi delivered its tenth consecutive quarter of GAAP profitability with record revenues of $1.1 billion, but missed Wall Street’s expectations. Experian is looking toward the future of security with the launch of its "Agent Trust" framework to verify bot-initiated transactions, while Stripe is turning AI agents into a direct commerce channel by plugging its checkout into Google’s AI Mode and the Gemini app. Meanwhile, OneMain Financial opened the year strong with $226 million in net income. Barclays completed its acquisition of Best Egg to expand its U.S. consumer lending reach and Synchrony took over the MyLowe’s Pro Rewards American Express portfolio.

Lots to break down. Let’s get toasting!

Carlos Caro, Founder at NMG, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster
Nick Madrid, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster and Uncovered Media

PS: To support us, please subscribe or forward this email to 1 of your colleagues!

Save the date!

We’re cooking up The Affiliate Marketing Summit For Lenders on September 23 & 24th in San Francisco!

PS: For exclusive invites & updates about this event, please reply to this email with “SF Event” so we can keep you informed!

SoFi’s Best Quarter Yet Disappoints Wall St.

SoFi posted record results in Q1 2026, with GAAP net revenue hitting $1.1 billion, up 43% year-over-year, yet Wall Street wasn’t impressed. The stock dropped 13% after the company maintained its full-year guidance, disappointing a market conditioned to expect beat-and-raise quarters. The core reason: the quarter was overshadowed by a meaningful slowdown in SoFi’s capital-light businesses, particularly the Loan Platform Business, which missed Morgan Stanley’s estimate by 25%. For a company that has built its premium valuation around fee-based, capital-light growth, that slowdown mattered more than the record originations.

Total loan originations hit a record $12.2 billion, up 68% year-over-year, with personal loans leading at $8.3 billion, student loans up 119% to $2.6 billion, and home loans up 137% to $1.2 billion. The LPB contributed $140.8 million to consolidated adjusted net revenue and added $3.6 billion in new commitments from three new partners. Personal loan net charge-offs came in at 3.03%, down 28 basis points year-over-year, with newer vintages tracking inside the 7-8% lifetime loss guide.

On the card side, SoFi reported 436,184 credit card holders, up 42% year-over-year, with interchange fee revenue growing 54%, driven by nearly $25 billion in annualized spend across SoFi Money and the credit card. The borrower profile stayed prime at a weighted average FICO of 745 and average income of $154k.

For the first time in several quarters, balance sheet lending rather than capital-light businesses drove the top-line beat. The Technology segment underperformed, posting $75 million against expectations of roughly $105 million. Higher operating expenses added further pressure, as SoFi accelerated marketing spend in the first half of the year. Both Bank of America and Morgan Stanley maintained Underperform ratings post-earnings, with Morgan Stanley cutting its price target to $16 and Bank of America lowering theirs to $17.

SoFi pushed back.

Management said the LPB demand continues to exceed what the company chooses to fulfill, pointing to broad-based buyer interest and all existing partners approaching renewal choosing to extend. The harder question is whether private credit is competing for the same institutional buyer pool.

SoFi says no.

Morgan Stanley is not fully convinced, cutting its 2026 LPB forecast by 20% while raising ex-platform origination estimates by 25%. The 2H guide now requires a significant acceleration to hit full-year targets, a ramp the company believes its heavier 1H marketing investment will support. Whether that plays out depends on the LPB returning to form and the Technology segment stabilizing after losing Chime as a customer. (SoFi)

TOASTER’S TAKE

The SoFi management team’s earnings call left a goldmine of intel for marketers in the lending niche.

Here’s some things that stood out to us:

• Their unaided brand awareness rose to an all-time high of 10% up 300bps from a year ago. We knew SoFi’s brand investments were top notch, but now we have data to quantify just how well they’re doing on this front.

• Lending distribution = Direct mail + affiliates

  • Many of us have this deeply ingrained in our DNA, but it’s nice to have a leader like SoFi put it out there in the open. “The lending business has historically been one that relies on legacy channels such as direct mail, but is heavily influenced by affiliate partnerships.” -Anthony Noto, CEO

• Checking/savings distribution = Digital

  • “Our SoFi Money product is a broad-based digital strategy that we leverage to drive good marketing efficiencies.” -Anthony Noto, CEO

• Credit card 0% APR Balance Transfer offers are working

  • “We're starting to see people transition from balance transfers with zero APRs actually paying a full APR at a reasonable rate.” -Anthony Noto, CEO

• Brokerage distribution = Affiliate + digital

  • “And that, again, is really an affiliate and visual marketing channel acquisition product.” -Anthony Noto, CEO

• Crypto distribution = Not sure, still developing a POV

  • “Crypto is the new kid on the street, and we’re developing new opportunities for marketing there.” -Anthony Noto, CEO

SoFi just publicly confirmed that affiliates are core to lending, checking/savings, and brokerage. For Toaster readers (many of whom are specialists/operators in this channel), this should be no surprise, but it also shows that the channel isn’t going anywhere, even for players with SoFi’s scale and brand.

We’ll be breaking down the friction between SoFi’s record growth and the market’s skeptical reaction in-depth later this week on The Free Toaster News Pod. Be sure to tune in!

Sponsored by Bulldog Media Group

Reach the Borrowers Others Miss.

Bulldog Media Group specializes in connecting consumer lenders with less than perfect borrowers — a massive, underserved market that requires precision targeting to get right. With 25 years of financial services marketing experience, they deliver qualified leads through affiliate marketing, targeted email, and data-driven acquisition strategies built for this exact audience.

If you’re a lender looking to scale, these are your people.

Get Qualified Borrower Leads

Experian Launches Agent Trust to Verify AI-Driven Transactions

Experian launched Agent Trust™, an identity verification framework that links AI agents to verified human owners to facilitate agentic commerce. Experian currently prevents $15 to $19 billion in annual fraud losses and is applying that data infrastructure to verify bot-initiated transactions. The system uses Human-to-Agent Binding to create a secure link between a consumer’s device and their AI representative. A real-time Agent Trust Token signals identity, consent, and fraud risk to merchants during the checkout process. An Agent Registry also monitors bot behavior over time to identify misrepresentation or unauthorized actions. The technology integrates with existing payment standards from Visa, Cloudflare, and Skyfire. This platform-agnostic tool allows businesses to process automated purchases while maintaining a verified connection to a human payer. (Experian)

Stripe Powers Checkout Inside Google’s AI Mode and Gemini

Google is turning AI Mode and the Gemini app into a direct sales channel. Businesses can now list products inside AI-generated responses and complete transactions without the user leaving the interface. The infrastructure is Stripe‘s Agentic Commerce Suite, handling discovery, checkout, and payment inside the AI experience. Retailers like Best Buy, Kate Spade, and Coach are already live. Quince, Fanatics, and JD Sports are coming on the Google side.

Affiliate-driven comparison sites and SEO-optimized landing pages have always competed for the top of Google results. AI Mode removes the click entirely. A consumer asking about the best personal loan or travel card gets an answer, and increasingly a buy button, inside the response itself. Publishers and marketplaces that sit between the consumer and the product, NerdWallet, LendingTree, and similar players, lose the referral step if AI handles both the recommendation and the transaction.

Stripe has already integrated the same setup with OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta. And now Google is playing ball, too. (Stripe, PYMNTS)

OneMain Financial Reports Strong Q1 2026 Results with $226M Net Income

OneMain Financial opened 2026 with solid top-line results. Total revenue reached $1.6 billion in Q1, up 6% year-over-year, driven by receivables growth. Managed receivables grew to $26.1 billion, also up 6% from a year ago. Consumer loan originations totaled $3.1 billion, up 3% year-over-year. The company reported net income of $226 million, or $1.93 diluted EPS, versus $1.78 in Q1 2025.

The credit card portfolio is the clearest growth story this quarter. Receivables hit $983 million, up from $676 million a year ago, with customer accounts now at 1.17 million. Revenue yield on credit cards was 33.9%, up 309 basis points year-over-year. Credit card net charge-offs improved sharply, falling 176 basis points year-over-year to 18.0%.

On the consumer loan side, the net charge-off rate was 8.0%, up 19 basis points year-over-year. The 30-plus delinquency rate for consumer loans stood at 5.22%, up 14 basis points year-over-year, though the company noted that the older “back book” loans, now just 5% of the portfolio, are driving an outsized 14% of 30-plus delinquent receivables. The front book, representing originations since August 2022 credit tightening, continues to perform in line with expectations. (OneMain Financial)

E048 - Q&A on Application Friction - Nick interviews Carlos

Nick Madrid interviews Carlos Caro live at the Fintech Summit in NYC on April 28th.

