Agile’s focus on delivering working software frequently has evolved into continuous integration/continuous delivery practices. AI is now pushing this boundary further toward what we might call “continuous creation.” When code generation approaches real-time, the limiting factor isn’t producing code but verifying it. AI offers solutions here as well—automated testing, security scanning, and quality analysis can be AI-enhanced. AI agents can write unit tests for new code and help create end-to-end tests, improving quality guarantees. The most successful teams will master this balance between acceleration and validation, exploring more ideas, failing faster, and converging on optimal solutions more quickly—all while maintaining high quality. These transformations create opportunities to streamline traditional Scrum processes. Teams can allocate a higher percentage of their sprint to spontaneous improvements as implementing features and bug fixes with AI may be faster than the overhead of including them in sprint planning. For architecture reviews, AI can serve as your first wave of feedback—a mental sparring partner to develop ideas before presenting to a committee. The AI-written summary can be shared asynchronously, often eliminating the need for formal meetings altogether. Retrospectives should now include discussions about AI usage. The improved individual productivity allows organizations to streamline overhead processes, leading to further increases in velocity. Teams can tackle larger, more complex problem spaces, and projects that previously required multiple teams can often be handled by a single team. Cross-team dependencies—a perennial challenge in scaled agile—diminish significantly. What’s most remarkable about AI’s impact is how it reinforces rather than replaces agile’s core values.
PhotoShelter enables complex organizations to partition their digital asset libraries across different departments or teams, while maintaining a unified platform and contract
PhotoShelter, the digital asset management (DAM) platform, launched a new feature that enables complex organizations to partition their digital asset libraries across different departments or teams, while maintaining a unified platform and contract. Within large organizations, asset access must be tightly managed so that teams can focus on what is relevant to them, without the risk of accidental changes or exposure of sensitive content. This feature enables organizations to segment their library, allowing each team to have a secure workspace and maintain control over its assets and workflows. This not only reduces confusion and clutter but also minimizes the risk of exposing sensitive content or having it unintentionally altered by others. And because all of this happens within a single platform and contract, organizations avoid the inefficiencies and costs associated with using multiple DAM vendors or separate accounts. Key benefits: Prevents unauthorized access or inadvertent changes to sensitive departmental assets; Eliminates inefficiencies from managing multiple DAM vendors or separate accounts; Consolidates billing, support contacts, and sharing processes; Reduces costs while improving organizational asset security. Use cases: 1) Higher education: Dozens of university departments can now manage their content with a single PhotoShelter account, maintaining independent control of assets and access, while benefiting from campus-wide integration and a single contract. 2) Corporate environments: Enterprises can allow separate departments to manage assets in a single library while maintaining each group’s control over its specific assets. 3) Healthcare systems: Providers can maintain stronger HIPAA compliance by allowing separate teams to manage content, ensuring patient data is visible only to those who need access.
Banks-Fintech-PSP consortium to promote use cases for Commercial Variable Recurring Payments (VRPs) in UK
A group of 31 fintechs, high street banks, challenger banks and payment providers have agreed to put up initial funding for a new entity that will be wholly owned and run by industry. Barclays, GoCardless, Mastercard, Monzo, Plaid, Revolut and Wise are among the backers. The proposed initial uses cases for cVRPs will focus on selected regulated industries such as payments to utility and rail companies, regulated financial firms, e-money institutions, government bodies, and charities. Offering cVRPs in these areas would give Brits better control over regular payments, as well as a frictionless experience when buying goods or services from websites. Henk Van Hulle, CEO, Open Banking Limited, says: “This is a significant moment for the industry, and I sincerely thank the organisations that have committed to fund efforts to create a company that will carry forward the important work on cVRPs. It is testament to the collaborative nature of our ecosystem that it can be industry-led.”
Vanguard unveils generative AI client summaries for financial advisors
Vanguard launched its first client-facing GenAI capability that equips financial advisors with efficient and personalized content for client communications. Vanguard’s Client-Ready Article Summaries produce customizable synopses of its top-read market perspectives tailored by financial acumen, investing life stage, and tone. It also generates the necessary disclosures to accompany the article summaries, creating an efficient and seamless information sharing experience for advisors. Sid Ratna, Head of Digital and Analytics for Vanguard Financial Advisor Services said “The best advisors can get even better with AI in their client toolkit, and Vanguard’s Client-Ready Article Summaries help advisors drive personalized and actionable conversations that enhance client relationships over the long-term.” Vanguard Financial Advisor Services provides investment services, portfolio analytics and consulting, and research to over 50,000 advisory firms comprising 150,000 advisors.1 Supporting advisors so they can best service their clients is integral to Vanguard’s mission of giving investors the best chance for investment success. In addition to rolling out the Client-Ready Article Summaries, Vanguard continues to experiment with advanced technologies, including spatial and quantum computing and blockchain, to improve investment outcomes, expand investor access, and deliver personalized experiences.
