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Mother’s Day, but Make It Platinum

2026-04-03T15:04:19Z

Mother’s Day is the annual moment when otherwise rational adults look into the maw of modern commerce and ask a spiritually revealing question: Is brunch enough? Usually, yes.

But at the far edge of the digital economy, Mother’s Day has quietly become a glorious, over-caffeinated payments event: part emotion, part logistics, part luxury checkout flow. The flowers and the card still matter, but so do the reservation link, the deposit request, the gift-card balance, the card-on-file confirmation and the little thrill of pretending a $61,500 trunk is really about “memory-making.”

The latest available numbers from the National Retail Federation (NRF) show why the holiday has become such a rich commerce story. In 2025, Mother’s Day spending was expected to reach $34.1 billion, with 84% of U.S. adults planning to celebrate. Online was the top shopping destination at 36%, while jewelry was the largest dollar category at $6.8 billion, special outings reached $6.3 billion and gift cards hit $3.5 billion. Nearly half of shoppers said they wanted something unique or different, and another big chunk said they were looking for gifts that create a special memory.

At the ultra-high end, the “things” side of the ledger is less about buying Mom one more nice object and more about buying her a better anecdote. A five-object fantasy board starts with Cartier’s Panthère de Cartier watch, because it is the rare gift that reads simultaneously as watch, jewelry and inheritance strategy; Cartier lists a small yellow-gold model at $27,000.

Then there’s the De Beers Talisman Locket, priced at $37,100 and notable because it is a limited series of 20 pieces with engraving potential. It’s less of a present, and more “future family lore.” For maximalist delight, Louis Vuitton’s LV x TM Music Trunk is the showstopper: a Murakami-splashed trunk with a compartment for a turntable and storage for vinyl, which is what happens when nostalgia gets a budget comparable to that of an Audi.

A smarter, slyer flex is Lalique’s Tourbillons vase, a $5,000 crystal classic first designed in 1926: especially notable because it turns the most traditional Mother’s Day gift, flowers, into a permanent upgrade. And for the mom whose taste runs more modernist than maison, Bang & Olufsen’s Beosound 2 starts at $4,000 and makes a persuasive case for premium audio as a sculptural home object.

The experience side is where Mother’s Day goes fully cinematic. Four Seasons’ World of Wellness 2026 private-jet itinerary is the obvious headline act: 20 days and eight destinations at a total sticker price of $188,000 per adult.

If Mom prefers sea air to airport lounges, Aman’s Amandira private yacht and its Komodo expeditions are almost comically well-appointed: a 52-meter yacht, five cabins, a crew of 14, private chefs, a dive master, a spa therapist and itineraries built around dragons, reefs and bragging rights.

Then there is Belmond’s Royal Scotsman Dior wellness journey, because once you accept the existence of a Dior spa carriage rolling through the Scottish Highlands, resistance feels provincial. Belmond says the spa carriage has two treatment rooms styled in Dior’s burgundy toile de Jouy, and the concept has already expanded into multi-day retreat programming.

Golden Door’s Golden Flight is another splendidly over-engineered choice: door-to-door transfers, private plane access, curated wellness kit and a seven-night all-inclusive stay that begins before takeoff.

Finally, The Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection’s Mediterranean voyages are currently listing seven-night sailings such as Monte Carlo to Rome from $11,100, which is useful for anyone hoping to frame “ultra-luxe yacht trip” as a heartfelt family gesture.

And that, really, is the payments angle. Mother’s Day at the top end is orchestration in its finest form: eCommerce checkout, concierge confirmations, trip deposits, premium-card points, dining reservations and experience spending all braided into one sentimental shopping occasion.

The latest NRF data makes clear that consumers already want uniqueness and memory-making; luxury brands are simply monetizing that desire at a level normally reserved for real estate and small watercraft.

So yes: payments plays in Mother’s Day the same way bass plays in a song — often behind the melody, but doing more work than it gets credit for. The flowers aren’t gone, they’ve just been joined by yachts, wellness jets, designer spa cars and a turntable trunk that could anchor its own inheritance dispute.