On the heels of a Curated Table Event on April 27th (sponsored by Spinwheel), Nick bumped into Carlos at the Fintech Summit and did a short Q&A on how lenders eliminate friction from their application flows.

Catch us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Substack, or your favorite player.

Please support our Newsletter by sharing this edition with a colleague!

And, consider checking out our sponsors:

• Need an affiliate marketing platform/network? Chat with Fintel Connect

• Need to improve application page conversions? Chat with Spinwheel

• Need help with performance marketing? Chat with Bulldog Media Group

• Need to grow in big marketplaces like Credit Karma? Chat with New Market Growth

• Need to hire top-tier talent in fintech or lending? Chat with CTB1

Synchrony Becomes Exclusive Issuer for Lowe’s Commercial Co-Brand Card

Synchrony now issues the MyLowe’s Pro Rewards American Express Card, taking over the co-brand portfolio to centralize Lowe’s commercial credit offerings. This new card runs on the American Express network and allows Pro customers to earn rewards at non-Lowe’s locations. It replaces the previous store-only model with a version that carries no annual fee and integrates into the existing MyLowe’s Pro Rewards program. The shift allows Lowe’s to move its commercial credit products under a single issuer to provide simpler applications and flexible financing for business project needs. This transition aims to consolidate the Pro customer experience by linking hardware spending with general business expenses. (Synchrony)

Barclays Completes Acquisition of Best Egg Personal Lending Platform

Barclays completed its acquisition of Best Egg. The deal integrates a scaled origination engine into Barclays US Consumer Bank to expand its existing credit card and deposit operations. Barclays will manage the business while maintaining the Best Egg brand identity. The acquisition follows an initial announcement on October 28, 2025. This transaction shifts Barclays toward a capital-light lending model in the U.S. market. The bank expects the move to increase capital efficiency and diversify its consumer finance revenue. (Barclays)

Upcoming Toaster Events

Affiliate Marketing Summit for Lenders (San Francisco | Sept 23–24)

Step away from the daily grind for a two-day, senior-level industry event in San Francisco. On day one, we’ll spend the day at the Exploratorium, a killer indoor/outdoor space where we’ll have a mix of keynotes, panels, structured networking, and great food & drink overlooking the water. On day two (optional, for anyone interested), we’ll head out to wine country so you can continue the conversations you initiated the day prior. Our goal is to make this Summit the ONE event per year you can’t miss if you’re a lender who’s serious about affiliate marketing.

B2B Fintech Founders Lunch: Using Content & Events to Scale (NYC | May 12)

​Join us for a curated lunch and powerful conversation with 20 fellow founders and operators, exploring the most undervalued combination of personal brands and events. The hosts, our own Carlos Caro and Supriya Gupta, will candidly share a few lessons (and mistakes), where some of their best business relationships started and how they are thinking about content strategy this year. B2B fintech founders can learn more and register here.

PayPal Splits into Three Units and Makes Venmo a Standalone Division

PayPal is reorganizing into three business units and establishing Venmo as an independent division to accelerate growth for the payments platform. CEO Enrique Lores is leading this restructuring following his March appointment and the departure of former CEO Alex Chriss. The new structure separates Venmo from a consumer and merchant group and a payment services arm containing Braintree and crypto operations. Creating a standalone Venmo segment simplifies performance tracking and creates a path for a potential sale of the asset. This move follows reports that Stripe evaluated an acquisition of parts of PayPal. The company currently faces intensifying competition from large technology firms and fintech rivals. PayPal shares have slipped 12.7% this year after a 2026 profit forecast fell well short of analyst expectations. Management will disclose further details of the overhaul during next week's earnings call. (Reuters)

Looking for a new role?

The Free Toaster Jobs Edition tracks where fintech teams are actually investing across marketing, product, data, credit, risk, and partnerships.

The Free Toaster Jobs

The Free Toaster Jobs curates real openings across credit, risk, product, data, and growth, with a focus on consumer fintech and lending. No noise. Just roles that signal where budgets and priorities are moving.

By Toaster Media

Sources: Fiserv, Mastercard, Visa, Upbound Group (Brigit)

Other News We’re Reading and Listening to

(Credit) Nearly Half Of Americans Regret Financial Decisions Due To A Lack Of Understanding, Experian Research Finds (Experian)

(Travel/Rewards) Lyft And United Launch First-Ever Pay With Miles Option For U.S. Rideshare (Lyft)

(Economy) The U.S.-Iran War Is Coming For Your Credit Score And Mortgage Application (CNBC)

(Lending) Justice Federal Credit Union Selects Upstart To Expand Personal Lending (Business Wire)

(AI/Banking) Introducing AI Agents: Next Phase Of Citi Artificial Intelligence Journey (Citi)

(Security) Frontwave CU Discloses Data Breach Involving Member SSNs (CU Today)

(Tech Standards) PYMNTS: Google And Mastercard Contribute Agentic Commerce Standards To FIDO Alliance (FIDO Alliance)

(Crypto/Cards) Introducing MoonAgents Card (MoonPay)

(Cards) Royal Caribbean Debuts Two New Credit Cards: Are They Worth It? (One Mile at a Time)

(Banking/M&A) Mercury Receives OCC Conditional Approval To Establish Mercury Bank, N.A. (Business Wire)

(M&A) OppFi Announces Definitive Agreement To Acquire BNCCORP, Inc. And BNC National Bank And The Elimination Of Up-C Structure (OppFi)

(Fintech/Investment) Goldman Sachs Invests $50 Million In Kashable (American Banker)

Spot something worth sharing with your team? Drop this week’s edition in their inbox:

https://www.thefreetoaster.com/p/sofis-best-quarter-yet-disappoints

Catch you next week,

The Free Toaster Team

P.S.: If you’d like to sponsor or host an event in the consumer lending community in 2026, we’d like to hear from you. The Free Toaster will be organizing & hosting curated events this year, and we’d love to work with you as a sponsor.

Hey Toaster Readers,

This week is sponsored by our friends at Fintel Connect.

OnePay is bridging the credit gap for thin-file consumers with its new no-deposit, no-fee Builder Card. Meanwhile, LendingClub had a strong quarter where originations climbed 31%. Capital One’s net income hit $2.2B as the Discover acquisition takes full effect, while American Express continues to dominate the premium market with an 18% jump in membership fees. Additionally, Aven launched a Bitcoin-backed Visa Card and Cash App is capturing Gen Alpha with new accounts for kids as young as six.

Lots to break down. Let’s get toasting!

Carlos Caro, Founder at NMG, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster
Nick Madrid, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster and Uncovered Media

PS: To support us, please forward this email to 1 of your colleagues!

OnePay Launches Builder Card: No Deposit, No Credit Check, No Fees

The OnePay Credit Builder card enters a crowded space. With similar existing products from Chime, Current, Kikoff, Arro, Upgrade, and more! It runs on Mastercard rails, connects directly to the customer’s Cash account, and reports positive payment activity to all three major bureaus each month. Customers spend from their available balance, the app sets funds aside automatically, and payments run on autopilot. No revolving debt, no way to overspend.

The card is only available to existing Cash account holders, a choice that deepens the app’s value for users already in the ecosystem. OnePay doesn't need to underwrite it. The Builder Card spends from a balance the customer already holds, so there's no default risk to price for. It can serve the consumer that Chase and Capital One walked away from, and it costs OnePay almost nothing to do it. OnePay's distribution comes from Walmart, where 90% of the U.S. population lives within 10 miles of a store.

The timing also lines up with a bigger distribution push. Three weeks ago, OnePay became a Workday Wellness partner, putting its financial tools inside employer HR and payroll systems. Workers switching direct deposit through Workday can now access banking, investing, and credit building in one app. For context on where the company stands: back in January, we shared that OnePay hit a $4B valuation, up from $2.5B in 2024. It has 3 million monthly active users and is built almost entirely on the Walmart partnership. The Workday deal suggests they are ready to grow beyond it. (OnePay)

Sponsored by Fintel Connect

Is Your Marketing ROI Falling Behind Other Banks and Credit Unions?

Cornerstone Advisors‘ latest report, commissioned by Fintel Connect, The Marketing ROI Gap in Banking uncovers a growing disconnect between where financial institutions invest and where they actually see results. Based on insights from 126 senior executives at large U.S. banks and credit unions, the data points to a persistent gap between spend, performance, and measurable ROI.

