Nasdaq has agreed to acquire the equity interests it does not already own in LeveL Markets, the third-largest US alternative trading system by volume, folding the off-exchange venue into a newly created Digital Liquidity Networks unit that houses the exchange operator's digital assets and tokenisation ambitions. The deal, announced on 11 August 2026, converts a five-year minority stake into full ownership of an ATS that processes hundreds of millions of shares a day and conne

A week that saw a payment giant swallow a fraud specialist, Europe's new financial crime supervisor publish its harmonisation blueprint, and half of Europe's banks still catching up on operational resilience shows why RegTech is no longer a nice-to-have line item. If anyone still needed convincing that regulatory technology has moved from cost centre to strategic asset, the past week has done the job for them. As of this week, Visa has agreed to buy a behavioural biometrics s

Spare has agreed to embed its account-to-account payment rails into Tabadulat, a UAE Shariah-compliant brokerage, letting investors fund and withdraw from trading accounts directly from their bank rather than via card. The deal, announced on 12 August 2026, pushes Open Finance in the UAE past its consumer-payments origins and into the funding layer of retail investment platforms, a segment where settlement speed and verified sources of funds carry direct regulatory weight. Wh

Munich-based regulatory technology group cleversoft has signed a definitive agreement to acquire FS Assist, the UK software house whose Excel-based tools sit behind Solvency II and Lloyd's syndicate submissions at hundreds of insurers and pension providers. The deal, announced on 11 August 2026, is expected to close later this month subject to customary conditions, and it hands cleversoft an established foothold in a UK insurance reporting market that has spent the past two y

As the DTCC pushes live tokenised equities and Treasuries towards an October switch, the London Stock Exchange sketches its own around-the-clock venue, and Deutsche Boerse warns the industry not to trade itself into thinner liquidity. Financial market infrastructure is not usually where you look for drama. It is the plumbing: clearinghouses, central securities depositories, exchanges, the settlement pipes that let a trader in Frankfurt sell a bond to a fund in Boston without

Cashi, a consumer app that lets people hold and spend stablecoins, has launched a spending and cashback card in Hong Kong, with a second market, Mexico, lined up for late 2026. The programme runs on issuer processing infrastructure from Thredd, placing the stablecoin card firmly on the Visa network rather than on any standalone crypto rail. The launch is a consumer play in a category that has, until recently, skewed towards institutional and B2B use. Cashi's proposition is na

From an Ahmedabad reinsurance play to a Vancouver acquisition, the first week of August has quietly reshaped how carriers, brokers and start-ups think about the modern insurance stack. Why This Week Matters If you blinked in the first week of August 2026, you missed several important moves. Federato launched an AI-native claims platform. InRisk Labs secured $27 million to expand its parametric reinsurance ambitions. Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. bought Apollo Insurance Solutions

OORI, a Riyadh-based investment platform, has secured a licence from the Saudi Capital Market Authority to conduct arranging and advising activities, giving it a regulated route to sell private market investments to qualified Saudi investors. The authorisation, held under CMA licence number 26341-30, positions the platform to open access to venture, growth and pre-IPO technology deals that have historically sat behind high minimums and limited distribution. The launch is fund

Digital bank deposits in the Philippines reached P138.5 billion by the end of 2025, a rise of nearly 44 per cent year on year, as app-based lenders continue to pull funding growth away from the country's traditional banks. The figure, drawn from Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas data, sits behind a broader repositioning of the Philippine banking market that industry leaders will examine at the fifth World Financial Innovation Series (WFIS) in Manila on 25 and 26 August. How fast ar