Standards for bank tokens proposed by Kinexys by JP Morgan, MIT – Ledger Insights – blockchain for enterprise
Kinexys by JP Morgan, the bank’s blockchain arm, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Digital Currency Initiative (MIT DCI) have collaborated on a paper to explore standards for bank tokens on open blockchains. The authors suggest primarily relying on existing Ethereum standards, but propose two new ones they believe are needed for interbank payments. They also suggest areas where regulations might be relaxed for blockchain-based bank payments. By open blockchains they mean permissionless blockchains and also open permissioned blockchains such as Unified Ledgers and Singapore’s Global Layer One. In the latter case, a key differentiating feature is the blockchain node operators are regulated. Part of the paper explores potential standards for bank tokens to enable interoperability for payments between banks. It maps various bank token functions against existing Ethereum token standards. However, this mapping process unveiled a couple of large gaps, particularly around payment orchestration. One example is AML and fraud analysis, which is based on large datasets, so would be processed off chain, and currently would be executed before the payment is initiated. The ERC-20 payment standard has three – payment and recipient wallet addresses and the amount. Banks need more variables. So, when a user wants to make a payment, the wallet would request the format of the payment information needed by the bank (or other entity with authority), and present the appropriate screen to the user for input. Once the user has entered the data, the bank responds to the wallet with the authorization, which is included in the on-chain transfer request. The transfer and authorization would be validated on -chain, for example, to ensure that the payment amount does not exceed the amount authorized. Stepping back, JP Morgan is keen for these standards to be “designed to be narrow in scope and componentized in a way that allows them to be easily composed with other standards,” the authors wrote.
When chatbots replace search bars, retailers will need to ensure their inventory, pricing and product information are optimized for AI crawling and decision-making algorithms
Shopping agents are positioned to become invisible sales conversion engines. As OpenAI, Perplexity, and others race to capture this trillion-dollar opportunity, the future of how consumers search and buy hinges on how these platforms will make money, and how their algorithms will decide which products to show consumers (or buy on their behalf). The answers will determine whether these chatbots deliver on their promise of personalized commerce in their truest and most authentic sense — or become a more sophisticated version of today’s pay-to-play search and commerce platforms. Their strength as a conversational interface, capable of understanding complex requests, makes them well-suited to complete purchases without users ever visiting a physical or digital store or leaving the conversation. An emerging Agentic AI commerce ecosystem now stands at the ready to help advance their ambitions. The speed at which the GenAI chatbots have amassed an audience shows the potential for how these models could upend the retail and commerce status quo by changing where consumers start their searches and end by making a purchase without a lot of steps or friction in between. As AI agents increasingly handle the search and presentation of results (or completed sales), traditional retailers risk becoming invisible in the commerce ecosystem altogether. In this world, payment credentials might emerge as the real winner as embedded offers, financing, rewards and other data-driven incentives become an invisible part of the transaction. The venture capital pouring into these platforms signals expectations for massive adoption and ROI. GenAI represents a new form of commerce orchestration across marketplaces, social signals and retail inventory through a simple and single conversational interface. The unique nature of conversational AI suggests that different approaches might not just be possible but necessary to compete. LLM platforms can build on GenAI’s growing sense of user trust, its potential for creating a distinctive new shopping and buying utility and its ability to monetize these new forms of value. How these models present recommendations and act on behalf of users presents new challenges because of their current lack of clarity — and new opportunities because of what they could become for the entire commerce ecosystem. And that could reshape how retailers and the ecosystem adapt their products and platforms to drive sales. For retailers and brands, that now means competing for both customer and AI attention. Retailers will need to ensure their inventory, pricing and product information are optimized for AI crawling and decision-making algorithms. The winners in this new era may be those who recognize that when conversations drive commerce, trust itself becomes the product. And that monetizing trust comes wrapped around a different business model.
Sam Altman’s World iris ID project is evolving into a superapp with a digital currency, a bank account number and by partnering gaming specialist Razer and dating platform operator Match Group
AI visionary Sam Altman is leading a project to distinguish real people from software fakes on the internet using eye scans. The World identification project, which uses eye scans to distinguish people from machines, is entering the money transfer and financial services business. Users can send money to friends and family free of charge via the World app and will have an account number for interactions with the banking system. The project aims to make it increasingly difficult to distinguish people from software online. Users create a profile called “World ID” using an eye scan on World scanners called Orb. As an incentive, World is launching its own digital currency. The project is also targeting online dating markets, such as gaming specialist Razer and dating platform operator Match Group. With these new functions, World is moving closer to the vision of a super app that covers all possible areas of everyday life, similar to WeChat in Asia. World, a web3 project started by Altman and Alex Blania that was formerly known as Worldcoin, is based on the idea that it will eventually be impossible to distinguish humans from AI agents on the internet. To address this, World wants to create digital “proof of human” tools; these announcements are part of its effort to get millions of people to sign up. After scanning your eyeball with one of its silver metal Orbs — or now, one of its Orb Minis — World will give you a unique identifier on the blockchain to verify that you’re a human.
