
Fiserv and Affirm announced an expanded partnership that will embed Affirm’s pay‑over‑time (BNPL) solution into debit card programs. The integration will be available to thousands of U.S. banks, allowing debit cardholders to access installment financing at the point of sale. By leveraging Fiserv’s processing network, the service aims to broaden consumer access to flexible payments without requiring a credit line. The rollout is slated to begin later this year, with pilot merchants already testing the model.

Trend Micro researchers have uncovered a JScript‑based command‑and‑control framework called PeckBirdy, used by China‑aligned APT groups since 2023. The framework runs via living‑off‑the‑land binaries across browsers, MSHTA, WScript, Node JS and .NET, delivering modular backdoors such as HOLODONUT and MKDOOR. It powers...

CFOs are accelerating payment modernization as AI becomes mainstream, according to Boost Payment Solutions founder Dean Leavitt. The COVID‑19 pandemic forced a rapid shift from checks and wires to digital platforms, boosting transaction volumes and highlighting the need for flexible,...

A new PYMNTS Intelligence study of 3,196 U.S. consumers finds that influencers act more as discovery catalysts than direct sales drivers. While 56% of shoppers purchase an influencer‑recommended item at least once a year, 95% conduct additional research before checkout,...
Retailers often treat Black Friday as the ultimate test of customer experience, yet the true test arrives in January when peak‑season buffers disappear. The post‑holiday period exposes weaknesses in returns processing, inventory synchronization, and delivery speed that were masked by...
Abbott announced its board increased the quarterly common dividend to 63 cents per share, a 6.8% rise. The hike marks the 54th consecutive year of dividend growth and the 408th uninterrupted quarterly payment since 1924. The dividend has risen more...

The 2024 Grammy Awards arrive as the music industry grapples with AI‑generated hits, genre‑blending chart‑toppers, and unprecedented cross‑media successes. Nominees—including Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Kendrick Lamar, Bad Bunny and Tyler the Creator—are chosen by roughly 15,000 professional voters, aiming to reflect current market...

Brickanta, a Stockholm‑based developer of an agentic AI platform for construction, announced an $8 million seed round. The financing was led by Northzone with participation from Y Combinator, 20VC, and angels linked to OpenAI, Google and Meta. High‑profile athletes Mario Götze...

Orbit Media Group has rebranded as Orbit One, shifting from a pure creative agency to a full‑service business solutions partner. The new brand emphasizes integrated data, automation, and AI tools that connect marketing, finance, HR, and communication platforms into a...

The surge in zero‑trust adoption has not delivered expected protection, as static implementations struggle against zero‑day exploits and a rapidly evolving threat landscape. A leading bank that integrated a cyber fusion center (CFC) with zero‑trust achieved 65% automated incident responses...
OneBill and linked2pay announced a strategic integration that unifies billing and payment processing for merchants. The partnership embeds linked2pay’s gateway into OneBill’s cloud‑based revenue platform via real‑time APIs, supporting credit‑card, debit‑card and ACH transactions without separate systems. It promises faster...
RBI Floating Rate Savings Bonds are a government‑backed, seven‑year debt instrument that allows investors to earn semi‑annual interest that resets every six months based on the National Savings Certificate rate plus a 0.35 % spread. The minimum investment is ₹1,000 with...

AICA Data International unveiled an AI‑powered Product Classification Platform that automates mapping to UNSPSC and GS1 GPC standards. The solution delivers over 95% accuracy, handling 40,000 to 6 million items per hour, and provides a Reliability Score for each output. It...

AI startup EmergeGen announced an expanded quantum initiative that moves quantum computing from research to production within enterprise AI systems. The company has built a scaled quantum team across New York, the United Kingdom and Malta, leveraging partner infrastructure to...

Dr Martens reported progress in its turnaround, with full‑price direct‑to‑consumer (DTC) sales up 2% year‑to‑date, while overall group revenue fell 2.7% to £253 million in Q3. The company’s wholesale channel rebounded, growing 9.3% as DTC revenue slipped 6.5% due to a...

Canada’s Privacy Commissioner Philippe Dufresne launched Data Privacy Week 2026 (Jan 26‑30) with a focus on privacy‑by‑design, urging organizations to embed data protection from the outset. He highlighted recent high‑profile breaches—including Aylo, 23andMe, TikTok, and an investigation into X’s Grok chatbot—to...

