Mercury, the San Francisco fintech serving more than 300,000 business and individual customers, has secured conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to establish Mercury Bank, N.A., a federally chartered national bank that would move the company out of its partner-bank model and into direct regulatory oversight. The decision represents one of the most consequential fintech-to-bank transitions since SoFi completed its own charter in 2022 and sign

European PayTech Nexi has activated Wero for online checkout in Germany, with BAUR, Quelle and the Bünting Group among the first merchants set to offer the account-to-account payment method to consumers. The integration marks one of the most consequential expansions yet of the European Payments Initiative (EPI) into commercial payments, a sector long dominated by US card schemes. For finance professionals tracking the continent's drive toward strategic autonomy in financial i

Eurozone inflation expectations surged across every time horizon in March 2026, according to the European Central Bank's latest Consumer Expectations Survey, with one-year-ahead expectations climbing to 4.0% even as growth forecasts deteriorated sharply, a combination that signals rising stagflation risk for the bloc. The data, released on 28 April by the European Central Bank, shows median one-year inflation expectations rose 150 basis points from 2.5% in February to 4.0% in

From Vanguard’s free AI portfolio tool to $80 million funding rounds for AI note-takers turned operating systems, WealthTech in April 2026 is moving faster than a momentum trade on earnings day. The wealth management industry has spent decades perfecting the art of the long lunch and the firm handshake. But as of this week, the sector looks more like a Silicon Valley sprint than a Wall Street stroll. Between Vanguard rolling out a free AI-powered portfolio analysis tool, Altr

The Same Day ACH per-payment ceiling will climb to $10 million in September 2027, a tenfold increase that opens the U.S. payment rails to large-ticket business-to-business flows long routed through wires. The move, approved by Nacha membership and announced April 27 at the Smarter Faster Payments 2026 conference in San Diego, applies exclusively to domestic ACH transactions between U.S. bank and credit union accounts. It marks the third upward revision in the program's decade

Pine Labs has acquired checkout optimisation platform Shopflo Technologies in an all-stock deal, betting that the next phase of growth in Indian digital commerce will be won not at the payment gateway but at the checkout page itself. The Pine Labs Shopflo acquisition gives the listed fintech a conversion-focused front end to layer onto its payments infrastructure, targeting the 60 to 70 percent of Indian online shoppers who abandon carts before completing a purchase. The tran

Banking Circle, the Luxembourg-based correspondent bank that processes more than €1.5 trillion in annual cross-border flows for over 750 financial institutions, has launched a stablecoin settlement service operating directly from its core banking platform. The rollout follows the bank's receipt of a Crypto-Asset Service Provider (CASP) licence from the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier on 15 April 2026, making it one of the first regulated EU credit institutions

Eurozone credit conditions tightened sharply in the first quarter of 2026, with a net 26% of firms reporting higher bank loan interest rates, more than double the 12% recorded in the previous quarter, according to the latest Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises (SAFE) published by the European Central Bank on 27 April 2026. The deterioration spans both small and medium-sized enterprises and large corporates, signalling that the financing squeeze is broad-based rathe

Egyptian fintech startup Kiwe has secured final regulatory approval from the Central Bank of Egypt to launch its mobile application and payment card, positioning the four-year-old company for a 2026 commercial rollout in one of the Middle East's fastest-growing digital finance markets. The approval clears the final regulatory hurdle for Kiwe to enter a sector that has seen Egyptian fintech investment more than triple over the past three years, driven by a population of over 1