Retail commerce company Shopify unveiled a slew of announcements this week, one of which caught our eye. The Canada-based fintech joined forces with cryptocurrency payments processor CoinPayments to enable merchants to use crypto payments processing.

When Spotify merchants opt to add CoinPayments to their point of sale, they will be able to accept 1,800 cryptocurrencies. Transacting in cryptocurrencies not only reduce fees for sellers, it will also facilitate cross-border payments, enabling them to increase their global customer base.

CoinPayments was founded in 2013 and has since facilitated more than $5 billion in total transactions. The Cayman Islands-based company’s crypto acceptance platform enables merchants to accept more than 1,900 altcoins and charges 0.5% per transaction, much less than the standard 2% to 3% transaction fee typically charged with debit and credit card transactions.

“The combination of Shopify and CoinPayments is unstoppable in the payments industry,” said CoinPayments CEO Jason Butcher. “By bringing our easy-to-use global crypto payments platform together with Shopify’s extensive merchant base, we look forward to delivering a seamless process for anyone looking to do business using cryptocurrencies. As leaders in ecommerce and crypto payments, our combined expertise reflects the future of business transactions.”

Among Shopify’s other releases this month are:

• Shopify Balance, a business bank account, card, and financial management tools
• Shop Pay Installments, a buy now, pay later option for customers
• Local Delivery, a tool to help online merchants with local delivery logistics
• Shop, a direct-to-consumer app and personal shopping assistant to facilitate purchasing and order tracking

Shopify has also added a handful of products to help merchants struggling in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The company recently added a quick website launch to help brick-and-mortar stores go digital, and also added the option to help merchants collect tips and sell gift cards.

As the gig economy grows, so do opportunities for banks and fintechs.

That’s what’s on the mind of Oxygen, a challenger bank built for freelancers. The San Francisco-based startup, which recently launched its mobile app, is now collaborating with CPI Card Group to create a debit card option for its users.

Oxygen tapped CPI Card Group for its “advanced print design services” in hopes to better connect with its unique target market made up of freelancers, digital natives, and small businesses. At launch, two vertical card designs will be available. Both feature a “clean and crisply-designed” look with back-of-card personalization.

“At Oxygen, we understand that the physical brand experience – including everything from the card design to the packaging appearance – matters for our creative, tech-savvy clientele. With CPI’s cost-effective scale and design strengths, we were able to deliver a sleek card to customers in a unique, memorable fashion,” said Oxygen Founder and CEO Hussein Ahmed. “We are pleased to have such a reliable secure card provider and are thrilled to offer customers an eye-catching debit card that echoes their drive, ambition and lifestyle.”

Oxygen was founded in 2018 and caters to the growing set of customers that rely on gig work and multiple income streams to pay their bills. The challenger bank offers both personal and business accounts with features including cash-back rewards and virtual cards for personal accounts, as well as accounting tools and the ability to mail checks from within the app for business accounts. Both accounts boast no monthly fees.

Along with its digital capabilities and creative branding, Oxygen differentiates itself with a lending product that works for the self-employed workforce with fluctuating income. Instead of relying on job stability and credit scores to underwrite loans, Oxygen instead looks at a borrower’s historical cashflow to assess risk and repayment capability.

Oxygen and other challenger banks such as Wollit and Xolo are among the growing number of players eager to serve the gig economy. These customers have traditionally been ignored by larger traditional financial institutions, which haven’t seen the value in serving clients with unpredictable income. This may change in a post-coronavirus economy, however, as more of the population earns their paycheck with freelance work rather than a full-time job.

European wealth management firm Raisin is bringing its Savings-as-a-Service solution to the U.S. The new offering, the first U.S.-based product from the Berlin-based fintech, will enable banks and credit unions to provide private-banking services typically not available to the average banking customer.

