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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…
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Singapore Cracks Down on Foreign-Only Digital Token Services
On the 6th of June the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) published a terse clarification with outsized impact: from 30 June 2025, any Singapore-incorporated firm that offers digital-token services solely to customers overseas must hold a Digital Token Service Provider (DTSP) licence—or shut down. In the same breath, the regulator warned that such licences will…
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Visa Protects Pay-by-Bank Buyers—A Payments Gamechanger?
When Visa formally switched on its Pay-by-Bank rail in the UK on 2 June 2025, the headline feature was not speed—open-banking payments have been real-time for years—nor reach, thanks to Faster Payments. The news was the guarantee: a card-style dispute-resolution rule set that promises to reimburse consumers if a transfer goes wrong. Visa says the…
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Australia’s New BNPL Rules Mean Credit Scores Will Never Look the Same
Buy-now-pay-later has been the feel-good payments story of the past decade: interest-free instalments, a tap-and-go checkout, no bank-manager questions. By mid-2024, Australia had approximately 7 million active BNPL accounts with an average transaction value of A$136. Yet the same scale that made Afterpay and Zip household verbs, has also drawn regulator heat. On 10 June…
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Scalable Capital’s US$175 Million Raise: Is Europe’s Invest-Tech Winter Over?
On 3 June, the Munich-based digital investment platform Scalable Capital announced its largest financing to date: €155 million ≈ US$175 million, led by Belgian listed investor Sofina and growth-equity shop Noteus Partners, with repeat cheques from Balderton Capital, Tencent and HV Capital. The round lifts Scalable’s cumulative funding to more than US$535 million and comes…
