Lloyds and Nationwide-backed fintech Aveni has released the first version of its domain-specific large language model for financial services, FinLLM.

UK high street bank Lloyds has stepped up its efforts to engage with fintechs with the release of its Innovation Sandbox supported by NayaOne.

Crypto exchange Kraken has become the first company to be awarded a Markets in Crypto Assets (Mica) licence from Ireland’s central bank.

Major players from crypto and traditional finance have joined in a $135 million funding round in Digital Asset, the firm behind the Canton Network blockchain platform for tokenised assets.

BBVA has been demonstrating a conversational app concept built directly into OpenAI’s ChatGPT that lets customers get information about the bank’s offerings.

Stackwell, a digital investment platform targeting the black community, has raised $3.5 million in a seed funding round.

Sustainable investment app Clim8 has secured a £2 million investment from “media-for-equity” fund Channel 4 Ventures.

Private equity firms Bain Capital and Reverence Capital have agreed to buy Envestnet in a deal that values the provider of wealth management technology and data at $4.5 billion.

Sustainable finance is a swiftly growing industry, with new innovations arising rapidly from all over the world. In conversation with an author of SEB’s Green Bond Report, Finextra considered the latest advancements in the sustainability sector leading up to our annual Sustainable Finance Live conference.

A cluster of ESG driven minds are honing a risk-weighting methodology for banks to implement across climate-exposed assets.

UK digital bank Monzo has rolled out a tool that lets sole traders and landlords file taxes directly to HMRC from their business account.