The paycheck to paycheck 2026 squeeze is surprisingly coming not from summer vacations but from common places like the grocery aisle, the utility bill and the gas pump. Thus, the pressure doesn’t end when the season does. Many turn to BNPL but does it really help?
China’s digital yuan e-CNY network expansion tripled in less than a year showing how quickly central-bank digital currencies (CBDCs) can scale.
Bilt, a rewards platform for renters, and luxury gym chain Equinox have launched a joint membership benefit that lets Bilt members earn points toward Equinox classes and spa services.
American crypto regulation horizon starts clearing up. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has proposed a new framework for crypto assets. Meanwhile, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) is moving to clarify how some digital assets could be treated in financial statements.
Global bond markets today are not soothing investors concerned over the high costs of borrowing and the consequences this is having on household accounts.
Meta’s youth safety trial opened on August 18 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, putting Facebook and Instagram’s product design under unusually close legal scrutiny. Four states: California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, are leading the bellwether case, part of a broader lawsuit brought by 29 states in 2023.
Razorpay has launched Vulcan, an artificial intelligence (AI) foundation model designed specifically for payments specifics of the Indian market. The company describes Vulcan as India’s first transformer-based AI foundation model for payments, beyond using separate AI tools for individual tasks such as fraud detection or payment routing.
Twitch added a new privacy setting on August 12 that lets streamers stop Amazon from using their content to train generative AI models. The catch is that the setting is switched on by default. Streamers who don’t find and disable it are automatically included.
Alipay introduced China’s first full-stack agentic commerce platform on August 17, 2026, at its AI Ecosystem Partner Conference in Hangzhou. The platform is designed to help merchants move from standard digital operations to AI-powered operations.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has given conditional approval to World Liberty Trust Co., clearing the way for the Trump family-linked crypto venture to operate as a national trust bank. The decision lets World Liberty Financial (WLF) bring management of its USD1 stablecoin in-house. For now, the company relies on third-party […]
Two major M&A deals this week show how deeply artificial intelligence (AI) and payments are becoming intertwined. Stripe has agreed to buy OpenRouter, an innovative tech marketplace that lets people access hundreds of AI models through one gateway, for more than $7 billion. Meanwhile, Anthropic is in early talks to acquire Decart, an Israeli startup […]
Three different regions made their movements this month to reduce dependence on the two global companies that process most of the world’s card payments. On the surface, they may look unrelated, but together, a pattern emerges where governments and central banks build various types of alternative payment rails instead of relying on Visa and Mastercard.
New survey data shows Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) is becoming a routine part of predictable, recurring shopping for American households, and almost half of US consumers will use it to make the annual back-to-school purchases possible.
Nvidia, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Cloudflare, Microsoft, IBM, Hugging Face, Databricks, Salesforce, SpaceXAI, and hundred more tech firms are supporting the Open Secure AI Alliance (OSAA) SAFE Framework aimed at standardizing reporting for cases when AI agent or an automated system makes unauthorized, unintended or otherwise unsafe actions.
Europe is currently seen by many as a bright example of well-defined crypto regulation opening doors for banks and payment providers to move from stablecoin experimentation to operational adoption. Yet, despite undeniable MiCA implementation milestones and compliant euro stablecoins gaining ground, local industry players have a lot of obstacles to overcome to establish the crypto […]
More young shoppers are paying with their phones instead of physical cards, but new research suggests the shift is driven not only by convenience but also by tight budgets.
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