Inside the report, you’ll find:

• ROI measurement is still broken: 20% of banking executives can’t reliably attribute marketing outcomes, and nearly 60% say their core or CRM limits ROI measurement.

• Affiliate is a major missed opportunity: Only one-third of financial institutions use it, yet it ranks among the top channels for customer lead quality and remains one of the most underleveraged channels in the mix.

• Budgets aren’t performance-driven: 60% of institutions still set marketing budgets based on last year’s spend rather than ROI.

Written for marketing, growth, lending, and finance leaders, this report highlights where performance is breaking down - and where smarter investment decisions can unlock stronger returns.

Rethinking your growth strategy?

Start Here

Credit One Bank and Bright Money Partner to Launch Embedded Credit Card Tools

Credit One Bank integrated its credit card products into the Bright Money app, granting more than 1 million users direct access to three Visa products. This partnership marks the bank's second fintech integration using its proprietary API, following a 2025 deal with MoneyLion. Users link bank accounts to the Bright Money’s Money Science algorithm to receive personalized offers for the Platinum Visa for Rebuilding Credit or two Platinum Rewards Visa options. All three cards provide 1% cash back on gas, groceries, and telecommunications. The system uses AI to analyze income and spending before facilitating the application process within the native app environment. This move targets digital-first consumers by bypassing traditional external application sites. (PR Newswire)

Aven Launches Bitcoin-Backed Visa Card With Up To $1M Credit Limit

Aven launched a Bitcoin-backed Visa card that provides a line of credit up to $1 million without requiring the sale of the underlying bitcoin asset. The Aven Bitcoin Visa Card functions as a secured loan where users deposit bitcoin with an OCC-regulated custodian to access liquidity for everyday purchases or major expenses. This structure allows long-term investors to avoid costly tax consequences associated with capital gains while maintaining their original BTC positions. The product features fixed-rate terms lasting up to 10 years and includes a 5-year interest-only payment period. Users receive unlimited 2% cash back on purchases and pay no annual fee for the account. A 1% fee applies to cash outs and the card carries risk of liquidation if market volatility impacts collateral value. Aven originally focused on home equity products and is now applying the secured lending model to digital assets. (Aven)

LendingClub’s $2.67B Originations and the Rebrand

LendingClub closed Q1 2026 ahead of guidance on every major metric and announced it is rebranding to Happen Bank this summer. Total net revenue reached $252.3M, up 16% year-over-year. Originations hit $2.67B, up 31% from $2.03B in Q1 2025, driven by product and marketing initiatives. Net interest income grew 18% to $176.2M, with net interest margin expanding to 6.28% from 5.97% a year ago. Deposit funding costs came down, with the average rate on interest-bearing deposits dropping to 3.60% from 3.91% in Q1 2025. The rebrand reflects a deliberate repositioning away from its marketplace lending roots toward a full-service digital bank, one that combines deposits, lending, and a capital-light marketplace model under a single consumer brand.

The credit story is where lending teams should pay close attention. LendingClub's personal loan book is priced at an average APR of around 15%, against the national credit card average of 22%, a 700 basis point gap that the company is actively using as a customer acquisition argument. Net charge-offs on loans held for investment dropped to $42.5M from $76.1M in Q1 2025, a 44% improvement. For credit and lending teams, their NIM expansion signals that LendingClub is growing volume while actually improving book quality, not trading one for the other.

The Happen Bank rebrand could also help with distribution. Moving from a lending-first identity to a full banking brand gives the company more surface area to cross-sell deposits, checking, and eventually home improvement loans into its existing base of 5 million members. (LendingClub)

News Pod #15 - OpenAI Acquires Hiro Finance

In the latest The Free Toaster News Pod, we deconstruct OpenAI’s power move into the financial sector with their acquisition of Hiro Finance. Building on our recent coverage, we look at how this integration could reshape consumer lending distribution. It’s a quick breakdown of what changes when a major AI player moves deeper into fintech infrastructure.

Catch us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Substack, or your favorite player.

Please support our Newsletter by sharing this edition with a colleague!

And, consider checking out our sponsors:

• Need an affiliate marketing platform/network? Chat with Fintel Connect

• Need to improve application page conversions? Chat with Spinwheel

• Need help with performance marketing? Chat with Bulldog Media Group

• Need to grow in big marketplaces like Credit Karma? Chat with New Market Growth

• Need to hire top-tier talent in fintech or lending? Chat with CTB1

TransUnion Q1 2026: 14% Growth Fueled by U.S. Lending Surge

TransUnion reported $1,246 million in total revenue for Q1 2026, up 14% year-over-year (11% on an organic constant currency basis), beating its own guidance across revenue. U.S. Financial Services drove the quarter, growing 24% organically to $501 million. Within that, auto was up 11%, consumer lending up 21%, and card/banking up 5%. Full-year 2026 revenue guidance was raised to $5.10–$5.14 billion, primarily reflecting the completed acquisition of TransUnion de Mexico, with organic constant currency growth assumptions held steady at 8–9%.

The number that matters most for lending and fintech operators: U.S. Financial Services revenue grew 24% year-over-year to $501 million. That segment covers the credit data and analytics products lenders rely on for underwriting, marketing, and customer acquisition. Growth was broad-based across lending verticals, which signals that lenders are pulling more data, running more decisioning, and actively growing their books.

What makes these numbers hold up over time is the data underneath them. At its March Investor Day, TransUnion management noted that 95% of revenue comes from a proprietary data moat: 84% core credit, 11% alternative data. The Neustar acquisition added identity resolution data; the Argus acquisition brought over 450 billion credit card transactions. Management has been leaning into alternative data, including utility payments and rental furnishing tradelines, to supplement core credit files, deepen penetration, and build new products. (TransUnion)

Amex Reports 11% Revenue Increase and Record Card Member Spend

American Express posted a strong Q1 2026, with total revenues of $18.9 billion, up 11% year-over-year. Card member spend accelerated to 10% growth, the highest quarterly rate in three years. Net card fees hit $2.8 billion, up 18%, compounding at 17% annually since 2019. Net interest income grew 13% to $4.7 billion, driven by revolving balance growth. Despite revenue coming in at or above the high end of full-year guidance, management held its 2026 outlook at 9-10% revenue growth, citing a forthcoming drag from two commercial card partnership exits: Lowe’s moving to Synchrony and Amazon transitioning to U.S. Bank in Q3.

Net card fees growing at a 17% CAGR since 2019 reflects a durable premium card model still pulling in annual fee customers. 73% of all new accounts acquired globally were on annual fee products.

On the lending side, net interest income has grown 12% year-over-year for four consecutive quarters. The bigger strategic story is Amex’s push into agentic AI commerce. The company launched its Agentic Commerce Experiences (ACE) developer kit and introduced Amex Agent Purchase Protection, an industry-first commitment to cover registered agentic purchases by cardholders.

Amex also recently acquired Hypercard. Management was clear on the earnings call that this is a long-term play. The thesis centers on Amex’s closed-loop network: its ability to match declared purchase intent with actual transaction data gives it fraud detection and authorization capabilities that open networks cannot replicate. They noted this could ultimately produce stronger fraud protection than what exists today in both online and brick-and-mortar commerce, where purchase intent data is simply unavailable. (American Express)

Capital One Reports $2.2B Net Income Amid Discover Acquisition Gains

Capital One posted $15.2 billion in total net revenue for Q1 2026, up 52% year-over-year. The growth is largely attributable to the Discover acquisition closing in May 2025. Quarter-over-quarter, revenue fell 2%, driven by lower net interest income as the company carried higher average cash balances and saw lower average credit card loans. The credit card segment generated $11.4 billion in net revenue, up 59% year-over-year. Domestic card purchase volume reached $216.5 billion, up 40% year-over-year but down 8% from Q4 2025, consistent with seasonal patterns. Pre-provision earnings grew 8% quarter-over-quarter to $6.8 billion.

On the credit side, the trend is improving. The domestic card 30-plus day performing delinquency rate fell to 3.70%, down 55 basis points year-over-year. The domestic card net charge-off rate came in at 5.10%, down 109 basis points from Q1 2025. Morgan Stanley noted that Capital One management described the consumer as remaining robust, with unemployment improving and card purchase volumes accelerating, while delinquencies outperformed seasonal expectations. On expenses, Morgan Stanley flagged that adjusted non-interest expense came in about 3% better than forecast, with the adjusted efficiency ratio at 49.7% versus an estimated 50.6%. That said, marketing spend is expected to increase through the rest of 2026, as Q1 reflects both a seasonal low and a deliberate timing shift of some marketing investment into later quarters. (Capital One)

The Toaster team is on the ground in NYC for Fintech Week.

