The deal, announced Wednesday (April 29), is designed to capitalize on both OppFI’s digital finance capabilities with BNC’s national banking charter.

“Combining our operations under unified regulatory supervision by the OCC and Federal Reserve simplifies and strengthens our compliance and risk management,” Todd Schwartz, OppFi’s CEO and executive chairman, said in a news release.

“This will position OppFi/BNC for long term scalability and sustainable growth. We are excited to get to work with BNC’s team to maximize the strengths of our businesses and continue to find ways to better serve customers who have been traditionally underserved by banks.”

Headquartered in Arizona, BNC had approximately $1.1 billion in total assets and approximately $1 billion in total deposits as of the end of last year. OppFi’s platform is designed to connect consumers with community bank partners and consumer loans.

The company said the acquisition will allow it to deliver more services, such as Small Business Administration (SBA) lending, secured consumer lending and wealth management.

OppFi’s acquisition plan comes as many other FinTechs are working to land banking charters, as PYMNTS wrote last month.

In fact, that report said, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has gotten so many applications for banking charters from FinTech, payment and crypto firms to lobbying group the Bank Policy Institute (BPI) is considering suing the regulator over its wave of approvals.

In 2025 alone, the OCC received 14 de novo charter applications, a number nearly equaling the total applications received by the agency in the prior four years put together. By the middle of March, the OCC had approved four new applications and received more than seven.

Earlier FinTech-to-bank conversions depended heavily on acquisitions. Buying a bank provided speed and regulatory certainty, while also importing “legacy systems, cultural mismatches and balance sheet constraints designed for a different era,” PYMNTS wrote.

A bank charter “is not a trophy, and it certainly isn’t a product label, but it’s a public trust,” Rodney E. Hood, former acting comptroller of the currency, told PYMNTS affiliate Competition Policy International in a January interview.

“A federal charter should never be construed as an end run around supervision, and it should certainly never be a pathway to scale without accountability,” he added.

In one recent example, as reported by PYMNTS, is Adyen’s planned acquisition of Talon.One, which brings a loyalty and promotions engine into its payments infrastructure. The deal allows merchants to apply incentives at the point of checkout, linking pricing and offers directly to the transaction itself. The companies have said that through the combined efforts, merchants can recognize shoppers and apply a relevant offer instantly, before the payment is completed.

The integration reflects a broader structural change. Loyalty is no longer a separate marketing layer but mow is part of the transaction itself, where conversion is determined.

Billing and Workflow Move Upstream

Other recent acquisitions extend control into how transactions are structured before they reach the payment stage. Stripe’s acquisition of Metronome targets billing, particularly for usage-based pricing models that require tight coordination between product usage, invoicing and payment collection. By bringing billing in-house, Stripe moves into defining how revenue is calculated and recognized.

American Express is buying Hyper in a move that addresses workflow and decisioning. The addition of AI-driven expense management and checkout automation allows Amex to influence how transactions are initiated, categorized and managed within commercial environments.

These moves place both firms upstream of payments. Billing determines how much is charged and when. Workflow determines how transactions begin.

Settlement and Data Expand the Stack

A separate set of transactions targets the infrastructure that surrounds payments on either side of authorization. Mastercard’s acquisition of BVNK reflects a push into stablecoin infrastructure, positioning the network within programmable settlement flows and cross-border liquidity management. Stablecoins are being developed as an alternative settlement layer, particularly for transactions that move outside traditional banking rails.

Flutterwave’s acquisition of Mono extends into open banking and financial data connectivity. Access to account-level data supports payment initiation, underwriting and fraud detection. Bringing that capability into the platform reduces reliance on third parties and strengthens control over the information that drives transaction decisions.

Licensing Becomes Part of Platform Strategy

Airwallex’s acquisition of Paynuri addresses a different but equally important constraint: regulatory access. By acquiring a locally licensed provider in South Korea, Airwallex gains direct entry into domestic payment rails and reduces dependence on partners.

Licensing thus becomes part of platform construction. Without it, firms cannot operate fully within local markets or control how transactions are processed and settled.

A Repeatable Blueprint

Across these transactions, the pattern is consistent. Adyen targets incentives. Stripe targets billing. Amex targets workflow. Mastercard targets settlement. Flutterwave targets data. Airwallex targets licensing.

