Articles
Tracking Fintech Insights and Trends That Shape Money & Markets
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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,…
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Japan’s megabanks chose a trust to issue their joint yen stablecoin
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Japan’s three largest banks are not racing to issue separate stablecoins. MUFG, Sumitomo Mitsui and Mizuho plan to launch a single jointly issued yen stablecoin, with live transactions targeted during the fiscal year ending March 2027. The collaboration itself is notable for a market where these three usually compete on everything. The design they chose…
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Tokenized money market funds get useful the moment they post as collateral
Tokenized money market funds have spent two years being described as the proof that real-world assets work on a blockchain. The description undersells what changed in 2026. The largest of these funds, BlackRock’s tokenized Treasury vehicle, now holds around $2.4 billion and ranks as the biggest tokenized US Treasury fund. More telling than the size…
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JD and Ant asked Beijing for a yuan stablecoin. The answer is the signal
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Two of China’s largest tech firms made a case the government might have been expected to like. JD.com and Ant Group urged the People’s Bank of China to allow an offshore yuan-pegged stablecoin, issued in Hong Kong and later extended to the mainland’s free trade zones. Their argument was geopolitical: a credible yuan stablecoin could…
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Korea is building tokenized securities before it settles the won stablecoin
South Korea is doing digital assets in an order most people did not expect. The tokenized-securities law is done. The stablecoin law is stuck. On January 15, the National Assembly passed amendments to the Capital Markets Act and the Electronic Securities Act that let qualified issuers launch tokenized securities and trade them through brokerages, with…
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China is running two digital-money tracks, and they answer different questions
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Coverage of China’s digital currency tends to mash two separate projects into one story about beating the dollar. They are not one project. China runs a domestic digital-money track and an international one, with different tools, different goals and different problems, and reading them as a single de-dollarization push gets both wrong. The domestic track…
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Why Circle launched USYC: the GENIUS Act split between payments and yield
Tokenized US Treasury funds total roughly $15 billion on-chain in May 2026, up from under $1 billion in early 2024. The headline names are BlackRock’s BUIDL at around $2.9 billion, Franklin Templeton’s BENJI suite at around $2 billion, and Ondo Finance’s combined OUSG and USDY platform at around $3.5 billion. The fastest grower has been…
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Sovereign Bitcoin in 2026: the gap between announcement and balance sheet
Three small open economies have announced sovereign Bitcoin programmes. None of the three is currently buying Bitcoin. El Salvador stopped purchases in February 2025 under its $1.4 billion IMF deal. Bhutan has sold roughly $1 billion in BTC over the past eighteen months. Pakistan’s Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, unveiled at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas, has…
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Stripe’s vertical stablecoin stack: Bridge, Tempo and a 1.5% take rate
Stripe charges merchants 1.5% to accept stablecoins, plus 0.5% on FX where it applies. That single line is the most important data point in stablecoin payments right now. The underlying rails settle for fractions of a cent. The take rate Stripe is charging is interchange-shaped, sitting on infrastructure the issuers were told would commoditise payments.…
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Eight Indonesian digital banks made money in 2025. SeaBank is the only one with bank-like returns.
Eight of the nine listed Indonesian digital banks posted full-year net profits in 2025. The press coverage has treated this as vindication for the digital-banking model. The return on assets numbers tell a quieter story. SeaBank’s 2.3% ROA and 11.5% ROE are the only ones in the cohort that look like a conventional Indonesian retail…
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Hong Kong digital banks at year six: three at breakeven, five still losing
All eight Hong Kong digital banks are past their fifth full year of operation. The FY2025 results published in early 2026 give the first clean cohort comparison. Three operators have reached at or near breakeven: ZA Bank, WeLab Bank and Mox. Five remain loss-making: Livi, Airstar, Fusion, Ant Bank Hong Kong and PAObank. The variable…