Santander UK has completed its £3 billion acquisition of rival bank TSB, according to PA Media. The deal combines two major UK banking franchises and may affect competition, integration, and compliance oversight in the sector.
Finextra ↗Broadridge has closed its acquisition of CQG, a provider of futures and options trading, execution management, and market connectivity. The deal expands Broadridge’s trading and market connectivity capabilities in the derivatives space.
Finextra ↗Open Banking Limited was ranked ahead of the Smart Data Group in an industry evaluation by KPMG for the FCA. The assessment looked at which group is best placed to lead discussions for designing a UK open banking standard-setting body.
Finextra ↗Lloyds Banking Group has introduced Envoy, a scalable internal platform for building AI agents across its operations. The move signals continued adoption of AI tools inside large financial institutions to improve internal workflows and automation.
Finextra ↗GoQuant has launched GoCredit, a quote-based borrow and lend marketplace for digital assets. The platform offers full loan lifecycle management, real-time yield analytics, and improved credit market transparency.
Finextra ↗Sage has acquired Doyen AI, a startup founded in 2024 that uses AI to speed up customer onboarding and implementation for finance teams. The deal appears aimed at improving accuracy and efficiency in Sage’s finance software workflows.
Finextra ↗MoonPay said it will launch a virtual Mastercard debit card that lets users and AI agents spend stablecoins directly from onchain balances. The card converts crypto to fiat at the point of purchase and can be used at online merchants worldwide that accept Mastercard.
Finextra ↗WEX and Extend announced a collaboration to embed virtual card payments inside Concur Invoice. The move is aimed at making invoice payments easier through an integrated payment workflow.
Finextra ↗Ben Agnew is stepping down as CEO of The Payments Association after a period of growth and transformation. The move comes as the business enters its next phase following investment from Nineteen Group in 2025.
Finextra ↗Rezolve Ai said its SQD token is now listed on Revolut, expanding access to the token through the financial super-app. The announcement highlights a product and distribution update for the company’s decentralized data layer.
Finextra ↗Meta has bought Assured Robot Intelligence, a humanoid robotics startup, to strengthen its AI models for robots. The move supports Meta’s broader ambitions in humanoid AI and robotics development.
TechCrunch ↗Elon Musk spent several days testifying in his lawsuit against OpenAI, where emails, texts, and tweets are being used as evidence. The case centers on Musk’s claim that OpenAI betrayed its nonprofit mission by moving toward a for-profit model.
TechCrunch ↗The Pentagon has signed deals with Nvidia, Microsoft, and AWS to deploy AI on classified networks. The move reflects the Defense Department’s push to diversify its AI vendors after a dispute with Anthropic over model usage terms.
TechCrunch ↗NVIDIA Research says it has integrated speculative decoding into NeMo RL with a vLLM backend to speed up rollout generation. The paper reports a 1.8x speedup at 8B scale and projects a 2.5x end-to-end speedup at 235B without loss in output quality.
MarkTechPost ↗Meta introduced Autodata, an agentic framework designed to turn AI models into autonomous data scientists. The system is aimed at creating higher-quality training data for model development.
MarkTechPost ↗Google Research highlights global partnerships and open resources aimed at accelerating scientific discovery. The post focuses on data mining and modeling as part of broader efforts to support researchers and expand access to AI tools.
Google Research ↗TechCrunch interviewed Replit CEO Amjad Masad about the reported Cursor acquisition talks and whether Replit might also sell. The discussion also touched on Replit’s competition with Apple and Masad’s preference to keep the company independent.
TechCrunch ↗Elon Musk spent several days testifying in his lawsuit against OpenAI, and the case is becoming more contentious. Emails, texts, and Musk’s own tweets are being examined as the dispute over OpenAI’s shift to a for-profit model continues.
TechCrunch ↗This article walks through a coding tutorial using the lambda/hermes-agent-reasoning-traces dataset. It shows how to parse, analyze, visualize, and fine-tune agent reasoning traces from multi-turn conversations.
MarkTechPost ↗This tutorial shows how to build an end-to-end pipeline that decodes linguistic features from MEG brain signals using NeuralSet and deep learning. The example predicts word length from neural activity and walks through data loading, processing, and model setup.
MarkTechPost ↗