Each category represents a control point within the transaction lifecycle. The repetition across deals shows that firms are not experimenting. They are assembling the same set of capabilities in order to control how transactions are constructed from start to finish. Payments remain central, but they are no longer sufficient on their own.

The pace of acquisitions suggests that firms are moving quickly to secure these capabilities while they remain available. Building them internally would require time and coordination across multiple systems. Acquisitions provide a direct path to integration. The result is a market that is organizing around platform control.

The companies expect the transaction to close in the second half, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals, Adyen said in a Thursday (April 23) press release.

The acquisition will build on Adyen’s Unified Commerce strategy by adding Talon.One’s real-time decisioning capabilities to Adyen’s global payments infrastructure, creating a solution that will enable merchants to establish a consistent customer identity across channels and apply it directly in the shopper’s cart, according to the release.

It will also strengthen Adyen’s position in agentic commerce and other emerging commerce models by combining customer identity, SKU-level data and real-time decisioning to allow merchants to influence what is shown and sold across channels, per the release.

“Our merchants ask us every day how they can better connect their online and in-store customer data and act on that in real time,” Adyen Co-CEO Ingo Uytdehaage said in the release. “Many have tried to build a solution themselves but struggle to turn insights into action. With Talon.One, a merchant can recognize a shopper and apply a relevant offer instantly, before the payment is completed, ultimately driving higher revenue.”

Talon.One co-founders Christoph Gerber and Sebastian Haas will reinvest “a meaningful portion of their proceeds” in shares in Adyen and will maintain a long-term commitment to the combined business, according to the release.

“Joining Adyen allows us to embed real-time decisioning at the core of every transaction,” Gerber and Haas said in the release. “Together, we enable merchants to connect customer identity with pricing and promotions in real time, in-store and online, driving better outcomes for our customers.”

Adyen reported in February that in 2025, it increased its net revenue by 18% year over year, or 21% on a constant currency basis, to about $2.4 billion euros (about $2.8 billion).

“As we shared in November at our Investor Day, we see a significant opportunity ahead and remain focused on our ambition to grow into one of the largest FinTech players in the world,” Adyen Chief Financial Officer Ethan Tandowsky said in a Feb. 12 press release.

In October 2025, Tandowsky said Adyen is working with other industry leaders to develop standards for agentic commerce and aims to deliver a “really unique and differentiated solution” for its customers.

The home improvement retailer announced the acquisition in a Wednesday (April 15) press release, saying SIMPL uses advanced engineering and artificial intelligence (AI) technology to help distribution facilities operate faster and more efficiently.

Prior to the acquisition, the companies conducted a successful pilot at one of The Home Depot’s distribution centers and found that SIMPL’s systems accelerated pick speed and cycle times, according to the release.

In addition, SIMPL has a patented storage and retrieval solution that helps maximize storage density. This solution will allow The Home Depot to house a broader assortment of products closer to customers, making for greater product availability and faster delivery.

“We’re focused on providing the best interconnected experience in home improvement by having products in stock and ready to deliver to our customers whether it’s to the home or jobsite,” Amit Kalra, senior vice president of supply chain at The Home Depot, said in the release. “By bringing SIMPL’s industry-leading automation into our operations, we’re accelerating the flow of products through our distribution network to deliver with unprecedented speed and precision.”

SIMPL Automation shared The Home Depot’s press release in a Friday (April 17) post on LinkedIn, saying that the company is joining the home improvement retailer and that together they will focus on optimizing fulfillment speed, warehouse space utilization and the associate experience.

“The Home Depot’s commitment to advancing next-generation supply chain technologies creates an incredible opportunity for SIMPL to continue our mission: building solutions that seamlessly integrate into existing operations while delivering scalable, real-world performance,” SIMPL said in the post.

PYMNTS reported in February that The Home Depot has been growing its B2B business and, as part of that effort, has spent the last several years methodically assembling a wholesale-style ecosystem designed specifically for complex professional customers.

The Home Depot’s 2024 integration of SRS Distribution gave the company a foothold in roofing, landscaping and specialty building products, while its 2025 acquisition of GMS expanded the retailer capabilities in drywall, ceilings and steel framing.