Which feels, in its own extravagant way, exactly right for a holiday built around trying to repay someone for everything, with one very nice click.

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OpenAI CFO Says Company Hits Core Targets Despite Stretch Goals

2026-05-02T00:00:02Z

OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar said Thursday (April 30) that the company is meeting its objectives.

Interviewed by Bloomberg for a report published Thursday, Friar said that if anything is slowing OpenAI down at all, it’s not a lack of demand, but a lack of compute.

Friar’s remarks came three days after the Wall Street Journal reported Monday (April 27) that OpenAI had fallen short of its internal goals for new users and revenue and that some of the company’s executives, including Friar, were concerned about whether the firm would be able to fund its data center plans if its revenue didn’t grow quickly enough.

Bloomberg reported Tuesday (April 28) that OpenAI described the WSJ report as “prime clickbait” and that the company said its consumer and enterprise businesses are “firing on all cylinders” and “the mood internally is incredibly positive.”

Friar told Bloomberg Thursday that OpenAI may have internal “stretch goals” that are more ambitious than its publicly shared goals, but that demand for the company’s products continues to grow.

“Every company I’ve ever been inside of in my entire CFO life, and as an analyst, always has stretch goals — always,” Friar said, per the report.

The Information reported that OpenAI is projecting a giant shift in subscription revenue but still sees revenues more than doubling to $30 billion this year and reaching $284 billion in 2030.

The report said that while OpenAI has pulled in the bulk of its revenue from consumers’ $20-per-month ChatGPT subscriptions over the last three years, the company now expects that a cheaper, ad-supported subscription tier will attract new users but also lead existing subscribers to downgrade. The company hopes to generate more revenue by selling ads to more users than depending on its existing flagship monthly subscription service, ChatGPT Plus.

It was reported April 9 that OpenAI expects its nascent advertising business to generate $2.5 billion in revenue this year and surge to $100 billion by the end of the decade. The report said the company’s projections underscore its push to monetize its user base to help fund the soaring costs of developing its AI technology.

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Uber Taps Hertz Subsidiary to Scale Robotaxi Program

2026-05-01T23:34:19Z

Hertz plans to expand beyond its car rental business and serve “the next era of mobility” with a new affiliated operating company that will provide fleet management solutions for autonomous robotaxi and driver-led rideshare fleets.

The new company, Oro Mobility, said in a Thursday (April 30) press release that its first major partner is Uber.

Oro and Uber have formed strategic fleet partnerships in which Oro will provide operational and maintenance services for Uber’s autonomous and driver-led operations in key U.S. markets, according to the release.

For Uber’s autonomous robotaxi program, Oro will provide charging, maintenance, repairs, cleaning, depot staffing and other day-to-day vehicle asset management services. The companies plan to launch this collaboration in the San Francisco Bay Area by the end of the year and then consider expanding it in 2027.

For Uber’s driver-led operations, Oro will provide a fleet of vehicles maintained by the company and operated by Oro-employed drivers. The companies successfully piloted this partnership in Atlanta last year, later expanded it to Los Angeles and San Francisco, and now plan to extend it to Northern New Jersey this spring.

“This partnership with Uber establishes Oro as an integrated solution that connects demand with scalable fleet management services,” Hertz CEO Gil West said in the release. “Through this work, we’re deepening our capabilities across diverse mobility use cases, and positioning Hertz to play a significant role as the industry evolves.”

Uber President and Chief Operating Officer Andrew Macdonald said in the release that the partnership with Oro will help Uber transition to a network that includes both driver-led and autonomous rideshare operations.

“By combining Uber’s global platform and marketplace leadership with Oro’s dedicated fleet management expertise, we are well-equipped to meet increasing rideshare demand and deliver a seamless, high-quality rider experience across the entire mobility ecosystem,” Macdonald said.

