Finextra

In a statement to Reuters, the ECB confirmed that it and Brazil's central bank are carrying out an ongoing preliminary investigation on the possibility of a link. A ​pilot project could be launched in 2028, says Reuters, citing sources. The move would reflect a wider effort by the Eurosystem to make it easier for businesses and consumers in Europe to send and receive payments to and from other countries, including remittances.

Correspondent banking is the arrangement in which one bank holds accounts for another and executes payments on its behalf, giving institutions access to currencies, payment systems, and markets where they hold no licence or presence. Most international payments still settle this way, and access to the system is now the scarcest resource in it. Key takeaways Correspondent banking is one bank holding accounts and executing payments for another, and it still settles most international payments.

Checkout is the last step in the funnel and the costliest one to get wrong. That’s why it should be a priority for every payment product manager to be confident in the reliability of their checkout performance. It’s a good intuitive guess to be specifically attentive to optimising conversion through UX. Yet, it usually doesn’t matter how convenient the pay button is if it takes more than a few seconds for it to work.

Binary event contracts, allowing investors to bet on the outcome of specific yes/no questions, experienced explosive growth in 2024 and early 2025. The US election trading and the increasing adoption of short-term, high-risk, all-or-nothing instruments really led to massive market growth.

The partnerships are delivered through the Unico Campania consortium, which manages integrated ticketing for multiple public transport operators in the region. Thanks to these agreements, millions of tourists holding JCB and UnionPay cards, particularly from Asia, will be able to use the Tap & Go service, allowing them to access public transport and purchase tickets simply by tapping their contactless payment card or smartphone at enabled gates and ticket validators.

Ask a payments team how much agentic commerce volume they processed last month and most cannot answer. Not because the number is small. Because nothing in the payments stack was built to record it. That blindness is about to become expensive. Competing agentic commerce protocols are live simultaneously and merchants are integrating them piecemeal, as ecosystem trackers document, which means payments from AI agents are already arriving at checkouts that log them as ordinary card-not-present traffic.

After FAANG’s spell in the limelight, the opening years of the AI boom belonged to the Magnificent Seven. Now, after an extended period of turbulence, it appears high time for investors to move on to a new collective of superstar stocks.

Key Takeaways The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) is a passively managed exchange-traded fund (ETF) that tracks the S&P 500 Index of roughly 500 of the largest U.S. companies. Information Technology dominates the portfolio at roughly 37% of assets, led by Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft. The fund has traded in a comparatively narrow range in recent weeks, with a 30-day price move of less than 1%.

On September 11th, new EU reporting obligations come into effect. In the event of an actively exploited cyber vulnerability or data breach compromising payments hardware present in the EU market, that security event must be reported to regulators within 24 hours.

Why the next wave of transformation is not about digitisation or automation, but about rebuilding financial institutions around intelligence, decisioning, and real-time execution. For years, replatforming in financial services has meant replacing legacy systems, digitising journeys, and reducing cost. That framing is now outdated. Having spent the last few years building AI-native banking and wealth platforms from first principles, these are hard-won lessons, not theory.