Easter’s Gone Luxe and the Chocolate Is Driving
Easter spending is set to hit a record $24.9 billion in 2026, with the average shopper budgeting about $195.59. Luxury chocolate products—from Louis Vuitton’s $289 edible handbag to Neuhaus’s $41 limited‑edition egg—are anchoring the premium segment. High‑end hospitality and fashion brands are pairing these confections with exclusive experiences such as tea services, spa treatments, and cacao‑farm tours. The holiday has transformed into a multi‑step, high‑value payments journey involving pre‑orders, click‑and‑collect, and destination bookings.
FTC Prioritizes Children’s Online Safety in 5-Year Strategic Plan
The FTC unveiled its 2026‑2030 strategic plan, re‑adding “without unduly burdening legitimate business activity” to its mission and emphasizing children’s online safety as a top priority. The agency highlighted ongoing COPPA enforcement and new powers under the 2025 Take It...
Perplexity Asks Federal Court to Lift Amazon Shopping Agent Ban
Perplexity has filed an appeal to a federal circuit court asking it to lift a March injunction that barred its AI shopping agent, Comet, from accessing Amazon’s site. The district court had found Amazon likely to succeed on its claim...
One Inc and ManageMy Power Digital Payments for Insurance
One Inc and ManageMy have announced a partnership that integrates One Inc’s ClaimsPay and PremiumPay network into ManageMy’s insurance carrier platform. The combined solution enables carriers to accept premiums and disburse claims through digital wallets, instant payments, virtual cards, and...
The New Power Broker in Consumer Decisions Is AI
Artificial intelligence assistants are moving from occasional utilities to routine, general‑purpose tools that answer consumer questions and make recommendations. This shift replaces search engines as the default interface for everyday decision‑making, allowing AI to synthesize answers rather than list sources....
Why Gen Z Uses BNPL and Installments Differently
Consumers are no longer choosing payment methods out of habit; they select tools that fit a specific financial objective at checkout. A PYMNTS Intelligence study shows that in January 2026, 31% of shoppers used credit‑card installment plans while only 12%...
Check City Notifies 322,687 People of March 2025 Data Breach
Check City, a payday‑loan provider, disclosed that a March 2025 cyber‑attack exposed personal data of 322,687 individuals. The breach compromised names, Social Security numbers, government IDs, financial account details, credit and debit card numbers, dates of birth, and addresses. A...
Sen Warren Accuses White House of Using Tariffs to Help Big Tech
Senator Elizabeth Warren accuses the White House of using Trump-era tariffs to shield big‑tech firms while harming U.S. manufacturers. She argues that exemptions let companies like Elon Musk’s xAI evade foreign regulations, citing the Grok AI chatbot’s deep‑fake scandal. Warren...
EDX Becomes Latest Crypto Firm Seeking Banking Status
EDX Markets has filed an application with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to become a de novo national trust bank. The charter would limit the bank’s activities to custody, asset‑management and risk‑less principal trading while the exchange continues...
Fuel Costs Deliver Fresh Headaches to Fresh Food Companies
Rising diesel costs, up 44% since the Iran war began, are prompting fresh‑food distributors to tack fuel surcharges onto perishable items such as fruit and Chilean salmon. The added fees are inflating prices for supermarkets, restaurants, hospitals and schools just...
Credit Unions Want FinTechs on Speed Dial
FinTech partnerships with credit unions surged nearly 20% last year, shifting from a supplemental tactic to a core modernization strategy. Credit unions favor these alliances for speed, with 56% crediting FinTechs for faster, larger‑scale innovation. Payments and data analytics dominate...
Virtual Cards Bring Flexibility to SMB Payments Stuck in the Past
A February PYMNTS Intelligence report, conducted with Mastercard and surveying 412 U.S. SMB owners in December 2025, finds that nearly half of small and medium‑sized businesses are eager to cut reliance on cash and checks. Cash still dominates daily transactions,...
