Author: Digital Trade Outlook

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…

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. Luis Pinedo: What It Means 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…

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…