Visa, Mastercard and Ant International team up on ID checks for AI agents
Visa, Mastercard and Ant International team up on ID checks for AI agents

Ant International, Mastercard and Visa have begun working together on a shared Know-Your-Agent framework. It covers AI agents that make purchases on behalf of users. The three companies announced the collaboration on Thursday, Singapore time. Reuters a…

Ramp eyes $60bn valuation three months after $44bn, Bloomberg reports
Ramp eyes $60bn valuation three months after $44bn, Bloomberg reports

Ramp, the corporate card and spend management company, is in early talks to raise new funding at a valuation of roughly $60bn. That would put it $16bn above the valuation it reached just three months ago. Rebecca Torrence and Natasha Mascarenhas of Blo…

Instacart says AI-built carts beat its $115 average basket. Shipt shipped the same feature and called it relief from mental load.
Instacart says AI-built carts beat its $115 average basket. Shipt shipped the same feature and called it relief from mental load.

Shipt and Instacart both launched AI assistants that build a grocery cart from a prompt or a photo on 9 September. Instacart said orders placed through its assistant contain more items than a typical order and exceed its $115 average basket, while Ship…

How I learned to stop worrying and love the gamification of finance
How I learned to stop worrying and love the gamification of finance

Gamification has a bad name in finance, and rightfully so. Trading apps fired confetti when you bought options. Meme stocks turned rent money into casino chips. Say “gamified finance” today and people picture slot machines packaged as financial product…

Racing the clock: How Ashok Kumar turned milliseconds into millions in global ecommerce
Racing the clock: How Ashok Kumar turned milliseconds into millions in global ecommerce

Ashok Kumar, Staff Software Engineer at Walmart Global Tech, has built his career around making large-scale ecommerce systems faster, more reliable, and more economical. His work spans web performance, marketplace fulfillment, cloud cost optimization, …

Chime is paying $590m for its own sponsor bank
Chime is paying $590m for its own sponsor bank

Chime is buying the bank that has held its customers’ money for seven years. The company announced on Tuesday that it has agreed to acquire Stride Bank of Enid, Oklahoma, for $590m in cash. Stride will become Chime Bank and operate as a wholly owned su…

Robinhood ranks last of 18 banks on the Oura IPO. The channel it just joined is being built for what comes next.
Robinhood ranks last of 18 banks on the Oura IPO. The channel it just joined is being built for what comes next.

Robinhood has won its first IPO underwriting role, ranking last among 18 banks on Oura’s offering. The bigger shift is in retail distribution: SpaceX reserved about 20% of its deal for individuals and Fidelity cut its minimum order from $500,000 to $2,…

Nobody can predict Amazon’s ad reserve prices, including Amazon. That is the defence.
Nobody can predict Amazon’s ad reserve prices, including Amazon. That is the defence.

The Federal Trade Commission and 22 states sued Amazon in Seattle on 31 August, alleging it inflated auction prices for Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display, and generated more than $20bn in additional advertising costs since 2019…

Singapore is putting S$220M into fintech as private funding hits a decade low
Singapore is putting S$220M into fintech as private funding hits a decade low

Singapore has committed S$220M, about $173M, to its fintech sector over the next three years. It made the announcement three days after KPMG reported that private investment in Singaporean fintech had fallen to its weakest first half in roughly a decad…

The next frontier in fintech is understanding the person behind the data
The next frontier in fintech is understanding the person behind the data

Fintech has spent almost two decades making financial information increasingly accessible, portable, and actionable. Open banking, digital wallets and connected financial platforms have created an environment in which consumers can move between product…