Banking News and Headlines
Banking News and Headlines
Banking Pulse
EMAIL DIGESTS
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EMAIL DIGESTS
Daily
Every morning
Weekly
Tuesday recap
Lunar, the Nordic challenger bank, has signed a strategic partnership with delivery platform Wolt across Sweden, Denmark and Norway. The deal embeds Wolt+ unlimited delivery into Lunar’s top‑tier Unlimited (personal) and Limitless (business) subscription plans, while lower‑tier customers can redeem three to nine months of free service starting 11 February. A separate B2B offering provides Lunar banking solutions to Wolt’s restaurant, retail and courier partners. The collaboration marks the first formal bank‑Wolt partnership in the region, expanding Lunar’s value‑added services beyond traditional finance.
The European Central Bank’s latest focus piece finds euro‑area property investment has likely bottomed out in late 2024, with a brief, modest rebound in early 2025 that quickly faded. After a sharp decline that began in 2022, housing investment remains about 7 %...
Digital banking has become the cornerstone of modern finance, delivering round‑the‑clock services through mobile apps. Consumers now deposit checks, transfer funds, and invest without stepping into a branch, enjoying lower fees and personalized experiences. At the same time, providers are...
APAC’s rapid digital growth is hampered by fragmented cross‑border payment ecosystems. Companies expanding from hubs like Singapore face higher merchant discount rates, FX volatility, and regulatory bottlenecks when transactions are processed through non‑local acquirers. Payment orchestration emerges as a unifying...
TD Bank U.S. is launching a "More Human" brand refresh while pledging to keep its traditional branch‑centric ethos. New head of consumer deposit and payment products Marc Womack says the focus is on retaining customers amid fierce deposit competition and...
Banks face mounting regulatory, economic and consumer pressures as digital expectations rise, and their technology choices will dictate future competitiveness. nCino outlines six 2026 tech trends, from AI‑driven mobile banking that acts as a personal financial command centre to AI‑powered...
Fraud is evolving into a fast‑moving, AI‑driven threat across e‑commerce, payments and identity, outpacing traditional, institution‑by‑institution defenses. Discover Network argues that sharing data through a consortium enables real‑time signal aggregation, tokenization and enhanced decisioning to spot patterns no single bank...
The 2026 Certainty Project surveyed CFOs of U.S. middle‑market firms (revenues $100 M‑$1 B) and found overall uncertainty stable, but a sharp split between goods and services sectors. Tariff policy shifts and supply‑chain exposure pushed high‑uncertainty among goods producers up 27% year‑over‑year,...
The Wage to Wallet Index reveals that roughly 60 million hourly workers earning $50,000 or less are turning to side work, with one in five performing regular gigs. While overall job‑security sentiment is rising, financial confidence is splitting: higher‑income salaried professionals...
Ireland’s central bank warned that the country must deepen economic resilience as it enters 2026, despite current strength. Governor Gabriel Makhlouf and Deputy Governor Vasileios Madouros outlined five domestic priorities, including targeted infrastructure, stronger indigenous businesses, fiscal buffers, household market...
UK regulators recorded a surge in money‑muling, with 207,889 cases in 2024, up from 170,338 in 2023. Predominantly young adults are lured by promises of quick cash, only to become unwitting conduits for criminal proceeds. Banks, fearing fines, are now...
Google’s Threat Intelligence Group released a new report detailing how adversarial AI is increasingly weaponized against enterprises. The study highlights a surge in model‑extraction attacks, where threat actors query commercial LLMs like Gemini to create compact replicas, and documents AI‑enhanced...
KPMG UK analysts say the latest labour market data show wage growth slowing to 4.2% and unemployment edging up to 5.2%, signalling a cooling jobs market. The firm forecasts pay growth will dip to around 3% by year‑end and expects...
Dharmesh Mistry warns that AI‑driven automation is stripping banking jobs of their intrinsic purpose, turning roles into mere button‑pressing tasks. He argues that a superficial brand slogan like “better banking” won’t survive when machines already deliver superior products. Instead, banks...
