-
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…
-
Is Earned Wage Access Built for a High-Rate Environment?
–
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Trust Bank’s Rapid Rise: From Pilot to Powerhouse
Singapore’s cloud-native Trust Bank just filed results that would make even marble-and-mahogany incumbents blush. Revenue for 2024 vaulted from S$39 million to S$97 million – a 148% surge – while operating losses narrowed from S$128 million to S$93 million. The figures come straight from the bank’s FY-2024 statement, which also noted that costs rose only…
-
ECB Opens Digital Euro Sandbox to 70 Companies
–
When the European Central Bank (ECB) first pitched a “digital euro” back in 2020, sceptics complained the project lived inside a lab no merchant or fintech could ever see. That complaint ended on 5 May 2025, when ECB opened a digital-euro innovation platform and quietly emailed access keys to about 70 external organisations – supermarkets,…
-
Hong Kong Lights Up Stablecoins, Yet Old Rules Dim the Glow
Hong Kong’s shiny new Stablecoin Bill is the best kind of progress: the sort that lets policymakers hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony while telling the rest of the world, “see, we’re open for business.” On May 21st, the Hong Kong LegCo waved the Bill through, giving the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) clear authority to license…
-
Payment Aggregator Licences Are India’s Next Fight Club
–
The Reserve Bank of India’s payment aggregator stamp has quietly become the most coveted badge in Indian fintech. Since January 2025, the central bank has issued just nine final approvals—PayU, BillDesk, Adyen and, in the past week alone, Quicktouch and Getepay—while hundreds of hopefuls remain in limbo. The figure is striking, given that over 185…
