Hong Kong’s financial regulator is poised to give the green light to the first batch of bitcoin spot ETFs.

The UK’s Treasury Committee has floated the idea of introducing legislation to force shops to accept cash in the future, warning that a lack of action from the Government to tackle declining cash acceptance could lead to a two-tier society with the most vulnerable bearing the cost.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has launched an AI task force to spearhead the agency’s efforts to embed artificial intelligence into its operations.

Swedish account-to-account payments provider Brite Payments has raised $60 million in fresh capital as it continues to expand across Europe.

Announcing at the COP25 climate summit in Madrid, Mastercard has extended its collaboration with Swedish fintech Doconomy to offer cardholders carbon footprint tracking based on purchases made through the Bank of Åland’s cloud-based Åland Index.

Bank of the West is tapping impact investing tech from OpenInvest to provide clients with personalised environmentally-friendly and socially-conscious investment portfolios.

In conversation with Finextra TV, Antony Jenkins, founder and executive chairman of 10x Future Technologies and former Barclays CEO, highlights that the single most important factor in the push toward sustainability is transparency.

Ping An Technology and Intel are building an innovation lab in Shenzhen to experiment in areas such as cloud, AI, security and storage.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has published its second progress report on the preparation phase of a digital euro, laying the foundations for the potential issuance of the CBDC.

Italian bank UniCredit has partnered Wise to develop an international payment service for retail customers.

Italy-based commercial bank has agreed a 10 year deal with Google Cloud to accelerate its digital transformation project.

Simon Torrance, senior adviser at corporate innovation firm, Rainmaking, claims that the traditional financial services business model is no longer working.

Newly-licenced UK bank Griffin has raised $13.5 million in a Series A funding round led by MassMutual Ventures, with participation from existing investors Seedcamp, Notion Capital and EQT Ventures.

Standard Chartertered has signed a three-year deal with Microsoft as part of its ambition to become a ‘cloud-first’ bank.