In March, The Home Depot’s SRS Distribution subsidiary entered into an agreement to acquire Mingledorff’s, a wholesale distributor of heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) products. The retailer expects this acquisition to close during the second quarter, subject to customary closing conditions.

The deal, announced Thursday (April 16), is designed to add to American Express’ artificial intelligence expertise across its commercial services business, with Hyper’s team helping Amex build agentic and AI-powered automation tools for businesses.

“Our customers want smarter, more efficient ways to manage expenses so they can focus on what’s next for their business, and AI has the potential to transform the way businesses get things done,” Raymond Joabar, group president of Global Commercial Services at American Express, said in a news release provided to PYMNTS.

“We’re thrilled to welcome Hyper, a team with deep expertise in designing and deploying AI agents, as we build next-generation AI capabilities into our products and services, including our expense management platform launching later this year.” 

Founded in 2022, Hyper focuses on using AI agents to turn expense management from a manual to more autonomous process. These agents, the news release added, can “auto-categorize and file expenses, check them against budget and policy, and send reminders that submissions are due.”

Hyper teamed with Amex in 2024 to launch the Hypercard Rewards American Express card with embedded AI-powered expense agents employing the Agile Partner Platform. 

In related news, American Express announced this week that it would extend its customer protection to registered AI agent purchases.

That means the company’s Agent Purchase Protection will protect eligible customers from charges related to AI agent error if the card member has allowed an AI agent to make a purchase and that agent sends American Express the customer’s authenticated purchase intent, the company said in a news release.

PYMNTS wrote last year about the way AI was helping businesses move past the use of manual systems for things like accounts payable (AP) work. These manual systems are error prone and can “slow payments, obscure cash flow, hinder spend management and heighten fraud exposure,” that report said. 

Automation with AI technology has begun to emerge as an answer — not only speeding invoice workflows but also allowing data-driven financial decisions at scale. 

“While adoption is growing, with nearly three-quarters of organizations using AI in AP, automation maturity remains modest, leaving many manual steps in place. Trust is essential to achieving full automation maturity,” that report added. “Teams that succeed on this point stand to transform AP into a strategic advantage, unlocking real-time visibility, stronger control and smarter working-capital decisions.”

 

The deal, announced Wednesday (April 15), is designed to expand eToro’s digital asset capabilities and support Zengo’s growth by combining eToro’s multi-asset platform and distribution with Zengo’s non-custodial wallet technology.

The company did not reveal the price tag for the acquisition, but a report by Bloomberg News, citing a source familiar with the matter, put the value of the deal at $70 million.

eToro says the acquisition will also bolster its ability to support “evolving digital asset use cases,” such as tokenized assets and emerging decentralized trading models like prediction markets and perpetuals.

“We believe the future of finance will be increasingly digital, decentralized and user-controlled, with self-custody playing an important role in that evolution,” said Yoni Assia, co-founder and CEO of eToro. “Zengo has built an innovative and secure wallet experience, and this acquisition will enable us to accelerate its growth while continuing to provide users with choice in how they access digital assets.”

Ouriel Ohayon, co-founder and CEO of Zengo, said the deal helps the company further its mission of simplifying self-custody for everyday crypto users.

“Joining eToro allows us to accelerate that mission at a global scale,” Ohayon said. “Together, we can expand access to self-custody and on-chain finance while connecting it to a broader investing ecosystem that bridges traditional and on-chain finance.”

After going public last year, eToro said it had the cash to allow the company to pursue merger and acquisition deals.

“We’re looking to do more ambitious stuff involving acquisitions,” Assia told Bloomberg at the time, adding that this included deals that would let eToro add more asset classes and locales to its platform.

In other crypto news, PYMNTS wrote last week about the regulatory transformation happening in the industry, centered around the stablecoin.

“Absent the volatility of their cryptocurrency cousins, these dollar-pegged tokens are being reframed as extensions of the existing financial system and weighed by corporates for their benefits in streamlining cross-border payments and optimizing treasury operations,” that report said. “The first and only crypto policy signed into law, the GENIUS Act, is a stablecoin-specific framework. And regulators are now operationalizing it to create a unified supervisory regime.”

