Fintechly

Ahmet Kayhan joined VEON, the Dubai-headquartered, Nasdaq-listed telecoms and fintech group, as Chief Payments & Digital Assets Officer in April 2026, after roles at DgPays Group and on NEOPAY’s board. VEON’s fintech business now spans JazzCash in Pakistan, plus operations in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, with a fourth market, Bangladesh, preparing to launch through Banglalink’s Mukto Pay. Group financial services revenue hit $151 million in the second quarter of 2026, up 48.5% year on year.

Foloosi, a UAE-born payments technology company, has received In-Principle Approval from the Central Bank of the UAE (CBUAE) for a Category III payments licence under the Retail Payment Services and Card Schemes Regulation, the company said on 16 September 2026. The approval is a step towards a final licence, subject to Foloosi meeting the CBUAE’s remaining requirements and conditions.

Nik Storonsky has a number he likes: 6 per cent. That’s Revolut’s loan-to-deposit ratio, against roughly 100 per cent for a conventional bank, and in the Patrick Jenkins Interview in the Financial Times published this week, Revolut’s founder and chief executive explains why he intends to keep it that way. “We don’t plan to have exposure of more than 10-20 per cent,” he says. Loans Revolut does write are sold on whole or securitised.

Embedded insurance is coverage sold inside a separate purchase rather than bought on its own from an insurer. A shopper adding a laptop to a cart on Wayfair or a ride to a card on Uber can now add protection on the same screen, with the policy issued behind the scenes by a licensed carrier working through the platform’s technology partner.

Manchester-based payments company Ryft has raised £20 million in a Series B round led by Gresham House Ventures, to support expansion across Europe and the US. Existing investors Pembroke VCT and Ingenii Capital also took part, Ryft said. The company didn’t disclose a valuation. Ryft describes the round as the largest UK payments Series B of the year, a claim made by the company rather than independently checked against every other round in 2026.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has opened a regulated route for tokenised stock trading, granting temporary, conditional relief for platforms seeking to trade tokenised US-listed stocks through permissioned automated market makers and liquidity pools.

The United States still has no single rail for moving money between bank accounts in real time, and take-up of the two networks built to enable faster payments remains partial years after the first one went live. The Federal Reserve’s FedNow Service counts 1,900 participating banks and credit unions as of September 2026, according to the Fed’s own FedNow Explorer tracker.

Nearly three-quarters of surveyed payments professionals (72%) say their bank is actively planning, building, piloting or operating capabilities to issue its own payment stablecoin, but only one in ten say those capabilities are live in production, according to new research from RedCompass Labs. The report, “Are banks actually ready for digital money?”, surveyed 300 senior payments professionals across Europe, the UK and the US, and was published on 16 September 2026.

Opio co-founder and CEO Tristan Fulchiron on why AI’s job in financial due diligence is to do the groundwork, not replace the professional judgement at the centre of every deal. Tristan Fulchiron co-founded Opio in 2025 to bring AI to financial due diligence.

US banks are building application programming interfaces, or APIs, to hand customers control over their own financial data. The push follows the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Section 1033 rule, which requires banks to make transaction and account data available on request. An open banking API is the technical channel banks use to meet that requirement, replacing older methods that relied on stored passwords.