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MiCA’s First Regulated Dollar: Why Paxos’s USDG stablecoin Could Redraw Cross-Border Settlement
The euro zone just gained a fully regulated U.S-dollar stablecoin. On 1 July 2025, Paxos announced that its Global Dollar (USDG) is live across the European Union, issued by Paxos Issuance Europe OY under the direct oversight of Finland’s Financial Supervisory Authority and backed one-for-one with cash and cash-equivalent Treasuries. Kraken, Gate, Zodia Custody, and…
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“One-Stop RegTech”: The UK’s New Regulatory Innovation Office Wants to Turn Red-Tape Headaches into a Competitive Edge
When Britain’s Technology Secretary Peter Kyle unveiled the country’s Regulatory Innovation Office (RIO) on 1 July 2025, he framed it as an Regtech antidote to “the regulatory maze that slows world-class ideas at the moment they need to scale.” The press note promises one central shop where start-ups can test products, decode overlapping rulebooks, and…
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Mexican Digital Bank Klar’s $190 Million Raise Signals Latin America’s Cash-to-Card Inflection Point
Mexico’s four-year-old challenger digital bank Klar just landed a US $190 million Series C — US $170 million in equity plus US $20 million in venture debt — led by returning backer General Atlantic and joined by IFC, Prosus, Mouro Capital, Quona Capital and new strategic investors from the Santander and Televisa groups. The injection…
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Grab’s GXBank: Real Growth or Just Grab-and-Go?
It’s hard to miss GXBank these days. The Grab-backed digibank’s green-and-white QR codes have migrated from hipster cafés to kampung* mamak stalls faster than you can hail a GrabCar. That ubiquity is translating into real money: the bank now holds RM2.16 billion (≈US$460 million) in deposits, more than the other two Malaysian digital banks combined.…
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Zopa Tests Banking Loyalty with “Biscuit” Account Rollout
On 24 June 2025, Zopa unwrapped Biscuit, a current-account package that mixes a 2% headline interest rate, 2% cashback on Direct Debit, and access to a 7.10% AER regular saver. Customers who keep the average UK current-account balance of £4,460 and max out the perks could pocket about £256 a year—Zopa’s opening gambit to prise…
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Fiserv’s FIUSD Stablecoin on Solana: Bridging Incumbent Rails With Crypto Speed
When a 40-year-old payments behemoth decides to mint its own stablecoin, the signal is clear: digital dollars are moving from crypto novelty to mainstream infrastructure. On 23 June 2025, Fiserv, whose software quietly handles nearly one in three U.S. card transactions, unveiled FIUSD, a dollar-backed token that will ride the Solana blockchain and plug straight…
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Indonesia’s QRIS Payment Scales Up—But Faces Headwinds
When a warung owner in Yogyakarta scans a customer’s phone these days, the payment hurtles through Bank Indonesia’s Quick Response Code Indonesian Standard (QRIS) and lands in her account seconds later. That ubiquity is by design: the scheme has signed up 56 million users, conducted 2.6 billion transactions representing Rp 262 trillion (approximately US$15.5 billion)…
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Project Nexus Nears Lift-Off: Seamless Payment Between ID & PH
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Jakarta and Manila are only two time zones apart, yet a low-value remittance between the two capitals can still take hours and incur fees of up to 5%. Enter Project Nexus—a multilateral fast-payments “super-connector” incubated by the BIS Innovation Hub. It promises to shrink that wait-time to under 60 seconds, at a near-card-like fee. Now…
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Project Pine: Lessons Central Banks Can’t Ignore
In May, the New York Fed’s Innovation Center and the Bank for International Settlements published the much-trailed Project Pine report, a 57-page technical deep-dive that puts a provocative thesis on the table: even if wholesale finance migrates to tokenised ledgers, central banks can still run the show by wrapping monetary-policy tools inside smart contracts. The…
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Is Earned Wage Access Built for a High-Rate Environment?
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For half a decade, earned-wage access (EWA) platforms have promised to eliminate the cash-flow anxiety of payday gaps. Workers finish a shift, tap an app and pull down the wages they have already earned instead of waiting two weeks for payroll to run. The idea seemed so obviously consumer-friendly that venture money poured in during…
