As they face up to competition from a slew of new ‘virtual banks’, Hong Kong’s traditional lenders are broadly optimistic about their future in the fintech era.

Many national regulators are already undertaking regulatory and supervisory initiatives on climate-related financial risks, according to a BIS report, although most have not yet factored the mitigation of such risks into the prudential capital framework.

A seven man team from Barclays Bank, using tools from FreedomPay and their own Pingit mobile payments app, emerged with top honours at Microsoft’s week long Digital Wallet Foundry hack-a-thon in London.

With 2022 drawing to a close, we take a look back at our most downloaded whitepapers, sentiment papers and surveys over the course of the past year. These reports are Finextra-led and cobranded, based on editorially balanced, independent, referenced desk-based and online research.

At AFP 2025 in Boston, Larry Zelvin, executive VP and head of the financial crimes unit, BMO; Sarah McMorris, CTP, lead, treasury operations, Affirm; and Marlys Green, director, treasury controller, PDS Health, took to the stage to explore the profound shift in the threat landscape due to AI-enabled cybercrime.

Finastra today announced a multi-year agreement with Microsoft focused on trade platform modernisation to address evolving corporate customer expectations.

A handful of Wall Street banks are preparing to pay up to $200m each to settle a case with the Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) over the use of WhatsApp messages.

Digital wealth management platform Scalable Capital has raised more than €150 million in a Series E funding round led by Chinese tech conglomerate Tencent.

Stablecoin infrastructure startup Noah has teamed up with consumer money movement app Fin.com to roll out virtual EUR and USD bank accounts to hundreds of thousands of users globally.

BMO is to transfer large portions of its commercial and investment banking operations to Amazon Web Services in an effort to streamline its internal business processes and develop new customer-facing applications.

The initiative supports the COP30 Presidency’s goal of accelerating climate finance for forests and developing economies. Brazil, as host nation, is placing strong emphasis on halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation by 2030.

UK-based regtech eflow Global has raised £7 million in a Series A funding round led by Finch Capital.

Chase UK has become the latest bank to ban crypto-related transactions from its mobile app in the face of escalating fraud fears.