Author: Digital Trade Outlook

Sumsub has released its European KYB Benchmark Survey 2026, showing how manual business verification is costing European firms clients. Alongside it, the company has expanded its Business Verification suite with automated company-level risk scoring, automated periodic rechecks and corporate document expiry tracking. The survey, run in Q2 2026 among 154 compliance and risk professionals in banking, fintech and digital assets, found slow onboarding doing direct commercial damage. For almost 60% of businesses, verifying a corporate client takes more than a day. The result: 81% have lost potential clients to onboarding delays, 80% say KYB processes slow business growth, and 59%…

Swift’s blockchain-based ledger is ready for initial use, with 17 banks from six continents preparing to pilot live transactions using tokenised deposits for 24/7 cross-border payments. The ledger moved from concept to activation in nine months. The shared ledger gives banks a secure orchestration layer for bank-issued tokenised deposits held on their own ledgers. Banks can move funds for customers overnight and at weekends, then complete final settlement through existing systems, improving client experience and liquidity efficiency without weakening the compliance, credit, risk and control standards built into current payment processing. The pilot group reads like a roll call of…

Modern Treasury has announced that Depa Finance, the stablecoin-native payments infrastructure provider bridging traditional finance and digital assets, has selected its platform to power payments across US rails and stablecoins. Depa enables fintechs and corporates to execute cross-border payments using stablecoins, with settlement across 200+ countries and 24/7 availability. The company processes more than 14,000 payments per day and has transacted over $1 billion annually. Through Modern Treasury, Depa can automate flows between fiat and stablecoin accounts, manage the full lifecycle of payment orders at scale, and extend Global USD Accounts to clients who have historically lacked direct access to…

Financial crime compliance provider ThetaRay has appointed Luis Pinedo, former Vice President at Santander Group, as Chief Strategic Customers Officer to drive enterprise AI adoption across global tier-one banks. Pinedo spent 16 years leading financial crime transformation at Santander. At ThetaRay he will oversee product strategy and engagement across the full compliance stack: transaction monitoring and screening, customer risk assessment and agentic AI investigations. The hire comes as regulators shift to effectiveness as the primary measure of compliance. FinCEN, the UK’s FCA and the EU through AMLD6 are all moving towards data-led supervisory workflows, and rules-based systems cannot keep pace…

Treasury Intelligence Solutions (TIS) has issued a warning to corporate treasury, finance and IT teams: ISO 20022 is no longer a bank-only issue, and companies treating it as a simple messaging upgrade risk payment delays, rejected transactions, more manual intervention and reconciliation problems. The pressure comes from SWIFT’s phase-in of ISO 20022 as the sole standard for interbank payment instructions. From November 2026, unstructured address data will no longer be accepted for many cross-border payments, MT101 payment initiation messages will be retired, and the high-value US systems Fedwire and CHIPS will move to full enforcement. Non-compliant cross-border payments will be…

Modern Treasury has announced a partnership with Sardine to strengthen transaction monitoring and fraud prevention for businesses moving money across the US and globally. Integrating Sardine’s real-time monitoring and risk infrastructure gives Modern Treasury customers an additional layer of fraud detection on top of the platform’s built-in compliance controls, payment rail connectivity, US account infrastructure and ledgering. The logic is straightforward: as payments get faster and more embedded into software, fraud grows in both speed and sophistication. Teams need infrastructure that monitors transactions in real time, adapts to evolving threats and supports compliance without adding friction to the payment experience.…

Verification provider Sumsub has partnered with Ras Al Khaimah Innovation City, the world’s first free zone dedicated to digital asset companies, AI, Web3 and innovation businesses, to help international firms set up compliant operations in the UAE from day one. Companies in the Innovation City network get streamlined access to Sumsub’s verification and compliance stack, including Know Your Customer (KYC), Know Your Business (KYB) and related services. The aim is to close the gap between incorporation and operational readiness, so businesses launch already meeting regulatory requirements. “We’re excited to announce a strategic partnership between Innovation City and Sumsub to simplify…

Feedzai has launched Feedzai IQ Score, a fraud risk scoring solution that gives banks real-time access to anonymised, aggregated insights from its $9 trillion global transaction network. It is delivered through a single API and available on AWS Marketplace. The launch targets what Feedzai calls the “Silo and Legacy Paradox”: fraud data trapped inside internal sources, and risk infrastructure too disruptive to replace. With fraudsters attacking across multiple channels, a limited view of data is no longer defensible. Integration is light by design. No historical data requirement, no lengthy model training, no heavy operational lift. Banks can go from integration…

EY has launched a Managed Treasury Service (MTS) powered by FIS: outsourced, cloud-based treasury capabilities run by EY professionals on FIS technology. The pitch to finance leaders is simple, shift time from operations to outcomes. MTS covers cash and liquidity management, payments, bank relationship administration, debt and capital management, cash forecasting, financial risk across FX, interest rates and commodities, intercompany activities, and advanced reporting. The model targets a familiar bind. Sophisticated treasury operations are costly and complex to build in-house, especially for middle market organisations. Outsourcing the operational layer promises cost certainty, regulatory confidence and scalability, freeing internal teams for…

Fraud prevention and AML compliance provider SEON has launched an MCP server that lets fraud and AML analysts connect external AI tools, including Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot, directly to its data layer of more than 900 real-time risk signals spanning identity, device, behavioural, AML and IP data. The launch also includes Network Detection, an AI Chart Builder and an AI Playbook for risk and compliance teams, all available immediately to existing SEON customers. The MCP integration targets a specific operational gap. Analysts already have AI tools, but no structured way to get investigation data into them without manually…