Founded by the former CISO of Bank Leumi, Israeli web3 security company SphereX has raised $8.2 million in seed funding for its technology designed to prevent crypto hacks.

Following the 2022 Biodiversity Conference of Parties, the world has been trying to follow the ambitious Global Biodiversity Framework agreement. Recently, they reconvened for the COP16 event in Cali where the focus was on further agreements, resources and plans to ensure the GBF’s success by 2030. At the event, there were some successes and some pitfalls.

A UN-backed biodiversity module has been launched to help financial institutions explore the extent to which their portfolios indirectly drives species extinction risk and impact ecological integrity.

The FIX Trading Community is opening its technical standards process to software developers throughout the financial industry using GitHub, with several high performance projects already published to the repository.

India and the Philippines have moved to strengthen the ties between their respective fintech sectors by signing a memorandum of understanding (MoU).

Accelar has today launched a Nature Finance Impact Hub, which seeks to drive market confidence in nature-positive projects, by isolating their financial and environmental benefits.

The banking and financial services sector is the industry most keen to attract female coders into their workforce, data reveals today, as Starling Bank and Lloyds Banking Group become the latest major finance companies to actively search for female tech talent with Code First Girls – the largest provider of free coding courses for women in the UK.

Visa is upping it game in the stablecoin market, expanding its settlement capabilities in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (CEMEA) region to enable USD cross-border transactions through blockchain technology.

Citi has invested in programmatic mortgage infrastructure provider Pylon. Financial terms were not disclosed.

EBAday 2022 is fast-approaching, and as we edge closer to the conference’s kick off, we’re exploring some highlights across the agenda. A key stand-out is the event’s lunchtime session on day two, ‘Meeting the net-zero challenge: How can banks fulfil CSR expectations?’

Savana, a financial software player that helps banks and fintechs go digital, has raised $45 million in a Series A funding round led by growth-stage investor Georgian.

HSBC is the first bank to join BT and Toshiba’s quantum-secured metro network – connecting two UK sites using Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) to prepare its global operations against future cyber threats.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) have published a joint research study that explored how central banks could continue to implement monetary policy operations in tokenised wholesale financial markets.

Paytently, a B2B payment orchestration platform founded by industry pros from Merill Lynch, Checkout.com, Trustly, and TrueLayer, has moved out of stealth.

Worldcoin, Sam Altman’s project to build an identity and financial network by giving away free crypto tokens to people who agree to get their irises scanned, has launched in several cities around the world.