We kicked things off with a hosted dinner, The Free Toaster Presents: Eliminating Friction In Your Marketing Funnel, sponsored by Spinwheel. The room brought together operators and growth leaders across lending and fintech.

In the photo: Amanda Braslow, Carlos Caro, and Nick Madrid from The Free Toaster with attendees from the dinner.

Upcoming Toaster Events:

Affiliate Marketing Summit for Decision Makers (San Francisco | Sept 23–24)
Step away from the daily grind for a two-day, senior-level industry event in San Francisco. On day one, we’ll spend the day at the Exploratorium, a killer indoor/outdoor space where we’ll have a mix of keynotes, panels, structured networking, and great food & drink overlooking the water. On day two (optional, for anyone interested), we’ll head out to wine country so you can continue the conversations you initiated the day prior. Our goal is to make this Summit the ONE event per year you can’t miss if you’re a lender who’s serious about affiliate marketing.

Missed the Direct Mail Curated Table event on March 5th? Check out what I learned here.

Equifax Posts 14% Revenue Growth in Q1; Maintains Conservative 2026 Outlook

Equifax posted Q1 2026 revenue of $1.649 billion, up 14% year-over-year and $37 million above its February guidance midpoint. The beat was driven primarily by a strong U.S. mortgage market in January and February before rates rose following the Iran conflict. Equifax maintained its full-year 2026 constant currency revenue guidance of 10-12% growth, citing continued uncertainty around interest rates and mortgage activity, while raising its reported revenue guidance by $25 million for favorable FX impact.

USIS, the segment most directly relevant to consumer lenders, delivered 21% revenue growth in Q1. Within that, Diversified Markets, which covers financial institutions, auto, and consumer lending, grew only 3%, with core FI and core auto each up mid-single digits. Consumer Lending under Workforce Solutions Verification Services grew 14% year-over-year. Notably, Morgan Stanley flagged that volumes softened later in the quarter, not just in mortgage but also to a lesser extent in auto and card. On the credit scoring side, Equifax is actively pushing VantageScore 4.0 adoption at a $1 price point, with 240+ mortgage lenders currently testing it alongside paid FICO scores. A full conversion to VantageScore would reduce USIS mortgage scoring revenue by approximately $385 million, but increase Equifax’s adjusted EBITDA by roughly $35 million at current volumes. Morgan Stanley maintained its Overweight rating on the stock, noting that credit bureaus are starting from a muted base and should enter a multi-year upcycle trend, with the potential to grow revenue at low-double-digit to mid-teens rates. The firm also pushed back on AI disruption concerns, arguing that the bureaus’ data and regulatory moats should insulate them from competition. (Equifax)

Cash App Targets Gen Alpha With Parent-Managed Accounts for Kids 6-12

Cash App launched managed accounts for children aged 6 to 12 to capture the Gen Alpha demographic. The financial platform owned by Block provides mobile payments, debit cards, and investing services. Parents control these accounts through their own Cash App profile. Kids receive a debit card and earn 3.25% interest on savings balances. The service allows automated allowance transfers and P2P payments from up to five parent-approved contacts. Cash App currently has 5 million monthly active teen users. Users transition to a sponsored account with stock and Bitcoin trading capabilities at age 13. PwC data shows 89% of Gen Alpha teens already have their own smartphone, while 72% regularly spend on categories like food and drinks and over half purchase digital goods like apps and in-game items. (Cash App)

American Express Integrates Resy into Anthropic’s Claude for Real-Time Reservations

American Express integrated its Resy digital dining platform into Anthropic’s Claude AI to provide real-time table availability for U.S. restaurants. Resy operates software that manages reservations and connects restaurants to a network of diners. Users can now search for restaurants within Claude and receive prompts to connect to the Resy app. The integration displays restaurant recommendations based on chat context. It allows users to view venue pages, check available tables, and set Notify alerts. Claude then redirects users to Resy.com or the mobile app to finalize bookings. This partnership surfaces inventory to diners to help restaurants drive demand. (American Express)

Looking for a new role?

The Free Toaster Jobs Edition tracks where fintech teams are actually investing across marketing, product, data, credit, risk, and partnerships.

The Free Toaster Jobs

The Free Toaster Jobs curates real openings across credit, risk, product, data, and growth, with a focus on consumer fintech and lending. No noise. Just roles that signal where budgets and priorities are moving.

By Toaster Media

Other News We’re Reading and Listening to

(Auto) America’s Pandemic Car Bubble Is Now Trapping Buyers in Debt (WSJ)

(Lending) Affirm: Agentic Credit Rewrites the Rules of Consumer Lending (PYMNTS)

(Cards) AT&T and Citi Enhance the AT&T Points Plus Card (Citigroup)

(Payments) Uber and Block Expand Global Partnership to Transform Restaurant Operations and Launch Cash App Pay (Uber)

(Cards) Alaska Air Group and Bank of America Expand Long-Standing Credit Partnership (Bank of America)

(Lending) Total Expert Launches Customer IQ to Power Agentic Era in Mortgage Banking and Consumer Lending (Business Wire)

Spot something worth sharing with your team? Drop this week’s edition in their inbox:

https://www.thefreetoaster.com/p/onepay-launches-credit-builder-card

Catch you next week,

The Free Toaster Team

P.S.: If you’d like to sponsor or host an event in the consumer lending community in 2026, we’d like to hear from you. The Free Toaster will be organizing & hosting curated events this year, and we’d love to work with you as a sponsor.

Hey Toaster Readers,

This week is sponsored by our friends at Spinwheel.

OpenAI acquired Hiro Finance on April 13, its second fintech purchase following the 2025 acquisition of Roi. Meanwhile, LendingClub will rebrand to Happen Bank this summer. Mission Lane applied for a national bank charter with the OCC and FDIC to transition from its partner-bank model. FinWise Bancorp partnered with Vera, Inc. to launch an unsecured credit card program, while Synchrony launched a private label card for RH. Additionally, Ally and Bank of America reported their Q1 2026 earnings.

Lots to break down. Let’s get toasting!

Carlos Caro, Founder at NMG, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster
Nick Madrid, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster and Uncovered Media

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OpenAI Doubles Down on Fintech with Hiro Finance and Roi Acquisitions

OpenAI acquired personal finance startup Hiro Finance on Monday, marking its second fintech purchase in six months following the October 2025 acquisition of Roi. Hiro Finance develops tools for complex financial modeling and what-if scenarios, helping users project the impact of debt and investments. Founder Ethan Bloch and his team will join OpenAI to work on specialized engineering projects, while Hiro Finance shuts down operations on April 20. This follows the deal for Roi, a startup that raised $3.6 million from Spark Capital and Gradient Ventures to build a portfolio tracking app with an AI-driven investment advisor. While Roi focused on retail investment personalization, Hiro Finance adds deeper capabilities in mathematical financial simulations. These acquisitions support OpenAI’s expansion into enterprise services through Codex Labs, which currently reports over 4 million weekly active users. OpenAI is also scaling its global reach through a partnership with Infosys to deploy AI tools across 60 countries. (American Banker) (TechCrunch) (Fintech Futures)

Toaster’s Take

Hiro and Roi were not acquired because OpenAI wanted a budgeting app. They were acquired because both teams had figured out something specific: how to take messy personal financial data and turn it into a clear, actionable output. That’s a hard problem. Hiring for it in-house is harder.

What’s worth watching is where that capability lands inside ChatGPT. Hiro wasn’t just a recommendation engine. It was built to model what happens after you make a decision. That’s a different product category than “here are your options.” It’s closer to execution than discovery.

Today’s distribution model for lending depends on a user seeing an offer, deciding to pursue it, and completing the process themselves. Every click in that chain is a potential drop-off point. If OpenAI builds a layer that collapses those steps, ChatGPT-native financial starts feeling way more convenient than 2026-era marketplaces.

Google tried this. It had the data, the reach, and the brand. It still couldn’t get users to trust it with their financial lives. OpenAI may be more advanced on the product side, but the trust problem doesn’t go away because the AI is smarter. It’s a separate barrier, and it’s real.

The question isn’t whether OpenAI can build a good financial product. It almost certainly can, if it put the right resources against it. The question is whether users will convey their trust. Recommending a loan is one thing. Applying for one on your behalf (at potentially dozens of lenders) is another conversation entirely.

