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Block-owned Cash App has now made send and receive capabilities available for stablecoins. The offering includes stablecoin on- and off- ramps to fiat US dollars.
After teasing the capabilities last fall, Cash App now allows eligible customers to send and receive USDC on its platform. Because Cash App automatically converts to fiat currency, customers don’t need to manage a separate stablecoin wallet. To simplify…
Courtesy of a partnership with Visa, Highnote—a modern issuing, acquiring, credit, ledger, and money movement platform—has launched its new Agentic Commerce capabilities this week. Built using Visa Intelligent Commerce, the new offering will enable businesses to securely power AI-initiated payments with programmable controls, tokenized credentials, and dynamic authorization.
The new Agentic Commerce capabilities will allow companies to add payment capabilities to AI agents while enabling software to initiate and execute transactions with predefined rules, spend controls, and approval structures. In a statement announcing the launch, Highnote listed invoice and accounts payable automation, vendor payments, operational spend management, and AI-assisted procurement…
Spain’s ministry of consumer rights blocked access to Kalshi and Polymarket this week. The country has paused the use of the prediction markets (also known as event contracts) as it determines whether their models are operating legally without a gambling license.
Spain joins France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Romania, which have all limited or blocked access to Polymarket.
The controversy begs the question: are prediction markets useful forecasting tools, speculative tools, or simply gambling platforms wrapped in fintech language? With that in mind, here's a look at three arguments for and three arguments against event contracts.
Three arguments forSupporters argue that prediction markets are not necessarily about gambling, but rather about information discovery.
Prediction markets can aggregate information more efficiently than polls or experts
The agentic future is slowly becoming a reality in 2026. Ready for this reality, Robinhood is launching Agentic Trading and the Agentic Credit Card, which will allow AI agents to trade and make credit card purchases on consumers' behalf.
While building agents is still not mainstream, the value they can bring to financial tasks is irrefutable. In the investing world, they can automate and execute a…
Spain-based Didit just brought in an additional $6 million for its identity verification network, boosting its total Seed funding to $7.5 million.
Investors in today's round include Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund, Orange Collective, Founders Future, Phosphor Capital, SaaSholic, and Rebel Fund, alongside angel investors Tomer London, Taro Fukuyama, and others. Didit will use the investment to scale globally, expand its open infrastructure toward fully programmable identity and fraud coverage, and recruit new employees.
Didit was founded…
Digital financial services company Zip has teamed up with global paytech InComm Payments in a partnership that will bring Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) installment buying to the gift and prepaid card category. The integration will enable eligible consumers to buy popular gift card brands directly through the Zip app. Available gift cards include brands representing retailers, as well as entertainment, dining, and travel providers. Eligible users will be able to select their card of choice and the denomination, and then…
With the wealth of conversation about AI at FinovateSpring just a few weeks ago, what are some of the key takeaways on how businesses are understanding and deploying the technology?
One of the more compelling presentations on this issue was the keynote address provided by Chris Nichols. Nichols is President of Institutional Banking at SouthState Bank where he supports innovation, AI, digital assets, loan pricing, asset-liability management, open banking, payments, and fintech investing. He is also producer of the Banker-to-Banker blog. Based in Winter Haven, Florida, SouthState Bank traces its roots back to First National Bank, founded in 1933 in South Carolina. Today, the institution has more than 370 branches across eight states and, last year, completed a major $2.49 billion acquisition of Texas-based Independent Bank Group. SouthState Bank reported total assets of $66 billion as of Q3 2025.
In his keynote, Why Agentic AI is Truly a New Frontier…
If you're in the US, you may be pouring an extra cup of caffeine after an activity-filled long weekend. While you were away, however, the rest of the fintech world kept moving. This week, we’ll continue to add more announcements as the week progresses.
PaymentsMarqeta expands account and money movement offering in Europe, building on strong regional momentum.
PlayHQ partners with Gr4vy to power payments across global markets.
Mastercard renews its partnership with CIB, the largest private sector bank in Egypt.
ClearBank Europe launches Digital Asset Rails to unlock programmable liquidity for cross-border flows.
Business financial managementCoupa acquires Tonkean to accelerate agentic intake and orchestration for global trade.
Fraud and identityINETCO surpasses 100 billion annual transactions as demand for payment fraud protection soars.
Nigerian cybersecurity and compliance company SmartComply launches in the UK.
Agentic AIAgentic finance startup Catena Labs raises $30 million in Series A funding.
…
With new enabling technologies like stablecoins and AI moving quickly and classic fintechs like Mint.com and Dwolla making their exits, it feels like fintech is entering a new era. This is especially true in lending, where new capabilities are enabling faster, more efficient, and in many cases more customer friendly tools than we had five years ago.
Looking back at the dawn of the decade, most lending innovation focused on digitizing the application process, facilitating the onboarding process, and turning loans faster. While some of those elements are still in place today, lending has changed with better intelligence, different distribution, and new infrastructure layers underneath credit itself.
Here's a look at what's changed:
Underwriting is becoming continuous instead of episodicWe used to think of the FICO score as the gold standard in underwriting. Today, however, underwriting is no longer done as a snapshot in time. Instead, lenders are using…
FinovateSpring 2026 may be over, but the demos are just getting started. All 54 videos from the demo stage are now available to watch for free on Finovate.com and the Finovate YouTube channel.
This year’s demos showcased how fintechs are rethinking everything from AI-powered banking and embedded finance to fraud prevention, lending, payments, customer experience, digital identity, and wealth management. Earlier this month in San Diego, fintechs took the stage to deliver Finovate’s signature live, seven-minute demos in front of an audience of financial institutions, investors, analysts, and industry leaders.
Whether you attended FinovateSpring and want to revisit your favorite presentations or missed the event and want to catch up on the latest fintech innovation, the full demo lineup is now available on demand.
And stay tuned, because there’s more content on the way.
Recorded keynote presentations, panel discussions, fireside chats, and additional conference sessions will be added to the…
In last week's Finovate Weekly newsletter, I shared some thoughts on what fintechs might hope for from President Trump's summit meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping. While the meeting does not appear to have delivered anything of substance from a fintech or financial services perspective, Trump did sign an Executive Order (EO) shortly after returning from Beijing that actually has plenty for fintechs and financial services companies to think about—if not cheer for.
Let's take a look at five top takeaways from the EO, titled Integrating Financial Technology Innovation into Regulatory Frameworks.
From containment to enablementThe executive order directs Federal financial regulators to review existing policies to "facilitate innovation and greater competition in the provision of financial services." Even more directly, the order calls upon regulators to "take steps to encourage innovation by, and growth of, fintech firms and federally regulated institutions of all sizes."
The "fintechs…
Embedded payments infrastructure company NMI has acquired account-to-account (A2A) payment infrastructure provider Dwolla. The acquisition combines NMI's payment acceptance, channel distribution, onboarding, and merchant lifecycle management with Dwolla's capabilities in account-to-account infrastructure, real-time payments, open banking, and many-to-many funds flow. NMI will benefit from additional payment acceptance, orchestration, and money movement capabilities, enabling its ISO, ISV, and SaaS platform clients to accept, manage, and move money across a greater number of rails and use cases via a single infrastructure provider.
"This acquisition is a continuation…