Can Blockchain Decentralise Money, Contracts, and Finance?
Bitcoin’s blockchain, valued at $1.3 trillion, has operated uninterrupted since 2009, embodying the original promise of trust‑less money, contracts, and finance. In a new LTI report, economists Yackolley Amoussou‑Guenou, Bruno Biais, and Sara Tucci‑Piergiovanni assess how much of that promise has been realized. The interview highlights Bitcoin’s Nash‑equilibrium security, Ethereum’s smart‑contract expansion, and DeFi’s aim to eliminate rent‑seeking intermediaries. Yet the authors argue that without regulatory transparency, the technology’s libertarian ethos may falter.
On the Decentralisation of Money, Contracts, and Finance Using Blockchain
The fifth LTI Report surveys how blockchain aims to decentralise money, contracts, and finance by replacing central authorities with distributed ledgers and native cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin’s $1 trillion market cap and Ethereum’s $0.5 trillion ether supply illustrate the scale of monetary decentralisation achieved...
Crypto Tokens Thrive Amid Private Credit Crisis
Private credit is having its worst crisis in a decade. Blue Owl gated a $1.6B fund. Blackstone hit redemption caps. Meanwhile, crypto builders are constructing the parallel infrastructure. In this article, we break down three tokens positioned at the center...
Digital Revolution Can Revive Hong Kong Taxi Industry’s Image
Hong Kong will mandate electronic payment options for all taxis starting April 1, ending the long‑standing cash‑only fare settlement. The rule requires at least two e‑payment methods, including a QR‑code option and a card‑based alternative. About 90% of the city’s 46,000...
What BVNK’s Report Reveals About How Consumers Are Using Stablecoins
BVNK’s new report, based on a YouGov‑sponsored survey of 4,658 crypto and stablecoin holders across 15 countries, shows a sharp rise in stablecoin demand. Nearly half of respondents increased their holdings in the past year and 56% plan to acquire...
EarnIn Powers Real-Time Income with 1M+ Live Pay Transactions
EarnIn announced that more than one million Live Pay transactions have been completed since July 2025, marking a milestone for real‑time earnings. Over 600,000 workers have joined the Live Pay waitlist, reflecting strong demand for instant access to wages. Users engage with the...
RBI Fines Cashfree For Flouting Payment Aggregator Norms
India’s central bank has fined fintech payments platform Cashfree Payments ₹3.1 lakh for breaching payment aggregator and gateway regulations. The RBI’s inspection of Cashfree’s activities from April 2024 to June 2025 uncovered an impermissible debit from the company’s escrow account, prompting a show‑cause...
Fraud Rising in Auto Finance as Lenders Question Effectiveness of AI Tools
Fraud in auto finance is accelerating, with lenders reporting a sharp uptick in sophisticated schemes. A recent InformedIQ survey of over 2,500 industry executives revealed growing skepticism about the ability of current AI‑driven detection tools to keep pace. While many...
UK Banks Wary as Contactless Payment Limits Are Lifted
The UK is scrapping the £100 ceiling on contactless card payments, theoretically allowing unlimited tap‑to‑pay transactions. However, many banks are signaling they will retain their own limits due to heightened fraud exposure. Contactless already dominates UK in‑store spending, with 94.6%...
Fuse Raises $25M to Disrupt Aging Loan Origination Systems Used by US Credit Unions
Fuse announced a $25 million Series A round led by Footwork, Primary Venture Partners, NextView Ventures and Commerce Ventures to build an AI‑native loan‑origination system for U.S. credit unions. The platform promises to replace legacy LOS software that can take up to...
UPI Tightens Grip on Global Instant Payments Market
India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) now processes more than four‑fifths of all real‑time transactions worldwide, accounting for 81% of global instant payments. Transaction volume surged from ₹7,176.9 crore in FY22 to ₹22,167.9 crore in FY25, a 35% year‑over‑year increase. The system’s expansion...
