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

Finova, the UK's largest cloud-based mortgage, savings and lending software provider, has acquired Cubit Labs, an artificial intelligence company that builds automation and compliance tools for mortgage intermediaries. The deal, announced on 1 July 2026, folds Cubit Labs' founders and team into Finova as the company pushes to embed AI across the broker-to-lender journey. Financial terms were not disclosed. What is Finova buying, and why now? Cubit Labs has built AI-native too

PSD3 is no longer a rumour, BaaS has finally outgrown "growth at all costs," and core banking modernization has quietly become a $20 billion software-category bet. This week, the plumbing got serious. If 2024 was open banking's loud adolescence, mid-2026 is the bit where it gets a job, files its taxes and stops pretending it isn't regulated. Following last week's flurry of updates, from PSD3's near-final compromise texts to fresh API-governance offerings from CSI and Alkami,

FinanceX Magazine is proud to announce its media partnership with FinovateFall 2026, one of the fintech industry's most established and influential gatherings. Taking place 9 - 11 September 2026 at The Marriott Marquis Times Square in New York, the event brings together the people and technologies shaping the future of financial services. For nearly two decades, FinovateFall has set the pace for fintech innovation through its signature fast-paced, demo-led format. The 2026 ed