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The regulator has used its own exemptive authority to open an on-chain market for tokenised US shares, two days after Congress let crypto market-structure legislation lapse for the year.

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On-Premises AI Infrastructure Raises $85m as Banks Keep Data In-House

Go.AI, the Chicago company that sells private artificial intelligence systems to banks and other regulated institutions, has raised an $85m Series A, a sign that on-premises AI infrastructure is maturing into a paying market rather than a compliance workaround. The round, announced on 22 September 2026 and led by Washington DC growth-equity firm Updata Partners, takes the company's total funding to $90m. Existing backers GFT Ventures and LAUNCH also took part. For finance lea

Embedded Finance Grows Up, and Inclusion Finally Gets a Seat at the Board Table

Inside the week that turned embedded banking, ESG and financial inclusion into one conversation, from Jacksonville and Hong Kong to Cape Town. There are weeks in fintech when the announcements are noisy but the direction of travel is fuzzy. This is not one of them. In the seven days leading up to 23 September 2026, three unrelated stories on three different continents landed with the same underlying message: embedded finance has stopped selling itself as a novelty, sustainabi

bunq Wero Rollout spans Four Markets as Neobank Flexes Scale

bunq has switched on Wero for both peer-to-peer transfers and online checkout across the Netherlands, Germany, France and Belgium, becoming, by its own account, the first bank to offer the European payment scheme for both uses in all four markets. The bunq Wero rollout, unveiled at the neobank's Update 32 event in Amsterdam on 22 September 2026, lets personal and business users send and receive money using only a phone number, or select Wero at checkout on participating merch

RegTech Grows Up: DORA Enforcement Bites, Norm AI Hits Unicorn, Bretton AI Turns Compliance Into Software

As of this week, RegTech is no longer a pilot line item. Fines are being written, unicorns are being minted, and agentic AI is turning compliance from a cost centre into an operating layer. Here is what changed, and what it means for the people paying the bill. For most of the past decade, RegTech has been the industry that kept promising to arrive. This week it did. Three developments, taken together, mark a turning point: the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) has mo

Bitwise Lists Lighter Staking ETP as Perp-DEX Race Widens

Bitwise has listed a Lighter staking ETP on Deutsche Börse Xetra, giving European investors a regulated, brokerage-account route into one of the fastest-rising venues in on-chain derivatives without holding a wallet or a private key. The Bitwise Lighter Staking ETP (ticker BLIT) tracks LIT, the native token of Lighter, a decentralised perpetual-futures exchange, and is the second perp-DEX token the asset manager has wrapped for European portfolios in under six months. For fin

Binance Takes $100m Circle Stake in Five-Year USDC Deal

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

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CONTRIBUTORS & INTERVIEWS

Two Months Until CCD2 Comes Into Force. Are Banks Ready For the Non-Discrimination Principle?

By Enrique Velázquez, Chief Data & Policy Officer, Mifundo On November 20th 2026, the revised Consumer Credit Directive (CCD2) will begin to apply across the European Union. One provision deserves particular attention from banks preparing for implementation: the non-discrimination principle introduced in Article 6. Article 6 requires that the conditions for obtaining consumer credit do not discriminate on grounds such as nationality or place of residence. The timing is signif

Risk Prevention Models Have Tried an Early Version of AI Before

An interview with Laurent Clerc by Sean Murphy In the early 1990s, when Laurent Clerc was building credit scoring models for a living, a new technology arrived promising to sweep the old methods away. Neural networks, the first commercial wave of artificial intelligence, could find patterns in a sample of borrowers that no statistician would spot. For a while the industry was enchanted but then the models met the real world and their performance fell apart. Within a few years

Real-Time Cash Flow Lending for SMEs

By Inga Pinka, CEO and Co-Founder at POSfinance Traditional SME lending has long relied on historical financial statements, credit history, collateral and other relatively static indicators. While these remain important, the development of digital technologies, Open Banking and financial data analytics is creating another approach: real-time cash flow lending. The principle is straightforward. A company’s creditworthiness can be assessed not only by looking at what it owns or

A Property History for Your Home

An interview with Bob Frady, by Sean Murphy Last month a friend of Bob Frady's was closing on a house in Nashville and asked him to run the address. Frady came back with a puzzle. The place had clearly been improved, yet there was not a single permit on record, which meant that on paper everything was original. The estate agent insisted the work was only two years old. Then why, Frady asked, are there no permits? He told his friend to hold on to the inspection contingency wha

BNPL’s Regulated Era: When a Checkout Feature Becomes Consumer Credit

By Joris Nijboer, Managing Director at Akkuro Lending Buy Now Pay Later grew by making credit feel unlike credit. It embedded borrowing directly into the point of purchase, giving consumers greater flexibility while helping merchants reduce friction and support conversion. Customers could pay later without leaving the checkout journey, completing a lengthy application, or waiting for a conventional lending process. That simplicity helped drive BNPL adoption. But as the market

Know Your Agent: The Liability Gap in Agentic Payments in the UAE

By Zinah Abdaki, CMO at QUBE Events Agent-initiated payments moved into live operation over the course of 2026, and the UAE is not watching from the sidelines. Globally, the pace is comparable. FIS launched the payments industry's first dedicated agentic commerce offering in January 2026. In March, Mastercard and Santander, with PayOS orchestrating, completed Europe's first live end-to-end payment executed by an AI agent in a controlled environment, and Visa extended support

Founders - The Hidden Risk in a Lease is Not Always the Rent

By John D. Evans, CFA, Founder & General Manager at SEIML For many Founders, the first commercial lease feels like a milestone. It says: we are real, we have an office, we are building something. But inside that lease there is often a hidden risk that does not get enough attention: The deposit In Hong Kong, a commercial lease deposit can often be three months’ rent. In Central, that can be a very large amount of cash for an early-stage company. And for a Founder, cash trapped

Making Financial Data Meaningful

An interview with David Firth by Sean Murphy Around four in five of the calls landing in one high street bank's contact centre are not complaints, fraud or lost cards. They are people trying to make sense of a transaction they can’t recognise. The payment is almost always one of their own but a week later they have already forgotten and the transaction description is often a nonsensical collection of letters and numbers with no location and no memory to hang it on. Multiply t

The 95 Percent Problem: Why Compliance Breaks After the Alert

An interview with Kartik Dabbiru, by Sean Murphy Picture a financial crime analyst at the moment an alert lands. Five, perhaps ten systems are open across as many browser tabs: the alert itself, the customer record, the documents submitted at onboarding, the log of every conversation the firm has had with them. The analyst moves between them, following one branch and then another, until resolving the case has become an impressively convoluted decision tree. Somewhere along th