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IMF’s Offline CBDC Blueprint: What It Actually Asks Central Banks to Build
The International Monetary Fund just published its most practical guidance yet for running a central bank digital currency when connectivity is flaky, or indeed gone entirely. The Fintech Note, “Technology Solutions to Support Central Bank Digital Currency with Limited Connectivity” (2025/005), maps the option space for “offline CBDC,” grades trade-offs, and sets out a procurement…
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Wallet Interoperability: PayPal World and the Race to Link UPI, PayNow, FPS, & Co.
The dream of paying a Thai street vendor with your Indian UPI app, or sending money from a U.S. PayPal wallet straight into a Chinese WeChat Pay balance, has always collided with the reality of walled-garden schemes, foreign-exchange tolls and clunky integrations. That started to change on July 23rd, when PayPal unveiled PayPal World, a…
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What Circle’s USDC Launch in Japan Really Means
Tokyo has finally opened its doors to a foreign-issued stablecoin—and Circle walked through first. On 4 March 2025, SBI VC Trade became the inaugural exchange licensed to list USD Coin (USDC) under Japan’s revamped Payment Services Act, making USDC the first non-yen, non-bank stablecoin legally cleared for domestic use. Two weeks later, Circle announced that…
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Payment Connect Goes Live: How a Single Switch Is Re-Wiring Mainland–Hong Kong Payments
On the 22nd of June, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) flicked the “Payment Connect” switch, linking the mainland’s Internet Banking Payment System (IBPS) with Hong Kong’s Faster Payment System (FPS) in real time. In practical terms, anyone with a mobile number on either side of the boundary…
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Climate Metrics Without Mandates: Will Banks Disclose If They Don’t Have To?
The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision finally published its blueprint for climate-risk disclosure on 13 June 2025, then stamped it voluntary. National regulators are “invited to consider” the climate metrics framework, not obliged to enforce it. The climb-down followed months of lobbying from Washington, where the Trump administration’s Treasury argued that mandatory rules would “outsource…
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UK’s BNPL Clampdown: FCA’s CP25/23 Explained
Buy Now Pay Later exploded by trading soft credit checks for softer regulation: lenders advanced £60 million in 2017 and more than £13 billion in 2024, almost entirely outside the Financial Conduct Authority’s rule-book. That run-way just shortened. On 18 July 2025, the FCA published its 112-page “CP25/23 – Deferred Payment Credit” consultation, the first…
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Agentic Banking: The Rise of a Single-Brain Fintech
For decades, banks have tried to stitch together siloed channels, product systems, and data marts into something that feels like a single institution. In 2025, the ambition is finally getting a name—and a blueprint: agentic banking’s “single brain”. Think of a fabric of specialised AI agents (risk-scoring, treasury-optimising, fraud-hunting, portfolio-rebalancing) all plugged into one shared…
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FedNow Instant-Payment Fraud Lands on Washington’s Agenda: Why the OCC Is Crowdsourcing Fixes for FedNow and RTP
America loves its fast money. Two years after launch, the FedNow Service counts more than 1,000 participating financial institutions and now clears over a million payments a day, thanks in part to a February rules change that lifted the single-transaction ceiling to US$10 million. Yet the same rail that lets wages settle in seconds is…
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Anti-CBDC Act: Could a Privacy Backlash Derail America’s Digital Dollar Ambitions?
As part of “Crypto Week,” the US House of Representatives just passed the “Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act” (H.R. 1919), a measure that would bar the Federal Reserve from issuing, pilot-testing or even researching a retail central-bank digital currency (CBDC) digital dollar capable of being held by the public. Speaker Mike Johnson says the vote will…
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Basel’s Climate Climb-Down: Voluntary, Not Binding, Disclosures Signal the End of Capital Harmony
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The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) spent three years promising a global template for climate-risk disclosure that would anchor prudential rules just as Basel III anchors capital. On the 13th June 2025, it blinked. The final text, published as a “voluntary framework”, invites jurisdictions merely to “consider” adopting its metrics. In one stroke, the…
