In This Newsletter
Change 2026 Summit
CME vs. CFTC: The Fight Over Perpetuals
IPOs and M&A: An Active Summer for FinTech Dealmaking
Change 2026 Summit
Milken Institute FinTech Director Nicole Valentine joined 35 leaders in FinTech and AI this month for the Change 2026 Summit on Necker Island. The gathering, organized annually by FinTech Investor Jimmy Ku in partnership with Virgin Unite, Richard Branson's nonprofit foundation, brought together founders, investors, and researchers to explore a shared question: How can FinTech and AI expand opportunity and move money, credit, and capital to people who have historically been locked out of the financial system?
The event featured participants at the intersection of FinTech, AI, and philanthropy, including:
- Nick Allardice, president and CEO of GiveDirectly. The nonprofit uses mobile money to deliver unconditional cash transfers directly to people living in poverty, bypassing intermediaries that typically sit between donors and recipients. GiveDirectly has delivered more than $1 billion in transfers and built one of the largest datasets supporting direct cash as an antipoverty tool. Its research catalogs more than 30 randomized and nonexperimental studies, including a 2025 finding that a one-time $1,000 transfer to Kenyan households cut infant mortality by nearly half.
- Dean Karlan, the Frederic Esser Nemmers Distinguished Professor of Economics and Finance at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, the founder of Innovations for Poverty Action, and, from 2022 to 2025, chief economist at the US Agency for International Development. His research considers the effects of AI and mobile banking on household finance, savings, and social protection programs across dozens of developing countries.
- Suzy Ferreira, founder of Dinie, an embedded lending platform that enables Brazilian e-commerce and payments platforms to extend working capital to small businesses that traditional banks have largely failed to serve. The company focuses on Brazil's roughly 17 million small and medium-sized businesses, which the International Finance Corporation estimates face a credit gap of $483 billion.
- Beth Ferreira, general partner at Serena Williams’ Starfire Ventures, an early-stage firm investing across FinTech, health care, and consumer AI with a mandate to improve the lives of everyday Americans. The firm’s investments include FinTech platforms such as Esusu.
Discussions at the summit considered how the same infrastructure innovations reshaping consumer and small-business finance—instant payments, mobile-first distribution, data-driven underwriting—are increasingly becoming the infrastructure of philanthropy, financial inclusion, and humanitarian assistance.
CME vs. CFTC: The Fight Over Perpetuals
Perpetual futures arrived in the US market this spring, and they may soon face their first major challenge in court. Perpetual futures, or “perps,” track the price of an underlying asset such as Bitcoin, oil, or gold but never expire, unlike traditional futures contracts, which settle on a fixed date. Traders can hold positions indefinitely, and periodic funding payments exchanged between long and short holders keep the contract price tethered to the spot market. Whether that funding mechanism makes a perp a swap or a future is the subject of recent litigation between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
On May 29, the CFTC approved Kalshi's Bitcoin perpetual futures contract. CFTC Chairman Michael Selig, currently the agency's only confirmed commissioner, simultaneously issued a policy statement permitting all designated contract markets to self-certify similar crypto perpetual contracts without further commission review. The same day, the CFTC also cleared Coinbase to allow US investors to access its own foreign perpetual futures pegged to cryptocurrencies, Reuters reports.
The product has become one of Kalshi's fastest-growing lines, with trading volume reported at $16.1 billion as of early July, and the company is reportedly in advanced discussions with the CFTC to extend perpetuals beyond crypto into gold, foreign exchange, and energy commodities. Polymarket has signaled similar ambitions to enter the space.
CME Group moved to stop the momentum of perpetual contracts on June 18, suing the CFTC and Selig in federal court. The complaint argues that Kalshi's perpetual contracts meet the Dodd-Frank Act's definition of a swap rather than a future, a classification that would subject them to substantially heavier oversight. Shares of CME, Cboe, and Intercontinental Exchange fell on the news, signaling that investors are pricing in real competitive risk from new trading venues, MarketScreener reports. Perpetuals and innovation in derivatives market structure are rapidly becoming a new frontier in FinTech policy discussions. Payments processor Block was originally part of the consortium when talks began in April but has since exited the deal.
IPOs and M&A: An Active Summer for FinTech Dealmaking
The FinTech initial public offering (IPO) pipeline is filling out. Plaid is in early talks with banks about a US listing, following a February funding round that valued the company at $8 billion, up from $6.1 billion the previous year. Kraken confidentially filed for an IPO in November 2025 and is targeting a second-half 2026 listing at a reported $20 billion valuation, while Revolut is reportedly preparing a 2026 public listing at a $75 billion valuation that would make it Europe's most valuable FinTech to go public.
In mergers and acquisitions (M&A), Stripe and private equity firm Advent International submitted a joint $53.4 billion cash bid for PayPal, offering $60.50 a share, a 28 percent premium to PayPal's prior closing price, backed by roughly $50 billion in financing led by JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley. Under the proposed structure, Stripe and Advent would jointly own PayPal, pairing Stripe's Bridge stablecoin infrastructure with PayPal's PYUSD stablecoin and its 100 million-user Venmo franchise.
Reuters reported on July 16 that PayPal's board viewed the offer as undervaluing the company and was weighing financing certainty, regulatory hurdles, the deal timeline, and price. As of July 20, the board had formally rejected the bid, with some analysts pegging fair value as high as $70 to $115 a share, compared with the $60.50 offer. The two sides are expected to continue discussions, and PayPal's July 28 earnings report, which will show whether its core checkout business is stabilizing after a weak 2026 outlook, is likely to shape whatever comes next.