Finance

By a 10-2 vote, the central bank’s Federal Open Market Committee lowered its benchmark overnight borrowing rate to a range of 3.75%-4%.
In addition to the rate move, the Fed announced that it would be ending the reduction of its asset purchases – a process known as quantitative tightening – on Dec 1.
The statement reiterated concerns that policymakers have over the labor market, saying that “downside risks to employment rose in recent months.”

US Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell speaks during a press conference at the end of a Monetary Policy Committee meeting in Washington, DC, on Oct. 29, 2025.
Jim Watson | AFP | Getty Images

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday approved its second straight interest rate cut, though Chair Jerome Powell rattled markets when he threw doubt on whether another reduction is coming in December.
By a 10-2 vote, the central bank’s Federal Open Market Committee lowered its benchmark overnight borrowing rate to a range of 3.75%-4%. In addition to the rate move, the Fed announced that it would be ending the reduction of its asset purchases – a process known as quantitative tightening – on Dec 1.

Governor Stephen Miran again cast a dissenting vote, preferring the Fed move more quickly with a half-point cut. Kansas City Fed President Jeffrey Schmid joined Miran in dissenting but for the opposite reason – he preferred the Fed not cut at all. Miran is an appointee of President Donald Trump, who has pushed hard on the committee to lower rates quickly.
The rate also sets a benchmark for a variety of consumer products such as auto loans, mortgages and credit cards.
The post-meeting statement did not provide any direction on what the committee’s plans are for December. At the September meeting, officials indicated the likelihood of three total cuts this year. The Fed meets once more in December.

Powell, however, cautioned against assuming that a rate cut is a sure thing at the next meeting.
“In the committee’s discussions at this meeting, there were strongly differing views about how to proceed in December,” Powell said during his post-meeting news conference. “A further reduction in the policy rate at the December meeting is not a foregone conclusion. Far from it.”

He later added that there is “a growing chorus” among the 19 Fed officials to “at least wait a cycle” before cutting again. Traders lowered odds for a December cut to 67% from 90% a day ago, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch.
Stocks, which had been higher after the initial decision was released, turned lower on the chair’s comments. Major averages slowly came back during the session with reporters.
The reduction came even though the Fed essentially has been flying blind lately on economic data.
Other than the consumer price index release last week, the government has suspended all data collection and reports, meaning such key measures as nonfarm payrolls, retail sales and a plethora of other macro data is unavailable.
In the post-meeting statement, the committee acknowledged the uncertainty accompanying the lack of data, qualifying the way it categorized broad economic conditions.
“Available indicators suggest that economic activity has been expanding at a moderate pace. Job gains have slowed this year, and the unemployment rate has edged up but remained low through August; more recent indicators are consistent with these developments,” the statement said. “Inflation has moved up since earlier in the year and remains somewhat elevated.”
Each of those characterizations represented tweaks from the September statement. The most significant change was the view on broad economic activity. In September, the FOMC said activity had moderated.
The statement reiterated concerns that policymakers have over the labor market, saying that “downside risks to employment rose in recent months.”
Even before the shutdown, evidence had begun to build that while layoffs have been contained, the pace of hiring had flattened. At the same time, inflation has held considerably above the Fed’s 2% annual goal. The CPI report last week, released because of its importance to Social Security cost-of-living adjustments, showed the annual rate at 3%, pushed by higher energy costs as well as several items with direct or indirect links to Trump’s tariffs.
The Fed tries to strike a balance between full employment and stable prices. Officials lately, though, have said they see a slightly higher risk posed by the jobs picture. Along with the interest rate decision, the Fed said its process of reducing the amount of bonds it holds on the central bank’s $6.6 trillion balance sheet will end.
The program, also known as QT, had shaved some $2.3 trillion off the Fed’s portfolio of Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities. Instead of reinvesting maturing proceeds from the securities, the Fed has been allowing them to roll off the balance sheet at a limited level each month. However, recent signs of some tightening in short-term lending markets have raised concern that the roll-off has gone far enough.
An implementation note accompanying the decision indicated the Fed will be rolling proceeds from maturing mortgage securities into shorter-term bills.
Markets recently had begun anticipating that the Fed would end QT either in October or by the end of the year. The Fed expanded its holdings during the Covid crisis, pushing the balance sheet from just over $4 trillion to close to $9 trillion. Powell has said that while the Fed found it necessary to shrink its holdings, he did not foresee a return to pre-pandemic levels.
In fact, Evercore ISI analyst Krishna Guha said he could foresee a scenario where the Fed actually restarts the purchases early in 2026 for “organic growth purposes” as market conditions shift. The Fed rarely eases monetary policy during economic expansions and bull markets in stocks. Major averages, though volatile, have been posting a series of record highs, boosted by further gains in Big Tech stocks and a robust earnings season.
History has shown that the market continues to rise when the Fed does cut under such circumstances. However, easier policy also poses the risk of higher inflation, a condition that forced the Fed into a series of aggressive rate hikes.
Correction: This story has been updated to correct that Jeffrey Schmid is president of the Kansas City Fed, and that the Fed raised interest rates following an inflation spike. More

