Firenze, a Manchester-based fintech unlocking Lombard lending for mass affluent investors, has closed a £2.5M Seed funding round led by Outward VC, the backers of Curve, PrimaryBid and Vauban.

Investment funds processing network Calastone has been bought by US-based funds servicing firm and software vendor SS&C Technologies in a deal worth £776m ($1.03bn).

The operator of the OKX crypto exchange will pay more than $504 million in fines and fees after admitting breaking US anti-money laundering laws.

Getpaid, a European payments startup for marketplaces and platforms, has raised $6 million in a seed funding round led by Nordic investor Inventure with participation from Picus Capital as well as high profile business angels from the payment and marketplace industry.

UK regulators are calling for feedback on the benefits and risks digital wallets from Big Tech giants such as Apple and Google bring to people and businesses.

Dozens of US credit unions have been hit by outages following a ransomware attack on a cloud computing vendor.

The UK Government has announced that the British High Commission (BHC) in Suva, Fiji have formed a partnership to deliver climate finance projects in Pacific Island countries.

Earlier this month, Richard Peers of ResponsibleRisk – and keynote speaker at this year’s Sustainable Finance Live conference – spoke to director of nature programmes and GFI Hive at the Green Finance Institute (GFI) on nature-related financial risks for the UK.

Dr Carsten Wengel, head of global sales and distribution in the card and digital payment business at G+D, spoke to Finextra on sustainable cashless options that are emerging in the financial services sector.

UBS has launched Hong Kong’s first investment-grade tokenized warrant on the Ethereum public blockchain network.

SG-Forge, the digital asset division of French bank Societe Generale is deploying its Euro-based stablecoin on the XRP Ledger (XRPL).

HSBC has enlisted Google Cloud to build a global call centre AI chatbot that helps employees cut down on the time they spend on manually intensive queries.

SC Ventures, the fintech investment and incubation arm of Standard Chartered, has launched Labamu, an invoicing and billing platform for SMEs in Apac.

PayPal’s PYUSD is now available on the Solana blockchain in a move that the company says will make its stablecoin faster and cheaper to use.