A PYMNTS Intelligence and Citi report, “Chain Reaction: Regulatory Clarity as the Catalyst for Blockchain Adoption,” argues that blockchain’s next leap will be determined by regulation, with evolving guidance creating the foundations for safe, scalable blockchain adoption.

“Still, the report found that implementation challenges continue to complicate blockchain’s institutional and systemic progress,” PYMNTS added.

The deal, announced Tuesday (April 14), is designed to complement Synctera’s offerings in compliance areas such as know your customer (KYC).

“What Cable offers sits on the other side of the equation: instead of executing compliance controls, it independently verifies that those controls are working as intended,” Synctera Co-founder and CEO Peter Hazlehurst wrote on the company blog.

“There’s no reason to be satisfied by sampling every 100th KYC to check if we followed policy. We’ll test everything.”

Cable’s solution is designed to help banks audit and test whether FinTechs and service providers are actually doing what they claim in terms of anti-money laundering (AML) policies, KYC, transaction monitoring and other compliance measures.

“We’ve also found that banks find it quite helpful for their own internal use,” Hazlehurst added.

“Cable’s product will continue to operate as a standalone offering, while also being extended to add an additional layer of compliance control on top of the Synctera Platform natively.”

Writing on her company’s blog, Cable Co-founder and CEO Natasha Vernier noted that the startup’s journey had coincided with the rise of Banking as a Service (Baas) as a way for banks to expand their revenue streams and reach new markets.

“Banks look to BaaS providers like Synctera to help them grow,” she wrote. “Cable being a part of Synctera means that even more banks will benefit from automating the hardest parts of their work.”

In related news, PYMNTS wrote recently about new proposed AML rules for federal banking regulators, arguing that they offer a “clear path for how compliance will be expected to operate as financial services continue to digitize and expand across platforms.”

The rulemaking retains the central requirement that banks create and maintain programs for AML and to counter terror financing, while redefining how those programs are evaluated.

A deeper reading of the proposed rulemaking, PYMNTS said, shows that the traditional structure of AML programs remains in place. Banks must keep internal controls, independent testing, a designated compliance officer and continual training.

“What seems on a glide path for change is how those components must operate,” the report added. “Internal controls must be risk-based and ‘reasonably designed’ to identify, assess and mitigate risks tied to customers, products and geographies.”

The deal, announced Tuesday (April 14), is designed to promote Instacart’s global expansion while adding to its technological capabilities.

“We see a meaningful opportunity to expand internationally through an enterprise-led strategy that empowers retailers across the globe to meet the evolving omnichannel needs of their customers,” Ryan Hamburger, Instacart chief commercial officer, said in a news release.

“We’ve already seen growing global demand for our online and in-store technologies, including Storefront Pro and Caper Carts, with early traction in Europe and Australia. With the addition of Instaleap’s technology, international expertise, and deep retail relationships, we can accelerate our international expansion and better serve retailers and consumers around the world.”

Instaleap’s technology, the release added, is designed to meet “core retailer needs” such as marketplace integrations and fulfillment services. The company has relationships with close to 100 grocery retailers and marketplaces outside North America and operations in nearly 30 countries in Latin America, Europe and the Middle East.

Writing in February about Instacart’s most recent earnings report, PYMNTS argued that the company has been “positioning itself as a technology enablement layer for grocers that want true omnichannel capabilities without stitching together point solutions.”

In its shareholder letter, Instacart said its marketplace now spans more than 2,200 retail banners and almost 100,000 locations, while its Storefront technology powers upwards of 380 grocers’ eCommerce sites.

Elsewhere in the world of supermarket technology, PYMNTS wrote this week about efforts by the likes of Tesco, Albertsons and Walmart to use AI-powered shopping assistants “that convert a meal question into a ready-to-checkout grocery basket.”

“Each of these tools keeps discovery, selection and payment inside the retailer’s own platform. That matters as third-party AI systems grow capable of intercepting the same customer journey,” that report said.

OpenAI recently said it would end its Instant Checkout feature, which allows shoppers to purchase directly through ChatGPT, and is shifting its focus to facilitating sales through retailers’ dedicated apps within the chatbot.

Around the same time, Google updated its shopping agent platform, letting it load real-time product data, and allowing users to add multiple items to carts, and connect loyalty memberships.

