Author: Digital Trade Outlook

Broadridge has expanded its Distributed Ledger Repo platform to support G7 securities, strengthening the use of tokenisation for cross-border financing, intraday liquidity and collateral movement. With $7.4 trillion in repo transactions processed in August, the move highlights a broader shift toward scaling DLT-based settlement infrastructure, as regulators and financial institutions develop frameworks for tokenised assets, collateral and central-bank money.

Standard Chartered is expanding institutional Bitcoin and Ether spot trading into the UAE through Standard Chartered DIFC, becoming the first Global Systemically Important Bank (G-SIB) to offer the capability in the market. The service builds on the bank’s existing digital asset custody offering, allowing eligible institutional clients to trade deliverable crypto through existing electronic trading channels and settle with their preferred custodian. The UAE launch strengthens Standard Chartered’s broader digital assets strategy spanning custody, trading and tokenisation.

Euroclear and HSBC are partnering to launch AutoFX, an automated FX service designed to help financial institutions prepare for Europe’s and the UK’s T+1 settlement shift in October 2027. The service will integrate FX conversion directly into securities settlement across more than 30 currencies, offering real-time tracking, intraday fixing points, transparent pricing and tools to reduce funding requirements. The partnership highlights the growing need for automated FX and settlement infrastructure as markets move toward faster post-trade processing.

TabaPay raises $155 million from FTV Capital to acquire FDIC-insured Transact Bank, expanding its payment infrastructure and banking capabilities with plans to launch TabaBank.

Singapore’s DBS Bank and US payments firm Stripe have announced a partnership aimed at cross-border payments and AI-driven commerce across Asia, the two companies said in a statement Thursday. The deal combines DBS’s banking infrastructure and regional reach with Stripe’s payments platform, with the two also planning to jointly develop AI tools that let DBS customers transact more efficiently. That comes as AI agents take on a growing role in helping consumers and businesses complete purchases — a shift projected to drive up to $5 trillion in global consumer commerce by 2030. Under the partnership, Stripe will tap DBS’s money-movement…

FrieslandCampina Engro Pakistan Limited (FCEPL) has partnered with Citi Pakistan to give its suppliers access to the Citi® Supplier Finance digital platform. The program lets suppliers receive early payment against approved invoices while FCEPL keeps its own payment terms unchanged — a working-capital arrangement designed not to disrupt the company’s cash flow during the rollout. “One of the most common issues we see within the supplier landscape is financial disbalance, which leads to competent candidates often missing out on opportunities to secure transactions and contracts,” said Kashan Hasan, Managing Director of FrieslandCampina Engro Pakistan Limited. “This partnership will clear the…

Bakkt is rolling out new infrastructure aimed at the $208 trillion global cross-border payments market, betting that stablecoins can fix a system still bogged down by delayed settlement, high fees and banking-hour restrictions. The company’s pitch centers on 24/7 settlement rails: stablecoin transactions that move continuously, without pausing for banking hours, time zones or the cut-off times that typically stretch cross-border transfers into multi-day affairs. The target audience isn’t consumers — Bakkt is building for businesses that move money across currencies and jurisdictions and want to cut down the time (and cost) that funds sit in transit. The company says…

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…