Uber and carmaker Rivian announced in March that they have teamed up to deploy 10,000 fully autonomous Rivian R2 robotaxis, starting in Miami and San Francisco in 2028 and then expanding to 25 cities by 2031. The companies aim to have thousands of robotaxis deployed across 25 cities in the U.S., Canada and Europe by the end of 2021.

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AI Takes the Wheel at Europe’s Biggest Carmakers

2026-05-01T23:05:41Z

Artificial intelligence (AI) is running on the production line, inside the vehicle and within the investment thesis. Europe’s premium automakers are moving on all fronts at once.

The pressure behind that movement is specific. Order-to-delivery flows across disconnected systems, multiple suppliers and dozens of handoffs. By the times teams learn about a delay, it has already hit the schedule. Inventory builds in the wrong place, small disruptions cascade and manual tracking fails at scale. AI fixes that by monitoring workflows in real time and triggering interventions before delays reach the customer.

AI Enters the Factory

Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz are running AI across production operations. Automotive News reported that all three brands use AI-powered image processing to detect welding defects in real time. Issues get flagged before they move down the line. Defect rates fall without slowing throughput.

BMW has gone further. Nvidia reported that BMW is deploying autonomous mobile robots inside its factories to handle material transport without human guidance. Parts move to the line as needed. The logistics layer coordinates itself.

BCG documented BMW Group’s generative AI program scaling across engineering, manufacturing and supply chain operations. The program compressed development timelines and reduced manual decision-making across the organization. The outcome was not incremental. It changed how the company moves information and acts on it.

Capital Follows the Conviction

BMW i Ventures launched its third fund at $300 million on Wednesday (April 29), bringing total capital under management to $1.1 billion. Fund III targets physical AI, agentic AI, industrial software, manufacturing technologies, supply chain technologies and advanced materials, investing from seed through Series B across North America and Europe.

Managing partner Marcus Behrendt said the firm focuses on what will actually determine the future, not what is trending. The AI Insider noted that BMW Group is already deploying humanoid robots at its Leipzig plant in Germany as part of a European pilot expanding physical AI in vehicle production, building on a 2025 program at its Spartanburg, South Carolina plant.

The fund backs startups early enough to shape how the technology develops. The thesis is direct: AI will define the next generation of automotive suppliers, and BMW wants equity in the companies building that layer now.

Intelligence Moves Into the Vehicle

The investment logic extends from the factory to the car itself. Mercedes-Benz announced a multi-year partnership with Liquid AI to deploy embedded, on-device intelligence across its vehicles in North America.

Liquid AI stated that the embedded Liquid Foundation Models deliver fast, private AI without cloud dependence, evolving the MBUX Virtual Assistant by integrating voice control, vehicle functionality and contextual understanding into a more capable in-vehicle experience. According to the release, initial production deployment is scheduled for the second half of 2026.

The architecture matters beyond the in-car experience. On-device AI processes data locally without sending it to a server. That same design principle applies upstream. AI running inside production systems does not wait for a nightly report. It reads the order queue, tracks supplier lead times, monitors assembly progress and flags the gap before it becomes a delay.

AI is not a feature added to an existing process. It is the coordination layer replacing manual oversight across the full order-to-delivery chain. For European automakers competing with software-native rivals from the United States and China, the window to build that infrastructure is not open indefinitely. BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi are treating that deadline as vital.

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Fed Prepares New Playbook to Support Bank AI Adoption

2026-05-01T20:26:46Z

Anthropic’s Mythos highlights the speed at which artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities can advance and the need for supervisory approaches to keep pace with emerging technology, Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle W. Bowman said Friday (May 1).

In a speech delivered at an event hosted by the Financial Stability Oversight Council in Washington, D.C., Bowman said regulators must ensure safety and soundness without hindering innovation.

The Mythos AI model’s ability to detect cyber vulnerabilities can be used for enhancing cybersecurity or for malicious purposes, Bowman said.

“As we learn more about this tool and others to be released in the coming weeks and months, we will continue to consider effective supervisory approaches for these and other emerging capabilities,” Bowman said.