MoCaFi Files for Bankruptcy
MoCaFi, a fintech focused on the unbanked and underbanked, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and entered liquidation after losing a central revenue program. The loss stemmed from a failed partnership with BNY on the Treasury Department’s Direct Express benefits platform, which the...
Kudwa Lands $1.1 Million Funding to Scale Its AI Finance Manager Platform
Kudwa, a UAE‑USA fintech SaaS, secured $1.1 million in a round led by 1818 Venture Capital, F6 Ventures, Sparked VC, IM Fndg and IVP. The AI‑powered finance manager automates reporting, forecasting, and insights, linking to ERP and accounting systems. The capital...
UAE Blockchain Startup Utexo Raises $7.5 Million Seed Led by Tether
UAE‑based blockchain infrastructure startup Utexo announced a $7.5 million seed round led by Tether, with participation from several venture firms. The company builds enterprise‑grade APIs that let financial institutions, digital wallets and exchanges process USDT stablecoin payments directly on the Bitcoin...
Musk Courts Bankers and Lenders to Teach Grok Finance
Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI is recruiting Wall Street bankers, portfolio managers, traders and credit analysts to train its Grok chatbot on complex financial products such as leveraged loan syndications and CLOs. The move follows job postings that describe data‑annotation...
Nayax Scores Another EV Payment Processing Win
Israel‑based payments firm Nayax announced a new partnership with E‑Plug to handle payment processing at an estimated 2,200 charging stations across the United States. The deal follows recent collaborations, including a January agreement with Autel Energy to embed Nayax technology...
Instant Checkout in ChatGPT Reflects Enormous Challenge
OpenAI announced its Instant Checkout feature for ChatGPT in late 2025, but in March 2026 the company said it is scaling back the rollout to focus on merchant‑site integrations. The pause reflects the difficulty of embedding AI agents in e‑commerce,...
AI and Stablecoins: The Flywheel Reshaping Finance
Artificial intelligence is overhauling the capabilities layer of finance—automating underwriting, fraud detection, compliance and customer service—while stablecoins are redefining the rails that move money, offering instant, programmable settlement. The two trends are not parallel but form a self‑reinforcing flywheel: AI...
Orca Strengthens Fraud Detection for Africa’s Digital Payments
Orca, a fraud‑detection platform focused on Africa’s burgeoning digital payments market, has closed a new funding round to accelerate product development and regional expansion. The company’s real‑time analytics layer scans transaction streams across banks, fintechs, and payment providers, flagging suspicious...
Ironlight Group Raises $21M in Series A Funding
Ironlight Group, an Austin‑based fintech, announced a $21 million Series A round. The round was backed by Greg Braca, the Sei Development Foundation and Laidlaw Private Equity. The capital will be used to scale Ironlight Markets’ alternative trading system and its tokenized...
Nigerian Fintech Duplo Gets Licenced for E-Invoicing and Tax Transmission
Duplo, a Nigerian B2B payments platform, secured Systems Integrator and Access Point Provider licences from the Nigeria Revenue Service. The dual licences let the company generate NRS‑compliant e‑invoices, transmit them automatically, and settle payments within its platform. Nigeria’s digital tax...
What Are the Gaps Between Fintech’s Digital Promises and Market Reality?
The Money Motion 2026 fintech conference in Zagreb highlighted that the technology to digitize finance is mature, yet adoption bottlenecks remain in institutions and legacy systems. In wealth management, 69% of institutional investors now favor firms with sophisticated digital platforms...
SmartKYC QnA: Accelerating Due Diligence at Scale
Founded in 2014, smartKYC automates KYC and due‑diligence for financial institutions using AI, multilingual NLP and federated search. The platform creates unified entity profiles that combine identity, risk, network and opportunity data, enabling faster onboarding, continuous monitoring and reduced manual...
South Korea’s Hana Financial Partners with Standard Chartered on Digital Assets
Hana Financial Group has signed a strategic agreement with Standard Chartered to cooperate across global finance and digital‑asset services, including investment banking, money markets, foreign exchange and crypto‑related offerings. The deal builds on Hana’s recent collaborations with Circle and Crypto.com...
