Heading into May, bankers are looking at top issues from April such as the resurgence of fintechs buying banks, the ongoing fallout from Synapse's bankruptcy proceedings, an increasing number of bots attacking banks and more.
For the previous month's host of top headlines,
How Chainlink Labs CEO Sergey Nazarov sees tariffs affecting DeFi
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Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of Chainlink and CEO of Chainlink Labs, sees a clear case for decentralized finance and blockchain adoption as markets reel and global trade relations strain as a result of President Donald Trump's tariff war.
Chainlink is a decentralized oracle network that connects external off-chain data to blockchain smart contracts. Because it uses open-source infrastructure, any blockchain can connect to off-chain data through Chainlink and contribute.
The Chainlink platform has enabled more than $20 trillion worth of trading transactions across several blockchains with more than 2,200 projects spanning from decentralized finance to capital markets, according to the company.
Why fintechs have been buying up banks
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Fintechs looking to gain the benefits of bank charters are starting to acquire them again by buying banks.
After several years of almost no fintech/bank M&A activity under the Biden administration, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency approved a deal for
"We will now be offering loans nationally, and we will be taking deposits to fund those loans," SmartBiz CEO Evan Singer told American Banker. "We will also be originating loans on our own balance sheet. We can be more efficient doing it ourselves instead of relying exclusively on partner banks, ultimately providing a better experience for small businesses."
Bad bots are taking over the web. Banks are their top target
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Internet insecurity has reached a new milestone: More web traffic (51%) now comes from bots, small pieces of software that run automated tasks, rather than humans, according to a new report.
More than a third (37%) comes from so-called bad bots — bots designed to perform harmful activities, such as scraping sensitive data, spamming and launching denial-of-service attacks — for which banks are a top target. ("Good bots," such as search engine crawlers that index content, account for 14% of web activity.)
About 40% of bot attacks on application programming interfaces in 2024 were directed at the financial sector, according to the 2025 Bad Bot Report from Imperva, a Thales company.
Synapse bankruptcy court orders Evolve Bank examination
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The Central California bankruptcy court handling the bankruptcy of Synapse, a defunct middleware provider, has granted a motion for a claimant to examine Evolve Bank & Trust, one of Synapse's partner banks.
The judge granted former Synapse customer fintech Fund That Flip's motion for a so-called 2004 examination of Evolve, which allows parties to a bankruptcy case to conduct an examination of a person and/or documents, similar to a deposition. Fund That Flip provides an online platform for investing in short-term residential real estate debt; it recently changed its name to Upright.
According to the company's lawyers, Synapse's banks hold $243,861 of its customers' money, to which neither they nor their customers have access or know where it is being held.
Exclusive: Visa threat report highlights NFC relay attack
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Relay fraud — a category of schemes that abuse the near-field communication, or NFC, technology that enables tap-to-pay — is having a resurgence this spring, according to Visa's latest biannual threat report.
The report, which was released in April, details the extent of the damage that traditional payments fraud, such as digital card skimming, are inflicting on merchants and their banks, as well as some of the novel fraud methods criminals are wielding, like NFC relays.
Between July and December 2024, Visa's Payment Ecosystem Risk and Control team detected and blocked 134.3 million presumed fraudulent transactions via preemptive, targeted declines, according to the report. These blocks represented 76% of the incidents the payment network detected.
Exclusive: Starling Bank coming to U.S. to sell core software
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One of the first-ever challenger banks in the world is bringing its software to the U.S. It will face many difficulties unique to the U.S. market.
Starling Bank has registered its software unit, Engine, as a limited liability company in Delaware. It is exploring potential East Coast office locations for Engine in Florida, North Carolina and the District of Columbia.
Engine has started talks with potential candidates to be its U.S. president and anticipates building a U.S. team of about 10 people in the first year, covering product, engineering and sales — a mix of local hires and current Engine staff from the U.K.
Bank of America: More than 90% of its employees now use AI
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Bank of America says it is seeing results from its artificial intelligence efforts, with most of its 213,000 employees using the company's virtual assistant or other forms of AI.
By answering employees' questions, the assistant, Erica for Employees, has reduced calls to the IT help desk by more than half, the bank said. More than 90% of employees use Erica, the bank said.
The company has also quietly rolled out generative AI in areas like Merrill Lynch, private banking and call centers, to help advisors and relationship bankers answer questions and draft client memos and to generate summaries of calls for customer service reps.
Solid Financial files for bankruptcy after pig-butchering scandal
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Embedded finance platform provider Solid Financial Technologies filed for bankruptcy this week, less than a month after victims of an alleged pig-butchering scheme — where scammers build a rapport with victims before stealing their money — filed a class action lawsuit seeking to recover $28 million in funds from a fraudster who had kept roughly $5.3 million in funds with Solid.
Solid's bankruptcy filing,
Arca, Tassat, tZERO lead joint creation of tokenized Treasury fund
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A group of digital asset companies announced the planned release of Lynq, a real-time settlement network powered by a tokenized Treasury fund that pays out daily yield to institutional clients.
Arca Labs, Tassat Group, tZERO Group, Avalanche, B2C2, Galaxy Digital, U.S. Bank and Wintermute all collaborated on the project. Lynq will use Tassat's patent-pending Yield-in-Transit algorithm to calculate interest earned on holdings in increments of five-seconds and pay yield out daily.
The tokenized Treasury fund is custodied at a special purpose broker-dealer facilitated by tZERO, meaning it is authorized by the SEC and FINRA to handle and hold digital asset securities on behalf of a client. Lynq is slated to go live in the second quarter of 2025.
Cyber agencies warn of fast flux threat tactics
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Three U.S. cybersecurity-focused agencies, alongside similar agencies in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, recently issued a warning about fast flux, a type of tactic threat actors use to avoid detection and eviction from networks.
Fast flux provides threat actors with network redundancy and enables them to avoid drawing too much attention to any specific network resource — such as an IP address, a name server or a domain name. It is useful for hiding compromises in a network that institutions would typically detect by, for example, figuring out which IP addresses computers are connecting to most often.
"This resilient and fast changing infrastructure makes tracking and blocking malicious activities that use fast flux more difficult," reads the report from the FBI, the National Security Agency and the other agencies that issued