Foremost, FIs that partner with Raisin will be able to leverage the company’s technology to quickly build custom retail deposit products. These products include market-linked solutions that enable customers to benefit from a resurgence in economic activity while at the same time providing 100% FDIC deposit insurance up to $250,000. Banks and credit unions can also create deposit products with dynamic features such as laddering, and ones that can be optimized for profitability or other individual preferences.

“Given the current economic uncertainty, financial institutions want a share of the big increase in deposits, but many don’t have the technological tools to optimize or meet customers’ current needs,” Raisin U.S. CEO Paul Kodel explained. He said that in order for banks and credit unions to help rekindle the economy, they will need to be able to offer a wider range of solutions. “Banks need affordable products that enable customers to stabilize their assets now, and then also grow with a recovery,” Kodel said.

Raisin Communications Manager Maggie Bell noted that the company’s new offering comes at a time of increased opportunity in deposit products for financial institutions. She cited data from the Federal Reserve indicating that while commercial bank deposit market volume had grown by more than 10% since the beginning of the year, deposits spiked from $13.5 trillion to nearly $15 trillion between the second week of March and the third week of April. Additionally, deposits could represent a significant part of the refinancing mix for banks, Bell wrote, “especially as bonds have become more cost-intensive within the last two months.”

With 92 partner banks, more than 260,000 customers and €23 billion in assets invested, Raisin was founded in 2012. The company provides access to guaranteed deposit products from across Europe and, in Germany, offers diversified, cost-effective exchange-traded fund (ETF) portfolios and pension products. Named a top five European fintech by the FinTech 50 awards, Raisin is backed by investors including Goldman Sachs, PayPal Ventures, Thrive Capital, and Index Ventures.

Blame it on the halving?

This week the Wall Street Journal reported that JPMorgan had established an official banking relationship with two cryptocurrency exchanges: Gemini and long-time Finovate alum Coinbase. JPMorgan is not going all-in on crypto; the agreement calls for the bank to process only the exchange’s fiat-based transactions. Nevertheless, the partnership is a notable milestone in the relationship between big banks and the bitcoin business.

The news is interesting for a variety of reasons. For one, JPMorgan CEO and Jamie Dimon has been a notorious critic of, if not all cryptocurrencies, then at least bitcoin. In 2017, Dimon called bitcoin “a fraud,” adding that bitcoin is “worse than tulip bulbs. It won’t end well. Someone is going to get killed.” He has since moderated his critique, and his bank, like most other major financial institutions, are piloting various initiatives that use bitcoin’s underlying blockchain technology – even if not embracing bitcoin itself. That said, last year the bank announced the creation of a JPM Coin that can be used as a digital token to instantly settle transactions. The initiative was the first real-world use of a digital coin by a major bank in the U.S.

The partnership news also comes just after the bitcoin halving, in which the reward for mining BTC transactions is reduced by 50% in order to manage supply. This week’s process is the third in the cryptocurrency’s history; bitcoin was halved first in 2012 and again in 2016. After the most recent halving four years ago, bitcoin saw significant price appreciation, climbing from approximately $650 that July to nearly $20,000 a year and a half later. And while the halving has helped draw renewed attention to cryptocurrencies as alternative stores of value, few anticipate bitcoin making the same kind of post-halving run this time around as it did in 2016.

Whether or not JP Morgan will seek out other customers in the cryptocurrency industry remains to be seen. One advantage both Gemini and Coinbase have is that they are among the most heavily regulated cryptocurrency exchanges in the U.S. Both have earned BitLicenses from the New York State Department of Financial Services, and are registered as money services with FinCEN. These may prove to be high hurdles for many other crypto businesses.

Coinbase made its Finovate debut in 2014 at our west coast conference. Founded two years earlier, the company has raised more than $547 million in funding, and had an estimated global revenue of approximately $520 million in 2018 according to Reuters. Since inception, Coinbase has facilitated the exchange of $150 billion in cryptocurrencies, and served more than 30 million customers in 102 countries.