Federal Reserve Governor Stephen Miran speaks with CNBC during the Invest i America Forum on Oct. 15, 2025.
Aaron Clamage | CNBC

There were two dissenters from the Federal Reserve’s decision to lower the federal funds rate by a quarter percentage point on Wednesday, in two different directions.
Federal Reserve Governor Stephen Miran instead called for a half-point cut, while Kansas City Fed President Jeffrey Schmid voted for no decrease.

“The decision to lower interest rates by 25bps in October was never in doubt, but the unexpected hawkish dissent from a regional Fed president highlights that future moves are becoming more contentious,” said Michael Pearce, deputy chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics. “We expect the Fed to slow the pace of cuts from here.”
Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, called two dissents “unusual,” particularly because one wanted a deeper cut and the other wanted no change.

Kansas City Federal Reserve President Jeffrey Schmid speaking at Jackson Hole on Aug. 22, 2024.
David A. Grogan | CNBC

“[Fed Chair Jerome] Powell will have to use all of his leadership skills to keep Fed leaders moving in the same direction in the months to come,” she said.
It is the second dissent in a row for Miran, who was the sole dissenter during September’s meeting when he called for a half-point rate cut there too. The central bank instead decreased the federal funds rate by 25 basis points, or a quarter percentage point.
Miran joined the Fed in September after being appointed by President Donald Trump and confirmed by the Senate. Schmid voted for the rate decrease in September, despite expressing some doubt about lowering interest rates during a CNBC interview in late August. More

This is a comparison of Wednesday’s Federal Open Market Committee statement with the one issued after the Fed’s previous policymaking meeting in September.
Text removed from the September statement is in red with a horizontal line through the middle.

Text appearing for the first time in the new statement is in red and underlined.
Black text appears in both statements.

Arrows pointing outwards More

Hedge fund HoldCo has emerged from relative obscurity to launch activist investor campaigns against three regional banks: Comerica, Eastern Bank and First Interstate.
Founders Vik Ghei and Misha Zaitzeff tell CNBC exclusively about their next two targets, Columbia Bank and Bank United, and their broader plans to challenge banking CEOs.
The millennial upstarts are bringing activism back to a sector that had been largely immune to it since the 2008 financial crisis. It comes amid a wave of regional bank consolidation.
On Tuesday, after publication of this story, Columbia Bank rose 4.4%, the biggest gainer of the more than 140 banks in the S&P Regional Banking ETF. BankUnited climbed 2.1%.

Misha Zaitzeff and Vik Ghei, founders of HoldCo Asset Management, at their Fort Lauderdale, Florida, offices.
Courtesy: HoldCo

American banks have found an unlikely pair of adversaries in Vik Ghei and Misha Zaitzeff.
Since July, the nine-person hedge fund they run from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, called HoldCo, has challenged lenders with more than $200 billion in combined assets, demanding that they take swift action or face public campaigns to overthrow their boards and fire their CEOs.

The fund notched a victory this month after Comerica, under pressure from HoldCo, agreed to sell itself to rival Fifth Third for $10.9 billion in the biggest bank merger of the year. HoldCo has since announced activist campaigns against two smaller regional lenders, Boston-based Eastern Bank and Billings, Montana-based First Interstate.
A fourth bank is now in their sights, CNBC has learned exclusively: HoldCo plans to launch a proxy battle against Columbia Bank, a lender with $70 billion in assets and 350 branches across Western states, unless it can strike a deal with management.
HoldCo, with $2.6 billion in assets, is bringing back activism to an industry that has largely been insulated from it since the 2008 financial crisis. The demise of bank-specific hedge funds in the post-crisis years and regulatory resistance to mergers meant that underperforming CEOs faced little discipline from the markets until now, according to Ghei and Zaitzeff.
Regional banks have struggled to regain their footing after the 2023 crisis that consumed Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic, leaving them exposed to activists seeking undervalued targets. At the same time, mergers are now viewed as more likely to be approved by regulators in the Trump administration, giving activists like HoldCo a clear exit strategy.
Coming from a hedge fund that few outside of banking circles had heard of, HoldCo’s moves have garnered admiration in some corners of Wall Street, while making them a pariah in others.

