Four UK nationals have been sentenced for fraudulently obtaining and laundering bitcoin and other cryptocurrency worth tens of millions of pounds from an Australia-based cryptocurrency exchange.

A London-based digital asset financial services platform called BVNK has launched, promising to remove the barriers that prevent businesses and financial service providers from realising the benefits of cryptocurrencies.

UBS has invested in Lynk, an AI-driven ‘Knowledge-as-a-Service’ platform that the bank works with to help its institutional clients in their investment research.

Outward VC, a London-headquartered early-stage venture capital fund, has closed on a £51 million fund to back early stages founders operating on the intersection of fintech and connected sectors.

Agricultural challenger bank Oxbury is the first client for a new cloud-based core banking platform developed by low code outfit Naqoda.

The UK’s Financial Ombudsman Service is expecting more than 181,000 consumer complaints in the next year, driven in part by an increase in financial fraud and scams.

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.