IBM revealed its expected roadmap for building the world’s first large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer, which would enable scaling up quantum computing for real-world practical results. The technology giant said it expects to be able to deliver the platform in 2029. The new computing system, dubbed IBM Quantum Starling, will be built at the company’s campus in Poughkeepsie, New York, and is expected to perform 20,000 times more operations than today’s quantum computers. According to the company, this new platform would require the memory of more than a quindecillion of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, that’s a number equal to a 1 with 48 zeros after it. IBM already operates a large, global fleet of quantum computers and released a new Quantum Roadmap that outlines its intent to build out practical quantum solutions. The company’s most recent IBM Heron, a 156-qubit quantum processor, released in 2024, demonstrated high fidelity with error-correction. The company said Starling will be able to access the computational power required to solve monumental problems by running 100 million operations using 200 logical qubits. The company intends to use this as the foundation for IBM Blue Jay, which will be capable of executing 1 billion quantum operations over 2,000 logical qubits. To reach the fault-tolerance needed for large scale, the company revealed in its roadmap that it will build new architectural components to assist with correcting errors in real-time to create exceptional fault-tolerance. This includes “C-couplers,” that connect qubits over longer distances within Quantum Loon, a processor expected this year. Another processor, IBM Kookaburra, expected in 2026, will be the company’s first modular processor design to store and process encoded information that will combine quantum memory with logic operations, a basic building block for scaling fault-tolerant systems beyond a single chip. In 2027, IBM Quantum Cockatoo will entangle two Kookaburra modules using “L-couplers” to link quantum chips together like nodes in a larger system, marking the final advancement toward building Starling in 2029.
Afterpay claims its customers are being asked to close BNPL accounts by banks to qualify for a mortgage and later offered a credit card upon qualification in a bid to protect decline in interest-yielding credit card debt
Some customers of Australia’s Afterpay have been asked to close buy-now-pay-later accounts to qualify for a mortgage and offered a credit card upon qualification, the BNPL provider said, underscoring fierce competition in the consumer finance sub-sectors. Afterpay claimed banks were capitalising on a perception of BNPL users as riskier than traditional borrowers to protect a declining lending category. Australian interest-accruing credit card debt is down 30% in half a decade as borrowers seek cheaper options. The company added that its survey found BNPL users had credit scores and on-time repayment records broadly in line with credit card users. The BNPL model has avoided regulation under Australian consumer credit laws so far as it doesn’t involve interest. However, “if it looks and acts like credit, then it should be regulated as such,” the Australian government had said last year. New legislation requiring BNPL firms to run credit checks on borrowers kicks in on Tuesday, which, Afterpay’s Head of Public Policy Michael Saadat hopes, would improve transparency around user creditworthiness. The main reason Afterpay customers close their accounts is because their lender or broker told them to, and “this should not be something that is driven by misperception of the regulatory requirements,” Saadat told.
Ratio is the only platform that combines embedded BNPL with a fully integrated Quote-to-Cash system for B2B subscription businesses
Ratio announced the launch of its Custom Payment Terms feature, which enables sellers to tailor financing options to match each buyer’s cash flow needs—without sacrificing upfront revenue. This release comes as Ratio reports over 800% growth in the past 12 months and adds Taxwell (also known as Drake Software) as a marquee customer. Ratio is the only platform that combines embedded Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) with a fully integrated Quote-to-Cash system for B2B subscription businesses. Ratio enables Taxwell to configure fully customized payment terms that align with the needs of its customer base—primarily SMBs—while maintaining full control over billing, renewals, and revenue collection. By integrating Ratio into its sales and finance workflows, Taxwell can manage deals end-to-end with greater speed and accuracy, reduce operational friction, and improve both buyer experience and cash flow. Ratio’s new Custom Payment Terms solution includes: Fully configurable schedules – Offer monthly, quarterly, deferred, or custom terms; Upfront cash flow – Sellers receive full contract value immediately; Modular Quote-to-Cash process – Unified quote-to-checkout-to-subscription experience inside CRM and billing workflows, configurable as a complete end-to-end flow or as a modular layer within your existing stack.
Core to delivering next-gen personalized, compliant payment experiences worldwide is building planet-scale architectures that operate globally, comply locally and serve personally, J.P. Morgan Payments led convention concludes
As a part of Tech Week NYC and in collaboration with Tech:NYC, J.P. Morgan Payments convened industry leaders and members of the media to discuss the latest trends in fintech and technology in New York and beyond. The event, which played to a standing-room-only crowd, also featured a dynamic panel discussion featuring Julie Samuels, President and CEO of Tech:NYC, Nicole Casperson, founder & CEO of Fintech Is Femme, and Dennis Owusu-Sem, COO of This Week in Fintech. Moderated by CNBC reporter Hugh Son, the conversation explored fintech media trends and the evolving narrative around New York City’s growing technology ecosystem. Looking ahead, Shivananda highlighted four trends that he believes will define the future of payments.
- Planet-scale architectures: These systems are designed to deploy globally, comply locally and serve personally. Shivananda acknowledged that this is not an easy problem to solve, particularly given the regulatory complexities across jurisdictions. But he believes solving for this scale is foundational to delivering personalized, compliant experiences worldwide. Digital ledger transformation: Digital ledgers have “an opportunity to reshape payments completely.” While consumer experiences have become more seamless, often ambient and invisible, the core infrastructure has stayed largely unchanged for decades. “That’s beginning to shift,” he said, as the foundation becomes more “scaled, flexible, agile, nimble [and] innovation-friendly.” With digital payments evolving, cryptographic security has become even more central. Shivananda described this as part of the foundation that enables trust and safety at scale: “Delivering security the way our customers expect it, in fact, probably better than our customers expect it sometimes, is now table stakes.”
