New research from Checkout.com reveals that Christmas 2025 will mark a turning point for agentic AI adoption, as consumers increasingly turn to intelligent digital agents to manage the stress, cost and complexity of peak-season shopping. With 47% of consumers planning to use an AI agent for their Christmas shopping and a third saying they planned to rely on agentic tools over Black Friday, this year’s festive season could be the first in which automated shopping becomes a mainstream behaviour.

The UK is experiencing rapid AI adoption in financial services, with 75% of financial firms now using artificial intelligence, up from 58% in 2022, as reported by the Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority (2024 report). But new research from FIS, a leading provider of financial technology, reveals that consumer confidence is failing to keep pace with innovation, creating a widening AI trust gap and an imperative for banks to educate and build trust with their customers. 

Ant International, HSBC and Swift today have completed a successful Proof of Concept (POC) for the cross-border transfer of tokenised deposits using ISO 20022 standards. The initiative leverages Swift’s global messaging network and HSBC’s recently launched Tokenised Deposit Service, combined with Ant International’s blockchain technology.

Pension-finding platform, Raindrop has joined forces with some of the UK’s largest financial providers to track down over £1 billion in lost pension pot savings for UK savers since launch.  

In total, Raindrop’s pension-finding technology has recovered over 100,000 individual pots with an average value of over £11,000.

Simply Asset Finance, the specialist business lending provider, has announced that following a successful Q3 2025 it has reached a £2 billion total loan origination milestone - building on its continued growth and lending support for SMEs this year. 

2025 saw Simply grow its gross loan book to £543 million, and increase its customer base to 13,000 as the business brought new digital origination channels onstream and introduced products such as commercial loans to its suite of finance solutions.   

Today, Zilch, the consumer payments platform powering the future of commerce, has announced that it has secured a payments services licence from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), further cementing its position as a trusted leader within the market.

Yonda Tax, the global tax automation platform helping businesses stay compliant across borders, today announces its first institutional funding round, bringing total investment to $15 million. The round was led by Kennet Partners, with participation from NYO Capital and Portfolio Ventures. The funding will be used to enhance platform features and functionality, and to support its expansion into new industries and tax jurisdictions. 

Tandem Bank has welcomed Russell Strevens as its new Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Russell brings a proven track record in building and scaling modern technology across financial services and other regulated industries – experience that will help power Tandem’s next phase of growth as the bank sharpens its focus on delivering value for customers to help them get more from their money and choose more sustainable lifestyles.

Temenos, a global leader in banking technology, today announced that Finductive, a Malta-based financial services provider, has gone live with Temenos to power its new digital payments platform, enabling secure and efficient digital payment services for businesses across Europe.

Veriff, the global AI-native identity company powering trust infrastructure online, reports over 30x year-over-year growth in authentication volumes. Growth is booming across every service online, driven by rising demand for verification across the entire customer journey from onboarding to authenticating every transaction online.