Creator Monetization Platform Destream Enters GCC Market
Destream, a creator‑focused monetization platform, has launched services in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), giving regional influencers access to a global payment infrastructure. The rollout includes secure payment links, multi‑currency payouts and a Mastercard‑backed debit card, plus a built‑in eSIM for travelers. GCC’s creator economy has expanded roughly 75% over two years, now encompassing about 263,000 influencers and a $315.5 million influencer‑marketing market. Destream already supports Twitch, YouTube and Instagram and operates in more than 20 languages.
Embedded Card Programmes Gain Momentum as European Firms Move Beyond Banks for Issuing
European firms are rapidly adopting embedded card programmes, bypassing traditional banks thanks to API‑driven platforms. Wallester’s recent webinar with Visa and GF Money shows launch times shrinking from a year to as little as 28 days. Regulatory clarity under PSD2 is...
MetaQuotes to Release Build 5640 of MT5 Platform
MetaQuotes will roll out build 5640 of its MetaTrader 5 platform on February 20, 2026. The update refines the dark interface theme, adjusting background, tab and scrollbar colours for a more cohesive visual experience. It adds Markdown support in MetaEditor, allowing developers to document...
Klarna Hits $1B, Doubles Users, yet Stock Plunges
Klarna just posted its first $1B revenue quarter, successfully doubling its banking users to 15.8 million. The pivot from a pure BNPL provider to a global digital bank is underway. But Wall Street just handed them a massive 27% stock drop....
FinTech Futures: Top Five News Stories of the Week – 20 February 2026
FinTech Futures highlighted five notable developments this week. Vestwell secured a $385 million Series E round, doubling its valuation to roughly $2 billion and earmarking funds for platform expansion and payroll integrations. The UK regulator fined Bank of Ireland UK £3.78 million for a 14‑month...
Lunar Teams Up with Wolt on Subscription Benefit Expansion
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...
Policy-as-Code Guardrails Preempt AI Compliance Violations
Agentic AI Gating Layer: Policy-as-Code = gating layer for agentic AI Controls AI actions by: Separating free-form reasoning (AI decides) from allowed execution (policy permits) Improving auditability (clear what AI can/can't do) Preventing compliance violations before they happen Guardrails, not post-incident cleanup. 📰 Intelligent compliance for...
Local Deposits Multiply Small Business Lending, Not Government Debt
Local deposit ➡️ Local loan ➡️ Local growth A $1,000 local bank deposit can support up to $30,000 in #smallbiz lending over 5 yrs. The same $1,000 in stablecoin backs government debt. Local deposits build communities. Stablecoin reserves fund Washington. #banklocal
Loan Applications, Drivers Licences, Personal Data of 440k Aussies Exposed After Hacker Hits Sydney Finance Tech Company youX
Australian fintech platform youX confirmed an unauthorized intrusion that exposed personal data of approximately 440,000 Australians. The stolen information includes loan applications, driver’s licence details and other identifying data. The breach was disclosed following the company’s internal investigation and reported...
PayPal Discloses Data Breach that Exposed User Info for 6 Months
PayPal disclosed a data breach affecting its Working Capital loan application, where personal information—including Social Security numbers—was exposed from July 1 to December 13, 2025. The company identified the issue on December 12, 2025, rolled back the faulty code, and halted unauthorized access within a...
Consumers Misunderstand Credit Scores; Banks Must Rethink Risk
Most consumers don’t understand how their credit score is calculated, and stigma keeps them from getting help. Financial institutions must rethink risk. We explore this with Steve Min, Chief Credit Officer at @CreditOneBank. Watch the full episode now: https://t.co/wUIHckaAy4 https://t.co/dX96wDMpfj
Badge Raises $17M to Shape the Future of Digital Wallets
Badge, a digital‑wallet platform founded in 2023, raised $17.1 million in a Series A round—$13.8 million led by TTV Capital and a $3.3 million seed from QED Investors and Infinity Ventures. The company builds interactive elements for Apple Pay and Google Pay, letting brands embed loyalty,...
Nexi Unveils ‘Nexi Ready’ as Europe Embrace ‘Buy’ Model
Nexi Group has launched Nexi Ready, a fully managed digital‑issuing platform that lets banks, corporates and fintechs outsource technology, scheme compliance and day‑to‑day operations while keeping their brand and customer data. The service is positioned as a new “plug‑and‑play” issuing...
White House Talks Make Progress on Stablecoin Yields but No Deal Yet
Negotiations between banks and crypto leaders advanced during the White House’s third closed‑door meeting, but the core dispute over stablecoin yields remains unresolved. Industry representatives described the dialogue as constructive, emphasizing a need for consumer protection and U.S. competitiveness. The...
