Riyadh-based OORI has agreed a partnership with women's leadership platform Playbook to deliver private-market investment education to female leaders across the Gulf, giving the young, regulated platform direct access to a ready-made pool of prospective women investors. The tie-up was announced at the Women Shaping Wealth Summit in Riyadh on 28 and 29 September 2026, where OORI acted as a Learning Partner. For finance professionals, the notable angle is distribution. A CMA-li

The Bitwise NEAR ETF began trading on NYSE Arca on 29 September 2026 under the ticker NRR, becoming the first US spot exchange-traded fund tracking NEAR and the newest single-token crypto product to reach American brokerage accounts. For investors, the more useful detail sits beneath the launch: the fund charges 0.75% a year, close to four times the 0.20% on Bitwise's own flagship Bitcoin fund, and it arrives in a market where single-asset crypto funds have multiplied since t

A week that pushed tokenised settlement from press release to production, with central banks, exchanges and CSDs finally reading from the same script. For years, "tokenised markets" has been the sentence that arrives at every conference and leaves before the coffee break. As of this week, that sentence has grown teeth. Between Frankfurt, Mumbai, New York and Singapore, the plumbing of global finance quietly moved from pilot to production, with central banks, exchanges and cen

German financial-crime software firm spotixx and Dutch cryptography company Roseman Labs have secured funding from the EU's Eurostars programme to expand a bank fraud data sharing platform that lets institutions detect cross-border criminal patterns without exchanging any customer data. The two-year project runs from 1 October 2026. The German side is backed by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space under grant reference 01QE2653, while Roseman Labs draws para

As of this week, InsurTech's centre of gravity has moved. AI-native carriers are landing nine-figure rounds, parametric cover is settling before customers can file a claim, and specialty lines are being rewired by AI-driven partnerships. Here is what actually happened, and what it says about where premiums, and payouts, are headed. For most of the last three years, "InsurTech" was a suspect category. Valuations had cooled, IPOs had disappointed, and the buzzword pile (embedde

Swift is testing whether a phone number or email address can carry an international payment the way it already carries a domestic one, an initiative built around cross-border pay by alias that would place the network at the very first step of a consumer transaction rather than in the messaging and settlement layer it has traditionally occupied. The cooperative said on 28 September it is working with banks, payment service providers and technology vendors across four continent