A new industry paper is pressing finance ministries and power utilities across eastern and southern Africa to treat drought not as an operational nuisance but as a balance-sheet and sovereign-credit risk, and to hedge it with parametric insurance before the next dry year arrives. The paper, From Exposure to Protection: The Case for Parametric Insurance Revenue Cover for Hydro-Dependent Utilities in Eastern and Southern Africa, was published on 16 September 2026 by IDRIMA, the

Revolut has applied to the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) for a full banking licence, a move that would let Europe's most valuable fintech convert its 1.3 million Swiss users from a low-cost travel card into a fully banked customer base. The application is under review, and FINMA has not indicated a timeline. Alongside it, the London-based group has committed more than CHF 150 million (around USD 183 million) to the Swiss market over the next five years,

As of this week, the European Union's new anti-money laundering machinery is quietly picking its first supervisory targets, agentic AI is eating the KYC stack, and investors are writing bigger cheques than at any point since 2022. RegTech's grown-up era is here. The RegTech sector has spent the better part of a decade oscillating between "we automated a workflow" and "we redefined compliance." In September 2026, both claims finally feel earned. Three things are happening in p

Ritholtz Wealth Management, the New York registered investment adviser that has grown to a company-stated $9.4 billion in assets, has hired compliance startup Hadrius to monitor and archive every employee interaction with Anthropic's Claude, clearing the regulatory path to put an enterprise chatbot in front of its entire workforce. The arrangement gives Ritholtz's compliance team a logged, searchable record of AI usage that can be produced for an examiner, and it makes the RI

As of this week, the tokenisation of wholesale markets stops being a slide in a conference deck and starts settling in central bank money. The next six days will tell us whether the plumbing holds. Europe's financial market infrastructures are having a very loud fortnight. In the space of two weeks, the European Central Bank has flipped a live switch on distributed ledger settlement, the Financial Conduct Authority and the Bank of England have published feedback that sets the

Chinese corporate globalisation has entered a phase in which the product being shipped abroad is increasingly the operating model itself, not the goods, according to a report published on 15 September 2026 by Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business and IE University's China Observatory. The study, led by CKGSB economics professor and associate dean Li Wei, calls this stage capability export, and argues that the era in which Chinese firms could win overseas on price, scale and