Articles
Tracking Fintech Insights and Trends That Shape Money & Markets
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Fintech investment hit $103bn in the first half. China got $149m of it.
KPMG’s Pulse of Fintech for the first half of 2026, published 25 August, counts $103.1 billion of global fintech investment across 2,100 deals, up from $72.2 billion in the second half of 2025. The Americas took $86.9 billion, the US alone $80.8 billion. Asia-Pacific fell to $4.6 billion from $7.1 billion, and within that India…
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Singapore digital banks have the deposits and cannot find the loans
Singapore’s five digital banks filed their 2025 accounts last month, and between them the four retail and SME banks lost S$291m. GXS lost S$132m, MariBank S$55.6m, Trust Bank S$53.6m and ANEXT S$49.8m. The fifth, Green Link Digital Bank, made S$16.1m, its first profit, on a business that lends to small and medium-sized enterprises and never…
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China digital lending platforms lost half their July volume to a collections escrow
FinVolution’s China loan volume fell by around half in July. Qfin, the largest listed facilitator, lost 15% of its July volume and has guided third-quarter profit down by two-thirds. Lexin has warned it may post a net loss for the quarter and has moved its dividend from semi-annual to annual to preserve cash. None of…
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The OCC has 40 charter applications and just told Wise and bunq why theirs failed
Three European fintechs walked through the same door this summer. Wise applied for a national trust bank charter and was denied on 21 July. bunq applied for a full national bank charter and was denied on 4 August. Revolut applied for a full national bank charter in March and received preliminary conditional approval on 2…
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The US widened card surcharging in the year Australia banned it
From 1 October, an Australian merchant will no longer be allowed to add a fee for paying by card, and the interchange an issuer earns on a domestic consumer credit card will fall from a cap of 0.8% to 0.3%. In the United States, a settlement between Visa, Mastercard and 12 million merchants that received…
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Four regulators are deciding which foreign stablecoins count
A dollar stablecoin that is legal to hold in one country is now, in several others, unlawful to sell. In the four weeks between 7 August and 1 September the United States, Singapore, the European Union and Japan each moved on the same question, which is what a regulator does about foreign stablecoins issued somewhere…
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Southeast Asia Digital Lending Stopped Being An Adoption Story
For most of the past decade the question about the Southeast Asia digital lending segment was how fast it could grow. That question has been answered, and the answer was: fast, then less fast. The regional loan book went from about $62bn in 2023 to $76bn in 2024 to $90bn in 2025 — growth of…
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The Anchorpoint stablecoin shows the consortium shape the HKMA wanted
The first stablecoin licence Hong Kong awarded went to a bank. The second one is the more revealing choice. Anchorpoint Financial, the other name on the April 10 list, is a joint venture between Standard Chartered, Hong Kong Telecommunications and Animoca Brands. The regulator picked a bank, a telco and a digital-asset firm stapled together.…
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Singapore made its stablecoins boring, and that is the point
Singapore stablecoin rules read like a list of things a stablecoin is not allowed to be. No double-digit yields. No exotic reserves. No algorithmic peg. The framework the Monetary Authority of Singapore finalized strips out almost everything that made stablecoins exciting to crypto markets, and that subtraction is the strategy. The rules are narrow on…
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Agentic checkout is splitting into two settlement rails
The card networks and the crypto firms are no longer fighting over the same agentic checkout payments market. They are quietly dividing it. By mid-2026, the production landscape has settled into a pattern: AI agents authorize and settle retail consumer purchases on card rails, and machine-to-machine and cross-border B2B flows increasingly settle on stablecoins. The…
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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,…