NatWest today announces Adeel Hyder as its new Managing Director of Business Banking, leading the bank’s strategy to strengthen support for small and micro businesses across the UK.

ING is strengthening its Transaction Services (TS) business in the UK as part of its strategy to position Transaction Services as a key driver of Wholesale Banking growth, built around our clients’ businesses.

CMC Markets (“CMC”), a leading global provider of online trading and investing services, today announces a collaboration with Kinexys by J.P. Morgan to leverage Kinexys Digital Payments for near real-time blockchain-based settlements.

Nexi Group, the European PayTech, today announced

Visa, a global leader in digital payments, and Bridge, a leading stablecoin infrastructure platform and a Stripe company, today announced an expansion of their global card issuance product that they first unveiled in 2025. Bridge enables businesses and fintech developers to offer stablecoin-backed Visa cards. Now, through Bridge’s partnership with Lead Bank, these card transactions can be settled onchain with Visa.

Klarna, the global digital bank and flexible payments provider, today announced that its flexible payment options will soon be supported in AI agent-driven shopping experiences through Stripe’s Shared Payment Tokens (SPTs), making Klarna available in AI-powered checkout flows for US merchants already live with Klarna through Stripe, provided AI shopping agents allow the ability to offer flexible payments at checkout.

Ripple, the leading provider of blockchain-based enterprise solutions across traditional and digital finance, today announced a major expansion of Ripple Payments — its solution for moving money across both traditional and digital rails.

AI agents have advanced from recommending products to completing purchases at checkout.

Spreedly today announced that agentic commerce is now live as a channel within its open payments platform, enabling merchants to process agent-initiated transactions over their existing payment infrastructure.

During MWC Barcelona 2026, China Unicom and Huawei host an innovation summit with the theme of Innovating on a Solid Foundation and Advancing with Stability; Co-Creating an Intelligent Digital Ecosystem. At the summit, China Unicom and Huawei unveiled the AI Reshaping Co-Creation Initiative and China Unicom Universe Ecosystem Co-Creation Platform. Huawei will support China Unicom in developing AI computing backbones and intelligent agent services to enable digital and intelligent industry transformation and empower its principal services.

Rent is one of the largest recurring payments in the UK economy, yet it still largely runs on traditional bank transfers. While consumers can pay for travel, groceries and even taxes by card, rent — often their biggest monthly expense — has remained structurally locked to legacy payment rails.

London-based fintech Payr has raised $2.1 million in seed funding to change that.