Ecer.com’s mobile marketplace is reshaping cross‑border B2B trade by enabling end‑to‑end transactions on smartphones. Guangzhou Dinghao Furniture reduced a week‑long order cycle to a single call, leveraging instant messaging, real‑time video and 360° factory tours. Platform data shows response times...

Cymulate has joined the Wiz Integration Network, embedding its Continuous Threat Exposure Management platform into Wiz’s cloud‑security ecosystem. The partnership enables automated pre‑ and post‑exploitation simulations across Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud, delivering continuous validation of security controls. Joint customers...

Singapore’s family office sector is experiencing rapid growth, driven by an influx of first‑generation wealth since 2019. These offices allocate a sizable portion of portfolios to alternative assets—particularly private equity, private credit, and digital infrastructure—leveraging Singapore’s tax‑friendly fund regimes and...

Canadian retailers are under pressure to rebuild consumer trust and deliver personalized experiences as inflation curtails spending, according to SOTI’s latest global retail tech study. The survey of 1,000 Canadians shows 83% are shopping more carefully, while 53% expect retailers...

Recent high‑profile attacks, including the 2024 assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, have highlighted severe gaps in executive protection, especially online. Organizations are reassessing security operations, investing in physical safeguards while recognizing that digital exposure often reveals executives' locations and...

Conquer has introduced Voice Plus, a mobile‑first app that lets field sales reps capture calls, meetings and notes in under 30 seconds, removing the need for end‑of‑day CRM admin. The solution is built natively within Salesforce, syncing activity instantly to...

New Relic’s 2026 AI Impact Report, based on 6.6 million users in 2025, shows that engineers leveraging the platform’s generative AI and AIOps features ship code 80% more frequently than peers without AI. AI‑strengthened observability cuts alert noise by 27% and...

Sam Altman publicly acknowledged that OpenAI "screwed up" the writing quality of GPT‑5.2, noting it feels unwieldy compared to the earlier GPT‑4.5. The company deliberately prioritized technical strengths—reasoning, coding, and engineering—over prose in the 5.2 release. GPT‑4.5 was marketed for...

Global talent solutions provider Atrium announced the creation of Atrium Innovation & Research (AIR), a dedicated technology lab and product incubator. AIR’s first offering, ZephyrIQ, is a conversational AI platform that delivers instant, on‑demand insights from complex extended workforce data....

Cisco has launched the Cisco 360 Partner Program, a revamped partner ecosystem aimed at accelerating AI‑driven outcomes for customers. The program introduces new partner designations, a Partner Incentive (CPI) model, and tools such as the Partner Locator and AI Assistant...

A recent clinical analysis links specific perioperative medications to the incidence of emergence agitation (EA) in surgical patients, especially children. The study found that dexmedetomidine and midazolam premedication reduced EA rates by up to 30%, while high‑dose sevoflurane and rapid...

The article presents a five‑question framework—attention, memory, choice, trust, and emotion—derived from cognitive psychology to evaluate ad effectiveness. It shows how inattentional blindness, the serial‑position effect, choice overload, thin‑slicing, and emotional resonance shape a viewer’s split‑second decisions. Practical tips include...

Aligne, the London‑based contemporary womenswear label, has named Ellie Dickinson as its global Direct‑to‑Consumer (DTC) director. Dickinson arrives from a commercial director role at Australian brand Dissh, where she oversaw the UK, EU and US markets since September 2024. Her...

London‑based Flowla, an AI‑assisted automation platform for sales and customer success, closed a $2.5 million seed round led by Revo Capital. The funding will accelerate development of its buyer‑journey automation engine and fund a U.S. go‑to‑market team. Flowla’s no‑code digital sales...

Wonderful introduced Agent Builder, an autonomous AI system that creates, tests, and refines enterprise agents. Powered by Anthropic’s Claude, it ingests policy documents, knowledge bases, and call recordings to iteratively meet production standards. The tool claims up to 50% faster...

Descope has launched an upgraded Agentic Identity Hub that treats AI agents as first‑class identities alongside human users. The platform adds OAuth 2.1, PKCE, DCR, CIMD and tool‑level scopes to MCP servers, letting developers secure agent access with enterprise‑grade policies. It...

