Fewer than one in ten UK organisations now hold a flood action plan across all their sites, a figure that has fallen from 30% a year earlier, even as the financial toll of extreme weather climbs to record levels. The finding sits at the centre of the second annual State of Flood Resilience Report from Previsico, the surface-water flood forecasting firm spun out of Loughborough University, drawing on responses from more than 70 UK organisational leaders. The collapse in prepar

As Wero crosses 40 million users in Europe and Wall Street's biggest banks rush to launch their own tokenised deposit network, the payments industry is sprinting toward a programmable future, and the timeline just got a whole lot shorter. If you blinked this week, you missed a payments industry pivot that years of conference panels failed to predict. Stripe, Visa and Mastercard, three rivals who normally treat each other like cordial frenemies, are reportedly building a joint

Inside the June 2026 collision of generative AI, quantum computing and tokenised finance, the week the future of finance stopped being a forecast. There are weeks in finance when nothing happens. This is not one of them. As of this week, agentic AI has crossed from pilot to production inside banks, quantum computing stocks ripped after a White House executive order, DeFi absorbed another nine-figure exploit, and BlackRock quietly cemented Ethereum's role as Wall Street's toke

The European Central Bank will permanently fold portfolios of corporate loan claims into its standing collateral framework, closing the final chapter of the crisis-era easing measures that have governed Eurosystem lending for more than a decade. The Governing Council confirmed on 25 June 2026 the eligibility criteria and risk controls for integrating non-financial corporate (NFC) credit claim portfolios, with technical implementation slated for November 2027 at the earliest.

From Blend's autonomous mortgage agents to the FCA's incoming BNPL crackdown and a 308% surge in tokenised real estate, the lending stack is being rebuilt in public, and this week brought a fresh round of receipts. If you blinked at any point this past week, congratulations, you missed three credit revolutions, one regulatory hammer, and a tokenised tower block. The lending world is no longer pretending to "explore" AI; it is shipping it. The buy-now-pay-later world is no lon

Companies that wrote substantively about artificial intelligence in their 2024 annual reports outperformed silent peers by roughly 18 percentage points, according to the 2026 AI Barometer released today by AI-native systems integrator Blue Bridge Group AI. The finding lands a clear message for investors and reporting teams alike: AI disclosure has shifted from optional narrative colour to a measurable signal of strategic credibility, and markets are now pricing the difference

The 'open banking lurches onward' era is officially over. Between a near-final PSD3 text, a fresh recurring-A2A framework anchored by Britain's biggest banks, and a new chapter for BaaS, this week reset what European financial infrastructure actually looks like.

A digital legacy startup is betting that automated notifications alone will not deliver an estate, so it is putting a trained person on the phone to make sure heirs actually receive what was left for them. LegacyApp, a digital inheritance platform, has launched GOLD, a tier that adds supervised delivery by a human "Guardian" who intervenes when a beneficiary fails to respond to automated alerts. The product targets a growing structural gap in estate planning: the wealth, acce

More than 1,000 senior financial leaders from over 40 countries convened at Oradea Fortress in Romania on 17 and 18 June for the fifth edition of the UNCHAIN Festival, where the digital euro, AI governance, and stablecoin regulation dominated an agenda built around Central and Eastern Europe's claim to a defining role in the future of European financial services. The anniversary edition drew roughly 170 speakers and central bank and supervisory representatives from more than