PaymentExpert

Michael Selig said the CFTC will use its existing authority to set market structure rules if the CLARITY Act fails to pass this year The Commodity Future Trading Commission (CFTC) Chair Michael Selig said the agency will write its own crypto market rules if Congress fails to pass the CLARITY Act this year, telling industry executives the regulator stands ready to act alone.

Razorpay wants to replace separate AI models for fraud, payment routing and checkout with one system that can learn how payments behave across its wider network. Razorpay has launched Vulcan, an AI foundation model made specifically for India’s payments ecosystem. The company says Vulcan has created “a vocabulary for how Indians transact”, allowing it to learn patterns in how money moves and apply that understanding across different payment decisions.

Payment Expert’s Fintech Unwrapped delivers the latest developing news that has shaped the sector over the course of the last week This week, Kraken launched its multi-asset Krak Card in the US, letting customers spend from more than 600 currencies and assets and earn cashback in dollars or Bitcoin.

I studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Oxford. It was not a technical degree, apart from an econometrics paper that I still have nightmares about, but it shaped how I think about business and the world. PPE forces you to look at systems from several angles at once: incentives, institutions, markets, politics, and human behaviour.

AML rules govern how payment firms onboard customers, monitor transactions and report suspicious activity. Here is Payment Expert’s guide to what they demand Anti-money laundering rules set the terms on which a payment firm can operate, governing which customers it takes on and which transactions it lets through. For banks, payment processors and fintechs, they are a direct constraint on the core business of moving money.

TikTok is expanding further into payments after an engineering update to its US app revealed a new peer-to-peer (P2P) payment feature. A hidden engineering code has been uncovered in the US app which would allow users to perform P2P payments via direct messages (DMs). The code would also enable users to make ‘tap to accept’ payments under a timed expiration date.

Orbital’s H1 2026 index finds global crypto app usage down almost 40%, but steady or growing in markets with weak currencies and limited dollar access Stablecoin usage held up in a quarter of the world’s markets through the 2026 crypto downturn, concentrated in economies where people use crypto to hold and move dollars, according to Orbital’s H1 2026 Stablecoin Retail Payments Index.

The Affiliate Leaders Summit will tackle rising advertising regulation, emerging market opportunities, and the future of the affiliate model head-on through its Future of Affiliate Strategy track. Taking place on Wednesday, 30 September 2026, the track will bring together affiliate executives, operators, media leaders and performance marketing specialists to examine how regulation, technology, changing audience behaviour and international expansion are reshaping affiliate strategy.

Recent claims that Visa is searching for a replacement settlement partner have conflated two separate parts of its payment architecture. Reports suggested that Mastercard’s $1.8bn acquisition of BVNK in March 2026 had prompted Visa to look for a replacement settlement partner. According to CoinDesk, a Request for Information (RFI) document shows the payments giant exploring settlement and over-the-counter (OTC) partners with exchange licences in the US, Canada, the UK and Singapore.

The SEC is pushing ahead with its crypto framework as Congress is divided on the CLARITY Act. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has proposed rules that would provide crypto businesses with two routes to raise capital without registering their offerings under the Securities Act of 1933. Commissioner Hester M. Peirce announced the proposal in a statement on 18 August, describing it as part of the SEC’s effort to establish “clear, sensible, enforceable rules” for crypto offerings.