“A shopper who plans meals and builds a cart through a general-purpose AI platform takes transaction data and discovery behavior with them,” PYMNTS added. “The retailer loses visibility into what drove the purchase, what was considered and rejected, and which promotions landed.”

The deal will see Hiro’s team join OpenAI, founder Ethan Bloch said in a LinkedIn post Monday (April 13). Bloch said the deal provides the opportunity to expand Hiro’s vision of creating an “AI personal CFO.”

“For decades, personalized financial guidance has been too expensive, too generic or too hard to access. ChatGPT is finally changing that,” Bloch wrote.

“The mission that brought us to Hiro, and to Digit before that, has not changed: improving people’s financial well-being. If anything, it feels even more important now.”

Terms of the deal were not released. The company’s LinkedIn profile says it has under 50 employees. Founded in 2023, Hiro’s tool allowed users to plan their finances by gaming out various scenarios according to their income, debt and spending patterns. 

Before Hiro, Bloch founded the aforementioned Digit, a neobanking platform which provided personalized savings, investing and banking tools. That company was acquired by FinTech Oportun in 2021 for $211 million.

Bloch said Hiro would begin shutting down operations April 20, and would erase all data from its servers on May 13. Customers can export their data prior to the shutdown.

The acquisition follows OpenAI’s purchase last year of personal finance app Roi, with that company’s co-founder and CEO joining the ChatGPT maker.

“We started Roi 3 years ago to make investing accessible to everyone by building the most personalized financial experience,” Sujith Vishwajith wrote in a post on X. “Along the way we realized personalization isn’t just the future of finance. It’s the future of software.”

These deals come as experts are raising questions about a limit to AI’s ability to provide financial advice: it has no sense of fiduciary duty, meaning no obligation to act in a client’s best interests.

“The problem that we have to solve is not whether AI has enough expertise,” Andrew Lo, a finance professor and director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at the MIT Sloan School of Management, told CNBC last week. “The answer right now is, clearly, AI has the [financial] expertise.”

But what they “don’t have is that fiduciary duty,” Lo added. “They don’t have the ability to suffer consequences if they make a mistake to the same degree that a human advisor does.”

Research by PYMNTS Intelligence has shown consumers are increasingly turning to AI for tasks like organizing their personal finances.

For instance, the data shows that 62% of Generation Z consumers said they were willing to use AI for “what if” financial planning.

AtlasClear, which is a technology-enabled financial services holding company, submitted regulatory applications with the Federal Reserve Board and the Wyoming Division of Banking, seeking approval for the acquisition, it said in a Monday (April 13) press release.

The acquisition remains subject to the receipt of regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions, according to the release.

AtlasClear President Craig Ridenhour said in the release that the submission of the applications is a significant step in the company’s strategy to build “a fully integrated financial services platform.”

“Farmers State Bank brings a stable, profitable and well-capitalized banking franchise that will complement our existing clearing infrastructure at Wilson-Davis & Co.,” Ridenhour said. “We believe this combination will enhance our capabilities in deposits, payments and lending, while creating long-term value for shareholders through scale, diversified revenue streams, and operational synergies.”

Sandip Patel, general counsel and chief financial officer of AtlasClear, said in the release that the transaction structure reflected in the filings is designed to satisfy the requirements of the regulators to which they were submitted.

“We have worked diligently to ensure our applications are thorough and complete, and we are confident in our ability to advance through the regulatory review process,” Patel said. “Upon closing, the addition of Farmers State Bank’s regulated banking capabilities will directly support our vision of delivering a fully integrated clearing and banking platform to our clients.”

AtlasClear announced in February that it entered into a new share purchase agreement to acquire Commercial Bancorp that replaced a previous merger agreement. The company said that under the terms of the agreement, it will acquire 100% of the outstanding shares of Commercial Bancorp for consideration structured to be predominantly equity-based.

John Schaible, executive chairman of AtlasClear, said at the time in a press release: “The share purchase agreement streamlines the transaction for regulators, preserves cash, aligns incentives through equity ownership, and delivers full ownership of a profitable Federal Reserve member bank that we expect to be accretive and strategically transformative for AtlasClear.”