Stablecoin-by-committee launches with 140+ partners

J.P. Morgan Payments and NPCI teamed up to power real-time FX for cross-border UPI transactions, integrating the bank's FX platform and APIs with India's instant payment rails.

Crédit Agricole launched EURXT, a MiCA-compliant, euro-pegged stablecoin issued on Ethereum by its asset-servicing arm CACEIS.

Citi pitched its new Digital Depositary Receipts service as a cleanup for the murky SPV market, tokenizing private-company shares on SIX's regulated blockchain.

Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, Nationwide, NatWest, and Santander went to work on a UK Finance-backed digital verification service that would let customers prove their name, age, or address through their banking app.

A new Aqua Global survey found that real-time payments remain out of reach for most banks, with one in three taking more than a day to resolve reconciliation exceptions.

Visa rolled out new Visa Pay, Visa Accept, and Visa Direct capabilities to turn smartphones into cash registers for small businesses in emerging markets — Visa Accept, which converts a phone into a card terminal with no extra hardware, is live in 25+ countries with millions of merchants expected by 2027.

zerohash launched Portfolio Strategies, an API-driven product that lets brokerages and wealth platforms create, manage, and rebalance crypto portfolios.

MetaMask rolled out Money Account, a self-custody account built on Monad that bundles stablecoin yield, payments, and trading in a single mUSD balance.

Interpolitan Money debuted a fixed income treasury product giving professional clients exposure to US Government Securities Repo on idle USD balances.

Google launched a dedicated Google Finance app for Android (iOS to follow), bringing its AI-revamped service out of beta with a consolidated portfolio dashboard.

Lean and Ziina launched the UAE's first one-tap Pay by Bank experience under the country's Open Finance framework.

Stablecore launched an early-access stablecoin and digital asset program for US credit unions with CUSO Circuit and backing from Curql's 160+ credit union collective — RBFCU, Stanford FCU, and La Capitol FCU.

Jet Bank launched as Albania's first fully digital bank, built greenfield by a team of 70 in six months on Backbase's AI-native Banking OS, with 75,000+ people on the waitlist and multi-currency accounts, savings goals, and debit cards live at launch.

N26 surpassed €500 million in revenue and hit its first full year of net profitability, following a shakeup that demoted co-founders Maximilian Tayenthal and Valentin Stalf and installed former UBS executive Mike Dargan as CEO.

Private credit giants like Blue Owl, KKR, and Elliott poured billions into buy now, pay later companies… an untested marriage of "shadow banking" and "phantom debt" that has credit raters and former regulators worried about what happens in a downturn.

Grasshopper added a stablecoin-based payments capability with banking core Increase.

Erebor, the Palmer Luckey-founded, Peter Thiel-backed bank, is eyeing a raise at a valuation of at least $8 billion, just five months after receiving its charter, with deposits nearly quadrupling to $4.05 billion since March.

Cross River expanded its partnership with Stripe to power card issuing for agentic commerce, providing the banking infrastructure behind Link's agent wallet.

Binance told customers in the EU it will stop providing services from July 1 after failing to secure a MiCA license — the exchange withdrew its Greek application amid concerns over money laundering and whether founder Changpeng Zhao passed the "fit and proper" test. Nearly 1,700 UK investors sued Binance and founder Changpeng Zhao in London's High Court, seeking at least £150 million over allegations the exchange knowingly sold high-risk leveraged derivatives to British retail traders.

A Swedish court ordered Google to pay $1.97 billion in damages to PriceRunner, the price comparison service Klarna acquired in 2022, finding Google systematically demoted rival comparison shopping services in search results for over a decade.