David’s Bridal CEO Kelly Cook on Betting Big and Knowing When Not To
David’s Bridal CEO Kelly Cook marks her first year by redefining the company from a single‑purchase wedding dress retailer into a year‑long, data‑driven bridal ecosystem. She reframed the problem, discovering that a bride’s journey spans 18 months and hundreds of...
Secured Credit’s Next Turn: Unlocking Growth With Dynamic Funding
Secured credit is being reinvented as a growth engine for banks and fintechs through dynamic funding models that lock only the amount actually spent. Traditional secured cards required double funding and separate collateral accounts, creating liquidity friction for underserved consumers....
Gen Z Digital Wallet Use Climbs 21% as Budgets Tighten
A PYMNTS Intelligence survey of 2,108 U.S. adults shows digital wallet usage soaring, especially among Gen Z, where adoption for retail purchases more than doubled to 36%—a 21% increase since March 2024. Consumers experiencing high financial stress are twice as likely...
Why Payroll Is Becoming the Latest Loyalty Product
Instant payouts are evolving from a convenience into core payroll for gig‑economy workers, with the PYMNTS Intelligence report showing that 68% of users who try instant disbursements become regular users. The study highlights that digital wallets deliver the highest stickiness...
CFOs Are Using Stablecoins More Like ACH Than Digital Assets
The latest PYMNTS Intelligence report finds that 88% of firms receiving stablecoins immediately convert them into U.S. dollars, treating the tokens as a fast payment rail rather than a store of value. CFOs are leveraging stablecoins to accelerate cross‑border and...
The Enterprise’s New Hire Is an AI Agent
Enterprises are moving from treating AI tools as isolated utilities to onboarding them as fully fledged agents, complete with job descriptions, authority limits, and human supervisors. Harvard Business Review advises treating new agents like interns, measuring reliability and timeliness alongside...
AI Takes On the Spam Call Epidemic
In 2025 Americans received roughly 29.6 billion robocalls, driven by large‑scale SIM farms that can place thousands of calls from legitimate numbers. These farms evade traditional filters, especially as scammers adopt AI‑generated voices that sound human. Researchers at Virginia Tech propose...
CFOs Target Idle Cash as Treasury Shifts to Real-Time Control
Corporate treasuries are moving from batch‑based cash handling to real‑time liquidity management as CFOs target idle cash. While 71% of finance leaders report faster Time to Cash cycles, nearly 30% see no improvement, highlighting a growing divide. Visibility gaps persist...
This Spring, Divest From Clutter to Reclaim Personal Productivity Like a Boss
The article reframes spring cleaning as a strategic portfolio rebalancing for high‑earning professionals, urging them to divest physical and digital clutter. It recommends hiring certified organizers, upgrading to premium storage, and outsourcing deep‑cleaning to reclaim valuable time. Digital hygiene steps...
Hollywood’s Classics Get an AI Upgrade
Artificial intelligence is reshaping film preservation by automating image enhancement, scratch removal, resolution upscaling, and audio reconstruction, dramatically speeding up work that once required painstaking manual effort. Global archives are deteriorating faster than traditional methods can handle, prompting studios and...
First Dollar Wins: How Deposit Timing Is Rewiring Financial Loyalty
The financial relationship now hinges on the moment a consumer’s earnings land in an account, turning the first deposit into a strategic asset. Wage‑to‑Wallet data shows 54 % of labor‑economy workers face cash‑flow gaps before payday, prompting providers to prioritize instant,...
Wells Fargo Says Convenience and Personalization Drive Adoption of Virtual Assistant
Wells Fargo announced that its AI‑powered virtual assistant, Fargo, has completed over one billion transactions in under three years, while its mobile app now boasts 33 million active users. The bank credits convenience, speed and personalization for driving adoption, noting that customers...