How Safaricom’s New M-PESA Masked Phone Number Feature Will Work
Safaricom will roll out a phone‑number masking feature for M‑PESA transaction alerts at the end of March 2026. Alerts will replace full numbers with a partially hidden format such as 0722*000**, while still displaying the sender’s first and second names....
Fino Payments Bank Shares Slump Over 17% On Report Of Potential ED Probe
Fino Payments Bank’s shares tumbled 17% to a 52‑week low after a report that the Directorate General of GST Intelligence may recommend an Enforcement Directorate probe into online‑gaming related transactions. The bank refuted the claim, labeling it speculative, while its...
Willis and Qover Launch Embedded Insurance Partnership
Willis, through its GB Affinity unit, has partnered with European insurtech Qover to create an embedded insurance ecosystem for UK businesses. The joint offering combines Willis’ broking expertise and Radar analytics with Qover’s API‑driven platform, enabling rapid, product‑agnostic insurance programs...
Leveraging NLP for Alpha Extraction in Financial Markets
Recent advances in natural language processing, especially transformer models like BERT, are reshaping how systematic traders extract alpha from text data. LSEG Data & Analytics reports double‑digit performance gains on GLUE benchmarks and highlights BERT’s ease of fine‑tuning with limited...
WealthAi and Stratiphy Partner on AI Portfolio Solutions
WealthAi, an AI-driven operating system for wealth managers, has partnered with Stratiphy to embed its managed portfolio services into the WealthAi platform. The integration delivers Stratiphy’s AI‑built portfolios via bank‑issued synthetic certificates, giving firms a single interface for construction, execution,...
Visa and Fiserv Expand European Payments Partnership
Visa and Fiserv have broadened their European partnership by integrating the Visa Acceptance Platform into Fiserv’s merchant acquiring and processing solutions. The API‑first, cloud‑based acceptance layer consolidates multiple connections into a single integration, aiming to boost authorization rates, cut fraud...
25 Users Can Win Up to $16,000 In Rewards on Hotstuff
Hotstuff has launched a 14‑day Volume Championship starting March 16, rewarding the top 25 traders with a shared pool of up to $16,000 in USDC. The competition features two tiers—Tier 1 for volumes over $150 million and Tier 2 for volumes over $300 million—with the...
Robots Will Build Tomorrow's GDP—Position for Robot Money
I have been working on the concept of $ROBOTMONEY since 2009, when I founded my first fintech company, a roboadvisor called @NestEggWealth, thereafter became @AdvisorEngine In 2015, I wrote this piece, which you can see still rhymes with how the future...
Outdated Credit Models Stifle Consumer Opportunity and Bank Growth
If credit decisions only look backward, how can we support forward progress? In this episode, I discuss why relying on outdated credit models limits opportunity for consumers and growth for banks. Watch the full episode now: https://t.co/m6PArSdD2z https://t.co/BKhnOAD5Lg
Regulation of Payment Service Providers –Tranche 1 Draft Legislation
On 12 March 2026 the Australian Treasury released tranche 1 exposure drafts to overhaul the regulatory framework for payment service providers. The package replaces the purchased payment facility regime with Australian Financial Services licensing for stored‑value facilities and grants APRA prudential powers over...
Mobile Wallets Boost Security and Credit Card Rewards
Using payment services like Apple Pay and Google Pay can offer extra security and encourage you to maximize your credit cards. https://t.co/VPFoaKTwsB
Privy Earn Lets Apps Share Aave Yield with Users
Privy Earn, powered by @aave. A powerful way to share yield with your user base to increase monetization and retention.
Fed Inquiry Into Checks Has Bankers Fearing 'Disaster'
Community bankers are warning that the Federal Reserve’s request for information on the future of its check‑clearing services could lead to an abrupt shutdown of the system, harming elderly, rural customers and small businesses that still rely on paper checks....
