Things we’re reading today include … Netherlands bank moves billions in gold to London in ‘crisis preparedness’ move FSB Chair’s letter to G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors: August 2026 European banks and private markets: Mapping the linkages Taxing the banks: what Europe’s windfall levies brought in as Burnham eyes his next move HMRC……

This week’s main blog discussions include … The true cost of AI (Part One) There is a rather awkward conversation beginning in boardrooms about artificial intelligence. For the last few years, the question has been what AI can do, how quickly companies can deploy it and how many people it might replace, but the question……

I came across another interesting piece of proposed American legislation this week: the GRANITE Act. On the surface, it has nothing specifically to do with banking, stablecoins or cryptocurrencies, but put it alongside the GENIUS Act and CLARITY Act and something much bigger starts to emerge. America is building a digital financial fortress. The GENIUS……

Things we’re reading today include … Crypto billionaire pardoned by Trump gives Reform UK another £4m Hargreaves Lansdown opens 9 crypto ETNs to investors A Core Egyptian Bank Gets Caught Up in Treasury’s Iran Crackdown How Mollie & GoCardless are Reshaping SME Payments in Europe What’s gone wrong with Nordic fintech AI-Powered Fintech Compliance and……

Things we’re reading today include … Conflicts Accelerate Cryptocurrency Adoption in the Middle East Hunter Biden Launching $LAPTOP Memecoin Bitcoin hack drains $320 mn from crypto network in latest security breach HSBC and BNP Paribas Trial FX Tokenised Deposit With Swift Inside Italy’s banking M&A boom — and why Wall Street is watching China’s central……

There was a headline the other day that really annoyed me: Major Banks Are Racing to Appoint Chief AI Officers It annoyed me because it reveals something much deeper about how banks think. Whenever something becomes strategically important, banks respond by appointing a new executive to own it. AI is simply the latest example. For……

Things we’re reading today include … China to pump $54bn into state banks and insurers to boost economy FATF exposes hawala networks fuelling money laundering Nigel Farage’s family members ‘have bank accounts frozen because of their association to him’ Moody’s warns banks over AI tech dependency Deutsche Bank led $1bn of troubled lending to Hollywood……

Things we’re reading today include … Tokenised asset use could cut UK bank collateral needs by 30% Chime to buy nationally chartered Stride Bank for $590 million, shares jump Block Pursues National Trust Bank Charter to Custody Crypto How Central Banks Can Win the Digital Currency Race China’s $54bn capital boost for banks falls far……

There is something wonderfully contradictory about the British payments system. Almost nobody outside banking knows who Pay.UK is, and yet almost everybody in Britain depends upon it. Salaries arrive, mortgages disappear from accounts, businesses pay suppliers, consumers transfer money and billions of Direct Debits quietly do their thing every year because an enormous piece of……

There is a rather awkward conversation beginning in boardrooms about artificial intelligence. For the last few years, the question has been what AI can do, how quickly companies can deploy it and how many people it might replace, but the question now landing on the CFO’s desk is much simpler: how much is this stuff……