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UK financial regulators are holding urgent discussions with the government’s main cyber security watchdog and the country’s biggest banks to assess the risks posed by the latest AI model from Anthropic.

Officials at the Bank of England, the Financial Conduct Authority and HM Treasury are in talks with the National Cyber Security Centre to explore potential vulnerabilities in key IT systems revealed by Anthropic’s latest model.

From: UK financial regulators rush to assess risks of Anthropic’s latest AI model.

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We plan to add crypto wallets, real estate, and other asset types to personal finance in the future.
The Plaid integration is now available on desktop to all signed-in users in the US and Canada, with mobile and other countries to follow.

From: Computer is Now Your Personal CFO.

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Launched in 2023, the FedNow interbank RTGS service currently does not let participants use intermediaries, other than reserve banks, for fund transfers. Because this means that transfers sent through FedNow can include only two US banks other than a reserve bank, the service can only be used for domestic payments.

However, the Fed says FedNow participants have expressed interest in using the service to initiate cross-border instant payments, arguing it would improve both speed and efficiency.

In response, the Fed board has now voted unanimously to support a proposed change to its regulations that would allow participants to use intermediaries other than reserve banks.

Says the proposal: “The Board believes this change could support private-sector cross-border payment solutions, among other potential use cases, by allowing FedNow participants to leverage an intermediary (for example, a correspondent bank) for the international portion of a cross-border transaction and use the FedNow Service for the US.”

From: Fed consults on FedNow cross-border payments.

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The US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) have set out their proposed requirements for permitted payment stablecoin issuers (PPSIs) related to combatting illicit finance. The Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) sets out anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) and sanctions compliance measures that PPSIs will be expected to implement once the GENIUS Act regulatory regime becomes fully operational from January 2027.

In short, PPSIs will be expected to comply with the same set of financial crime compliance obligations that already apply to other US financial institutions. What’s more, the NPRM indicates that relationships PPSIs form to provide services to partners, customers and counterparties (such as issuance and redemption arrangements it enters into with cryptoasset exchanges) would be treated as correspondent accounts.

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Early one recent morning, a team of researchers at Alibaba were urgently summoned to a meeting. The company’s cloud computing firewall had flagged several security policy violations coming from the company’s training servers, on which newly developed AI agents were being run. Some AI agents had attempted to access internal network resources they had no business accessing. Others were mining cryptocurrency.

From: AI agents are going rogue. Here’s what banks can do about it | American Banker.

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The U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and OFAC issued a 303-page proposed rule implementing the GENIUS Act, reclassifying permitted payment stablecoin issuers (PPSIs) as financial institutions under the Bank Secrecy Act. Requirements include bank-grade KYC, suspicious activity reporting, transaction blocking/freezing capabilities, and appointment of a U.S.-based compliance officer. Enforcement begins January 2027. A 60-day comment period opens now.

From: FIncen/OFAC 303 Page Rule Squashes Stablecoin eCom Ambitions | Noyes Payments Blog.

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My general view on the future of retail financial services has been for some time that the big change in financial services will come when customers use AI to assess offers from financial institutions. They will have access to AI as powerful as the banks have – because Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon (and companies like them) will be giving it to them. And this will mean individuals won’t be the customers: their bots will be.

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Crucially, the integration is read-only: Plaid shares data you’ve explicitly permissioned, but Perplexity doesn’t move money or initiate transactions, and the user data stays isolated from Perplexity’s core servers. That’s in line with Plaid’s broader permissioned data model, where consumers can see which apps they’ve connected, what data was shared, and revoke access at any time via Plaid’s own Permissions Manager and consumer controls.

From: Perplexity and Plaid unite to bring all your money data into one smart view.

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Scale is becoming a strategic requirement. Ongoing consolidation reflects the need to fund technology, analytics, and compliance investments that smaller institutions increasingly struggle to support on their own.
Consumer expectations are now set outside banking. Daily digital experiences — from e-commerce to streaming — are redefining what customers consider normal in terms of speed, personalization, and ease of use.
48% of consumers log into their bank’s digital channels daily, and 74% want more personalized experiences.
U.S. consumers average 48 payments per month, making payments one of the most frequent points of contact between customers and their bank.

From: Retail Banks Face Shrinking Margins for Strategic Mistakes – The Financial Brand.

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Stablecoin transaction data can be misleading for a vareity of reasons because rhe majority of volumes comes from cryptocurrency dealing and related transactions. However, it is possible calculate adjusted volumes by filtering for organic economic activity such as payments, remittances and settlement. The latest adjusted figures show that stablecoins processed $28 trillion in real economic volume in 2025 and by 2035, that figure could reach $1.5 quadrillion, surpassing today’s entire cross-border payments market, because of generational wealth transfer. In the US, some $80-100 trillion will shift from Boomers to Millennials and Gen Z, putting the wealth in the hands of those already comfortable wirh digital assets, decentralised finance and cryptocurrencies. Even if these figures are correct, we still see that when it comes to payments, stablecoins are not that disruptive: in fact, they are a welcome and sustainable innovation path because financial instittuions will use the new technologies to reduce cost and cement their significant advantages in areas such compliance and distribution.

Beyond payments, however, stablecoins adumbrate real change.

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Blockchains disrupt the correspondent banking system for pure money movement, but the biggest banks use the technology to cement their other advantages — like compliance and distribution. Blockchains don’t disrupt cross-border Fintech models because the Fintechs add value in ways other than pure money movement; instead, these Fintechs simply absorb blockchain advantages to make themselves more efficient and competitive.

From: Are Stablecoins a Disruptive innovation or a Sustaining one.

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