FinTech Weekly · Author
Jan Kus
Entrepreneur, Speaker & Lecturer
Jan Kus is co-founder and CEO of Railslove, a Cologne-based agency for web applications and digital products, and of hack.institute, which brings creative communities together with corporates through hackathons, innovation events and workshops. Together with the Railslove team he created the FinTech Weekly information platform. FinTech and Open Banking are his core passions, alongside building technologies that enable automated financial services. He is also the owner of the venture capital firm hackers & thinkers and a founding member of Dingfabrik, one of Germany's first fablabs. Jan works as a speaker and moderator on FinTech, Open Banking and innovation topics, and has been a lecturer at TH Cologne since 2012. As a community activist he organizes meetups and hackathons to promote entrepreneurship and digital innovation.
Articles
Europe's Payment Stack, Honestly
Instant payments, payee checks, a new rulebook and its own wallet are landing between 2025 and 2029. Whether Europe actually ow...
Payments Now Arrive in Seconds. Getting Scammed Money Back Still Depends on Where You Live
Fast payments can cross borders more easily than rules for resolving disputes.
Countries Are Wiring Their Payment Systems Together. Nobody Is Building One Global Rail
Cross-border payments may depend on links between national systems, not one global network.
Payments Got Fast. The Fight Is Now Over Who Controls the Rails
How fast payments, public infrastructure and regulation are reshaping financial competition.
Wero Is Taking Over iDEAL. Europe's Sovereign Checkout Finally Gets Real Volume.
EPI has started moving Dutch online payments from iDEAL to Wero. In Germany, Wero still struggles to win merchants. In the Neth...
Verification of Payee Is One Year Old. Instant Payments Are Still Testing Europe.
One year after Verification of Payee went live in the euro area, the consumer check works, but corporates are opting out at sca...
Your AI Agent Wants to Move Your Money. Wall Street Said No.
America's largest banks are drawing a hard line around autonomous access to customer accounts. Europe is testing a different mo...
Fintech's Second Act: From Disruption to Infrastructure
Fintech is no longer judged mainly by how well it challenges banks from the outside. It is judged by whether it can run as regu...
Europe Agreed on Its New Payment Rules Ten Months Ago. Not One of Them Applies Yet.
2026 was supposed to be the year fintech got its new rulebook. Most of it is agreed, delayed or stuck, while the rules already ...
Banks Spent a Decade Building Apps. Now the Fight for the Customer Is Back in the Text Inbox.
RCS is turning the humble text message into a verified, app-like channel — and banks are being pushed back into an inbox they t...
Europe's Fintechs Talk About Sovereignty. Most of Them Still Run on American Clouds.
DORA, the Data Act, a proposed Cloud and AI Development Act, Wero and the digital euro all point in the same direction: Europe ...
EBICS vs. PSD2: Europe Built Two Bank Interfaces. They Were Never Meant to Compete.
Open banking was supposed to make old bank channels obsolete. Eight years after PSD2, corporates still move their money over EB...
BlackRock Says AI Agents Will Run on Stablecoins. The Agents Have Not Shown Up Yet.
BlackRock's new paper on the "machine-native economy" argues that autonomous AI agents will need stablecoins and tokenised comp...
Europe's Central Banks Want Stablecoin Reserves Out of Bank Deposits. Here Is Why.
In their response to the Commission's MiCA review, the ECB and the EU's national central banks ask Brussels to drop the rule fo...
The ECB Just Answered Tokenisation's Hardest Question: What Do You Pay With?
With Pontes, live since 21 September, banks can settle tokenised securities in central bank money for the first time. The techn...