For now, the pressure is low. Adoption will be gradual. But the benchmark for convenience is shifting. Platforms built around user-driven flows should be paying attention, because the standard for “low friction” is about to get redefined.

We will be digging into this story further later this week in The Free Toaster podcast.

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LendingClub to Become Happen Bank, “a Digital Bank for People Going Places”

LendingClub will officially rebrand to Happen Bank in the summer of 2026. The company operates a digital marketplace bank that currently serves more than 5 million members and has facilitated over $100 billion in loans. CEO Scott Sanborn noted the name change follows a multi-year transition from an online lender to a diversified digital-first bank. The new identity targets the Motivated Middle, defined as high-FICO, above-average income consumers who actively manage their finances. While the visual branding will change, the bank will maintain its existing interest rates, loan terms, and account features. The shift includes a new website, mobile app, and marketing system designed to reflect action and progress. Management indicates the name change aligns with their expanded banking capabilities and a strategy to deliver long-term shareholder value. This rebrand marks the next phase of a business model that combines credit underwriting with a digital marketplace. (PR Newswire)

Mission Lane Credit Card Startup Applies For Bank Charter

Mission Lane applied for a national bank charter with the OCC and FDIC to transition from a fintech partner to a standalone special-purpose credit card bank. The Richmond-based company currently serves three million customers and targets a niche of 70 million credit-marginalized Americans underserved by traditional finance. As a CEBA institution, the proposed Mission Lane Bank will focus exclusively on credit card products and optional credit protection. The bank will not accept demand deposits, offer checking accounts, or engage in commercial lending. This filing moves the firm toward a de novo charter, following similar moves by Affirm, Upstart, and Mercury. Mission Lane currently relies on Transportation Alliance Bank to issue its cards. Obtaining this charter allows the company to operate under a federal regulatory framework rather than relying on third-party sponsor banks. (PYMNTS)

News Pod #14 - Wells Fargo Books 631,000 New Credit Card Accounts in Q1 2026 - How Did They Do It?

In the latest The Free Toaster News Pod, we deconstruct Wells Fargo’s massive 60% YOY surge in credit card bookings, totaling 631,000 new accounts for Q1 2026. Expanding on their recent newsletter coverage, we dig into the aggressive acquisition tactics fueling this volume and what it means for the rest of the industry. It’s a quick-hit breakdown of how the banking giant is suddenly dominating the customer acquisition race.

Catch us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Substack, or your favorite player.

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FinWise Bancorp Partners with Vera, Inc. to Launch Unsecured Consumer Credit Card Program

FinWise Bancorp signed a BIN sponsorship agreement with Vera, Inc. to launch an unsecured consumer credit card program for prime and near-prime U.S. borrowers. FinWise Bancorp provides API-driven banking and payment infrastructure to fintech firms. Under this deal, FinWise Bank issues the cards while Vera, Inc. serves as the program manager and purchases the resulting receivables. The cards offer three reward modes with no annual fees and function through Vera, Inc.'s mobile application. The technical stack utilizes Zeta’s Tachyon cloud-native processing platform. Vera, Inc. is a 2025 startup led by former Capital One executives. This partnership expands FinWise Bancorp’s existing strategic program lending and payments business. (Global Newswire)

Synchrony Launches Integrated Credit Card Program for RH

Synchrony launched a new private label credit card for RH to provide promotional financing across the retailer's galleries, outlets, and e-commerce sites. RH operates as a luxury home furnishings curator with retail locations and hospitality experiences across North America and Europe. The card integrates with the RH Members Program to combine existing 30% member discounts with specific financing rates. Synchrony uses its PRISM decisioning system to evaluate 9,000 data attributes for each applicant. This system provides credit decisions within minutes during the customer checkout process. The partnership expands Synchrony's footprint in the home segment where it currently maintains contracts with over 50% of the Furniture Today Top 100 retailers. RH customers gain access to these financing options immediately through a digital prequalification process. (Synchrony)

Upcoming Toaster Events:

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CarParts.com Introduces the CarParts.com Mastercard®

CarParts.com launched the CarParts.com Mastercard through a partnership with Concora Credit and The Bank of Missouri. This technology-led e-commerce business sells over 1.5 million vehicle parts and accessories via its nationwide distribution network. The new credit program offers cardholders 3% cashback on CarParts.com purchases and 1% on other transactions. Customers can prequalify for the card without a credit score impact. This launch follows a product expansion that added 100,000 SKUs to the company catalog over the last year. The company also recently introduced the CarParts+ membership and specialized hubs for European and performance vehicles. CEO David Meniane stated the strategy focuses on building a driver-first experience to simplify vehicle maintenance. The company continues to manage several private-label brands including JC Whitney and Garage-Pro. (CarParts.com)

Sezzle Canada Launches Virtual Card, Expanding Buy Now, Pay Later Capabilities

Sezzle launched its Virtual Card in Canada to enable in-store "buy now, pay later" payments at point-of-sale terminals. The fintech company provides interest-free installment financing and currently reports 1.9 million user sign-ups and nearly 7 million total orders in the Canadian market. Sezzle integrated the card with Marqeta technology to allow eligible users to add the credential to Apple Pay and Google Wallet. This expansion targets more than 90% of Canadian retailers that accept contactless payments, including SoftMoc, JD Sports, and QE Home. Internal 2025 survey data showed 74% of users were more likely to shop in-store if Sezzle was an available payment option. The launch aims to increase transaction volume and basket sizes for brick-and-mortar merchants without requiring new hardware integrations. (Sezzle)

Looking for a new role?

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Sources: Ally, Bank of America

Other News We’re Reading and Listening to

(Fraud) As AI-Driven Fraud Grows More Sophisticated, Advanced Digital Defense Becomes Essential (TransUnion)

(Banking) North Iowa Community Credit Union Launches Mahalo Digital Banking Platform (Business Wire)

(Payments) Adyen Expands Its Partnership With lastminute.com By Introducing Virtual Card Issuing For Supplier Payments (Adyen)

(Fintech) Slash, A Ramp Competitor Founded By Teenagers, Raises $100M At $1.4B Valuation (TechCrunch)

(Lending) 4Front Credit Union Selects Scienaptic AI’s LendSmart Auto To Power Deal-Level Vehicle Loan Pricing (Scienaptic AI)

(Payments) Galileo Enables SoFi To Send And Receive FedNow® Service Payments (Business Wire)

(Acquisition) American Express To Acquire Hyper, Adding To Its AI Expertise And Expense Management Capabilities (American Express)

(Cards) Wells Fargo Adds Wyndham Rewards As A Transfer Partner (Forbes)

(Fintech) Ramp Is Telling Investors It Is About To Hit $1.4 Billion In Revenue A Year, As The Company Prepares To Go Public (Business Insider)

(Marketing) Ally Achieves Historic 50/50 Sports Media Pledge One Year Ahead Of Schedule (Ally)

(Payments) Airwallex Is About To Take On Stripe And The Rest Of The Payments Industry — In The Physical World (TechCrunch)

(AI) Welcome To Vibe Ordering, ChatGPT Is Taking Your Order Now (PYMNTS)

(Cards) Lobster.cash Teams With Mastercard To Secure Agentic Card Transactions (PYMNTS)

(Payments) Venmo Continues Its Evolution From A Peer-To-Peer App Into A Money Movement App For The Next Generation (PayPal)

(Innovation) American Express Debuts Agentic Commerce Experiences (ACE)™ Developer Kit And Announces Industry-First Protection For Registered Agent Purchases (American Express)

(Cards) Private Credit Is On The Hunt For Credit-Card Debt (WSJ)

Spot something worth sharing with your team? Drop this week’s edition in their inbox:

https://www.thefreetoaster.com/p/openai-doubles-down-hiro-finance

Catch you next week,

The Free Toaster Team

P.S.: If you’d like to sponsor or host an event in the consumer lending community in 2026, we’d like to hear from you. The Free Toaster will be organizing & hosting curated events this year, and we’d love to work with you as a sponsor.

Hey Toaster Readers,

This week is sponsored by our friends at Bulldog Media Group.

Wells Fargo is reporting a massive surge in new credit card accounts, but there is a catch: purchase volume isn't keeping pace, and a reporting change for co-branded cards is muddying the waters. JPMorgan Chase and Citi are posting major profit jumps , JetBlue and Barclays are overhauling premium card benefits , and Atlas is pivoting to a $999 billionaire charge card after its previous debit startup collapsed.