Liferay’s 2026 Broken Trust Report, based on a survey of 1,000 U.S. adults, finds that 75% of users will abandon a website they perceive as unsafe and often turn to a competitor. A single “off” moment erodes trust for 61%...
Roots is an open‑source daemon that orchestrates Docker containers for game servers, exposing a full‑featured HTTP/HTTPS API, WebSocket console streams, and SFTP file access. It reads a YAML configuration (default /etc/roots/config.yaml) that defines panel integration, daemon networking, Docker settings, storage...
A new study introduces an API‑driven platform that leverages transfer learning on a pre‑trained vision transformer to diagnose plant diseases from images. By training on a large, diverse dataset, the model achieves high accuracy and can deliver real‑time results through...

Fermilab CISO Matthew Kwiatkowski explains how open‑science environments create cybersecurity blind spots when scientists design infrastructure without early security input. He notes that collaboration between IT and researchers reduces risky implementations and that publicly releasable data is often mislabeled, prompting...

DemandScience’s 2026 State of Performance Marketing reveals a pervasive "Marketing Data Mirage," where 99% of marketers rely on signals that don’t reflect real buyer intent. AI tools amplify the problem by producing generic, non‑data‑driven content that erodes brand distinction. The...
CISOs increasingly view a breach as inevitable, with 76% expecting a material cyberattack within the next year and 58% deeming their organizations unprepared. Four core issues impede progress: insufficient training and empowerment of security teams, lagging AI governance, limited AI...

January 2026 saw CERT‑In publish three critical advisories targeting SAP, Microsoft, and Atlassian products. The alerts disclose high‑severity flaws—including remote code execution, privilege escalation, and data exfiltration—affecting SAP S/4HANA, Windows, Azure, and on‑premise Atlassian tools such as Jira and Confluence. One...

Egypt will stage Ai Everything MEA Egypt 2026, the region’s first all‑AI expo, on 11‑12 February at the Egypt International Exhibition Center. Backed by GITEX, the Ministry of Communications and ITIDA, the event gathers more than 350 AI enterprises and...

A recent study employed high‑resolution three‑dimensional imaging to visualize uterine blood vessels in patients with adenomyosis, revealing distinct vascular remodeling within ectopic endometrial tissue. The researchers quantified a 35% increase in microvessel density and identified abnormal branching patterns that align...

AI superintelligence remains a theoretical goal, yet artificial intelligence is already woven into the fabric of enterprise operations, accelerating decision‑making and threat detection. Companies report faster, more accurate alert investigations, but the same speed introduces novel vulnerabilities and operational risks....
Commercial trucks now generate continuous digital evidence through ELDs, dash cameras, and event data recorders, creating an objective timeline of speed, driver actions, and crash dynamics. Insurers and trucking firms can access this data immediately after an accident, while claimants...

Recent CDC and Medicare analyses show a steady rise in sepsis mortality among older Americans with diabetes, increasing 12% from 2010 to 2024. In 2024, deaths reached 112 per 100,000 for those 65 and older, driven by the growing prevalence...

Estateguru’s investors collectively earned €8.3 million in the past year as the platform deployed €66 million across 283 Baltic real‑estate projects. The average return on repaid loans hit 8.9%, and 97% of funded amounts have been fully repaid or remain on schedule....
Financial institutions are intensifying their suspicious activity reporting (SAR) programs as fraud cycles accelerate and regulators tighten oversight. Strong SAR readiness hinges on real‑time data signals, skilled analysts, clear processes, and modern AML platforms that automate monitoring and case management....

The CyberExpress article argues that the traditional network perimeter is no longer sufficient for data privacy, and that the true protection now lies at the moment of access. It highlights the rise of the “Identity‑Data Gap” and the shift toward...
A new study in Biology of Sex Differences reveals that women now exhibit higher lifetime risks of peptic ulcer disease, overturning the long‑standing view that men were the primary sufferers. The researchers linked this gender reversal to socioeconomic inequalities, chronic...

L’Oréal announced a US$380 million investment to build a global beauty‑technology centre in Hyderabad, India, backed by an initial commitment of over 35 billion rupees. The hub will serve as an AI‑driven innovation platform, targeting 2,000 technology jobs by 2030 and feeding...

Compensation platform Compa secured $35 million in Series B financing, led by Jump Capital with participation from Crosslink, Storm Ventures and others. The AI‑driven solution aggregates nine million real‑time market observations to replace traditional salary surveys, delivering instant pay analytics across salary,...