The British Business Bank has launched an asset-based lending variant of the Recovery Loan Scheme.

The asset-based lending variant aims to broaden the support available for small businesses in the UK to access finance through the Recovery Loan Scheme, making use of a broad range of business assets.

Banks have vastly evolved over the last 50 years but the underlying global financial system has remained largely the same; obscure and inefficient. The advent of regulated digital assets and programmable money, along with its adoption by central banks around the world offers a root and branch transformation of how value will move around the world.

VNX, a renowned European player of real-world asset tokenization, has marked a new milestone with the launch of its stablecoins, VNX Euro (VEUR), VNX Swiss Franc (VCHF) and tokenized gold  VNX Gold (VNXAU) on the Solana blockchain. The move emphasizes VNX's commitment to broadening the utility and accessibility of stable assets within the digital ecosystem. 

Emirates NBD, a leading banking group in the MENAT (Middle East, North Africa, and Türkiye) region, has announced leading enterprise distributed ledger technology and services firm R3 as a key council member of the Digital Asset Lab. R3 will join PwC, a professional services firm, and Fireblocks, a digital asset transfer and direct custody technology platform, as the founding council members of the Lab.

ClearBank, the enabler of real-time clearing and embedded banking for financial institutions, today announced the appointment of Megan Cooper (nee Caywood) as Chief Product Officer. 

Mollie, today unveiled the UK findings from its latest European E-commerce Report. The report highlights how spending and payment behavior has shifted in light of growing inflation and the cost of living crisis. Despite economic challenges, nearly half of consumers believe the economic situation will improve in the short term and expect to spend more in the next year. 

Regtech Salv, with its suite of tools to help banks and service companies fight financial crime, has raised €3.9m in new funding, bringing its capital raised this year to €7.9m and total funding to €12.1m. The round includes investments from new and existing investors and is a testament to a strong year for the Estonian-based regtech, which is on track to double its revenue in 2023 compared to 2022.

Temenos today announced that Lesha Bank, an investment bank based in Qatar has migrated to the latest Temenos core banking platform to enhance its wealth management and investment banking services.

The move enables Lesha Bank, a long-standing Temenos client, to get to the modern API-driven, cloud-native technology and to have access to the latest banking capabilities from Temenos and the Exchange ecosystem. 

Bitso, the leading financial services company powered by crypto in Latin America, announced that during 2023 reached a 60% growth in its operation of the Bitso Business division, which reached an annualized volume of 8 billion dollars globally.

Over the past year, 1,700 institutional clients traded at least once a month through Bitso. Such organizations use Bitso payment rails and blockchain-based technology for mass pay-ins and pay-outs to employees and suppliers, cross-border payments, and other types of financial operations.

More than a third (36 percent) of people in regulated firms who ‘can’t trust’ electronic ID verification and instead rely on manual checks are leaving their doors open to financial crime, anti-money laundering expert warns.

This statistic - from SmartSearch’s 2023 annual survey of 500 compliance stakeholders - has doubled since their 2022 survey, when 18 percent of people said they couldn’t trust the technology.