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Visa is repositioning as a settler of tokens it does not issue
Visa spent decades as the toll road between cards and merchants. Its current pitch is something else: the layer that authorizes, secures and clears payments no matter what money settles them, including Visa stablecoins has no hand in issuing. The company’s leadership now talks openly about stablecoin and agentic payments as growth, which is a…
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Paytm Payments Bank’s licence cancellation closes the payments-bank experiment
On 24 April, the Reserve Bank of India cancelled Paytm Payments Bank’s licence under the Banking Regulation Act, ending the most-watched test in the country’s payments-bank category. The regulator did not soften the language. It found the bank’s affairs managed in ways harmful to depositors, persistent non-compliance with licence conditions, and a general character of…
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Nubank’s Mexico banking license turns its expansion into a real test
Nubank has crossed 131 million customers and become the largest private financial institution in Brazil, a scale that settles the first question a neobank has to answer: can it win a home market against entrenched incumbents. The harder question is whether the model travels, and Mexico is where Nubank now has to prove it with…
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The digital euro now hangs on a 2026 European Parliament vote
The European Central Bank has done its homework on the digital euro. It finished a multi-year preparation phase, picked technical providers, and moved the project to its next stage. None of that gets a digital euro issued, because the decision was never the ECB’s to make alone. Issuance requires the European Parliament and the Council…
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Bank-issued stablecoins are overtaking crypto-native issuers across three continents
For a decade the stablecoin market belonged to crypto-native firms. Tether and Circle built it, and the assumption was that the next big issuers would look like them: technology companies, not banks. The first half of 2026 broke that assumption on three continents at once. HSBC won a stablecoin licence in Hong Kong, Japan’s three…
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The BIS answered the GENIUS Act with a plan for tokenized central bank money
The Bank for International Settlements published its annual economic report on June 23, and the chapter on the future of money reads as a verdict on the year behind it. Stablecoins, the report argues, fail the test of singleness, the assurance that every form of money in an economy redeems at par against central bank…
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Real-Time Payments, Real-Time Fraud: What Changes When Settlement Is Instant
Instant settlement shortens the window for real-time fraud intervention. Fraud programs increasingly depend on stronger checks before the payment is sent, supported by faster operations when something goes wrong. A Co-branded analysis from GL Insight in collaboration with FIS. Introduction: Instant Settlement Changes the Risk Equation Real-time payment rails are spreading quickly across many markets.…
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New Rails are cutting Africa stablecoin remittance costs to a fraction of the banks’
The case for stablecoins in rich countries is mostly theoretical, a faster rail for payments that already work. In Africa it is arithmetic. Intra-African remittances sent through banks typically cost 7 to 9 percent, among the highest rates in the world, while transfers routed over mobile-money-and-stablecoin rails consistently land at 1 to 3 percent. On…
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M-Pesa and MTN built Africa’s payment rails; stablecoins now threaten their best business
M-Pesa moves more than a billion dollars a day across Africa, and for nearly two decades the mobile-money networks it pioneered have become the default Africa payments rails. They taught hundreds of millions of people to send money by phone, and they built durable businesses on the fees for doing it. Those same networks now…
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The PBOC is recruiting foreign banks into a 24/7 e-CNY network
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On June 16, the People’s Bank of China’s digital yuan international operation centre signed agreements with 26 financial institutions, granting them direct participant status in its Cross-border e-CNY Transfer Services network, known as CBETS. Standard Chartered confirmed it was among the first foreign banks to sign. The network offers around-the-clock connectivity between foreign central banks,…