Ghei and Zaitzeff say HoldCo has been banned from attending a banking conference held next month outside Miami by Piper Sandler, an investment bank known for advising regionals on mergers. A spokesman for Piper Sandler didn’t have a comment.
The millennial upstarts now find themselves key players in a larger story of industry consolidation. While retail banking is dominated by three giants, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, the country has more than 4,400 banks, and a long-expected merger wave began this year.

Bad incentives

The HoldCo thesis on regional banks is simple: Many are undervalued because their CEOs have put their own interests above that of shareholders, Ghei and Zaitzeff told CNBC in interviews over the past month.
That’s because the CEOs earn millions of dollars more in annual compensation if they grow by acquiring other banks, even if the deals prove disastrous for shareholders, according to the investors. Bank boards mostly operate as rubber stamps for such deals, they say, because directors are often handpicked by the CEOs themselves.
“We’re trying to shame them into doing the right thing,” Ghei, 43, told CNBC. “At some of the banks we own, the CEOs have doubled compensation while their stocks have dramatically underperformed, or even fallen.”
On top of that, some of the investment bankers and research analysts that cater to small and medium banks are complicit, because their firms earn fees from mergers, and shareholders are usually silent because they risk losing management access if they challenge bank leaders, said the HoldCo founders.
“We feel that the way to rectify this is to publicly shame banks and aggressively pursue things like proxy battles,” Ghei said. “CEOs should be fired, and the boards should be fired, because they rolled the dice and lost; there should be consequences.”
Regional banks face pressure to bulk up through mergers to compete with super regionals and megabanks, which have far larger budgets for technology and compliance, according to industry consultants who requested anonymity to speak candidly. Poorly managed firms are more the exception than the rule, they said.

As a group, regional banks have trailed both larger peers and broader stock indexes in recent years, partly because of the hangover from the 2023 tumult. The S&P Regional Banking ETF is still 14% below its 2021 peak, and shares of regional lenders tumbled again this month on concern over a trio of defaults tied to alleged corporate fraud.
In April, after bank stocks plunged in the sell-off sparked by President Donald Trump’s so-called liberation day tariff policies, HoldCo began loading up on shares of beaten-up regionals, including Columbia, Citizens Financial and KeyCorp.
Those bets kick-started their recent round of activism and raised their profile: HoldCo “is quickly becoming a household name in both the regional banking space and the world of activism,” Gordon Haskett analyst Don Bilson wrote in an Oct. 21 research note.
The firm’s rise has rattled executives across the U.S. regional banking landscape; several banks have quietly started reviewing their capital plans in anticipation of possible activist scrutiny, according to the industry advisors who spoke to CNBC.
HoldCo said it now owns more than $1 billion in regional bank shares.

‘Best job in the world’

Over steak dinners, Zoom meetings and phone calls, Ghei and Zaitzeff began private discussions with a succession of bank CEOs in recent months, hoping to persuade them to commit to their shareholder-friendly actions.
When that approach has failed, they’ve gone public, releasing their presentations online and in the pages of The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News.
It’s a playbook more familiar to other sectors including technology, media and health care, where hedge funds far larger than HoldCo have attempted to sway management with public campaigns.
“I wish I could say there’s more nuance involved,” Ghei said. “But you actually need to put the CEO’s job at risk and make this very legitimate case that you can defeat them.”
HoldCo’s campaign against Columbia Bank is one of the firm’s largest bets yet. Its position is worth roughly $150 million and makes up about 1.9% of the company’s voting shares.
In a 71-page presentation, the activist said that while CEO Clint Stein quadrupled Columbia Bank’s assets through two acquisitions since taking over in 2020, the bank’s shares have fallen 36% during his tenure.
At the same time, Stein’s most recent pay package rose 80% to $6.3 million from his 2021 compensation, the year he began announcing the takeovers.
Columbia Bank declined to comment for this article.