Lawmakers Press Bank Regulators on Tech Rules and Delays
During a March 26 House Financial Services subcommittee hearing, senior officials from the Federal Reserve, FDIC, OCC and NCUA outlined a shift in bank supervision toward risk‑based integration of financial technology. The agencies emphasized moving away from categorical caution, updating...
Macy’s AI Chatbot Quadruples Customer Spending
Macy’s introduced the Ask Macy’s AI shopping assistant on March 23, leveraging Google’s Gemini model to provide outfit‑completion suggestions and virtual try‑on capabilities. Early data show that shoppers who engage with the chatbot spend roughly 4.75 times more than those...
Platforms Clamp Down on Customer AI Agent Access
Enterprise platforms such as Slack, Workday, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp are tightening or outright blocking third‑party AI agents from accessing their data and APIs. Salesforce limited Slack data pipelines, Meta banned general‑purpose chatbots on WhatsApp, and Google cut off Antigravity usage...
Velera Picks Longtime Exec Brian Caldarelli as CEO
Velera, the credit union service organization serving roughly 4,000 credit unions, announced that Chief Administrative Officer Brian Caldarelli will succeed President and CEO Chuck Fagan on September 30, 2026. Caldarelli, a longtime PSCU veteran who joined as CFO in 2013, replaces Fagan, who...
Private Credit Sector Could Benefit From New Bank Capital Rules
U.S. regulators are drafting new bank capital rules that would lower the risk‑weight for certain securitization exposures from 20% to 15%. The change treats loans to special purpose entities holding private‑credit assets as less risky, encouraging banks to extend more...
AI Usage Limits Are Becoming the New Reality for Consumers
Anthropic announced a temporary promotion that doubles Claude usage limits during off‑peak hours for all plan tiers through March 28. The move highlights a broader industry trend of imposing explicit daily and weekly caps on AI consumption to manage costly compute...
FIS Debuts Clearing Solution for Prediction Markets
FIS has launched the CD Prediction Clearing solution, delivering 24/7 real‑time post‑trade clearing for regulated prediction markets. The platform replaces fragmented batch processes with continuous, high‑volume transaction handling and instant risk updates, capable of processing millions of trades daily. It...
Wallets and Interoperability Drive Next Phase of P2P Competition
Digital wallets have become mainstream in the United States, especially for cross‑border and consumer‑to‑consumer transfers, but fragmentation still hampers seamless use. Nearly 28% of consumers cite incompatibility between sender and recipient platforms as a barrier, while one‑third of SMBs point...
CFOs Say AI Less of a Threat to Highly Skilled Workers
A new NBER working paper shows CFOs expect artificial intelligence to trim only about 0.4% of U.S. corporate headcount in 2026, mainly affecting routine clerical and administrative roles. The survey, conducted with Federal Reserve economists, indicates highly skilled workers such...
53% of Scam Victims Recover Money When They Tell Their Bank
A PYMNTS Intelligence study of 15,110 U.S. consumers finds 19% have fallen victim to a financial scam in the last five years. Nearly two‑thirds of those scams result in payments within 24 hours, highlighting the power of urgency. Victims who...
Bitcoin Dips Under $69K Amid War and Regulatory Worries
Bitcoin fell below $69,000 on March 22, its lowest level since the start of the month, marking a roughly 20% decline since the U.S.-Israeli strike on Iran on Feb. 28. The price drop is being driven by heightened geopolitical tension...
Federal Reserve Orders External Review of 2023 Silicon Valley Bank Collapse
The Federal Reserve announced a third‑party review of the March 2023 Silicon Valley Bank collapse, citing evidence of supervisory and management failures dating back to 2022. Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman said the external audit will examine all events...
3 Reasons Now Is the Best Time to Centralize Treasury Operations
Businesses are moving toward centralized treasury operations as fragmented systems impede real‑time cash visibility and risk assessment. Volatile interest rates, supply‑chain shocks, and currency instability now shift financial positions within hours, making delayed insight strategically dangerous. Advances in AI and...
