Latest news by Rick Steves
Airwallex raises $320m Series H at $11bn valuation
The most valuable thing Airwallex bought with its new $320 million round is not a product roadmap — it is the ten years of payment licences that agentic commerce cannot function without. The cross-border paytech…
CLARITY Act would split US crypto between the SEC and CFTC
The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (H.R.3633) would replace a decade of US regulation-by-enforcement with a statutory split that hands most spot crypto trading to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and leaves investment-contract tokens…
Backbase buys Kasisto to bring agentic AI to core banking
Backbase has acquired Kasisto, a New York-based pioneer in agentic artificial intelligence (AI) for banking, in a deal that lands inside a remarkable three-week cluster of agentic-banking dealmaking — and signals that core-banking software vendors…
MiCA grandfathering ends July 1, resetting EU crypto access
MiCA's Article 143(3) grandfathering period ends on July 1, 2026 with no extensions across all 27 EU member states, and with roughly 204 firms holding full Crypto-Asset Service Provider (CASP) authorisation against an estimated 3,000…
Meta takes 20% of Cred in $900m deal, names Shah WhatsApp head
Meta is paying $900 million for a 20% stake in India's Cred and installing the fintech's founder, Kunal Shah, as the global head of WhatsApp — a deal that buys distribution optionality and fintech leadership…
Why the FATF Travel Rule still splits VASP compliance in 2026
Seven years after the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) extended its Travel Rule to crypto, compliance in 2026 still splits sharply by jurisdiction: 85 of 117 surveyed jurisdictions have passed implementing law, but most have…
bunq opens its banking licence as a BaaS platform across the EU
bunq has opened its Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform to businesses across the European Union, letting third parties build regulated accounts and payments directly on the Dutch neobank's own banking licence. The move matters because it inverts…
Float raises CAD $85m Series C at a $548m valuation
Float Financial has raised CAD $85 million in a Series C round that lifts the Toronto company's valuation by 70%, and the use of proceeds says more about where corporate-spend fintech is heading than the…
Why the US stablecoin KYC rule stops at the issuer’s door
A five-agency US rule proposed on June 18, 2026 would treat payment stablecoin issuers as financial institutions under the Bank Secrecy Act and force them to run customer identity checks — but only at the…
Nuvei to buy Payoneer for $2.75bn in cross-border paytech deal
Nuvei has agreed to acquire Payoneer for roughly $2.75 billion, a deal that bundles payment acceptance with cross-border payouts and marks the next consolidation step in the race to own the full business-payments stack. Announced…