Lots to break down. Let’s get toasting!

Carlos Caro, Founder at NMG, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster
Nick Madrid, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster and Uncovered Media

PS: To support us, please share our Newsletter or Podcast with 1 of your colleagues!

Wells Fargo Posts $5.3B Q1 Profit as Loan Growth Hits $1 Trillion Milestone

Wells Fargo posted $21.4 billion in revenue for Q1 2026, up 6% year-over-year, with net income of $5.3 billion. The loan book crossed $1 trillion in period-end balances, with commercial and industrial lending the primary growth driver, up 23% year-over-year. Consumer loans held relatively flat. Deposits were up 7%, and average deposit costs continued falling, down 15 basis points from the same period last year. Consumer loans grew modestly, up about 4% year-over-year, with auto originations more than doubling and credit card balances up 5%. Card fees climbed 9% on higher merchant processing and debit interchange income. Headcount fell 7%, which management tied to ongoing efficiency initiatives, while advertising and promotion spend jumped over 100% year-over-year.

The more interesting story for fintech operators is what’s happening in Consumer Banking. Wells opened 631,000 new credit card accounts in Q1 2026, nearly 60% more than the 396,000 opened in Q1 2025. Purchase volume also climbed, reaching $40.0 billion versus $36.7 billion a year prior. Both figures cover combined consumer and small business customer activity. Worth flagging: Wells revised its credit card metrics this quarter to exclude co-branded cards, with prior periods restated to match. That means the growth figure reflects proprietary card activity only, which is worth keeping in mind before reading too much into the year-over-year jump. (Wells Fargo)

Toaster’s Take

Account growth of that magnitude runs far above the typical 5-10% range for large issuers. That alone is worth a second look. But the bigger puzzle is what isn’t moving alongside it. Purchase volume grew modestly year-over-year. Balances don’t show a similar spike. Delinquencies are stable. The natural question: if these are high-quality acquisitions, why isn’t spend following?

A few possible explanations:

One is churn. The metric here is new accounts, not net new accounts. Wells could be adding aggressively on one end while losing or closing accounts on the other. Another is acquisition mix. If the funnel has shifted toward lower-spend or promotional-driven signups, you’d get exactly this pattern: strong account numbers, weak purchase volume. A third is portfolio reshuffling. Wells may be migrating customers from discontinued products into new ones, which counts as new accounts in the data without necessarily representing new customers.

The co-branded card exclusion adds another layer. Wells revised its credit card metrics this quarter to exclude co-branded cards, with prior periods restated to match. That change affects how the year-over-year growth reads, and it’s worth keeping in mind when interpreting the magnitude of the spike.

The new card launches don’t resolve the question either. Wells rolled out a Private Bank Visa Infinite and Autograph Premier this quarter, both targeting high-income and private banking clients through tight underwriting and limited distribution. These are relationship-deepening products, not intended for the mass-market. The audience is simply too small to generate 200,000-plus incremental accounts in a single quarter. And if premium cards were driving the growth, you’d expect higher spend per account. That’s not showing up in the numbers.

So the real question heading into Q2 is whether spend starts to move. If it does, this quarter looks like the early signal of a more deliberate push into card acquisition.

We’re digging into this further on the next episode of The Free Toaster News Pod later this week.

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JPMorgan Reports Record Q1 2026: $16.5B Profit Amid Robust Growth

JPMorgan posted $16.5B in net income for Q1 2026, up 13% year-over-year, on managed revenue of $50.5B. Average loans grew 11% YoY, card sales volume jumped 9%, and the Card Services net charge-off rate held at 3.47%. Card Services & Auto revenue hit $7.8B, up 13%, driven by higher revolving balances. The Payments business brought in $5.1B, up 12%, on deposit growth and fee expansion. Active mobile customers grew 7% YoY, and the bank opened over 450,000 net new checking accounts in the quarter. CEO Jamie Dimon credited broad-based performance across the franchise, noting that "we continued to acquire new customers at a robust rate," but was measured on the macro outlook: "There is an increasingly complex set of risks, such as geopolitical tensions and wars, energy price volatility, trade uncertainty, large global fiscal deficits and elevated asset prices." (JPMorgan Chase & Co.)

Citi Q1 2026: Cards and Payments Fuel $5.8B Net Income Surge

Citigroup’s Q1 2026 numbers came in strong: $5.8B in net income, up 42% year-over-year, on $24.6B in revenue. The card business is the number to watch. U.S. Consumer Cards pulled in $4.8B in revenue and opened nearly 2.95 million new accounts in the quarter, while net credit losses dropped 11% YoY on improved performance across both general purpose and private label portfolios. Spend volume was up 5% and returns came in just under 20%. On the payments infrastructure side, Treasury and Trade Solutions hit $4.6B, up 17%, with commercial card spend up 8% and cross-border transaction value growing 12%. CEO Jane Fraser described it as “an exceptionally strong start,” noting that “U.S. Consumer Cards saw 4% revenue growth and returns of nearly 20%.” One deal worth flagging for anyone tracking co-brand distribution: the forward purchase commitment of the Barclays American Airlines card portfolio drove a meaningful portion of the ACL build this quarter, suggesting Citi is still actively expanding its co-brand footprint even as others pull back. (Citi)

News Pod #13 - Experian No Ding Decline, American + Citi CoBrand, and Cash App P2P News

In the latest episode of The Free Toaster, Carlos and Nick welcome Capital One veteran Amanda Braslow to break down Experian’s massive “no-ding” expansion into personal loans and why 40% of marketplace volume has already shifted to these rails. The crew dissects the Citi and American Airlines exclusive renewal as a high-stakes play for premium lounge dominance and reacts to Cash App bringing BNPL to P2P transfers.

Catch us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Substack, or your favorite player.

Please support our Newsletter by recommending us to one of your colleagues!

And, please check out our sponsors:

• Need an affiliate marketing platform/network? Chat with Fintel Connect

• Need to improve application page conversions? Chat with Spinwheel

• Need help with performance marketing? Chat with Bulldog Media Group

• Need to grow in big marketplaces like Credit Karma? Chat with New Market Growth

• Need to hire top-tier talent in fintech or lending? Chat with CTB1

JetBlue and Barclays Add Companion Passes and Status Accelerators to Premier Card

JetBlue and Barclays added several statement credits and status accelerators to the JetBlue Premier World Elite Mastercard while maintaining the $499 annual fee. Cardmembers now receive a 25-tile bonus annually. This deposit completes 50% of the requirements for Mosaic 1 status. The update introduces a tiered companion pass system where $15,000 in annual spend earns a credit up to $500. Spending $75,000 unlocks an additional credit worth up to $1,500. JetBlue also added a 15% redemption rebate on TrueBlue points for award flights and up to $300 in annual credits for TrueBlue Travel bookings. A new partnership with ClassPass provides up to 14 monthly credits for fitness and wellness services. These changes coincide with the airline's expansion of its BlueHouse lounge network. A second location opens at Boston Logan International Airport this summer following the recent opening at JFK. (JetBlue)

NFL and U.S. Bank Expand 20-Year Relationship with Official League Sponsorship

The NFL named U.S. Bank its official bank and wealth management sponsor in a new multi-year agreement. The bank becomes the presenting sponsor of the Super Bowl MVP Award starting with Super Bowl LXI. It also takes a top-tier sponsorship role for the NFL FLAG Championships. The partnership centers on U.S. Bank Financial Edge, a program providing financial education to players regarding cash flow and long-term wealth. Prospect Fernando Mendoza will advise the bank on tailoring these services for athletes navigating NIL contracts. Both organizations will launch a joint corporate social responsibility initiative in the coming months. This deal formalizes a relationship between the two entities that has lasted over 20 years. (US Bank)

Upcoming Toaster Events:

CardCon, April 21-23, 2026 - Amanda, Toaster’s GM of Events, will be at CardCon in Phoenix, Arizona, before heading to The Fintech Summit on April 28, 2026, as part of the action-packed Fintech Week NYC. Whether you are looking to talk shop, explore new partnerships, or simply catch up over coffee, we invite you to connect with us during these events. Contact amanda@thefreetoaster.com

Eliminating Funnel Friction, Private Dinner, April 27th in NYC - We’re hosting a curated dinner in New York City. Our objective is simple: facilitate a high-level exchange on what’s actually working to eliminate friction in your marketing funnel. No presentations. No conference booth vibes. Just 15 marketers, great food, and candid discussion on smart design and better tech to convert your customers. Learn more about the event here.

