Articles
Tracking Fintech Insights and Trends That Shape Money & Markets
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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…
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Issuer ROI in 2026: Consolidation, Automation, and Reducing the Tech Tax
How issuer platforms are being evaluated as banks simplify operations and speed up delivery in a tighter operating environment. A Co-branded analysis from GL Insight in collaboration with FIS Introduction: Why Issuer ROI Looks Different in 2026 Issuer modernization over the past decade has expanded capabilities across digital channels, fraud prevention, loyalty, analytics, and real-time…
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The HKMA Stablecoin License Shortlist Tells You What The HKMA Actually Wants
The HKMA received 36 first-batch issuer applications for a HKMA stablecoin license under the Stablecoins Ordinance. It awarded two. Anchorpoint Financial Limited, a joint venture of Standard Chartered Hong Kong, HKT, and Animoca Brands, received FRS01. The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation received FRS02. Both are required to issue HKD-referenced stablecoins. Both operate inside the…
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Project Pontes Is The ECB’s Quiet Rejection Of Multilateral CBDC
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The ECB joined BIS Project Nexus as a special observer and committed to launching its in-house Project Pontes pilot in Q3 2026. Read the two announcements together and the strategic position around CBDCs is clear. The ECB is hedging Nexus while building Pontes. The hedge will close. Europe is going to settle on Pontes, the…
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The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) Just Opened A Credit Union Door For Stablecoin Issuance
The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) published its proposed rule for permitted payment stablecoin issuers on May 15, 2026. The stablecoin policy press did not notice. They should have. The rule creates a third regulatory door for US stablecoin issuance, alongside the OCC bank pathway and the FDIC pathway for state-chartered insured depositories. The NCUA…
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Why fintech startups are raising more money in fewer deals
In the first quarter of 2026, fintech startups raised more capital in fewer deals than the same period a year earlier. According to Crunchbase, fintech startups raised US$12 billion across 751 deals in the January to March period, marking a 5% annual increase in funding but 31.5% fewer deals. This shows investor preference for large, later-stage…
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Is Revolut worth US$200 billion?
Is Revolut worth nearly as much as Citigroup or American Express? Both of those financial firms have market capitalizations that exceed US$200 billion. They also have annual revenue of US$85.2 billion and US$72.2 billion respectively. Revolut posted US$6 billion in revenue last year. Yet, the UK fintech unicorn is not letting something like modest revenue…
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Are Malaysia’s digital banks in trouble?
Malaysia decided to greenlight digital banks amid a wave of investor excitement and regulatory acquiescence in early 2020. Led by Hong Kong and Singapore, many East Asian economies sought to introduce more competition to their staid banking sectors. The backers of digital banks – venture capitalists, large tech firms, telecoms giants and even incumbent lenders…
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Why the crypto industry is unhappy about Hong Kong’s stablecoin issuance licenses
In fairness to the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), it is rare that the digital assets industry is satisfied with regulations. Crypto firms want regulations that provide them with the legal and safety benefits enjoyed by the rest of the financial industry without slowing down their preferred breakneck speed of development or putting them at…
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TikTok steps up its fintech foray
Chinese social media giant TikTok is borrowing a page out of the book of Alibaba and Tencent with its push into digital financial services. The ByteDance-owned company has super app ambitions. Fintech is a logical progression for the massively popular short video app, which generated an estimated US$23 billion in annual revenue in 2024. It is the…
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Why is Monzo leaving the U.S.?
UK neobank Monzo can’t seem to make up its mind about the U.S. market. The company first launched in the U.S. in June 2019 but withdrew its application for a banking charter in October 2021. Monzo remained in the U.S. market, though, operating through its partner bank, Sutton. Then on April 1, the UK online lender abruptly…