Casap, the leader in intelligent automation for dispute and fraud operations, has raised $25 million in Series A funding led by Emergence Capital, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Primary Venture Partners, SoFi and others. The raise signals a surge in demand from financial institutions looking to streamline dispute resolution and reduce fraud losses while building consumer loyalty. Casap’s AI-powered platform is already in use by a fast-growing base of credit unions, banks and fintechs seeking to modernize their dispute process and lower fraud. Chartway FCU and MidSouth Community FCU are among the many institutions seeing real impact: over 51% reduction in fraud losses, positive ROI in weeks and scaled case volume without additional headcount. By replacing fragmented tools with a unified intelligent system, Casap helps teams resolve cases faster and build consumer trust. From intake to chargeback filing and member communication, Casap’s AI agents handle the full dispute lifecycle in one system. The platform intelligently analyzes evidence, predicts outcomes, and automates key actions, such as issuing credits, filing chargebacks and responding to merchants. Casap’s proprietary fraud score identifies suspicious consumers and merchants to proactively reduce disputes. Customers benefit from real-time decisions, predictive win scores, and self-service experiences that build trust.
New U.S. Accounting Rule requires U.S. public and private companies to apply one model to various environmental credits that companies obtain for their compliance programs or voluntary use
The Financial Accounting Standards Board voted to set first-ever requirements on how companies account for environmental credits such as renewable-energy certificates and carbon offsets, while dialing back the extent of disclosures it had proposed last year. The standard setter voted to require U.S. public and private companies to apply one model to various credits that companies obtain for their compliance programs or voluntary use. The new rule covers carbon offsets, cap-and-trade programs and renewable-energy credits. Companies obtain certain environmental credits for producing or selling products aimed at removing or reducing pollution or generating energy from renewable sources. Businesses are also granted emissions allowances and cap-and-trade credits from regulators. Companies will have to recognize an environmental credit when the credit likely will be used to settle an obligation or be sold to a customer. They will need to record the value of the credit at its cost. If they don’t expect to settle the liability, they also have to test whether to reduce the value of the credits on the balance sheet. Carbon offsets are credits companies buy and count toward reducing the overall climate impact of their activities. Renewable-energy credits are certificates regulators provide to energy suppliers when they deliver wind, solar or hydroelectric energy to a power grid. The new standard, for which FASB issued a proposal last December, is aimed at making the information more comparable for investors and filling a void in U.S. accounting rules. The board reduced proposed disclosures that businesses would have to provide on renewable-energy certificates and carbon offsets in response to concerns from companies that the requirements were excessive and could pose a competitive risk.
Confident Security offers an end-to-end encryption tool that wraps around foundational models, guaranteeing that prompts and metadata can’t be stored, seen, or used for AI training
Startup Confident Security aims to be “the Signal for AI.” The company’s product, CONFSEC, is an end-to-end encryption tool that wraps around foundational models, guaranteeing that prompts and metadata can’t be stored, seen, or used for AI training, even by the model provider or any third party. The company wants to serve as an intermediary vendor between AI vendors and their customers — like hyperscalers, governments, and enterprises. CONFSEC is modeled after Apple’s Private Cloud Compute (PCC) architecture, which “is 10x better than anything out there in terms of guaranteeing that Apple cannot see your data” when it runs certain AI tasks securely in the cloud. Like Apple’s PCC, Confident Security’s system works by first anonymizing data by encrypting and routing it through services like Cloudflare or Fastly, so servers never see the original source or content. Next, it uses advanced encryption that only allows decryption under strict conditions. Finally, the software running the AI inference is publicly logged and open to review so that experts can verify its guarantees. CONFSEC is also well-suited for new AI browsers hitting the market, like Perplexity’s Comet, to give customers guarantees that their sensitive data isn’t being stored on a server somewhere that the company or bad actors could access, or that their work-related prompts aren’t being used to “train AI to do your job.”
