Brazil heads to a runoff as stablecoin consortium OUSD goes live

Brazil's presidential election goes to a second round on 25 October.

With 96.6% of polling stations counted, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro (PL) led with 47.5% of valid votes (54.7 million) against 44.6% (51.3 million) for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT), short of the majority either needed to win outright. The first market read-through came from the NEXT Funds Ibovespa Linked ETF in Tokyo, which opened Monday up almost 8%; an election-focused fund manager quoted in the piece said even a narrow margin for the right-leaning candidate would be read as favourable on expectations of a tighter fiscal stance.

Three weeks of binary political risk now sit over BRL assets, B3 valuations and any Brazilian fundraising or exit timetable.

Grupo Cibest to acquire 100% of Colombian fintech PTM.

Through Estrategias Cibest, the Bancolombia parent plans to take full ownership of PTM, which runs banking-agent networks linking roughly 20,000 merchants across Colombia and provides correspondent services for Bancolombia alongside digital services for Nequi, Grupo Aval, Davivienda, DaviPlata, BBVA and Banco Agrario. Terms were not disclosed.

Agent networks remain the physical backbone of Colombian financial inclusion, and the largest bank group bringing one in-house raises questions for the rival banks and wallets that rely on it.

Platam adds B Venture Capital as an investor.

The Colombian embedded-lending fintech, which offers BNPL, confirming and factoring to MSMEs, said its portfolio more than tripled over the past six months; the ticket size was not disclosed.

Working-capital credit for Colombian small businesses keeps attracting institutional venture money despite high local rates.

Uin raises US$2 million to expand recurring-payments technology across Latin America.

The Argentine fintech will fund product development and team expansion as it grows regionally; investors were not named.

Subscription-billing infrastructure remains underbuilt in Spanish-speaking Latin America, and Argentine founders continue to raise for regional rather than domestic plays.

Nubank rolls out Cardamon's AI compliance platform across all its markets.

The neobank, now past 140 million customers, is deploying the regulatory-mapping tool group-wide; Cardamon claims it maps regulatory positions up to 20 times faster than legacy approaches.

Nubank's multi-country footprint makes it an early reference customer for AI-native compliance tooling that other regional fintechs will be asked about by their boards.

Monzo explores a private-equity stake sale after talks with Nubank collapse.

The UK neobank held early conversations with CVC and Advent International about selling up to 15%, after discussions with Nubank ended over Monzo's valuation of up to £10 billion.

Nubank was willing to look at a transformational European acquisition but is disciplined on price.

OUSD, the network-backed stablecoin, is now live.

Open Standard switched on OUSD on Tempo, Ethereum, Solana and Base; businesses can mint and burn at par at no cost through Coinbase, Stripe, Visa and Mastercard. Bridge issues the token, reserves sit at BlackRock, BNY and Lead Bank with monthly attestations, and Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa each hold an equal founding equity stake, with BNY, Standard Chartered, DBS and SoFi already listed as distribution partners.

Distributors earn rewards and equity in proportion to the supply they bring, a structure designed to be less threatening to bank deposits than yield-bearing private stablecoins.

Stripe agrees to acquire embedded lender Parafin.

Parafin lets platforms such as DoorDash, Amazon, Gusto and Worldpay offer loans to the small businesses running on them, underwritten on the data those platforms already see; it has lent more than US$3 billion to 60,000-plus businesses and was last valued at US$750 million in December 2024. Price undisclosed.

It continues Stripe's run of capability acquisitions (Bridge, Privy, Metronome, OpenRouter) and brings a working credit business with its capital-markets partners attached.

MNT-Halan closes US$82 million in securitised bond issuances.

The Cairo-based lender's active loan book is approaching US$1 billion across roughly 1.9 million borrowers; it holds 24.3% of Egypt's non-bank microfinance market and is preparing a potential IPO of up to 20% of its shares.

Securitisation rather than bank credit as the growth-funding channel for emerging-market lenders is a model Latin American credit fintechs are watching closely.

Visa reports almost 200% annual growth in stablecoin card payments.

The network supports more than 160 stablecoin-linked card programmes; commercial cards account for about 17% of volume, and research cited by Visa puts annual stablecoin payment volume at US$401–527 billion.

Trustly raises US$40 million; Settle secures a US$240 million credit facility.

The Stockholm account-to-account payments company took equity from Nordic Capital and Alfvén & Didrikson, while US B2B payments fintech Settle, which has originated more than US$4 billion, will use the facility to lend to larger customers.

Community banks sue the OCC over trust charters for non-fiduciary businesses.

The Independent Community Bankers of America argues that granting trust-bank charters to firms conducting substantial non-fiduciary activities exceeds the regulator's authority.

The trust charter has become the preferred US on-ramp for stablecoin issuers and crypto firms.

Sifted 250 names Europe's fastest-growing startups by revenue.

London wellness marketplace Healf topped the ranking, followed by Stockholm's Neko Health and Ghent-based Aikido; Notion Capital, Accel, Y Combinator, Bpifrance and Balderton backed the most companies on the list.

The age of the scaleup fund.

EQT won the mandate to manage the European Commission's €5 billion Scaleup Europe Fund and a contest is under way to run the UK's £1 billion Scale-Up Fund.

A template for crowding institutional capital into growth rounds, relevant to BNDES-style initiatives in Brazil.

Robinhood Ventures Fund II writes 46 cheques into Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch.

The publicly listed vehicle invested more than US$15 million at US$100,000–600,000 per company, giving retail investors exposure to the batch.

US labour share of GDP falls to a record-low 52.8%.

Asset owners have pulled away from wage earners, consumer confidence is sliding despite GDP growth and record equity markets, and the share of households rated financially vulnerable has ticked up, feeding demand for cash-advance, earned-wage-access and BNPL products.

Robinhood Agents and Airwallex push "bring your own agent" into finance.

Robinhood is rolling out named trading agents in limit-capped agentic accounts after 150,000 power users opened such accounts since May; Airwallex now lets Claude, Cursor or any MCP client read balances, prepare FX and issue cards within set permissions.

Both launch to sophisticated users via MCP first, then productise for the mass market.

NVIDIA's Kumo Tabular targets XGBoost's hold on credit and fraud models.

The tabular foundation model predicts missing values in a table in a single pass with no training and ranks first on the four main tabular benchmarks against tuned gradient-boosted trees.

Lenders' risk teams could move from months-long model builds to asking far more questions of the same data.

OpenAI's Dots and the agentic internet.

Tibo Sottiaux, who leads ChatGPT and Codex, on the launch of the Dots personal-agent platform, why most internet actions will soon be taken by agents, and why hand-built agent loops are a passing phase.

Payments in Full assesses McKinsey's 2026 Global Payments Report

, agreeing with the revenue-growth-to-5%-by-2030 call and finding the agentic-checkout framework (wholesale first, retail scaling only after 2035) the most useful chapter.

"Fintech Is Dead. What comes next?"

Simon Taylor's thesis that mobile, cloud and APIs are now table stakes and the next phase is AI models making decisions, tokens recording value and agents becoming customers.