Klarna Consumer FX is now live, letting the payments company's 120 million users buy from any connected merchant worldwide and pay in their own currency with no exchange fee. The rate and the converted price appear before checkout and stay visible in the Klarna app after purchase, closing off the statement-day surprise that has long followed cross-border shopping. Klarna says the feature works across all of its markets and currencies from launch, with no new integration requi

OKX has merged euro and EURC liquidity into a single trading venue for customers across the European Economic Area, extending to the euro a market-structure model it first built for the dollar. The exchange said on 21 October that its unified euro order book lets eligible users trade EUR pairs against one combined pool and settle in either euros or Circle's euro stablecoin, EURC, with conversion between the two at a fixed 1:1 rate. The practical effect is that a trader holdin

As of this week, the beyond-banking story has stopped being a slide in a pitch deck and started looking like a working business. The numbers, the deals and the regulatory noise all point the same way. For years, embedded finance has been the fintech equivalent of a gym membership in January: enthusiastically signed up for, less enthusiastically used. Platforms promised to tuck payments, credit and insurance into every retail flow, but most of the plumbing lived in slide decks

By Alexandre Kech, CEO at GLEIF AI agents can discover services, negotiate terms, analyze data, and initiate transactions for people and organizations. In financial services, this creates a governance challenge: how can other parties determine which organization stands behind an agent, who authorized it, and whether an action falls within that authority? As GLEIF’s most recent working paper on agentic payments observes, existing legal frameworks can generally allocate respons

Mizuho Bank has stopped accepting photographs of identity documents when verifying customers who open accounts online, switching instead to reading the integrated-circuit chips embedded in My Number and driving licence cards. The change, which took effect on Monday 19 October, confirms that Japan bank IC chip verification is becoming the sector default well before an April 2027 legal deadline that will make the method compulsory. The immediate trigger is a run of data breache

Europe's new anti-money laundering authority is up and running in Frankfurt, agentic compliance tooling is raising nine-figure rounds, and the EU AI Act has an opinion on both. The compliance stack is officially the new battleground. If 2024 was the year every bank hired a Chief AI Officer, 2026 is the year every Chief Compliance Officer discovered they needed one too. As of this week, the regulatory and funding environment around financial crime technology has moved from "in