Bowman said that regulators’ supervision of emerging technologies requires keeping up with new developments, coordinating efforts across government, communicating developments and risks to supervised institutions, getting feedback from industry, and regularly refining supervisory approach and response.

“As we work to support innovation, it is necessary to determine whether our framework is appropriate,” Bowman said. “Have we established reasonable and effective supervisory expectations? Are bankers comfortable discussing emerging risks and new technologies with supervisory teams? Have we successfully implemented a pro-innovation mindset that allows responsible innovation and AI adoption to occur within the banking system?”

Bowman said that the Financial Stability Board’s Standing Committee on Supervisory and Regulatory Cooperation, of which she is the chair, is working with the Treasury Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on a report that will cover sound practices for AI adoption, use and innovation. A draft is set to be released in the third quarter.

“The implications of AI extend far beyond the banking and financial systems,” Bowman said.

It was reported April 7 that Anthropic was allowing select partners to gain early access to Claude Mythos Preview, a model positioned for defensive cybersecurity work, so that they could identify vulnerabilities and strengthen systems before threats can be exploited.

Anthropic said at the time it was also discussing the model and its “offensive and defensive cyber capabilities” with government officials.

On April 10, a Treasury spokesperson told PYMNTS that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had convened a meeting with bank CEOs to address development in AI.

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Big Insurance Backs Away From AI Risk and Startups Rush In

2026-05-01T20:04:27Z

A company deploys an artificial intelligence (AI) agent. The agent makes a mistake. The insurance policy does not cover it.

That outcome is no longer hypothetical. Major insurers are carving AI out of standard corporate coverage. State regulators are approving the requests and a new market is already forming to fill the gap.

Carriers Signal They Cannot Price the Risk

Berkshire Hathaway, Chubb and Travelers sought state regulatory approval to exclude AI-related damages from general liability policies. State regulators approved more than 80% of those requests, The Information reported. Florida, Connecticut and Maryland approved the highest number of requests. The exclusions began taking effect as early as January.

The moves follow two new optional endorsements introduced by the Insurance Services Office, a private body that sets industry standards. Policyholder Pulse reported that some carriers, including Berkley, have introduced absolute AI exclusions across directors and officers, errors and omissions and fiduciary liability policies. The endorsements cover bodily injury, property damage and personal and advertising injury tied to generative AI outputs, including defamatory content, intellectual property infringement and physical damages traceable to AI-driven errors.

PHL Firm noted that ISO forms underpin roughly 82% of U.S. property and casualty policies. Adoption is expected to be rapid. Many carriers will attach these endorsements at renewal.

What Falls Outside Coverage Now

Plaintiffs have advanced a wide range of legal theories in AI-related filings. Policyholder Pulse catalogued the categories: copyright and intellectual property claims arising from large language model training, privacy and data-use claims, antitrust claims, discrimination and algorithmic bias claims and AI-related securities class actions. Each now sits in a grayer zone for businesses whose carriers have secured AI exclusions.

Insurers are also moving to cap AI losses in cybersecurity policies, the Financial Times reported. That narrows options across multiple policy types at once. Policyholder Pulse flagged that courts have not yet settled how broadly these exclusions will be applied and that for some policyholders the effect could render their coverage illusory. PHL Firm found that small to mid-sized firms, often without specialized coverage, face the greatest exposure.

A New Market Fills the Gap

Specialized firms are stepping in. Munich Re and startups including Corgi, Armilla, Mayflower Specialty and Embroker now offer standalone AI liability policies, The Information reported. Coverage limits range from $2 million to $50 million. Premiums range from a few hundred dollars to several hundred thousand dollars annually.

The pattern mirrors how insurers handled cybersecurity a decade ago. A wave of attacks triggered corporate claims. Businesses argued successfully that traditional policies covered the losses because the policies did not explicitly exclude them. Insurers carved cyber out of standard coverage and built standalone products. That market matured. Now, the AI liability market is starting the same process.