Neobanks are going beyond the UX playbook and building infrastructure stack for compliance, payments, credit and ledgers; positioning themselves as super apps to address the embedded finance requirements of vertical SaaS, creator tools and marketplaces
Neobanks have proven the fintech thesis with explosive growth and billion-dollar profits, but their once-disruptive UX playbook is now a commodity, leaving them struggling to differentiate beyond branding. Revolut and Nubank are prime examples both combining consistent growth with solid financials. And it’s clear that they have already outgrown their “app” phase and now operate as full-scale financial institutions. The real battleground has shifted to infrastructure — compliance, ledgering, and risk engines — where plug-and-play models are showing cracks and control of the stack is becoming the new definition of strength. Build for vertical SaaS, creator tools and marketplaces — where finance runs in the background, silently. Shopify embeds financial tools directly into the merchant dashboard. Uber built a wallet into the driver experience. Klarna evolved from a standalone BNPL app into an invisible checkout layer. In healthcare, some players are doing something similar — embedding financing, payments and risk management tools directly into provider platforms. It’s fintech without the fintech branding, which makes it all the more scalable. So, infrastructure is turning into a multiplier. Even without consumer-facing brands, the most powerful fintech companies of the next decade will be those quietly owning the rails behind high-volume, cross-vertical financial flows. Major neobanks are already acquiring smaller players to control infrastructure end to end — positioning themselves not just as banks, but as super apps spanning crypto, margin trading, insurance and more. For founders and investors, the message is clear: long-term leverage comes from owning the stack early, even if it means trading off short-term speed. Smart money of the future will be backing the building blocks: unified compliance, simplified payments, modular credit and ledgers that scale. Importantly, this infrastructure is already becoming basic across SaaS, marketplaces and industries well beyond financial services. At this stage, strategic control matters much more than speed. The winners will be the ones who build beyond transactions, as they will power entire ecosystems. Think operating systems for finance, abstracted from banks themselves, embedded wherever economic value moves. That’s the next competitive edge: infrastructure that disappears into everything.
Starbucks pilots ‘coffee house of the future,’ to phase out mobile pickup-only store as it is “overly transactional and lacking warmth and human connection”
Starbucks Corp. is investing in improving its brick-and-mortar experience as part of its turnaround strategy under CEO Brian Niccol. The coffee giant plans to sunset its mobile order and pickup only concept in fiscal 2026. “We found this format to be overly transactional and lacking the warmth and human connection that defines our brand,” Niccol said. “We have a strong digital offering and believe we can deliver the same level of convenience through our community coffee houses with a superior mobile order and pay experience. “ Starbucks has been working on the “coffee house of the future,” Niccol told analysts, and has a new standalone prototype that will open next year. It boasts 32 seats, a drive thru and costs roughly 30% less to build. A small format version of the prototype with approximately 10 seats will open in New York City in the next few months. “We believe this new prototype will deliver an exceptional customer experience, improve unit economics and unlock growth opportunities in more markets,” Niccol said. Starbucks slowed new builds and major renovations to prioritize a new coffee house “uplift” program, with a target investment of approximately $150,000 per store and minimal to no downtime. The uplifts are intended to quickly replace thousands of seats the chain removed and introduce greater texture, warmth and layered design, Niccol said. The program, accelerating now in New York City, will be expanded to Southern California later in the fourth quarter. By the end of calendar year 2026, Starbucks will have completed at least 1,000 uplifts across North America, according to Niccol.
Perplexity is accused of willingly crawling and scraping content from websites that have explicitly blocked its bots, by obscuring its identity
AI startup Perplexity is crawling and scraping content from websites that have explicitly indicated they don’t want to be scraped, according to internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare. Cloudflare published research saying it observed the AI startup ignore blocks and hide its crawling and scraping activities. The network infrastructure giant accused Perplexity of obscuring its identity when trying to scrape web pages “in an attempt to circumvent the website’s preferences,” Cloudflare’s researchers wrote. Perplexity appears to be willingly circumventing these blocks by changing its bots’ “user agent,” meaning a signal that identifies a website visitor by their device and version type, as well as changing their autonomous system networks, or ASN, essentially a number that identifies large networks on the internet, according to Cloudflare. “This activity was observed across tens of thousands of domains and millions of requests per day. We were able to fingerprint this crawler using a combination of machine learning and network signals,” read Cloudflare’s post. Cloudflare said it first noticed the behavior after its customers complained that Perplexity was crawling and scraping their sites, even after they added rules on their Robots file and for specifically blocking Perplexity’s known bots. Cloudflare said it then performed tests to check and confirmed that Perplexity was circumventing these blocks. “We observed that Perplexity uses not only their declared user-agent, but also a generic browser intended to impersonate Google Chrome on macOS when their declared crawler was blocked,” according to Cloudflare. The company also said that it has de-listed Perplexity’s bots from its verified list and added new techniques to block them.