“Being a bank CEO is the best job in the world,” Ghei said. “You have incredible job security because shareholders never show their face and the board feels like they work for you. Everyone’s happy to meet you, and you have a bunch of investment bankers who want to make fees off of you.”
Stein and his chief operating officer flew to Fort Lauderdale in August to meet the activists at a steakhouse two blocks from HoldCo’s offices on bustling Las Olas Boulevard, according to Ghei and Zaitzeff.
Their meal was amicable enough, but the tone changed afterward when it became clear that HoldCo would pursue a proxy battle unless a deal was struck, meaning they would aim to replace directors with their own picks, with the ultimate goal of replacing Stein, according to the HoldCo duo.
In late September, the HoldCo founders delivered their presentation to board members, slide by slide, over a Zoom call.
HoldCo wants Columbia to swear off from doing more acquisitions, instead using excess cash to buy back their own cheap stock for five years, after which they should explore selling themselves to a larger bank.
“They are honestly accomplished people, but not in banking,” Ghei said of the Columbia directors. “I don’t think they understood how bad the transactions they did were.”

‘Don’t take it personally’

The HoldCo partners said they developed their appetite for confrontation in the rough-and-tumble world of distressed debt.
Ghei, a former Goldman Sachs analyst covering financial firms, had figured out a way to make money picking through the remains of banks that had collapsed in the 2008 financial crisis.
Then an analyst at Owl Creek, a hedge fund that specialized in the debt of failed companies, Ghei realized that bonds from the parent company of Washington Mutual were trading at deep discounts because everybody assumed that they wouldn’t be repaid.
But they were ultimately repaid at full price, plus interest, making hundreds of millions of dollars for Owl Creek, according to an American Banker profile of Ghei from 2013.
Ghei would repeat that trade at another Manhattan hedge fund, Tricadia, where he met Zaitzeff, a Brown University computer science graduate who ran models of new financial instruments called subprime collateralized debt obligations.
Tricadia made millions by both creating subprime CDOs and then separately betting that other CDOs would fail, similar to trades from Goldman Sachs and others chronicled in the Michael Lewis book “The Big Short.”
The men immediately hit it off, and in 2011 started their own firm out of “crummy offices” in New York’s Financial District, says Ghei. They called it HoldCo because of their early trades acquiring the debt of 70 holding companies whose banking subsidiaries had failed in the crisis.

Ghei and Zaitzeff say they would spend most of their waking hours over the next 14 years together, angering their wives with their singular focus on batting around ideas for investments until they came to consensus.
“We’re friends, first and foremost,” Zaitzeff, 42, said. “We spend a lot of time debating investments, but we don’t take it personally.”
They believed the bonds of dead banks had value because of assets like tax refunds on corporate ledgers. But the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which took over the failed banks’ subsidiaries, believed it was entitled to the assets, not HoldCo.
So HoldCo battled the FDIC in bankruptcy courts around the country, winning enough of the time on the strength of their arguments to develop a reputation as scrappy fighters.
By 2013, the pair had raised their first institutional funds from an endowment; word of mouth then spread, and they eventually garnered investment from about 20 universities, hospitals and family offices in a series of ever-larger funds.

One battle after another

Their go-anywhere investment style led them to buy the distressed debt of a New Orleans-based lender named First NBC Bank in 2016; the bank had been established a decade earlier to help the city rebuild after Hurricane Katrina.
After realizing that First NBC would soon be undercapitalized, HoldCo shorted the lender and published letters revealing their concerns. The bank’s auditor resigned and the institution was seized by the FDIC. In 2023, the former First NBC CEO Ashton Ryan was sentenced to 14 years in prison for bank fraud.
It was experiences like that led Ghei and Zaitzeff to their dim view of bank management. By proving to themselves that they could identify situations where the market wasn’t functioning like it should, the HoldCo partners had the conviction to take on regional banks this year.

