JasonMikula

Most weeks, the story breaks in San Francisco or Washington. A banking-as-a-service partner freezes deposits. A regulator drops a consent order at 4 p.m. on a Friday. A fintech raises a round at a valuation nobody can square with its revenue. And a few hours later, an inbox in the Netherlands lights up - because the person tens of thousands of bankers, founders, lawyers, and examiners trust to explain what actually happened is sitting outside Amsterdam, six time zones from the wreckage.

That person is Jason Mikula, and Fintech Business Weekly is his newsletter. It reaches more than 90,000 subscribers with a promise that sounds quaint until you notice how rare it has become: cover banking, fintech, and crypto without fear or favor. No funding-round cheerleading. No press-release stenography. When a deal looks shaky, he says so, footnoted, with the regulatory filing attached.

He did not arrive at this by accident. Mikula spent more than a decade inside the machine he now reports on - building and scaling consumer lending businesses at Enova in Chicago, LendUp in San Francisco, and Goldman Sachs's Marcus in New York. He worked the unglamorous middle: customer acquisition, marketing, product, the technology that decides who gets a loan and at what price. He is fond of admitting that when he first walked into Enova, he barely understood how banking worked. So he taught himself, on the job, one credit-risk model at a time.

The pandemic project that became an institution

Fintech Business Weekly started in 2020 for an almost sentimental reason. Mikula had moved to the Netherlands a few years earlier for personal reasons, and the pandemic dropped a second wall around an already-distant desk. The newsletter began as a way to keep a professional network alive while the world locked down - a reason to email smart people and have them email back.

It filled a hole he kept tripping over. The serious outlets ignored the plumbing - the bank-fintech partnerships, the middleware layers, the omnibus accounts - because the plumbing is boring until it floods. The tech press, meanwhile, treated every funding announcement like a coronation. Mikula planted his flag in the gap: long, technical, skeptical analysis of how money actually moves between a bank charter and an app.

The line is more than a slogan. His whole thesis is that the bank-fintech world punishes dabblers. Banks that rent out their charter without scaling oversight get burned. Middleware players handed program-management duties they can't carry get burned. Fintechs that treat a banking license as a feature rather than an obligation get burned. He has watched all three happen and written each one up in detail.

Writing the book, then watching it come true

In 2023 he published Banking as a Service: Opportunities, Challenges & Risks of New Banking Business Models. It was a best-seller in its corner of the industry and won awards, but its real luck was timing. He framed the architecture - embedded finance as the "what," banking-as-a-service as the "how" - just before the model was stress-tested in public.

Then Synapse collapsed. The middleware provider's failure stranded customer funds and exposed reconciliation breakdowns that, by Mikula's account, were unprecedented even against the wreckage of crypto bankruptcies. Ledgers that should have matched, didn't. Money that should have been findable, wasn't. The industry's worst-case footnote became its front page, and the analyst who had mapped the fault lines in advance became required reading. When the dust moved, the whole sector refreshed his Substack.

The podcast, the stage, the second screen

The writing is only half of it. Since 2022 he has hosted the Fintech Business Podcast - 117 episodes and counting - including a recurring "Fintech Recap" with Alex Johnson of Fintech Takes, where the two trade dry, knowing autopsies of the week's news. He turns up on conference stages from FinovateFall to Fintech Surge, and on the other end of the line for banks, fintechs, technology vendors, investors, and, yes, regulatory agencies that want a read on where the next crack is forming.

What makes the whole operation work is the angle of approach. He is not a journalist who learned finance, and he is not a banker who learned to write. He is both, which is why his pieces carry the texture of someone who has actually sat in the meetings - and the distance of someone who no longer has to be polite about them. The geography helps. From outside Amsterdam, he is close enough to care and far enough to be honest.

There is a retired Peace Corps volunteer somewhere in that résumé, and a University of Chicago education, and a Signal handle he hands to sources the way other reporters hand out business cards. He calls himself, with a straight face, a "2-bit amateur wannabe reporter who literally wrote the book on BaaS." The joke works because both halves are true, and because the people he covers know exactly which half to take seriously.

The bet underneath all of it is simple and a little stubborn: that an industry built on trust deserves at least one chronicler who isn't selling anything. So far, ninety thousand inboxes a week agree.