Sweden's private services sector expanded at its fastest pace in seven months in June, with the Purchasing Managers' Index for services climbing to 56.6 from 54.2 in May, according to data released by Swedbank and the Silf purchasing managers' panel. The reading, the highest since November 2025, pushed the index above its long-run average of 55.6 for only the second time this year and arrived alongside a composite PMI of 57.1, itself the strongest since November. The improvem

As of this week, the SEC is drafting its future around digital assets, the DTCC is weeks away from live tokenised trades, and Honeywell just spun quantum computing into its own ticker symbol. Welcome to the summer where the "frontier" started producing actual revenue. For most of the past decade, "technology frontier" in financial services meant a slide deck about blockchain that ended with the phrase "watch this space." As of the last week of June 2026, "this space" has furn

Visa has begun selling access to the cyber intelligence engine it built to protect its own network, launching the Visa Threat Intelligence Platform (VTIP) on 2 July 2026 to help banks catch attacks before they turn into fraud losses. The announcement, made in Paris, packages the same detection capability Visa uses to block roughly 90 million cyberattacks and 11 million phishing emails a month into a commercial tool for financial institutions. The logic behind VTIP is straight

Payward has closed its acquisition of Reap Technologies, the Hong Kong-based stablecoin card and payments firm, completing on July 1, nearly eight weeks after the deal was first announced. FinanceX covered the announcement in May; this is what changed between agreement and completion, and what's new now that the integration is live. What's Different Now That the Deal Has Closed? The structure is unchanged from May: up to $600 million in cash and stock, an implied $20 billion

As of this week, the machines aren't just scoring your loan, they're writing the entire underwriting playbook. From Ramp's $44 billion AI-fueled valuation to Flipkart's fresh RBI lending license and the EU AI Act's August countdown, lending in July 2026 looks nothing like lending in July 2025. If credit had a bad haircut for most of the 2010s, clunky FICO models, thin-file borrowers left in the cold, mortgage approvals measured in geological time, 2026 is the year it walked o

Lightspark Payments Europe AS has become the first company in Estonia to receive a standalone crypto-asset service provider (CASP) license under the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, paired with an electronic money institution (EMI) authorization from Finantsinspektsioon, Estonia's Financial Supervision Authority. The timing is not incidental: the license lands one day before MiCA's grandfathering period expires across the bloc, the point at which any crypto-asset ser

The African Trade & Investment Development Insurance agency posted a 20% rise in annual profit to $71.4 million in 2025, alongside a milestone 25th Anniversary Annual Report that puts its cumulative trade and investment support at more than $93 billion since 2001. The figures, released at ATIDI's 26th Annual General Meeting in Nairobi from 30 June to 3 July, mark one of the strongest financial years in the pan-African credit and political risk insurer's history and come as th

Sustainability signals are quietly migrating from glossy investor decks into checkout flows, loan files and mobile wallets. As of this week, the "beyond banking" thesis is no longer a slide, it's a balance sheet line item. For years, "beyond banking" sounded like a TED talk in search of a P&L. As of this week, the slide-deck era is over. Regulators are tightening, capital is consolidating around the players that can plug sustainability and inclusion directly into existing rai

Friendly fraud, the practice of disputing a legitimate card transaction as unauthorized, has increased over the past three years for 83.4% of enterprise merchants, according to the 2026 Chargeback Field Report from dispute management firm Chargebacks911. Across all merchant sizes, 73.7% of respondents who tracked a change in first-party fraud reported an increase, and 74.4% now call it a moderate or significant concern. The report, built from survey responses from more than 2