As of this week, credit is being rewired in three directions at once: Stripe is buying its merchant lender, European regulators are strapping affordability checks onto buy-now-pay-later, and Goldman Sachs is helping Apex Group tokenise an entire real estate fund. If you still thought of lending as a sleepy backwater, this week disabused you. The week credit stopped pretending to be boring There are weeks in fintech when the lending headlines are a drip. This was not one of th

Stripe is buying Parafin, FedEx and Stripe are turning parcel data into credit signals, ID Finance pulled in 545 million euros for Plazo, and PropTech tokenisation stack grew. Here is why SME lending just rewrote its own rules.

Franklin Templeton and its alternative-credit arm, Benefit Street Partners (BSP), have folded the investment team and a seed portfolio of Encina Lender Finance into their asset-backed finance business, adding 14 investment professionals and roughly $480m of existing commitments. The move pushes BSP into consumer and commercial lender finance, a corner of private markets that large managers are racing to build out as the broader asset-backed finance market swells toward an est

As of this week, embedded lending stopped looking like a side quest for fintech and started looking like the main event, with Berlin's finmid pulling in another €17 million, Grab circling Atome for $1.49 billion, and the Philippines central bank bracing for a BNPL boom. The Deal That Set the Tone The week opened with a very European flavour of ambition. On 5 October 2026, Berlin-based finmid announced a €17 million Series A extension, taking its total funding to €52 million.