Latest news by Rick Steves
Offshore FX licensing splits into real regimes and paper ones
The offshore foreign-exchange (FX) licensing tier has stopped being one market. St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) and Anjouan register companies without authorising financial activity, while Seychelles, Vanuatu and Mauritius impose real capital and supervision…
10x Banking raises £40m in debt and equity after turning profitable
The most revealing number in 10x Banking's £40 million raise is not the £40 million. It is how closely it matches what Thought Machine took in a month earlier — roughly £30 million from a…
Ambrook raises $30m with half its users new to software
Ambrook has raised a $30 million Series B led by Lachy Groom, taking total capital raised to $59 million — and the number that matters is not the round size. Roughly half of the company's…
The EU’s Retail Investment Strategy traded a ban for benchmarks
The European Union spent three years debating a ban on inducements, dropped it in the final deal, and replaced it with a value-for-money regime that gives supervisors a quantitative lever over product pricing without ever…
FNZ sells €155bn-custody German bank to Advent consortium
FNZ has agreed to sell FNZ Bank, its German custody and banking arm, to a consortium led by Advent International and including HarbourVest Partners — a deal the wealth platform frames as sharper focus, but…
Dubai’s two-regulator problem: VARA vs DFSA licensing in 2026
Dubai runs two separate financial regulators over the same 4,114 square kilometres: the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) supervises virtual asset activity across the emirate except inside the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), where the…
Deluxe Acquires Celero for $625 Million in B2B Payments Consolidation Push
Deluxe Corporation closed its $625 million acquisition of Celero Commerce on July 31, 2026, and the price says more about B2B payments consolidation than the deal announcement did. On Celero's 2025 figures, more than $200…
Visa to buy BioCatch for $2.4bn to stop fraud before payment
Visa has agreed to buy BioCatch, the Israeli behavioural biometrics firm, for $2.4 billion in cash from Permira-advised funds and other shareholders, the network announced on August 3, 2026. The more revealing number sits in…
Finfluencer regulation hardens: licences, charges, takedowns
Thesis: between May 2024 and mid-2026, finfluencer oversight moved from warning letters to criminal charges, coordinated international arrest weeks and, in the UAE, a mandatory licence — leaving brokers, platforms and the influencers themselves facing…
Natural rolls out agentic payments rails after $30m round
The agentic payments stack is no longer a memo — it is a funded product category, and Natural is the first infrastructure company built for it from scratch. The US paytech has begun rolling out…