First NBC Bank Chief Executive Ashton Ryan, center.
Source: Nasdaq

Banks didn’t understand the scope of HoldCo’s ambitions at first, the partners said.
“People were surprisingly nice to us after Comerica,” Zaitzeff said. “When we went after Comerica, they viewed it as us going after a bigger bank. But a lot of regional banks view Eastern and First Interstate as much more like them.”
Bank CEOs may believe that if they don’t engage with HoldCo, they can avoid activist campaigns, Zaitzeff said. The activists believe that’s why they were blacklisted from a recent banking conference.
But the hedge fund has purchased almost 5% of the shares of BankUnited, a Miami Lakes, Florida-based lender with $35.5 billion in assets, without speaking to management, according to the pair.
HoldCo plans to wage a proxy battle unless they can come to an agreement with management over increasing shareholder returns. BankUnited didn’t immediately return messages seeking comment.
On Tuesday, after publication of this story, Columbia Bank rose 4.4%, the biggest gainer of the more than 140 banks in the S&P Regional Banking ETF. BankUnited climbed 2.1%.
The investors, convinced of the righteousness of their position, say they also plan to publish regular dispatches about banks destroying shareholder value, even when they don’t hold a stake in the firm.
“The problem is that for so many years there’s been no accountability, and the world has gone insane,” Ghei said. “We’re trying to call out bad decisions and incent them into doing the right thing.”
— CNBC’s Gabriel Cortes contributed to this report. More

Markets are assigning a nearly 100% probability that the Federal Open Market Committee will approve a second consecutive quarter percentage point at its meeting this week.
Beyond that, policymakers are likely to debate the future path of reductions, the challenges posed by a lack of economic data and the timetable for ending the Fed’s balance sheet runoff.
“There’s dissent between people who want to cut now, and people who want to wait and see a bit more,” said former Fed official Bill English.

Jerome Powell, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, during the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank Fall meetings at the IMF headquarters in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, Oct. 16, 2025.
Kent Nishimura | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The easy part for the Federal Reserve on Wednesday will be announcing an interest rate cut when it wraps up its two-day policy meeting. The hard part will be taking care of other details that are presenting substantial challenges to policymaking these days.
Markets are assigning a nearly 100% probability that the Federal Open Market Committee will approve a second consecutive quarter percentage point, or 25 basis point, reduction in the federal funds rate. The overnight lending benchmark is currently targeted between 4%-4.25%.

Beyond that, policymakers are likely to debate, among other things, the future path of reductions, the challenges posed by a lack of economic data and the timetable for ending the reduction in its asset portfolio of Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities.
Underlining all of those deliberations will be a growing divergence of opinion over what the future holds for monetary policy.
“They are at a moment in the policy cycle where there’s genuine disagreement between people who are thinking we will probably cut rates but I’m not ready to cut again just yet, and people who think even though there’s risks, it’s time to do more now,” said Bill English, a Yale professor and the Fed’s former director of monetary affairs. “There’s dissent between people who want to cut now, and people who want to wait and see a bit more.”

Judging by recent statements and prevailing Wall Street sentiment, newly appointed Governor Stephen Miran is likely to dissent in favor of a bigger cut, as he did at the September FOMC meeting.
At the same time, regional Presidents Beth Hammack of Cleveland, Lorie Logan of Dallas and Jeffrey Schmid of St. Louis have expressed reluctance to go much further on cuts, though it’s far from clear whether they will vote against a cut this week. Only Miran, who wanted a half-point reduction, actually dissented in what was an 11-1 committee vote last month to cut by a quarter point.

Left to try to straddle the difference will be Chair Jerome Powell, who in a recent speech gave an implied nod to an October cut when he expressed worry over the state of the labor market.
Investors will look to the central bank chief, who will leave the position in May 2026, for guidance on the prevailing sentiment.
“I would expect him to try to walk a middle ground, not tip his hand necessarily, on December,” English said, referring to the next policy meeting after this one. “I don’t think he wants to be locked into a rate cut in December. But on the other hand, it does seem like he’s worried about the labor market and about the outlook for real activity, so he doesn’t want to come across as hawkish.”
Markets currently also are pricing in a near-certainty of a December reduction, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch tool, so it would take a lot do dissuade Wall Street from anticipating more Fed easing.
Worries about jobs
One big reason officials are in the mood to lower is concern over the labor market. Even with an absence of data, there are clear signs that inflation is slowing even if layoffs, judging by state-level jobless claims submissions that are still ongoing despite the federal shutdown, do not appear to be accelerating.
In fact, worries over jobs could keep the Fed cutting well into 2026, said Luke Tilley, chief economist at Wilmington Trust.
“We expect 25 [basis points Wednesday] and then again in December, and then again in January and March and April,” Tilley said. “Then that would bring them down to what we think of as the neutral range to 2.75% to 3%.”