DeFi Fuels AI-Driven Machine Economy, No Human Banks
Here's the thesis DeFi's killer app isn't replacing banks It's powering the machine economy When AI agents need to: • Pay each other • Pool resources • Share revenue • Settle debts They'll use DeFi rails No humans required
Machine Economy Relies on Crypto, Not Traditional Payments
When your AI agent needs to pay another AI agent Venmo won't work PayPal won't work Wire transfers won't work Crypto is the only rails that make sense The machine economy runs on machine money
Fintech News Digest: New Islamic Neobank Plans African Launch, Payments Shake-Ups in Europe and the Freelancer Economy, and a $35M...
The fintech digest highlights a new Islamic neobank preparing to launch across Africa, promising Sharia‑compliant digital banking services. Europe sees payment‑industry turbulence as Mastercard strengthens China ties and Airwallex scales its European footprint, while a freelancer‑focused platform secures a $35 million...
Crypto Powers AI: Robot Money for Autonomous Workers
We're building: • AI that can think • AI that can create • AI that can decide But we're using: • Banking systems from the 1970s • Payment rails that require humans • Financial infrastructure that assumes flesh This is the gap crypto fills Robot money for robot workers
Co‑operative Bank IT Collapse Exposes Governance Failures
Digital Hubris and the £349 Million Mirage — The Collapse of the Co-operative Bank’s IT Transformation A Masterclass in Governance Failure - Five Lessons to Learn Great read by Frank Schwab https://t.co/sKpx4mOYMF https://t.co/KUTIUvoGyT
Experian and OpenAI Bring Credit Data at Consumer Fingertips With OpenAI Integration
Experian has partnered with OpenAI to embed its credit‑score benchmark tool inside ChatGPT for UK consumers. The integration lets users query average credit scores by postcode and age group, presenting anonymized, aggregate data in natural language. By avoiding personal data...
Decentralized Crypto Powers AI Agents' Efficiency
We spent a decade arguing about decentralization for humans Turns out the killer app was decentralization for machines AI agents don't care about ideology They care about efficiency And crypto is the most efficient payment layer ever built
Banking's Gravity Shifts to Smartphones, Not Branches
The branch is no longer the center of gravity. Smartphones and the Internet define where banking lives today. Adapt or become irrelevant. https://t.co/13Zq2pzn3j
Fintech Startup Chaseit.ai Launches AI Agents for Call Centre Loan Servicing
Lithuanian fintech Chaseit.ai has entered live production with AI agents that automate loan‑servicing calls. The agents manage inbound and outbound interactions, verifying identities, reminding borrowers, negotiating repayment plans, and escalating complex issues to human staff. Within seven months of founding,...
OPINION: Securing Your Base in a Volatile Market: How Retention Data Drives Acquisition and Growth
Butter Payments CEO Charles Rosenblatt argues that in volatile markets, subscription firms must shift focus from acquisition to data‑driven retention. Machine‑learning models can analyze vast anonymized data to pinpoint churn drivers, payment failures, and high‑LTV prospects. By operationalising these insights,...
The Real Cost of Payment Downtime No One Talks About
The article highlights that payment system downtime costs extend far beyond immediate lost sales, affecting customer trust, brand reputation, cash flow, and employee productivity. It details how outages force teams into crisis mode, create communication gaps, and expose operational weaknesses...
PhonePe Puts IPO on Hold as Iran–Israel–US War Rattles Public Markets
PhonePe, one of India’s largest digital‑payments platforms, has temporarily halted its planned initial public offering due to heightened geopolitical tensions involving Iran, Israel and the United States. The company cited volatility in global capital markets and said it will resume...
KCM Trade Launches Copy Trading Service
KCM Trade, a global CFD broker, has introduced KCM Trade Copy, a mobile copy‑trading platform now available on iOS and Android. The app lets clients automatically mirror the trades of vetted Master Traders in real time, with adjustable lot sizes,...