CFOtech New Zealand

The Labour Party has unveiled an AI Action Plan ahead of the general election, centred on new oversight, copyright rules, and support for adoption across schools, businesses, and community groups. The policy package includes an Office of AI to coordinate policy across government and an online safety regulator within the Department for Internal Affairs.

Datasite has partnered with Rogo to integrate Rogo's AI tools with Datasite data rooms, giving approved deal teams access to live transaction content inside Datasite. The integration is aimed at mergers and acquisitions work, where transaction documents, diligence materials and financial information are often stored in controlled virtual data rooms.

Blee has raised USD $27 million in Series A funding in a round co-led by Fin Capital and SMBC Fin Atlas Beyond Fund. The New York company will use the funding to expand its marketing compliance software into more industries and geographies. The round brings its total capital raised to USD $27 million. Blee sells software for legal, compliance and brand teams that review marketing, product and sales materials.

PCI Pal has launched a Model Context Protocol server for secure AI payments, allowing conversational AI platforms and AI agents to access its payment functions. The feature sits within PCI Pal's cloud platform and targets banks, financial services groups, and other businesses that want to connect AI-led customer interactions to payment processing without exposing sensitive card data.

Paystand has launched its agentic finance suite for general availability, bringing artificial intelligence agents into accounts receivable, spend management, and reporting. The launch expands Paystand's effort to combine finance software with its payment network and USDb stablecoin for business transactions. The suite is aimed at finance teams managing manual work across collections, approvals, reporting, and reconciliation. Two products, the Reporting Agent and the Spend Agent, are available now.

TerraPay and Alipay+ have partnered to link TerraPay's Xend wallet network with Alipay+ for cross-border QR payments, initially covering 15 digital wallets in Africa. Under the agreement, users of those wallets will be able to pay at more than 150 million merchants in the Alipay+ network. The deal expands TerraPay's cross-border offering beyond account-to-account transfers into in-store payments through QR code acceptance.

Crypto wallets used to answer a simple question: where are my assets? Increasingly, users expect them to answer a much broader one: what can I do with my money from here? Receive funds. Hold dollar-denominated value. Access investment products. Pay at checkout. Move money across borders. The shift is already visible in spending. By July 2026, card programs tracked by Paymentscan were processing $759 million a month across nearly 9 million purchases, according to an analysis by a16z crypto.

Bitget has launched H100USDT and B200USDT pre-market compute perpetuals, which track Nvidia H100 and B200 GPU rental prices. The move gives retail traders access to perpetual contracts linked to GPU rental-price indices, a market that until now has largely been confined to institutional and infrastructure circles. According to Bitget, the instruments track hourly rental costs for Nvidia's H100 and B200 graphics processing units, which are widely used in artificial intelligence workloads.

Infobip has published research showing that 57% of brands cannot prove the return on investment from sports fan engagement. The study also found that brands allocate 13% of annual marketing budgets to sports activations. Nearly 73% of respondents expect that share of spending to rise over the next year, signalling continued momentum in sports marketing even as measurement remains weak.

Feedstead has launched a browser-based supplier price review tool for Shopify catalogue operators. It is aimed at businesses and agencies that update existing product prices from supplier cost lists. The service compares a supplier cost file with a current Shopify product export and prepares a CSV containing only the updates the operator selects. It works with supplier CSV files and Excel workbooks, matching products through exact SKU references in both source files.