Blue Owl Capital announced the sale of $1.4 billion of assets across three credit funds and permanently halted redemptions in one fund to return capital and reduce leverage. The announcement triggered a broad sell‑off in listed alternative‑asset managers such as Apollo,...
Coin Center’s executive director Peter Van Valkenburgh says the Senate is now confronting the core issue of the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act – whether developers of non‑custodial blockchain infrastructure will receive legal protection under the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act....
Chris Skinner’s roundup highlights a wave of fintech activity on February 20, 2026. Forbes lists the 50 hottest fintech startups, while Santander signals a push to scale its global investment bank. Regulatory pressure mounts as the ECB sanctions JPMorgan for capital‑misreporting, and...
MAS Financial Services (MFSL) posted double‑digit year‑on‑year growth in assets under management, revenue and net profit for the December 2025 quarter and the first nine months of FY 26, driving its stock up 9% versus the BSE Financial Services index. The...
M&T Bank’s Wilmington Trust subsidiary is defending a New York lawsuit alleging it failed to fulfill custodial duties for several Tricolor‑related trusts. Plaintiffs claim the bank breached contracts and fiduciary obligations, seeking unspecified damages, interest and fees. M&T reports that...
ATM jackpotting has shifted from a security demo to a lucrative crime, with hackers now pulling millions from cash dispensers. The FBI reports over 700 attacks in 2025 alone, netting at least $20 million in stolen cash. The primary tool, Ploutus...
Medallion Financial, the former taxi‑medallion lender, is pivoting to accelerate home‑improvement loan growth, aiming for mid‑teens percentage expansion in 2026. The strategy is anchored by hiring veteran consumer lender Joel Cannon from Regions Financial to lead a dedicated home‑improvement team....
Kentucky First Federal Bancorp announced that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has terminated its formal written agreement with First Federal Savings Bank of Kentucky, ending a regulatory oversight period that began in August 2024. The termination, achieved...
Global Payments reported fourth‑quarter net revenue of $2.3 billion, a 6 % year‑over‑year increase, while net income fell to $217.5 million, missing consensus forecasts. The results sparked a 13 % surge in the stock as the company completed its Worldpay acquisition and announced a...
The episode examines a McKinsey-Artemis Analytics report showing that while stablecoins process roughly $35 trillion a year, only about $390 billion is tied to real‑world payments, with most activity still internal to exchanges, custodians, and protocols. External payment use is growing fast,...
Metropolitan Commercial Bank (MCB) has partnered with Finzly to replace its legacy ACH mainframe with a cloud‑native, API‑first payment platform that consolidates ACH, wires and real‑time payments on a single system. The bank is the first to adopt Finzly’s unified...
Anchorage Digital has introduced Stablecoin Solutions, a federally regulated service that lets banks settle USD transactions globally in near‑real time via blockchain. The offering bundles minting, redemption, custody, treasury and settlement under Anchorage Digital Bank, N.A., overseen by the OCC,...
Senate Banking Committee ranking member Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell demanding a written commitment that the government will not bail out the crypto industry. She cited Bitcoin’s roughly 50%...
Atruvia, the backbone of over 900 German cooperative banks, tackled massive technical debt by adopting HashiCorp Terraform and Vault. The shift to infrastructure‑as‑code slashed cluster provisioning from three months to two hours and cut network setup from weeks to minutes....
Multi‑currency collateral agreements create optionality that requires discounting with a cheapest‑to‑deliver (CTD) curve. While Monte‑Carlo simulation can price this exactly, it is computationally heavy. Researchers propose an analytic approximation that combines the Clark algorithm and Gauss‑Hermite quadrature, delivering near‑Monte‑Carlo accuracy...
Visa announced it will reacquire Argentina’s Prisma Medios de Pago and Newpay from Advent International, bringing the payment processors back under its control. The acquisition, expected to close by the end of March, restores Visa’s card‑issuer processing, real‑time payments, ATM...
Remitly announced that former Santander executive Sebastian J. Gunningham will replace co‑founder Matt Oppenheimer as chief executive effective Thursday. Oppenheimer, who led the company for nearly 15 years, will move to board chair and focus on strategic initiatives. The leadership...