The tension sits inside the industry itself. PYMNTS reported that insurance giants are deploying AI agents to orchestrate entire workflows across claims, underwriting and policy servicing. Those same carriers are simultaneously pulling AI coverage from the policies they sell. PYMNTS also reported that AI is beginning to transform underwriting itself, compressing timelines and changing how risk gets priced. Insurers are betting on AI internally while refusing to absorb AI risk externally.

PHL Firm advised businesses to review existing policies for new endorsements with their brokers and consider seeking affirmative AI coverage through technology errors and omissions policies, cyber liability insurance, or emerging standalone AI products. Strengthening internal AI governance, conducting bias testing and disclosing AI use can also reduce exposure.

Insurers are not saying AI is uninsurable. They are saying they do not yet know what it costs. Until they do, the risk sits with the businesses deploying the technology.

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ChatGPT Finds Your Pizza but Loses the Checkout

2026-05-01T19:48:15Z

PYMNTS tried ordering food through ChatGPT. Getting a pizza from Little Caesars took longer than driving to pick one up.

Starbucks and Little Caesars launched apps inside ChatGPT this month. Both brands are betting consumers will order food the same way they already plan meals and research products. The interface is familiar. The checkout is not.

The Setup Takes Longer Than the Order

Getting started requires work. Users navigate to a connector directory inside ChatGPT, search for the brand and enable the integration manually. None of that happens in the native app. The Starbucks app opens with saved preferences, a loyalty balance and a reorder button. The ChatGPT path opens with a blank prompt.

PYMNTS asked for something low-fat and high-protein. Starbucks returned a relevant drink, explained the option and let size selection happen inside the chat. Nearby locations appeared next. The flow worked. Then a store got selected. A browser opened. The Starbucks app took over. Login, payment, checkout. The conversation did not carry over.

Little Caesars did not get that far. The same ask returned recipe suggestions and outside options. Nothing came from the actual menu. A follow-up prompt produced one item. The flow then asked for a ZIP code. No results came back. Checkout never happened.

Where the Handoff Breaks

Both brands hand off to an external screen to complete payment. Starbucks routes checkout through its own app or website. Discovery happens inside ChatGPT. Payment happens outside it. The company made that choice deliberately as its loyalty program depends on owning the transaction.

That split reintroduces the friction the channel was designed to eliminate. The native Starbucks app completes an order in second, holds users’ saved payment credentials and loyalty state. The ChatGPT flow takes several minutes to reach the same point. The handoff to a login screen does not feel like a final step; it feels like starting over.

The back-end infrastructure is the problem. Payment credentials live in one system. Loyalty lives in another. Order history lives somewhere else. The conversational front end cannot connect them. Users bridge that gap themselves, adding steps instead of removing them.

What the Friction Is Actually Measuring

This is not a technology failure. Commerce infrastructure is not built for this.

Bites is building its entire business model around ChatGPT as an ordering channel. Starbucks kept checkout inside its own ecosystem on purpose. Neither brand is treating this as a gimmick. Both are making deliberate bets on where the interface is going.

Those bets have logic behind them. Conversational ordering removes the browse-and-scroll loop. A model that knows a user’s preferences, location and time of day can outperform a static menu. The discovery layer already shows what that looks like.

The checkout layer is not there yet. Credentials need to travel with the conversation. Loyalty state needs to persist across sessions. Payment needs to complete inside the chat. Until that infrastructure exists, users have to bridge the gap themselves.

The tools work. The plumbing does not. That gap will close. The question is whether consumers wait for it or return to the three-tap experience that already knows their order, their address and their card number. Habit is a short-term moat. So is convenience. Right now, the native app still offers both.

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Stablecoins Grew Up. Now Come the Rules

2026-05-01T18:37:55Z

The stablecoin market is moving fast in two directions at once. One path leads toward greater financial integration and the other toward greater regulatory scrutiny. The two are increasingly inseparable.

In the past week alone, a flurry of announcements from major financial and technology players underscored the balancing act the digital asset space faces between achieving interoperability at global scale and managing the compliance needs that brings.

