US regional banks, Huntington National, First Horizon, and Regions, have joined an $18.7 million Series A round in deposit network ModernFi.

Standard Chartered is among the firms picked to join Hong Kong’s new stablecoin issuer sandbox. The announcement comes a day after the island’s regulators said they will soon propose a regulatory regime for stablecoin issuers.

UniCredit, Italy’s second-largest bank, has been fined €2.8 million (£2.3 million) by the country’s data protection authority over 2018 data breach case.

Crypto firm Circle Internet Group has acquired Hashnote, the issuer of US Yield Coin (USYC), the largest tokenised treasury and money market fund in the world.

Infinity Ventures, the early-stage fintech and commerce venture firm founded by PayPal veterans, has raised a $184 million Fund II.

Citi is running a competition to encourage individual developers, teams and companies from around the world to create innovative mobile banking and payments applications.

Gresham House Ventures has led a £4.65mn investment round in climate impact data business Connect Earth.

Nigerian digital bank Carbon has acquired Vella Finance for the launch of an AI-powered platform for SMEs. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Greenwashing has become a ‘systemic problem’ among UK banks despite universal claims that sustainability is at the heart of their business, a new survey has found.

An increasing number of challenger banks, neobanks and digital offshoots are being born in the cloud and the technology is now being used by traditional banks and new players alike for all IT needs. Banks that are born in the cloud are at an advantage because legacy players that are in the process of migrating to the cloud are struggling with application modernisation, data centralisation and security.