KYCP Streamlines UK Corporate KYC with Integration
KYCP has launched an embedded integration with Companies House, allowing users to pull official UK corporate data directly within its platform. The Corporate Source Register (CSR) lets compliance teams perform real‑time searches by company name or registration number and import...
Why Verifying a Business in Africa Is Harder than Moving Money
Cross‑border payments in Africa now settle in seconds, but verifying the counterpart business can take weeks. The delay stems from fragmented, offline national registries and a lack of cross‑border data harmonisation, creating a “registry gap” that hampers the African Continental...
MyCryptoParadise Exposes Hidden Tactics of Scam Traders on YouTube
MyCryptoParadise released a report exposing how YouTube scam channels manipulate new crypto traders by hyping meme coins, promising unrealistic returns, and faking expertise. The analysis identifies three recurring tactics: meme‑coin hype, exaggerated profit claims, and staged authority cues. In contrast,...
The Banking Revolution: Balancing Convenience and Security in the Digital Era
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...
Crypto Snack Unveils Five-Pillar Ecosystem Spanning Sports, RWA Tokenisation, iGaming, Consumer Rewards, and Payments
Crypto Snack unveiled a five‑pillar ecosystem that links its BEP‑20 $SNACK token to sports, real‑world asset tokenisation, iGaming, consumer rewards and a unified payments app. A Premier League club will accept $SNACK for tickets and merchandise, while the Alkemya Metacore...
Scaling a Financial Reconciliation Pipeline With Serverless
The team built an event‑driven reconciliation pipeline on AWS using Step Functions, Lambda, and DynamoDB. At low volumes it performed well, but processing million‑transaction daily batches exposed two bottlenecks: Lambda’s 15‑minute timeout and hot DynamoDB partition keys. They resolved these...
Build vs Buy: Why Pricing Strategy Choices Matter More in 2026
The article argues that the classic build‑vs‑buy debate in pricing modernization has shifted from technical feasibility to strategic resource allocation. Cloud platforms and open‑source tools now let banks prototype pricing engines in months, but maintaining custom systems diverts scarce engineering...
Optimising Cross-Border Payments for Seamless APAC Expansion
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...
How Fintech in Asia Is Enabling and Making Education Affordable for Everyone
Fintech platforms are partnering with Southeast Asian schools to provide affordable student loans, solving the cash‑flow timing mismatch between tuition costs and post‑graduation income. By offering predictable financing, schools can invest in teachers, classrooms, and digital infrastructure without fearing enrollment...
Friday Roundtable: ORCA Tap to Pay Begins on Monday
Sound Transit announced that ORCA’s Tap to Pay system will launch on February 23, 2026, allowing riders to tap a credit or debit card—or a mobile wallet such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, or Samsung Pay—directly at fare readers. The...
Fincite Secures ISO 27001 Certification
FinCite, a provider of end‑to‑end investment advisory software, has achieved ISO 27001 certification, confirming its information security management system meets global standards. The certification spans the company’s entire operational backbone, including cloud infrastructure, development lifecycles, and client‑facing services such as onboarding...
TD Aims to Retain Its Branch ‘Essence’ Amid Brand Refresh
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...
Strategic Product Leadership Elevates Platform Reliability for Industry Leaders
Shankar Raj, a veteran of Fidelity, Deloitte, LTI Mindtree and doTERRA, redefines enterprise platform reliability as a living, adaptive product rather than a finite project. His AI‑native framework treats failure signals as data, cutting incident recovery times by up to 30 %...
The Six Tech Trends Banks Need on Their Radar for 2026
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...
Global Alliance Emphasizes Operational Resilience and Verification Practices in Digital Account Management
Global Alliance announced enhanced operational safeguards for its digital platform, including multi‑factor authentication (MFA) for logins and sensitive actions. The firm now requires verification checkpoints before adding external withdrawal destinations, tightening outbound transaction controls. Real‑time data backups and DDoS mitigation...
Razorpay and NPCI Bring Agentic Payments to Claude at India AI Impact Summit
Razorpay and India’s National Payments Corporation (NPCI) have partnered with Anthropic’s Claude to launch Agentic Payments, a pilot that lets users complete purchases from Zomato, Swiggy and Zepto directly within a conversational AI interface. The solution combines Razorpay’s UPI‑based Reserve...
Discover Network Shows How Sharing Data Can Turn the Tide on Fraud
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...