Visa added five more blockchains to its global stablecoin settlement pilot, bringing its total to nine; while Meta started offering stablecoin payouts to a limited group of creators. Elsewhere, the Walmart-backed FinTech OnePay announced plans to add stablecoin payouts and account funding to its banking product through a new partnership with the Tempo blockchain; and Anchorage Digital launched a partnership with stablecoin infrastructure company M0 to merge M0’s infrastructure capabilities with Anchorage’s regulated issuance experience to serve a “growing universe of stablecoin builders.”

But as institutions race to unlock interoperability and cross-border efficiency, regulators are confronting a familiar set of concerns: money laundering, sanctions evasion and systemic risk. On Tuesday (April 28), a WSJ report flagged that individuals sanctioned by the U.S. for their participation in the Prince Group scam-ring had later worked to enable the use of the Trump family-linked World Liberty Financial’s stablecoin, USD1, on its network.

The news underscores that as stablecoins scale, so do their risks. Fraud, scams and illicit activity remain persistent challenges. But the growing regulatory push is not necessarily a headwind for the industry. In many respects, it reflects a recognition that stablecoins may be becoming systemically important.

Chasing Interoperability While Navigating Compliance

The very features that make stablecoins attractive such as speed, accessibility and borderless transferability can also make them susceptible to misuse. Unlike traditional banking systems, where intermediaries play a central role in monitoring transactions, stablecoin networks often rely on a patchwork of exchanges, wallet providers and on-chain analytics firms to enforce compliance.

In 2025 alone, an estimated $17 billion was lost to crypto-related fraud, with AI-enabled scams dramatically increasing in sophistication.

“The amount of content created for scamming people is absolutely through the roof. Our customers are swamped,” Emmanuel Marot, vice president of products at Chainalysis, told PYMNTS in a conversation about the company’s “blockchain intelligence agents,” unveiled earlier this March.

Still, the future of the digital asset space “sure looks bright,” Marot added, noting that “there’s a real-world usage and a need to make sure that the money goes to the right place.”

Among the clearest signals of crypto’s real-world usage comes from payment incumbents adopting them at scale. Visa’s stablecoin settlement pilot has already reached an annualized run rate of $7 billion, growing roughly 50% quarter over quarter.

In effect, Visa is building a multi-chain settlement fabric. Settlement—the behind-the-scenes process of reconciling transactions between banks—has long been slow, opaque and fragmented. Stablecoins can potentially compress that timeline from days to minutes while also reducing intermediary costs.

Elsewhere, Meta this week began offering stablecoin payments to creators, effectively turning its social platform into a financial one. This move revives an idea Meta explored—and abandoned—with its earlier digital currency initiative: embedding money directly into digital ecosystems. The difference now is that stablecoins provide a ready-made, interoperable solution, eliminating the need to build a proprietary currency from scratch.

Building the Picks and Shovels

Behind the scenes, a new class of infrastructure providers is emerging to support this ecosystem. Companies like M0 and Anchorage Digital are positioning themselves as the foundational layer for stablecoin issuance and custody.

This “infrastructure-as-a-service” model mirrors earlier waves in cloud computing. Just as AWS enabled startups to build without owning servers, these platforms allow companies to issue and manage digital dollars without building blockchain expertise from scratch.

The result may be a rapid proliferation of both stablecoin use cases and issuers.

That proliferation was precisely what Anchorage’s CEO advocated for on the latest episode of “From the Block.” Rather than a handful of dominant players, Nathan McCauley said he envisions thousands of crypto-native banks competing in a decentralized financial landscape, emphasizing that, “in a world where there are 4,000 banks, we’re powering 3,999 of them.”

What emerges from these developments is not a single trend but a layered transformation. At the base are blockchains, increasingly interconnected and specialized. On top sit stablecoins, acting as the unit of account. Above that, infrastructure providers enable issuance, custody and compliance. And at the surface, applications from payments to social platforms help deliver user experiences.

This stack is modular, programmable and global by design. But can it scale?