Bummed about missing CardCon this year? Join Jason Steele, founder of CardCon, and a select group of credit card marketing leaders to talk industry trends at an executive luncheon in NYC on May 6th. If interested, reach out at: jasondsteele@gmail.com.

loanDepot Integrates Figure Underwriting to Launch 5x5 HomeLoan Product

loanDepot and Figure Technology Solutions launched the 5x5 HomeLoan, a digital product offering mortgage approvals in five minutes and funding within five to seven days. loanDepot is a national retail lender that has funded $577 billion to consumers and operates a sales force of 1,800 licensed loan officers. The company integrated Figure’s blockchain-based underwriting engine into its mello technology platform to automate credit decisions. This partnership allows loanDepot to offer purchase, refinance, and equity lines ranging from $25,000 to $750,000 across all 50 states. The product eliminates appraisal fees, standard title costs, and standard closing costs for borrowers. Management expects the integration to reduce the cost to produce loans and increase market share. The loans feature fixed or variable rates with no prepayment penalties. (loanDepot)

Atlas Raises $40M to Pivot From Failed Debit Startup to $420M Billionaire Charge Card

Atlas closed a $40 million Series C funding round at a $420 million valuation led by Elad Gil and Verified Capital. The company operates a high-end charge card with a $999 annual fee and a text-based concierge service for travel and dining. This pivot follows the collapse of the founder's previous startup, Point, which lost its entire customer base after Column ended their banking partnership in 2022. Internal data showed 15% of users drove 90% of transaction volume, prompting the shift from mass-market debit cards to ultrawealthy spenders. Atlas now reports a gross revenue run-rate exceeding $20 million with approximately 2,000 customers. The business model relies on annual fees, 2% interchange fees, and commissions from hotel and airline bookings. Lead Bank currently provides the underlying banking infrastructure. The company competes with the American Express Centurion and JPMorgan Reserve cards by focusing on high-touch service rather than traditional reward points. Current investors include Eric Schmidt, Marathon, and 01 Advisors. (Forbes)

Looking for a new role?

The Free Toaster Jobs Edition tracks where fintech teams are actually investing across marketing, product, data, credit, risk, and partnerships.

The Free Toaster Jobs

The Free Toaster Jobs curates real openings across credit, risk, product, data, and growth, with a focus on consumer fintech and lending. No noise. Just roles that signal where budgets and priorities are moving.

By Toaster Media

Other News We’re Reading and Listening to

(Credit Card) Fed Data Signals Consumers Pulling Back on Credit Card Spending (PYMNTS)

(Lending) loanDepot Partners with Figure to Offer Express Path Loan Products to loanDepot Customers (loanDepot)

(Lending) Pagaya Issues AAA-rated $600 Million Personal Loan ABS Transaction (Pagaya)

(Lending) DuPage Credit Union Selects Upstart For Personal Lending (Upstart)

(Personal Finance) Computer Is Now Your Personal CFO (Perplexity AI)

(Credit) VantageScore Launches RiskRatio™ For Credit Benchmarking (VantageScore)

(AI/Shopping) Visa Opens The Door To AI-Driven Shopping For Businesses Worldwide (Visa)

(Credit) ClearScore Launches New Technical Standard For Agentic Credit Broking (FinTech Futures)

(Banking) Nymbus Launches Industry-Leading, Secure MCP Server For AI-Driven Core Banking Actions (Nymbus)

(Payments) New Loop Partners With Mastercard To Enable Seamless Payments For A Reusable Takeaway Packaging Return System (Mastercard)

(Fintech) Payments Fintech Pepper Pay Declares Bankruptcy (American Banker)

(AI/Banking) Ask, And AIR Makes It Happen (Revolut)

(Credit/AI) Moody’s Brings Credit And Compliance Workflows Directly Into Anthropic’s Claude (Moody’s)

(Payments) PayPal Embeds Payment Links Into Canva Designs (PYMNTS)

(Banking) Citigroup Says AI Helps Speed Account Openings And Systems Upgrades (Reuters)

(BNPL) Velera Wants Consumers To Turn To Credit Unions For BNPL (Velera)

(Financial Health) A Billion Connected: How We’re Empowering Even More People On The Road To Financial Health (Mastercard)

(Payments) Ahold Delhaize USA Introduces Pay By Bank Partnership With Fiserv To Expand Digital Payment Options For Online Grocery Orders (GlobeNewswire)

(Lending) Experian’s First-Of-Its-Kind Self‑Service Digital Onboarding Platform Helps Small Lenders Pull Credit Reports Quickly And Efficiently (Experian)

(Lending) Braviant Holdings Closes Two Revolving Asset-Backed Credit Facilities And A Forward Flow Facility (PR Newswire)

Spot something worth sharing with your team? Drop this week’s edition in their inbox:

https://www.thefreetoaster.com/p/wells-fargo-books-631000-new-credit

Catch you next week,

The Free Toaster Team

P.S.: If you’d like to sponsor or host an event in the consumer lending community in 2026, we’d like to hear from you. The Free Toaster will be organizing & hosting curated events this year, and we’d love to work with you as a sponsor.

Hey Toaster Readers,

This week is sponsored by our friends at Fintel Connect.

Experian is making it safer to shop for credit by expanding its “No Ding Decline” feature to personal loans. Also, mortgage costs are feeling the heat as FICO implements a huge 1,500% hike on tri-merge fees. We’re also breaking down Cash App’s move into P2P installment plans, the CFPB’s shift in antidiscrimination enforcement , and American Express replacing Visa as the official payments partner of the NFL.

Lots to break down. Let’s get toasting!

Carlos Caro, Founder at NMG, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster
Nick Madrid, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster and Uncovered Media

PS: To support us, please share our Newsletter or Podcast with 1 of your colleagues!

Experian Expands “No Ding Decline” Feature to Personal Loans

Experian has officially extended its No Ding Decline (NDD) feature to personal loans, allowing users to explore financing options in the Experian Marketplace without the risk of a hard credit inquiry upon rejection. This expansion follows a significant 16% increase in personal loan usage recorded by the company in 2025, a trend mirrored by the fact that 38% of U.S. consumers now hold at least one personal loan.

By using artificial intelligence, the tool pre-aligns applicant profiles with specific lender criteria before a formal application is ever submitted. This expansion builds on the success of the NDD program for credit cards, which has already seen significant adoption.

Speaking exclusively to the Free Toaster team, Experian confirmed the program’s explosive growth.

“With NDD, more than 40% of all cards and loans acquired through our Marketplace are now coming through the NDD program,” said Rakesh Patel, Executive Vice President of Experian Marketplace.

In addition to the loan update, Experian is further diversifying its reach by integrating its Insurance Marketplace into ChatGPT. According to Patel, these strategic moves reflect a broader commitment to “meeting consumers where they are” and reducing the friction of financial discovery. (Experian)

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FICO Hikes Tri-Merge Fees 1,500% as CHLA Reports $540 Average Credit Cost Per Loan

FICO increased its base tri-merge credit report fee from $1.80 in 2022 to $30 for 2026. This 1,500% price hike contributed to total mortgage credit costs rising to an average of $540 per loan. The Community Home Lenders of America (CHLA) reported these findings in a Tuesday update to its 2024 White Paper. Lenders currently lack alternatives because they must use approved scoring models to sell loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The CHLA is requesting that regulators accelerate the approval of competing models such as VantageScore to reduce costs. Current rules often require lenders to pull multiple reports per borrower, which compounds price increases for first-time homebuyers. Rob Zimmer, CHLA’s Director of External Affairs, stated the organization wants to fix a monopoly that will "continue to extract more and more resources from homebuyers." (HousingWire)

Cash App Launches Pay-Over-Time Feature for Peer-to-Peer Transfers

Cash App now allows its 59 million monthly users to convert peer-to-peer transfers of $25 or more into installment plans. This feature enables users to recoup the cost of a past transfer into their balance in exchange for a flat upfront fee. Users repay the balance through weekly installments rather than revolving interest. The product applies to transactions made within the previous 30 days. This expansion follows the previous launch of pay-over-time features for debit card purchases. Eligibility for the installment feature depends on individual customer assessments and state-level regulations. (Cash App)

CFPB Finalizes Rule to Narrow Lending Antidiscrimination Requirements

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is finalizing a regulation to narrow antidiscrimination requirements for lenders by eliminating the disparate impact standard. The CFPB will now focus solely on explicitly discriminatory conduct rather than policies that result in unintentional discriminatory impacts on women and minorities. This move implements a year-old executive order from the Trump administration aimed at reducing compliance burdens and legal liabilities for banks. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is currently reviewing a final version of the rule that contains no material change from the proposal issued in November. Industry groups support the change for reducing regulatory burdens while consumer advocates claim the rule contradicts the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act. The timing for the formal adoption of the rule remains unconfirmed. (Reuters)

Affiliate Marketing For Deposit Accounts - With Alana Levine, CRO at Fintel Connect

In the latest episode of The Free Toaster, Carlos joins Alana Levine (Fintel Connect) to dive into the high-stakes world of deposit affiliate marketing. Discover why deposit unit economics humble even the most seasoned lenders, how younger consumers became the stickiest depositors, and how to scale to billion-dollar quarters without triggering a regulatory inquiry.