IBM’s small models- Tiny Time Mixers — tackle network automation challenges where traditional large language models fall short and have an understanding time-series data
IBM Corp. is leaning into compact, specialized models — such as its new Tiny Time Mixers — to tackle network automation challenges where traditional large language models fall short. The key lies in understanding time-series data, something most large language models simply weren’t built to handle, according to Andrew Coward, general manager of software networking at IBM. “There’s new models, and IBM’s built one called Tiny Time Mixer. Very small parameters, million parameters, and they understand time. We can take network data, and then we can apply it to weather information or TV schedules. Then we can make predictions about what’s likely to happen. What we are seeing is the democratization of AI,” he said. “It’s almost free to put data in and run it against AI models, but if you need to train it, that’s the expensive bit. The training piece is coming down massively in costs.” Using small models, IBM helps address telco infrastructure problems, such as bandwidth congestion and poor network coverage. This explains why AI model accuracy takes center stage, Coward pointed out.
Upstart 1Q 2025: personal loan originations grow 83% year over year; 92% of loans were automated through AI driven activities; proportion of loans made to super-prime borrowers increased
Lending platform Upstart Holdings’ first quarter results saw loan originations nearly double from a year ago, driven in part by automated processes, while management pointed to strong credit metrics among the lending platform’s borrowers. Platform originations were up 89%, the company said, to $2.1 billion. Within that activity, personal loans of $2 billion were up 83% during the first quarter, year over year and flat sequentially, and super-prime borrowers accounted for 32% of originations. 92% of loans were automated through AI driven activities, with no human intervention in the mix. CEO Dave Girouard said the firm had seen “improved borrower health,” and said that higher conversion rates on lending helped boost revenues by 67%. In a nod to the firm’s automation efforts, Girouard said that during the quarter the company introduced embedding algorithms to Upstarts’ core personal loan underwriting model — with the result tied to “clustering data that have meaningful relationships, allowing seemingly random data to become valuable to predicting credit performance.” The algorithms, he said, lead to better model generalization, improved accuracy, and more informed credit decisions. Separately, the car loan platform grew originations 42% sequentially; home lending originations have also been growing, he said. “Our HELOC [home equity line of credit] originations grew 52% quarter on quarter and more than 6x compared to a year ago,” he said. Short-term lending continues to bring in new customers, and accounted for 16% of new borrowers in the quarter. “We’re rapidly automating routine tasks like processing payment failures and check handling, so we can spend human time on more valuable tasks,” said Girouard, who added that “in Q1, we automated 90% of hardship applications, making the process more seamless for borrowers and more efficient for Upstart. Beyond the technology, the work we’ve done to prioritize direct collections efforts for borrowers at risk of default have continued to have a meaningful impact. “For example, in Q1, we realized a 50% increase in debt settlement acceptances by extending repayment terms for at-risk borrowers.” CFO Sanjay Datta said that average loan size of about $8,865 “nudged up” from $8,580 in the prior quarter “as the proportion of loans made to super-prime borrowers increased.” But those gains among super-prime borrowers are also tightening contribution margins, which came in at 55% in the most recent quarter, down from more than 60% recently, and a similar mid-50% margin is forecast for the current quarter.
HSBC is offering a new loan product to US companies struggling to cover the cost of tariffs
HSBC is offering a new loan product to US companies struggling to cover the cost of President Donald Trump’s tariffs that have roiled international supply chains. The London-headquartered bank said on Wednesday its TradePay platform was being extended to directly cover the cost of tariff payments, allowing importers to effectively borrow to meet the increased expenses involved in shipping products into the US. “By settling import duties directly and frictionlessly through HSBC TradePay, our US clients have more visibility and control over their working capital,” said Vivek Ramachandran, head of global trade solutions at HSBC. Under the new loans, customers’ import payments will be automatically paid through pre-agreed credit with brokers or a direct deduction using automated clearing house credits, meaning companies will be better able to manage their cash flow and settle duties more efficiently. HSBC is the world’s largest trade bank and the biggest international bank in China, giving it a crucial role in oiling the wheels of international trade, particularly between the two biggest economies. The US has imposed tariffs as high as 145% on Chinese goods, while China has hit back with retaliatory rates of 125%. Talks aimed at de-escalating the situation are due to take place this week. Speaking last week, HSBC Chairman Mark Tucker said world trade was facing a “period of deep and profound change.” “The over-arching impact of the changing approach to global trade relations has been to increase economic uncertainty with serious potential risks to global growth,” said Tucker.