Santander Brasil Taps B3 CEO Gilson Finkelsztain to Lead Next Phase of Growth
Santander Brasil announced that Gilson Finkelsztain, currently CEO of Brazil's stock exchange B3, will take over as its chief executive by July, succeeding Mario Roberto Opice Leão. The transition, outlined in a U.S. SEC filing, will occur after Leão steps...
What Is This 600-Strong Bank Network Using Tokenized Deposits For?
U.S. banks Custodia and Vantage have launched tokenized deposits that will be used in Participate, a loan‑participation network spanning roughly 600 financial institutions. The SEC also approved Nasdaq’s plan to settle trades of major equities and ETFs with tokenized securities,...
Bitcoin Depot’s ATMs Face Compliance-Related Ban in Connecticut
Bitcoin Depot, the world’s largest crypto‑ATM operator, had its Connecticut money‑transmission license suspended after regulators identified compliance breaches. The state found more than 1,000 instances where fees exceeded the legal 15% cap, resulting in roughly $150,000 in excess charges. Additionally,...
OCC Ends Restrictions on 4 Banks
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency announced the termination of enforcement actions against four community banks—Heritage Bank, 1st National Bank, Slovenian S&LA, and Touchmark National Bank. Each institution had been subject to consent orders or formal agreements addressing...
Shopify’s USDC Integration Shows How Platforms Could Pick Stablecoin Favorites
Shopify has embedded USDC stablecoin into its core payments stack, allowing merchants to accept digital dollars at checkout without new providers. The integration, built with Stripe and Coinbase, lets shoppers pay via crypto wallets and gives merchants the option to...
Elavon Picks BofA Vet Wally Mlynarski as CEO
Elavon, the U.S. Bank‑owned payments processor, has appointed Wally Mlynarski as its new chief executive. Mlynarski arrives from Bank of America, where he oversaw merchant services and receivables, and previously spent seven years at U.S. Bank supporting Elavon in roles...
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...
Alibaba Consolidates AI Divisions to Power the Agent Economy
Alibaba announced the creation of the Alibaba Token Hub (ATH) Business Group, consolidating its Tongyi Laboratory, MaaS, Qwen, Wukong, and AI Innovation units under a single AI umbrella. Led by CEO Eddie Wu, the group will focus on token‑driven AI...
Trade Finance Faces Stress Test as Global Risks Rise
The war in Iran has crippled the Strait of Hormuz, halting non‑Iranian sea traffic and forcing airlines to reroute over the Middle East. Air freight rates on affected corridors have surged more than 70%, while shipping companies avoid the risk...
Propel Holdings Bets AI Can Replace FICO for the 40% of Americans Banks Won’t Serve
Propel Holdings has launched FreshLine, an unsecured credit line aimed at near‑prime borrowers with FICO scores between 650 and 700 who are increasingly shut out by traditional banks. The product relies on machine‑learning and AI to assess real‑time cash‑flow, income...
Visa Sees Check Fraud Spilling Into Faster Payment Scams
Visa warns that check fraud now accounts for roughly 30% of U.S. fraud losses in 2024, with checks being 31 times more likely to be fraudulent than real‑time transactions. Criminals are leveraging both traditional methods such as check washing and...
The Digital Economy’s Longest-Running Grudge Matches
The digital economy is rife with high‑profile rivalries that extend beyond market share into principles, fees, and brand prestige. In 2026, OpenAI and Anthropic are sparring for enterprise AI contracts, while Amazon secured a court order to block Perplexity’s shopping...
Vivid Seats Cuts Costs as Net Losses Mount
Vivid Seats reported a massive swing to a $428.7 million net loss in Q4 2025, far exceeding the $4.4 million loss a year earlier. Gross order value dropped 42% and revenue fell 37% year‑over‑year, while adjusted EBITDA shrank by $33.4 million. The company...