Halo Invest’s platform for advisers offers a light-touch, client-administrated option to efficiently service customers with more modest assets allowing them to easily check progress for clients and corporate actions
Halo Invest Adviser Gateway is now live, offering advisers a light-touch, client-administrated option to efficiently service customers with more modest assets. The platform, led by CEO Douglas Boyce, has secured its first advice firm client and a strong pipeline of new business for the immediate future. The platform is built to make investing “simpler, fairer and better” through innovative functionality, including a transfer dashboard for advisers to easily check progress for clients and corporate actions that the adviser doesn’t need to respond to individually. It also uses Go Cardless for efficient client money addition. The platform features include onboarding, trading, custody, and reporting, as well as a comprehensive range of investments and wrappers. The senior management team at Halo Invest has close to 200 years of combined experience within financial services, including former Tatton CEO Helen O’Neill, Head of Risk and Compliance Wendy Crawford, and Head of Customer Lynn Johnston. Halo Invest Adviser Gateway represents an evolution rather than a revolution, helping advisers achieve profitability from parts of their client book where it was previously difficult or impossible.
Jack Henry launches “MyFinancialHealth” on its digital banking platform designed using a configurable free-to-premium model, allowing financial institutions to offer key features at no cost to users, with optional paid upgrades
Jack Henry has launched MyFinancialHealth, allowing over 1,000 banks and credit unions to embed a suite of financial health tools powered by Array. The platform offers a broader suite of embeddable tools, including credit monitoring, identity protection, online subscription management, and federal student loans. The platform is designed using a configurable free-to-premium model, allowing financial institutions to offer key features at no cost to users, with optional paid upgrades for enhanced control and protection. The platform is easily activated through a single configuration, eliminating APIs, onboarding burden, and custom development. The launch aligns with Jack Henry’s mission to deepen the connection between accountholders and their primary financial institutions, reducing financial fragmentation and improving digital engagement. Array reports that users visit its components an average of 2.2 times a month, with many opting for premium services.
Salt Edge’s API solution to leverage IBM Z platform to enable banks to meet evolving global open banking regulations and simplify compliance with built-in consent management without overhauling their core systems
Salt Edge, a global provider of API technology for financial services, has confirmed its Open Banking API suite is compatible with IBM LinuxONE and IBM Z platforms, allowing global banks to implement a fully managed API access layer that meets evolving open banking compliance requirements. The solution leverages IBM Z’s performance, security, and scalability to help financial institutions modernize customer-facing services without overhauling their core systems. Salt Edge’s platform supports a broad range of open banking regulatory frameworks, simplifying compliance by exposing consent-based APIs that align with local laws and market needs. When deployed on IBM LinuxONE or IBM Z, Salt Edge’s platform enables banks to: Meet global open banking regulations without incremental development; Offer API-based services to fintechs and third parties with reduced operational burden; Accelerate time-to-market with built-in consent management, developer tools, and third-party onboarding; Leverage the reliability and performance of enterprise-class infrastructure to support critical workloads.
ThetaRay’s compliance solution allows users to build, modify, and simulate AML rules independently through no-code interface with customization and aggregation and safely test the impact of rules without affecting live systems
ThetaRay has introduced the Rule Builder Simulator, an AI-powered tool that enables banks and other financial institutions to build, test, and implement anti-money laundering rules faster. The tool offers a no-code interface for defining complex rule logic, reducing operational friction and approval bottlenecks. The Self-Service Rule Builder allows teams to test and analyze the impact of new rules in a secure environment before deployment without affecting live systems. This is part of ThetaRay’s mission to equip financial institutions with AI-enhanced tools that strengthen compliance, support growth, and innovation. Key Compliance Benefits: Autonomy and Speed: Users can build, modify, simulate, and deploy AML rules independently, reducing the rule lifecycle times from weeks to hours. Tailored Risk Coverage: Complex rule logic using no-code customization and aggregation, addressing institution-specific compliance needs with precision. Safe Testing Environment: Validate new rules in a secure simulation environment before going live, ensuring confidence in compliance decisions. Optimized Detection: Simulations help teams evaluate rule and AI combinations for optimal results in detecting financial crime. Seamless Production Deployment: Approved simulations can be applied to production with built-in governance and oversight workflows