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

Backbase has moved Delivery Factory, a set of banking-specific AI agents that work alongside a bank's own delivery team from an agreed requirement through to tested code, into general availability across all markets. The Amsterdam vendor says teams using it across more than 10 of its implementations over the past year shipped twice as fast as traditional teams, placing the Backbase Delivery Factory squarely on the part of a banking software project that most reliably runs lat

The New York startup, founded by former Revolut executives, has brought Charles Schwab and EQT Ventures onto its cap table to automate the back office of advisory firms, just as the industry braces for a shrinking pool of advisers. Nevis, a New York developer of wealth management AI, has raised a $70m Series B led by EQT Ventures, with The Charles Schwab Corporation joining as a strategic investor. The round, announced on 26 October 2026, takes the two-year-old company's tota

MAJORITY, the Miami neobank built for migrants, has switched on stablecoin remittances to Latin America, letting eligible members in the United States send money to relatives any day of the week on USDC rails operated by zerohash. The service, which went live on 26 October 2026, lets a sender pay in US dollars while the recipient receives USDC, a dollar-backed stablecoin, inside their MAJORITY Global Wallet. Payments settle around the clock, including weekends and public holi

Q3 funding tripled, Ridgeline raised a quarter of a billion, and tokenised cash is quietly rewriting what "cash in the account" even means. As of this week, the sector looks less like a side bet and more like the main event. If you blinked during the third quarter, you may have missed the moment WealthTech stopped being the quiet corner of fintech. Global funding for the sector hit roughly $2.8bn across 124 deals in Q3 2026, roughly three times the $932m banked in Q2, accordi