Latin America
6 itemsNubank is in early talks to acquire Monzo at a valuation of up to US$13bn.
Sky News reports discussions valuing the UK neobank at £8–10bn, roughly double its 2024 mark, while Monzo's board weighs an alternative round above £8bn to fund a push into mainland Europe. For Nu the prize is UK and EU licences, direct rail access and 15.2m customers; Nu lends out about 87 cents of every deposit dollar at a 22.9% net interest margin while Monzo lends under 10p per pound of its £25.7bn deposits. Talks are early and Monzo declined to comment, but a deal would put Nu on Revolut's home turf.
The ECB will assess linking its TIPS instant-payment system with Brazil's Pix.
The study covers technical, operational, legal and business questions for connecting the euro area to a system handling roughly 250 million transactions a day. A Pix–Europe corridor would be the first major interlink for Brazil's rail outside the region and a direct challenge to card and correspondent-bank remittance economics.
US stablecoin rails are re-entering Venezuela under a humanitarian licence.
After the June earthquakes OFAC issued a temporary general licence (GL 60) that UglyCash (formerly RPay) and AirTM are using to offer Venezuelans US virtual accounts powered by Bridge (owned by Stripe) and Lead Bank, with ACH deposits converted into eUSD or USDC. Augustus, which holds a conditional OCC charter but is not yet operating, plans to support dollar business accounts in the country, and Colombia's Qash is already marketing Augustus-powered accounts to Venezuelan businesses. Bridge's own documentation still lists Venezuela as prohibited, so compliance scrutiny of these programmes is likely.
Kontigo appears to have rebuilt its US deposit rails via Bloque and Brale.
The SUNACRIP-licensed Venezuelan wallet, previously reported to have helped the Maduro-era government integrate sanctioned oil proceeds, was cut off by Bridge, Stripe, PayPal and Rain in January; its app now routes US bank top-ups through Bloque and stablecoin platform Brale, which appeared unaware and whose option disappeared after inquiries. It is a live case study in how quickly infrastructure providers get pulled into high-risk Latin American flows.
Plenti reports 150,000 active users and US$3.1bn in annual volume offering dollar accounts to Colombians.
The company gives users US and European account details, dollar holding, a Visa card and access to brokerage and investment products. The category is getting crowded, with ARQ and Littio chasing the same customers, and the durable questions are regulatory tolerance and AML controls as volumes grow.
Two more Colombian dollar-wallet launches: Monni and Meru.
Barranquilla-based Monni opened a waitlist for a multi-currency wallet with USD, EUR, COP and MXN accounts, FX and an international debit card, with a credit card planned by Q3 2027. Meru launched as a financial super app offering up to 7% variable yield on USDC, 10% cashback on its Visa card at selected retailers and stock investing. Together with Plenti this confirms Colombia as the region's most contested market for dollarised consumer accounts.
Fintech & payments
6 itemsMeta's Muse has made agentic payments a mass-market product and a liability problem.
Muse can browse, compare, complete checkout and pay with Stripe built in, supports Stripe Link and PayPal wallets and appears to be getting a Meta Connect wallet. Amazon is blocking Muse sessions as unauthorised, and bank leadership teams are described as at "DEFCON 1" over Meta integrating banking data via Plaid. The open question is who bears responsibility when an agent initiates a payment the customer approved and the merchant processed.
SoFi moved its entire US$25bn card programme onto stablecoin settlement with Mastercard.
Transactions now settle seven days a week in SoFiUSD, the bank's own coin. It is by far the largest issuer on stablecoin settlement, exceeding Visa's entire US$20bn annualised book, and because SoFi issues the coin it keeps the float yield, which is why the networks are pushing the shared-yield OpenUSD.
The OCC conditionally approved national trust charters for Agora, Bastion and Catena.
Agora white-labels its AUSD stablecoin, Bastion runs standalone coins for clients such as Sony Bank, and Catena gives AI agents stablecoin accounts with spending rules. The charters position all three ahead of the GENIUS Act taking effect in January 2027, though of last December's five conditional approvals only two were live banks by August.
Stablecoin rulemaking advanced on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Federal Reserve requested comment on two proposals for Board-supervised payment stablecoin issuers under the GENIUS Act, while the ECB and EU central banks are pushing to scrap MiCA's stablecoin deposit rule. Capgemini estimates banks risk losing US$230m in payments revenue as stablecoins and tokenised deposits go mainstream.
Kalshi faces volume scrutiny while filing for margin trading.
The WSJ found nearly one million trades of about US$5,500 on Kalshi's ETH perpetual since August; the CFTC is reviewing the data and Kalshi denies wash trading. Separately Kalshi Klear filed with the CFTC for margined event contracts, initially for institutions, and New York has sued Polymarket as an illegal gambling operation.
A Synapse creditor is seeking a Delaware receiver, opening the door to suits against Evolve and Mercury.
Distressed investor SLFAQ, which bought TriplePoint's US$7.2m claim for US$1 plus 45% of recoveries, asked the Court of Chancery to appoint a receiver to pursue remaining claims, including roughly US$35m of reserve funds Evolve impounded.
Venture & markets
2 itemsNumeral raised a US$100m Series C led by Insight Partners for AI-driven sales tax compliance.
Salesforce Ventures joined, taking total funding to US$157m. The company combines a rules engine, AI for registration and filing paperwork and specialists for edge cases, and guarantees on-time filing; the model maps onto any high-volume, rules-based, deadline-driven tax job.
European rounds: Humanos, Circle Games and Kontext.
Lisbon's Humanos, which monitors and scores AI agents on behaviour for insurance purposes, raised a US$3.2m seed led by Anthemis; Istanbul's Circle Games raised a US$25m Series A led by Tencent with BITKRAFT and a16z Speedrun; and Munich's Kontext, a runtime security platform for AI agents, raised US$4m led by 42CAP with a16z CSX and HTGF. Agent security and agent insurance are becoming a fundable category.
AI & technology
2 itemsBanks are deploying agentic AI into fraud operations.
Feedzai launched Farol, an embedded investigation agent; NatWest unveiled a Fraud Triage Agent built on proprietary small language models; and Apate.AI, used by Commonwealth Bank, sends AI voice and text agents to pose as scam victims and harvest the accounts scammers reveal.
Mule account handovers are outpacing detection.
Incognia's survey of 511 fraud and AML professionals found 81% see handovers rising and only 16% detect them before suspicious transactions, directly relevant to the dollar-account products proliferating in Colombia and Venezuela.
Worth reading
3 itemsCan Wero beat the card networks?
A former JPMorgan Zelle lead argues the ECB-sponsored scheme lifts P2P volumes by under 5%, offers merchants little beyond already-capped interchange and, unlike Pix, does not grow the market.
Revenue per megawatt.
A framing of AI labs as factories converting energy into tokens, with Anthropic cited at US$50m of revenue per megawatt against a US$10–15m cost and its first profitable quarter.
Molly Graham on grief, loneliness and burnout in tech.
A 94-minute conversation on why "give away your Legos" no longer holds in an AI world and what the best managers are doing now.