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Driving the news this morning are reports which circulated this week that JPMorgan quietly terminated its relationship with prediction markets provider Polymarket last year over regulatory concerns.
At the time, Polymarket was banned by the CFTC from serving US customers on its platform.
Polymarket is pushing back on the framing, arguing that while JPMorgan closed the primary banking account, Polymarket still has a "close, active relationship" with the bank regarding operational integrations and fund flows.
This comes in the middle of an investigation into (alleged) ‘debanking.’ The DOJ is investigating JPMorgan and eight other banks for politically motivated debanking practices, which those banks deny. (Court filings recently disclosed that Capital One closed 385 bank accounts associated with President Trump in 2021 after flagging financial activities characteristic of money laundering.)
Meanwhile, New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin requested information from Polymarket this week as part of an inquiry into its marketing practices, a probe that's getting almost no attention next to the federal CFTC/DOJ ones.
Regulatory pressure on prediction markets is broadening beyond Washington.
But that hasn’t dampened investor enthusiasm: Polymarket is in early talks to raise about $1 billion in a new funding round at a valuation of more than $20 billion. Polymarket's annualized revenue has more than tripled since its April fundraise, passing $1.2 billion.
- Nik
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The Rundown
🏦 Financial Services & Banking
American Express and Conferma expanded their partnership to let Amex Business Travel Account customers push virtual cards to a digital wallet for on-trip spend like meals and rideshare.
Cantor Fitzgerald moved to give its institutional clients brokered access to block trades on Kalshi's prediction markets, with Susquehanna providing liquidity.
Nasdaq confirmed plans to stretch equities trading to nearly 23 hours a day starting December 6.
🚀 Product Launches
Binance launched Agent OS, a platform letting AI agents trade and manage funds on users' behalf through sub-accounts.
Kraken debuted its multi-asset Visa ‘Krak card’ debit card in the US.
Neobank Starling rolled out Smart tools covering tax help, fraud protection, and budgeting for its 5 million customers.
Former Signature Bank chairman Scott Shay started N3XT, a Wyoming-chartered digital bank to offer instant, blockchain-based overseas dollar payments.
Betterment launched Custom Portfolios to let retail investors build security-by-security portfolios.
Synchrony partnered with OpenAI to bring Amazon, Walmart, and Lowe's store cards into ChatGPT checkout.
Rippling and Apex Fintech teamed up to launch an integrated treasury product to give Rippling's customers embedded cash-management and investing tools.
💸 Other News
Rain launched the Agentic Payments Alliance, a coalition with Visa, Mastercard and others to define standards for AI-agent-driven commerce.
Nearly two-thirds of UK adults were registered for a mobile wallet in 2025, up from 57% the year before.
Affirm turned consistently profitable after more than a decade and $2 billion in losses, with CEO Max Levchin's insistence on building proprietary lending infrastructure; the company trades at a $25 billion market cap.
🤝 Partnership Corner
Personetics partnered with Plaid to add AI personalization for banks to get a fuller view of customers' finances.
😞 The Bad News
Monzo activated its independent backup bank, Monzo Stand-in, after an app outage left thousands of customers unable to make payments or transfers. (A win for the backup plan.)
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See you next week! - Nik