Middle-Market Confidence Splits in 2026 as Tariffs and Supply Chains Weigh on High-Uncertainty Firms
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,...
Everyone Has a Side Hustle Now. Not Everyone Has the Same Reason.
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...
Divest Launches V3, Expands Beyond Crypto-to-Cash to Build a Smarter Way to Move Money Across Africa
Divest, a Nigerian fintech known for crypto‑to‑cash services, has unveiled Divest V3, an integrated platform that combines fiat Money Exchange with its existing crypto conversion engine. The dual‑experience design lets users move cash and digital assets through a single interface,...
Remitly Names Former Santander Exec Sebastian Gunningham as New CEO
Remitly announced that Sebastian Gunningham, a former senior executive at Santander, will take over as chief executive officer effective immediately. Gunningham previously led Santander’s consumer banking and digital transformation initiatives across Europe and Latin America. The appointment follows Remitly’s recent...
The CISO View of Fraud Risk Across the Retail Payment Ecosystem
In a Help Net Security interview, Paul Suarez, VP and CISO of Casey’s, explains that fuel‑payment hardware receives the same disciplined patching and modernization approach as other retail technology. He warns that QR‑code payment methods create fresh fraud opportunities, prompting...
Quick Fire 🔥 with Feranmi Ajetomobi
Feranmi Ajetomobi has spent a decade driving growth across Nigerian fintech, consumer goods, and web3 ventures, from Cowrywise’s savings habits to Flutterwave’s rapid scaling. He leverages behavioral psychology, community‑led tactics, and data‑driven nudges to turn dormant users into active transactors....
Google Threat Intelligence Report Highlights Growing Adversarial Exploitation of AI
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...
Progcap Nearly Doubles Revenue to Rs 268 Cr in FY25; Nears Breakeven
Progcap, the Tiger Global‑backed fintech, nearly doubled its FY25 revenue to Rs 268 crore, a 93% jump from the prior year. The firm slashed its net loss by 87% to Rs 6 crore and posted a positive EBITDA of Rs 75 crore, delivering a 28% margin....
Banking’s Crisis of Meaning: When Purpose Disappears
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...
Coin Center Highlights Decisive Shift in Congressional Debates Over Digital Assets Market Structure
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....
Things Worth Reading: 20th February 2026
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...
APAC Fintechs Turn to Expansion and Banks Amid Funding Slowdown
🌏How can Asia-Pacific fintechs survive this year’s funding slowdown? APAC #fintech firms are heading into 2026 facing a cautious funding environment, with overseas expansion and bank partnerships emerging as key survival strategies. @AsianBanking. https://t.co/N1S2RZYpaH
Block Turns Cash App Score Into Fintech Data Service
Block’s Credit Score Play: Can Cash App Score Replace FICO? Block announced it’s selling its Cash App Score to third-party lenders. It could be one of the more interesting data-as-a-service businesses in fintech right now. New Fintech Snark Tank post: https://t.co/tItfZdy7IT
Stablecoin Payments Question Need for Traditional Rewards
If stablecoin is the future of payments, why do you need rewards? Are there FedNow rewards? ACH rewards? Check writing rewards? Wire rewards?
Uniswap Launches Free API and CLI for Instant Swaps
One of the things I'm most excited about at Uniswap right now is the hardcore focus on dev tooling Still in beta, but we just rolled out a dev portal with a free rest-API for swapping and an agent CLI Devs and...
White House Meets Ripple on CLARITY Act, Aiming Crypto Capital
LATEST: Ripple CLO Stuart Alderoty joined today’s White House stablecoin yield meeting, saying work will continue on the CLARITY Act to get it right and make the US the crypto capital of the world. https://t.co/BIFNUWh8la
Spark: Easiest, Fastest, Cheapest Lightning Integration
🚀! A reminder that the easiest, fastest, cheapest way to add Lightning to your product and wallet is @spark https://t.co/cVqtdpsgxP
Retail Banking Strategies Lag Behind Execution in 2026
The 2026 Retail Banking Trends research reveals a clear gap between strategy and execution across digital, payments, AI, and partnerships. Watch the full video: https://t.co/qrsFZDRVT6 https://t.co/pesk3Lrhfe
Fintech Team @Fintechaaron Gains On‑Chain Momentum
This is a team to watch. I have to say, after some initial skepticism, the drive and vision of @fintechaaron and the @rhythmic_io team won me over. Financial services are coming onchain. Excited for @thefintechfund to invest alongside @dragonfly_xyz and @deptvc. 🚀 https://t.co/YWI00yxELS