Fed officials in September indicated, through the “dot plot” of individual members’ expectations, that they won’t get to a rate that neither pushes nor restrains growth — the so-called “neutral” rate — until 2027, and even then it will be a quarter point above where Tilley sees.
However, he thinks the Fed won’t have any choice but to react to labor market weakness, particularly as it poses a challenge to surprisingly strong economic growth seen in the second half of this year.
Worries over jobs have taken more of the Fed’s focus even as inflation remains well above the central bank’s 2% target. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last week, in the only official data release during the shutdown, that the annual inflation rate as measured by the consumer price index was stuck at 3% in September.
Lack of data challenge
Outside of the CPI report, central bankers face the additional challenge of the data blackout that has accompanied the government shutdown.
“It’s hard to make policy to achieve two goals … when you’re not getting data about about at least one of them,” Tilley said, referring to the Fed’s dual mandate to maximize employment and keep prices stable, and the absence of the September nonfarm payrolls report due to the shutdown.
“I expect that to be communicated as more uncertainty about the path forward, that they have to be ready to pivot and hold rates, if need be, or to reduce them faster when they finally do get data,” Tilley said.
Finally, markets will be looking for more definitive answers on when the Fed will stop reducing its $6.6 trillion balance sheet, most of which is in Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities. Nicknamed quantitative tightening, or QT, the process has entailed allowing proceeds from maturing securities to roll off rather than being reinvested as usual.
In a recent speech, Powell indicated the time is getting closer to where the Fed will want to stop QT. While financial conditions are largely still solid, there have been some small signs lately that short-term markets are tightening up. With the Fed’s overnight funding facility nearly drained, officials are likely to signal this week that QT is in its final stages.
Market commentary was split over whether the Fed will announce the actual end of the program, or signal a future date when it will cease.
“There are signs that they’re getting close to bottom, so to speak, in terms of getting through ample reserves and actually getting some tightness and liquidity. So that’s why I would expect an announcement, if not action,” Tilley said. More

PayPal and OpenAI have signed an agreement to embed the payments wallet into ChatGPT.
Starting next year PayPal buyers and sellers will be able to complete transactions through the AI tool.
PayPal CEO Alex Chriss told CNBC the agreement means customer protections for users including package tracking and dispute resolution.

Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

PayPal has signed a deal with OpenAI to have its digital wallet embedded into ChatGPT so users can pay for items found through the leading consumer AI tool, the company told CNBC exclusively.
Shares of the company jumped as much as 14% in premarket trading on the news.

The agreement, sealed over the weekend, means that starting next year, both sides of PayPal’s ecosystem can plug into ChatGPT: PayPal users can purchase items through the AI platform, and its merchants can sell on it, with their inventory listed there, according to PayPal CEO Alex Chriss.
“We’ve got hundreds of millions of loyal PayPal wallet holders who now will be able to click the ‘Buy with PayPal button’ on ChatGPT and have a safe and secure checkout experience,” Chriss said in an interview.
The move makes PayPal an early part of OpenAI’s efforts to broaden ChatGPT’s use for e-commerce. The thinking is that its 700 million-plus weekly users can lean on artificial intelligence to help them find items, similar to a human personal shopper. Last month, OpenAI said its users could buy from Shopify and Etsy merchants, and two weeks ago it announced an e-commerce deal with Walmart.
“It’s a whole new paradigm for shopping,” Chriss said. “It’s hard to imagine that agentic commerce isn’t going to be a big part of the future.”
PayPal is attempting to position itself as a payments backbone for the coming era of agentic AI shopping, announcing recent deals with Google and artificial intelligence firm Perplexity. The fintech firm, which also released third-quarter results Tuesday, issued a release on its OpenAI deal after CNBC’s report.

