X + Visa, TikTok and DeepSeek: This Month In Fintech PR

After what seems to be an almost-too-long, too-quiet, and too-good-to-be-true December holiday break, January 2025 kicked off with a bang, with more financial news and headlines packed into 20 market-trading days than many could keep up with, ourselves included.

From Presidential pomp and circumstance to “J6” pardons, from DeepSeek to threats of deep and lasting tariffs, from the Gulf of America to the end of TikTok in the U.S., January’s business headlines were just as much about politics as they were about economics, financial markets and massive change in the way people and companies do business - and social media.

Of all the headlines, which ones were the most influential in business, financial and fintech news?

Here are our three top picks for the month:

Visa and Elon Musk’s X

WeChat and AliPay for America? Call it yet another busy news cycle day, but with surprisingly little fanfare and media attention, Elon Musk’s social media platform X on January 28 announced the launch of a digital wallet and peer-to-peer payments services provided by Visa.

The X Money Account service to be launched in tandem with the largest U.S. credit card network is expected to launch in the first quarter, with announcements of more financial partners likely.

One of the first use cases for X Money will be to allow creators on the site to accept payments and store funds without external institutions, CEO Linda Yaccarino said in a post on the platform.

Visa will enable X users to move funds between traditional bank accounts and their digital wallet and make instant peer-to-peer payments, Yaccarino said, similar to what they can do with Zelle or Venmo.

It’s the first concrete move from X to create a financial ecosystem for the social media site, which was called Twitter before Musk purchased it in 2022. At the time, Musk, who’s also CEO of Tesla, said the $44 billion acquisition was a way to create an “everything app.” He later said the platform would enable users to conduct their “entire financial world” on it.

That sounds a lot like WeChat, or Weixin in Chinese, Tencent’s massively popular instant messaging, social media, and mobile payment app first released in 2011. With more than 1 billion active users, WeChat has been described as China's "app for everything" and a super-app because of its wide range of functions, including mobile payments.

TikTok Ban

They really thought it was going to go dark.

Up to the day President Donald J. Trump was sworn in as 47th President of the United States, millions of Americans, the vast majority under the age of 35, expected the most popular and pervasive communications platform since television to be banned, leaving them in the dark not only as creators, but as consumers.

And it did actually go dark, sort of. TikTok on January 19 stopped its videos from playing on U.S. devices, with a message saying, "Sorry, TikTok isn't available right now. A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can't use TikTok for now."

The statement followed a Supreme Court ruling on January 17 that upheld a law banning the app in the U.S. unless its China-based parent company, ByteDance, sold the platform.

The app gave a shout-out to Trump, saying: "We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!"

And so he did. Even before Trump re-entered the Oval Office, TikTok was back on, with the platform restoring its services on Inauguration Day, even before he had been sworn in.

"Frankly, we have no choice. We have to save it," Trump said at a rally on Sunday ahead of his inauguration, adding that the U.S. will seek a joint venture to restore the short-video sharing app used by 170 million Americans.

In a message to users hours before the rally, TikTok said: "As a result of President Trump's efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S."

DeepSeek and AI

DeepSeek, or deep fake?

Definitely not a deep fake, though investors and market-watchers couldn’t be blamed for wondering whether the sudden emergence of a new AI model built at a fraction of the cost of what U.S. companies have spent on their own AI technologies was in of itself an AI-generated headline and story designed to make markets swoon.

Indeed it was real, as was the massive loss that hit the Nasdaq and one of its biggest stocks - AI chip maker Nvidia. Shares of Nvidia plunged 17% by the end of trading on Monday, January 27, suffering their worst daily percentage loss since March 2020, when stocks briefly crashed at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The slide knocked Nvidia from its position as the world’s most valuable company, sending its valuation from $3.5 trillion to $2.9 trillion, less than Apple’s and Microsoft’s. Other major AI technology providers including fellow chip designers Arm and Broadcom as well as data storer Oracle all tanked at least 10%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq shed 3.1% for the day.

The shock-and-awe moment: When DeepSeek revealed that it had spent just $5.6 million powering its base AI model, compared with the hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars U.S. companies spend. That’s even more shocking when considering that the U.S. for years has worked to restrict the supply of high-power AI chips to China, citing national security concerns.

That means DeepSeek has managed to turn a proverbial four-cylinder putter into a turbocharged V8 - at a fraction of the cost, something Nvidia itself called an “excellent AI advancement.”

Whether or not DeepSeek has accomplished what it says it has, the idea that the U.S. may not be in the driver’s seat when it comes to the AI race has been enough to recalibrate investors’ expectations. It has also raised doubts on the U.S.’s ability to sanction its way to AI and technology dominance.