As the cost-of-living crisis has rippled through the UK, more people are turning back to cash to help with their budgets. This is driving an upward trend in cash usage with withdrawals increasing by 10 percent in 2024 to 32.8 million compared to the year before. We have also seen a move towards increased cash use globally. Even Sweden, one of the world's most cashless societies, is also seeing a move towards cash due to geopolitical reasons. 

Zaki writes: the good news is that change is happening. A mix of new systems such as real-time payment rails, open banking, digital wallets and blockchain is helping to reduce delays, improve access and lower costs across borders.

Brex, the modern finance platform, and Zip, the world's leading procurement orchestration platform, today announced Brex for Zip – a groundbreaking solution that seamlessly integrates Brex's global card capabilities directly into Zip's procurement workflows. This category defining partnership delivers end-to-end spend orchestration that eliminates the traditional disconnect between procurement requests and payment execution.

PaySprint Private Limited, one of India’s fastest-growing fintech and regtech companies, had set out to raise a total of $3 million USD, out of which $1.2 million USD in the first tranche, has been successfully raised. The remaining ₹15 crore is expected to follow in the second tranche, further strengthening PaySprint’s vision of building the digital infrastructure powering Bharat’s financial future.

VAST Data, the AI data platform company, today announced its integration of the VAST Data Platform with NVIDIA AI-Q to deliver a unified foundation for building, accelerating, and scaling AI agents across enterprise environments.

Policy Expert, one of the UK’s leading personal lines insurers providing home, motor, and pet insurance to over 1.5 million customers has selected bank payment company GoCardless to offer a simpler way for customers to pay their pet insurance premiums.

The partnership will give Policy Expert customers that prefer to make monthly payments a way to pay on their terms each month, thanks to GoCardless’ Direct Debit payments.

Trading Technologies International, Inc. (TT), a global capital markets technology platform services provider, today announced that it has integrated with the EBS Market central limit order book (CLOB), a regulated, anonymous all-to-all matching platform. It also plans to offer EBS Direct, a relationship based disclosed platform, and CME Group’s new FX Spot+ platform. With this new connectivity, TT is substantially expanding its FX liquidity alongside its award-winning futures and options offering. 

Cytora, the digital risk processing platform, has partnered with AISIX Solutions, a provider of wildfire climate data, to incorporate cutting-edge wildfire data into the Cytora platform.

Global fintech, SumUp is pleased to announce the hiring of Pierre Lion as Global Director of Enterprise Sales, who will be responsible for the growth of the fintech’s enterprise solutions. Pierre joined SumUp in March 2025 and will be based out of its London headquarters. 

The Nordic Initiative has established a strategic partnership with nexo standards to transform payment systems across the Nordic Tier 1 consumer-facing industries. This collaboration aims to develop standardized payment solutions to benefit businesses and consumers throughout the region.