The company will also manage merchant routing, payment validation and other behind-the-scenes aspects of payment processing for PayPal sellers on ChatGPT, so individual merchants don’t have to sign up with OpenAI, the firm said.
Chriss touted the fact that both consumers and merchants have been verified by the fintech firm, reducing the risk of fraud for either group. Users can pull funds from linked bank accounts or credit cards, or stored balances, to pay for purchases, and they’ll get protections, package tracking and dispute resolution.
“It’s not just that a transaction can happen,” Chriss said. “It’s that this is a trusted set of merchants, the largest merchant network in the world from PayPal, that are verified, with the largest set of verified consumers in a consumer wallet.”
PayPal also said it is expanding the use of OpenAI’s enterprise AI products for its employees to speed up product cycles. More

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The fintech firm will merge with Cantor Equity Partners II, Inc., a blank-check company sponsored by an affiliate of Cantor Fitzgerald.
The deal values Securitize’s business at $1.25 billion in pre-money equity.
Following the merger, the combined entity Securitize Corp.’s stock will trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol SECZ. 

Carlos Domingo, chief executive officer of Securitize Inc., speaks during the Messari Mainnet summit in New York, US, on Thursday, Sept. 21, 2023. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Securitize, the “real world assets” platform that powers BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund, will go public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, CEO Carlos Domingo told CNBC in an exclusive interview.
The fintech firm will merge with Cantor Equity Partners II, Inc., a blank-check company sponsored by an affiliate of Cantor Fitzgerald that trades under the CEPT ticker. The deal values Securitize’s business at $1.25 billion in pre-money equity.

“Tokenization is what everybody’s talking about … but there’s nobody publicly traded that does it,” Domingo told CNBC. “We will do well in the public market because people want to index themselves to tokenization the same way that people are buying Circle because they want to index themselves to stablecoins.”
Tokenization refers to the registration of ownership rights to real-world assets such as stocks, bonds or gold on a blockchain. The process enables more transparent and around-the-clock trading versus traditional methods, according to its proponents — among whom are Robinhood Markets CEO Vlad Tenev and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.
Following the merger, the combined entity Securitize Corp.’s stock will trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol SECZ. Shares could begin trading on the exchange as soon as January, according to Domingo. 
The company will book $465 million in gross proceeds from the deal. That includes $225 million from private investors including Borderless Capital and Hanwha Investment, and $240 million in the SPAC’s trust account, assuming no redemptions. 

RWA tokenization takes off

The deal comes as tokenized RWAs boom. The combined market value of tokenized U.S. Treasurys has climbed to roughly $8.6 billion as of writing time, up more than 200% over the past year, according to data provider RWA.xyz.

The RWA tokenization market as a whole has ballooned 135% over the past year and is now worth $35 billion, the data shows. Citi analysts see massive growth for the tokenized RWA market, saying it could grow to almost $4 trillion by 2030.
That positions Securitize — which Domingo says has been profitable in recent quarters — to jump into the fray of firms aiming to capitalize on growing demand for digital assets. Earlier this year, Circle debuted on the New York Stock Exchange, raising about $1.1 billion in its blockbuster IPO. Cryptocurrency exchanges Gemini and Bullish also went public earlier in 2025.
Tapping public markets will create winners and losers as the digital asset space continues to grow and mature, Domingo added.
“The crypto industry needs to consolidate,” he said. “If you’re publicly traded and you have access to stock capital markets as well as cash, you can be on the side that is consolidating and not be consolidated by somebody else.”

‘A better ledger’

Founded in 2017, Securitize has facilitated several large financial firms’ first forays into tokenized funds. 
In March 2024, BlackRock launched its USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) on the Ethereum blockchain in partnership with Securitize, enabling qualified investors to digitally hold U.S. Treasurys and earn yield. The firm has also tokenized more than $4 billion in assets through partnerships with Apollo, Hamilton Lane, KKR and VanEck on their tokenized funds. 
Securitize is the largest tokenization platform, dominating 20% of the RWA tokenization market, per RWA.xyz.
The company plans to also digitize its own equity, a move designed to demonstrate how the public company process and trading can move on-chain, Domingo told CNBC. The executive sees a future in which everything is brought on-chain.
“There’s $400 trillion out there of assets that could potentially be tokenized,” Domingo said. “It’s an upgrade … within the next five to 10 years, you will see everything will be on-chain, because it’s just a better ledger.” More

IF YOU KNOW how to use artificial intelligence, it can save you a lot of time and money. Leasing a new car? Be sure to upload a photograph of the contract to ChatGPT first. Need help with a leaky tap? AI often understands the issue—and at a lower cost than a handyman. Parents with a fussy baby can now use chatbots to answer questions in seconds, rather than waiting for a doctor’s appointment. Giving Claude a PDF of a wine list is a great way to find the best-value bottles. More