Payment Labs, a global fintech leader specializing in payment solutions, today announced it has closed a $3.25 million oversubscribed seed round to simplify complex payment processes for high-growth industries such as sports, esports, and the creator economy.

Digital bank Zopa and Juniper Research have today released a new study detailing the seismic impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) on the UK banking sector.  

Rappi, Latin America’s leading super-app, has partnered with global wallet platform AstroPay to launch the region’s first wallet-on-file integration, allowing users in Argentina, Brazil, and Peru to pay seamlessly across currencies—no cards required.

Thread Bank today announced that it has selected Finxact from Fiserv, Inc., the cloud-native, real-time banking core that offers enhanced access to data, as the Bank’s core banking platform. The Finxact core will allow Thread to further execute on its strategy to deliver modern, compliant, and scalable embedded and core banking solutions, creating value for partners and providing an innovation roadmap for fellow community banks.

Corpay, Inc.,, a global leader in corporate payments, today announced a strategic partnership between its Cross-Border business and SKsoft, a leading independent software vendor (ISV) delivering global bank connectivity and treasury automation solutions embedded within the Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP ecosystem.

EquiLend today announced that EFG Hermes is going live on the firm’s Next Generation Trading (NGT) platform, becoming EquiLend’s first trading client based in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the first in the region to adopt full post-trade and trading automation via EquiLend. 

Pleo, one of Europe’s leading spend management platforms, has partnered with lemon.markets to launch ‘Pleo Investment Account’, an embedded treasury solution for German business customers. lemon.markets’ brokerage and custody infrastructure enables Pleo users to invest surplus cash in low-risk Money Market Funds (MMFs) and earn yield with next-day liquidity, directly within Pleo’s interface.

martini.ai, a leader in AI-powered credit intelligence, today unveiled the Financial Autonomy Ladder, a six-level framework designed to become an industrywide standard for measuring financial institution evolution from manual workflows to fully autonomous decision-making systems.

Ripple, a leader in enterprise blockchain and crypto solutions, and SBI Holdings, a major Japanese financial services conglomerate and its subsidiary SBI VC Trade Co., Ltd., a provider of crypto asset exchange business (jointly “SBI Group”), today announced a new memorandum of understanding (MOU) for SBI VC Trade, a licensed Electronic Payment Instruments Exchange Service Provider in Japan and subsidiary of SBI, outlining their intention to distribute Ripple USD (RLUSD) in Japan.

Zimperium’s zLabs research team has identified a new variant of the notorious Hook Android banking trojan, now equipped with some of the most advanced capabilities seen in mobile malware to date. Dubbed Hook v3, this variant expands its arsenal to 107 remote commands, including 38 newly added,  enabling attackers to steal data, hijack sessions, and bypass device defenses with unprecedented sophistication.

Among its most alarming new features: