Citi has agreed to acquire commerce media and rewards platform Kard Financial, a move that positions the second-largest US card issuer to monetise its cardholder base as an advertising channel and puts it in direct competition with Mastercard, Chase and PayPal for brand marketing budgets. The deal, announced on 13 August 2026 by Citi's newly formed US Consumer Cards business, folds Kard's transaction-linked offer technology into a franchise that counts roughly 70 million card

Clop's ransomware claim against Fiserv, a $3.7 billion deepfake-fraud toll and DORA's first year of teeth have collided on the same news cycle. Financial-services CISOs no longer have the luxury of sequencing these threats. A very bad Tuesday If a chief information security officer at a global bank had drawn up a stress test for August, this week's news would have looked contrived. On 12 August, DeXpose and multiple threat-intelligence trackers reported that the Clop ransomwa

FinanceX Magazine is delighted to announce its media partnership with the Amsterdam Fintech Event (AFE) 2026, taking place on 7–8 October 2026 at the World Trade Center in Amsterdam. An initiative of the Holland Fintech Association and Cognito Amsterdam, AFE has become a fixed date in the calendar for anyone working in or around financial technology, and we are proud to help bring its programme to a wider audience. As a media partner, FinanceX Magazine joins the Amsterdam Fin

IBM's $10bn quantum bet, JPMorgan's new data centre, an FIS-Anthropic AI agent, and Robinhood's UK crypto launch. Seven days that made every "future of finance" slide look conservative. If you drew a circle around the last week of financial technology news, you would find that the topics on every strategy team's whiteboard, quantum computing, agentic AI, tokenised securities, and stablecoins, have all produced hard evidence rather than the usual vapour. As of this week, banks

The European Central Bank reported on 13 August 2026 that 92% of euro area companies with physical points of sale now accept cash, framing the figure as a recovery after years of decline. The headline is clean, but the comparison underpinning it is not: the ECB's own earlier reporting put 2024 cash acceptance materially lower than the baseline used in the new release, which complicates the story of a straightforward rebound. What did the 2026 survey actually find? The ECB's l

From a $1.7bn Klarna capital deal to Brussels flipping the switch on high-risk AI rules, this week has quietly rewritten the operating manual for anyone who lends, scores, or tokenises real estate. August tends to be the month when finance people pretend to switch off. This year, the market refused to co-operate. In the last seven days, lending, credit, and PropTech have thrown up a stack of stories that will shape balance sheets, borrowing costs, and property portfolios well

Interactive Brokers has switched on trading in Romanian equities, giving its 5.3 million client accounts direct access to the Bucharest Stock Exchange after the market delivered its strongest annual run in more than a decade. Shares listed on the exchange's regulated market, along with locally listed exchange-traded funds, went live on the platform on 13 August 2026, folding Romania into the more than 170 markets the broker already routes from a single account. For a market t

As of this week, "open banking" has stopped being a five-year plan and started being a compliance deadline. Here is what is landing on desks in Frankfurt, London, and every core banking vendor's roadmap. For most of the last decade, "open banking" was a phrase people used to sound futuristic in a keynote. In August 2026, it has become an operational fact, a rulebook in draft, and, if you run a bank technology function, an urgent line on your capex plan. Three things happened

Crypto.com has launched tokenised US equities and ETFs for users across the European Economic Area, giving eligible customers price exposure to 1,500 American stocks and funds from as little as US$1 through the Crypto.com app. The product, branded Tokenized Stocks and switched on for EEA users on 12 August 2026, lets customers trade round the clock through instruments referencing names such as Nvidia, Tesla and Apple, alongside commodity ETFs tracking gold and silver. For fin