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American Express Replaces Visa as Official NFL Payments Partner

American Express signed a multi-year deal to become the official payments partner of the NFL starting with the 2026 season. The financial services firm replaces Visa, which ended its thirty-year sponsorship this month. American Express cardholders gain early access to tickets for the 2026 game in Melbourne and benefits at the Super Bowl and NFL Draft. The company’s sports marketing portfolio now includes more than 50 global leagues and teams. American Express will also launch an NFL Extra Points credit card later this year issued by Comenity Capital Bank. This partnership follows existing team-specific deals with the Atlanta Falcons, New York Giants, New York Jets, and Miami Dolphins. Elizabeth Rutledge, Chief Marketing Officer, stated the partnership is a "natural extension" of the company's existing sports portfolio. (Reuters)

American Airlines and Citi Expand Partnership to Admirals Club Lounges

American Airlines and Citi are expanding their 40-year co-branded credit card partnership to include direct branding and integration across the Admirals Club lounge network. American Airlines operates a global air carrier service with 6,000 daily flights and utilizes the Citi-issued AAdvantage portfolio as its exclusive U.S. card program. Starting in April 2026, Citi branding will appear at lounge entrances in ORD, DFW, LAX, and MIA, with a full network rollout scheduled through 2026. The move links Citi card membership tiers directly to lounge access, specifically for Executive World Elite Mastercard, Globe Mastercard, and Strata Elite holders. American Airlines recently updated its lounge amenities through substantial vendor contracts with Lavazza and Champagne Bollinger. Access remains available via annual membership, oneWorld status, or $79 one-day passes. This expansion focuses on the integration of the card rewards program into physical airport infrastructure. (American Airlines)

Perplexity Appeals Court Ban on AI Shopping Agent Accessing Amazon

Perplexity asked a federal appeals court to overturn an injunction barring its Comet AI agent from accessing Amazon. The AI-powered search engine functions as a shopping assistant that automates product discovery and purchases for users. Amazon recently won a court order claiming the tool accessed password-protected accounts without authorization and ignored cease-and-desist warnings. Perplexity argues that Comet acts as a browser for the user and claims the retailer produced no evidence of actual harm like lost sales or decreased traffic. Amazon generated $68.6 billion in advertising revenue in 2025 and claims automated agents bypass the sponsored listings that drive this income. While Amazon has blocked competitors like OpenAI, its own assistant, Rufus, generated $12 billion in incremental sales last year. Walmart and Target are currently testing integrations with third-party AI tools rather than implementing bans. Recent data from PYMNTS Intelligence shows 70% of consumers are open to using AI agents for retail transactions. (PYMNTS) (Court Listener)

Royal Caribbean Group and Bank of America Launch First Tri-Branded Cruise Credit Cards

Royal Caribbean Group and Bank of America launched the Royal ONE and Royal ONE Plus credit cards to enable reward sharing across Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises, and Silversea. The company operates 69 ships and 3 private destinations, with plans to expand to 8 private locations by 2028 and enter river cruising in 2027. The Royal ONE card has no annual fee and offers 3X points on cruise purchases and 2X points on gas and groceries. The Royal ONE Plus card carries a $99 annual fee and increases cruise rewards to 4X points while adding 2X points on airfare and hotels. Cardholders receive travel perks including priority boarding and a $120 TSA PreCheck credit for the Plus tier. The program introduces a redemption system for onboard credits, shore excursions, and Wi-Fi packages. This tri-branded partnership replaces previous brand-specific loyalty silos with a unified rewards ecosystem. The launch follows the recent implementation of a status match program across the three cruise lines. (Bank of America)

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Other News We’re Reading and Listening to

(CFPB Supervision) CFPB Supervision Reset: What Banks and Non-Banks Need to Know (Apple Podcast)

(AI) Visa and Mastercard Deploy Agentic AI for Disputes and Global Payments (American Banker)

(Banking) Small Businesses Can Soon Enjoy New Rewards With the Prime Business and Amazon Business Credit Cards (U.S. Bank)

(Cards) Small Businesses Can Soon Enjoy New Rewards With the Prime Business and Amazon Business Credit Cards (Mastercard)

(Lending) QuickFi Enables Air-Tow Trailers National Digital Captive Finance Program (PR Newswire)

(Fintech) UiPath Launches Agentic Solutions to Strengthen Financial Crime Compliance and Accelerate Lending (UiPath)

(Mortgage) U.S. Bank Enhances Consumer Mortgage Experience for New Homebuilding in Partnership With Built (U.S. Bank)

(Credit) TransUnion Introduces TruIQ Credit Strategy Studio to Transform How Lenders Build and Launch Prescreen Marketing Campaigns (TransUnion)

(Payments) Visa Unveils New Services to Modernize Dispute Resolution Process (Visa)

(Banking) Fintech Monzo Shutting Down US Operations to Focus on UK, Europe (Bloomberg)

(Lending) Octane Partners With Suzuki to Expand Financing to Prime Customers (PR Newswire)

(Retail) SurgePays Launches Stored Value and Loyalty Platform Across Retail Network (Issuer Direct)

(AI) Nearly 80% of Americans Use AI Tools but Most Still Want Humans Making Financial Decisions, TD Survey Finds (TD Bank)

(Social Media) TikTok and Meta Eye a Bigger Role in Financial Services (PYMNTS)

(Banking) America’s #1 Choice for Banking Expands Its Lead With the Launch of Chime Prime (Chime)

(Credit Unions) 72% of Gen Z Feels Financial Strain and Credit Unions See an Opening (PYMNTS)

(Credit) Average Delinquency Rates at Top Credit Card Issuers Were Stable in February (S&P Global)

(Credit) New Study Reveals Deepening Financial Divide Between Americans With High and Low Credit Scores (Business Wire)

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The Free Toaster Team

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SoFi adds $3.6 billion in new commitments to its loan platform business, reinforcing its shift toward a capital-light model. Meanwhile, Beast Industries’ acquisition of Step is under fire, with Senator Elizabeth Warren issuing a deadline to address concerns over youth safety and crypto expansion. We’re also looking at a new Fed study linking mobile sports betting to a spike in credit delinquencies, FICO’s latest report on falling U.S. credit scores, and Klarna doubling its credit facility to $2 billion to fuel American growth.

Lots to break down. Let’s get toasting!

— Carlos Caro, Founder at NMG, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster
— Nick Madrid, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster and Uncovered Media

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SoFi Secures $3.6 Billion in Loan Platform Partnerships

Not every borrower who comes to SoFi gets a SoFi loan. Some fall outside the credit box, meaning they don’t meet SoFi’s own underwriting criteria. That’s where the Loan Platform Business comes in. Instead of a dead end, those borrowers get routed to partners through referrals or the Lantern marketplace. SoFi still earns fee income and retains the servicing relationship. The marketing spend converts regardless of whether SoFi holds the loan.

That context matters for understanding why three new LPB agreements totaling over $3.6 billion in personal loan commitments is a bigger deal than the headline number suggests. A global bank takes $1 billion, a financial services and insurance group $600 million over 12 months, and a top-five global private asset manager up to $2 billion over two years. This follows a year where the LPB pulled in over $10 billion in total commitments.

SoFi spends heavily on brand, stadium naming rights, national TV, celebrity partnerships. That spend drives significant borrower demand. The LPB is what ensures none of that demand goes to waste. SoFi originates on behalf of third parties, collects fees, and retains servicing rights without carrying the credit risk. CEO Anthony Noto framed it plainly: “By connecting strong borrower demand with institutional capital, we’re building a capital-light, fee-based business that complements our overall lending business while leveraging our existing technology platform capabilities in underwriting, pricing, marketing and servicing.”