Binance has acquired a $100m equity stake in Circle Internet Group and signed a five-year commercial agreement to promote USDC across its platform, tightening the link between the largest crypto exchange by trading volume and the second-largest dollar stablecoin issuer. The commercial terms carry a detail the announcement plays down: Circle will pay Binance a recurring monthly incentive fee tied to the volume of USDC held through its wallet infrastructure, which makes the arr

Following yesterday's launch of the European Central Bank's Pontes platform, the settlement layer of global finance is quietly being replaced in central-bank money. Here is why the week that just began matters more than any regulatory conference. There are weeks in market infrastructure when nothing appears to happen, and then there is this one. As of Monday, 22 September 2026, tokenised bonds, funds and other securities in Europe can settle in central-bank money on a live pl

GoCardless has processed what it describes as the UK's first live agentic bank payment, a recurring charity donation set up from start to finish by an AI agent operating under Financial Conduct Authority supervision. The payment, a monthly gift to the anti-poverty charity Trussell, was completed inside a conversational checkout: an AI agent answered questions about the charity's work, presented monthly giving options of £5, £10 or £15, then set up a Direct Debit mandate once

ProCredit group has selected Kondor Up, the cloud-native treasury platform from newly independent vendor Teciem, to run funding, liquidity management and trading across its ten banks in South-Eastern and Eastern Europe. The agreement is one of the first publicly named client wins for Teciem since it separated from Finastra in February 2026, and it places a Frankfurt-listed banking group behind the cloud-native treasury model on which the vendor has built its independence. Nei

Corgi's $108m, Honeycomb, Pace and Airbnb's parametric push: how AI captured 95% of InsurTech funding in 2026. Read the breakdown.

A new institutional digital asset trading platform has gone live in Australia within days of a regulatory cut-off that will decide which crypto firms can legally keep operating. CloudTech Group switched on RooRooEx on 21 September 2026, running on trading technology from foreign exchange infrastructure firm Integral, roughly a week before the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) ends the transitional relief that has shielded digital asset businesses from en