Findings in the March PYMNTS Intelligence report, “Stablecoins Gain Ground: Why CFOs See More Promise There Than in Crypto,” reveal that while more than 4 in 10 (42%) middle market companies have at least discussed stablecoins, only 13% have reported actual stablecoin use.

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Fun Secures $72 Million To Power Global Capital Markets

2026-05-01T19:13:30Z

Fun raised $72 million in a Series A funding round to expand its payments infrastructure that powers Polymarket and other internet-native capital markets.

The company was founded in 2022, has operated in stealth, and now processes over $18 billion in transaction volume per year, delivering a 99.999% success rate and supporting millions of users across 100 countries, it said in a Friday (May 1) press release.

With the new capital, Fun plans to continue investing in engineering, expand into the Asia-Pacific region with a new office in Singapore, and make acquisitions to deepen its infrastructure stack, according to the release.

Fun Founder and CEO Alex Fine said in the release that the company is building a system for use behind financial markets that moves money instantly, globally and without friction.

“Financial markets have driven global prosperity for decades, but the systems behind them have not kept pace,” Fine said.

Polymarket Vice President of Engineering Josh Stevens said in the release that Fun builds around real user behavior, catches edge cases that others miss, and is meticulous about every detail.

“At our size, every percentage point of conversion is millions of dollars and millions of users, and every reliability failure becomes a public conversation,” Stevens said. “Fun has built the highest-converting, most reliable deposit flow we’ve ever had.”

It was reported April 16 that Polymarket and rival prediction market platform Kalshi had seen combined year-to-date volumes of $60 billion. Overall, prediction market volumes are on track to come to around $240 billion this year and hit $1 trillion by 2030.

Fun’s Series A round was co-led by Multicoin Capital and SignalFire, according to the company’s Friday press release release.

SignalFire said in a Friday post on LinkedIn that most payment infrastructure can’t keep up with modern capital and that Fun is rebuilding the system from the ground up rather than trying to put a better user interface on top of old rails.

“At the scale that global applications operate, payment performance isn’t just a boring back-office thing; it makes or breaks user retention,” SignalFire said in its post. “Fun engineered a custom, highly technical orchestration layer to handle that exact challenge.”

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SoftBank-Backed OPay Eyes $4 Billion Valuation in US IPO

2026-05-01T17:43:34Z

OPay Digital Services, a payments platform focused on Nigeria and backed by SoftBank Vision Fund and Sequoia Capital, is preparing for an initial public offering (IPO) in the United States, Bloomberg reported Friday (May 1), citing unnamed sources.

The company is seeking a valuation of $4 billion, which would double the $2 billion valuation it achieved in a 2021 funding round, and it could launch the IPO by the end of the year, according to the report.

OPay did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.

According to the Bloomberg report, OPay was founded by Chinese tycoon James Yahui Zhou, who also founded Kunlun Tech, which owns the web browser company Opera. OPay now has 40 million users.

It was reported in August 2021 that SoftBank’s investment in OPay was the global technology investor’s first foray into Africa. In that funding round, OPay raised $400 million.

OPay said in a Jan. 18 press release that it formed a new global core management team on Dec. 1, that includes Zhou as executive chairman and former Citigroup managing director James Perry as chief financial officer.

The company described itself in the release as a leading digital banking platform in emerging markets and said the new management team would lead its “new strategic chapter.”

OPay said in the release that “this management upgrade integrates seasoned expertise across strategy, globalization, operations and finance, forming a strong leadership synergy. The new team will accelerate OPay’s global expansion and deliver greater value to users worldwide.”

The company had already announced Perry’s appointment as CFO in a Dec. 18 press release in which it said he would oversee its financial strategy planning, capital structure management and investor relations. It said that during his 22 years at Citigroup, Perry directed and executed several mergers, acquisitions and capital market transactions for technology companies.

“[OPay] believes his exceptional international finance experience will provide strong support for OPay’s global strategic expansion and operational excellence,” the company said in the release.

The company said in a March 31 press release that it opened a new office in Nigeria to strengthen its nationwide network and expand access to financial services.

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