Remitly announced Sebastian Gunningham, a former Santander Consumer Finance chair with executive experience at Amazon, Apple and Oracle, will become its chief executive on Thursday. Co‑founder Matt Oppenheimer will transition to board chair as the company reported a strong 2025...
Subprime borrowers propelled U.S. unsecured loan balances to a record $276 bn, a 10% increase year‑over‑year, with 26.4 million consumers holding such loans. Credit‑card issuers expanded lending to lower‑income customers, pushing total balances 4% higher to $1.15 trillion, but responded by trimming initial...
The British Business Bank announced a £60 million commitment to NorthEdge IV, marking its first foray into private‑equity investments under a new growth‑equity strategy. The government‑owned development bank will back the Manchester‑based firm’s fourth fund, which targets founder‑led SMEs across technology, healthcare...
A new State of Financial Crime 2026 report from ComplyAdvantage reveals that financial institutions are falling behind AI‑enabled criminal networks. Over 600 senior compliance leaders reported 99% detection weaknesses, with only 33% employing AI for core AML functions and manual...
Rwanda’s central bank raised its key lending rate by 50 basis points to 7.25% on Thursday, reacting to a jump in consumer price inflation to 8.9% year‑on‑year in January. The move aims to bring inflation back within the bank’s 2‑8%...
Toast, the Boston‑based restaurant point‑of‑sale provider, announced it will launch a drive‑thru product aimed at quick‑service restaurants later this year. The move marks a strategic shift from its traditional focus on casual‑dining chains such as Applebee’s and Potbelly. In 2025...
Clip, the Mexico‑based payments‑tech firm, introduced tap‑to‑pay for Android devices, extending the functionality of its recently launched Clip Total 3 POS. In parallel, Wirex rolled out Stablecoin Push‑to‑Card using Visa Direct, while Justt announced an AI‑driven chargeback solution for franchise networks....
Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote to Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman demanding details on recent internal changes within the Fed’s banking‑supervision division, including reported job cuts and the sidelining of senior examiners. The request also asks for a...
J.P. Morgan now handles nearly two billion API requests each month, but only about 13% stem from direct customer‑initiated actions. Historically, open‑banking data flowed freely, enabling budgeting apps, lending tools and countless fintech services. In 2025 the bank began negotiating paid...
ClearBank has appointed former Uber payments chief Tristan Kirchner as its European CEO to accelerate the bank’s cross‑border growth. The fintech already holds an EU banking licence and serves more than 30 clients across multiple markets. Kirchner will oversee the...
Businesses of all sizes are embracing peer‑to‑peer payment apps such as Venmo, Zelle and Cash App to streamline vendor payments and employee reimbursements. The convenience has sparked a surge in fraud, with New York regulators reporting more than $390 million in losses...
Regional banks with $10‑$100 billion in assets leveraged mergers and acquisitions to outpace the broader market in 2025, boosting core deposits by more than 8% versus the industry’s 4% average. The 27 midsize lenders that completed deals saw a collective 29%...
DBS Bank, in partnership with Visa, has launched a pilot that enables AI agents to complete payments on behalf of customers using tokenised card credentials. The trial, dubbed Visa Intelligent Commerce, has already processed real‑world transactions such as food and...
The authors analyze the Bank of England’s 2012 Funding for Lending Scheme (FLS) and find that central‑bank liquidity acts as a backstop that improves private wholesale funding conditions rather than merely substituting for them. By lowering banks’ wholesale funding costs,...
The UK arm of Bank of Ireland was fined £3.78 million by the Payments Systems Regulator for a 14‑month delay in deploying the Confirmation of Payee (CoP) system. The lapse left 1.14 million new payees and roughly £7 million in payments without fraud‑prevention...
Denis Beau, representing Banque de France and ACPR, highlighted the strategic role of asset‑backed securities (ABS) in the euro‑area monetary‑policy framework, noting they account for roughly 30% of collateral despite representing less than 5% of eligible securities. He stressed that...
Axis Bank honored 100 employees as "Champions" for embodying five core values—customer centricity, ethics, teamwork, transparency, and ownership—highlighting culture as a strategic asset. The speech stressed that success hinges on how results are achieved, not just the results themselves. By...
