Specialty insurance rates fell faster in the first half of 2026 than in the whole of 2025, and by the 1 July renewals around 65% of the rate gains built up to the 2023 market peak had been eroded, according to WTW's latest Specialty Insurance Marketplace Survey (SIMS). Across the London, Bermuda and US excess and surplus (E&S) markets, insurance and reinsurance rates both fell 4% gross of claims trend and 6% net of trend in the six months to June, with the steepest cuts, in p

Anthropic pre-IPO trading is the hook in a new campaign from the crypto exchange BingX, promoted on 27 October 2026, a day after the AI company filed to go public. The product behind the pitch is a USDT-settled perpetual futures contract that tracks Anthropic's implied valuation. It conveys no shares, no seat on the cap table and no claim on the company, and no Anthropic stock can legally change hands until its registration with regulators takes effect. Anthropic, the develop

As of this week, Europe's regulator asked how tokenised collateral should actually clear, while the US post-trade giant moved its on-chain treasury pipes from pilot to production. The future of settlement is suddenly very current. Financial market infrastructure is not usually where you look for drama. It is the quiet machinery under every trade: exchanges, clearinghouses, central securities depositories, the stuff that only becomes interesting when it breaks. Yet in the last

Hong Kong's securities regulator has cleared retail investors to trade tokenised money market funds around the clock, turning a pilot framework into live retail products. From Monday 2 November, investors can buy and sell two ChinaAMC digital money market funds on PantherTrade, a licensed virtual-asset platform, with continuous secondary trading sitting alongside the usual subscribe-and-redeem route through the fund manager. The Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) describ

More than three quarters of the world's largest insurers plan to raise their allocations to private markets over the coming year, with private debt the clearest target, according to BlackRock's 15th annual Global Insurance Survey. The research, published on 27 October 2026, found that insurers' fear of a recession has almost halved in twelve months, from 35% to 18%, even as inflation remains their dominant macroeconomic worry at 62%. For a sector that manages liabilities meas

Capital is pouring into AI-native insurers, executives at ITC Vegas are warning of a vendor cull, and parametric claims are settling in 48 hours. As of this week, the sector's "AI everywhere" moment is colliding with its first serious discipline check. InsurTech has, for a long time, oscillated between two moods: giddy and chastened. This autumn it is doing both at once. In the same month that one AI-native specialty insurer raised $200m, executives on stage in Las Vegas warn