- Artificial intelligence: J.P. Morgan Payments is applying AI across both internal systems and emerging client-facing solutions. Shivananda described a two-by-two framework — assist vs. act, internal vs. external — and noted that while much of the current focus is on internal use cases like risk management, “with the right focus on guardrails… you can take it out to the customer.” He emphasized the importance of innovation, trust, ethics, and regulatory alignment as AI capabilities evolve and are introduced to clients as commercialized use cases.
Vanta’s AI agent auto-maps policies to relevant compliance controls by scanning uploaded documents and extracting key details including version history and SLAs, while providing rationale for its recommendations
Compliance automation startup Vanta unveiled an autonomous AI agent that handles end-to-end security and compliance workflows without human intervention. Unlike traditional automation tools that follow pre-defined rules, the Vanta AI Agent proactively identifies compliance issues, suggests fixes and takes action on behalf of security teams while keeping humans in control of final decisions. “By minimizing human error and taking on repetitive tasks, the Vanta AI agent enables teams to focus on higher-value work—the work that truly builds trust. The AI Agent tackles four critical areas that typically consume hundreds of hours of manual work. For policy onboarding, the system scans uploaded documents, extracts key details including version history and service level agreements, and automatically maps policies to relevant compliance controls while providing rationale for its recommendations. The AI Agent reviews uploaded documents against audit requirements to ensure accuracy and completeness, identifying gaps before they become issues. Perhaps most significantly, the agent proactively monitors for inconsistencies between written policies and actual practices—a common source of audit failures. The system also functions as an intelligent knowledge base, answering complex policy questions in real time. Looking ahead, the agent will support end-to-end compliance workflows by connecting all aspects of a customer’s program across the Vanta Trust Management Platform, including risk oversight and security reviews. This comprehensive approach could fundamentally alter how enterprises approach security and compliance management.
Fresh institutional inflows and rising demand for tokenization driving Ether’s outperformance vis-à-vis Bitcoin; likely to reach and/or surpass its all-time high price by the end of the year
Ether outpaces bitcoin on fresh institutional inflows and rising demand for tokenization, signaling a potential push towards its all-time high. ETH zoomed 5% in the past 24 hours, leading gains among majors. Ether ETFs have attracted more than $800 million in the past two weeks alone, outpacing bitcoin’s sub-$400 million, according to SoSoValue data. That’s helped the spread between ether’s implied volatility and bitcoin’s reach its highest level since late 2022 — a sign traders expect bigger price swings ahead. “Investors are finally recognizing the compelling investment opportunity that Ethereum presents. It’s still trading well below its all-time highs, while bitcoin is already near its ATH levels,” said Jeff Mei, COO at BTSE. He pointed to Ethereum’s growing role in tokenizing real-world assets like stocks, money-market funds, and U.S. Treasuries, adding that it was “very likely that Ethereum will reach and/or surpass its all-time high price by the end of the year.” Open interest in ether perpetuals on Kraken hit an all-time high of 30,000 ETH this week, said Alexia Theodorou, Head of Derivatives at Kraken. “This signals a notable uptick in speculative activity around the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap,” she noted. However, she cautioned that the market “has yet to form a clear directional consensus,” with the long/short ratio still well below January levels.
RISE leverages Ethereum’s network and Shreds transaction architecture to enable real-time transactions on standard hardware with ultra-low latency of 5-milliseconds and throughput of over 50,000 TPS
RISE, a real-time blockchain scaling Ethereum with record throughput and ultra-low latency, has secured a $4 million investment from Galaxy Ventures, raising its total funds to $8 million. RISE’s breakthrough transaction architecture, powered by Shreds, enables record-breaking latency as low as 5-milliseconds, making it ideal for advanced DeFi use cases like orderbook strategies, options, high-frequency trading, and market making. The blockchain addresses the tradeoff between low latency and high throughput, ensuring real-time transactions on standard hardware. RISE will also implement performance-compatible sequencing to leverage Ethereum’s network of validators and unlock synchronous composability between Ethereum and RISE. Key Differentiators of RISE: Shreds: Sub-blocktime transaction confirmations enabling as low as 5ms round-trip latency; Scalable Throughput: Currently benchmarked at over 50,000 TPS, with plans to exceed 100,000 TPS; Based Sequencing (Coming Soon): Unlocking a true extension of Ethereum and solving liquidity fragmentation for users; Secured Shreds (Coming Soon): Preconfirmations economically secured by Ethereum Validators, significantly improving the security profile.
BIS-led bank consortium Project Agora to create a unified, programmable financial ledger combining tokenized commercial bank deposits with wholesale central bank money as a regulated alternative to private stablecoins for cross-border and institutional payments
Project Agora, led by the BIS and seven central banks, aims to create a unified, programmable financial ledger combining tokenized commercial bank deposits with wholesale central bank money — challenging the role of stablecoins in regulated finance. The initiative provides a credible, regulated alternative to private stablecoins for cross-border and institutional payments, potentially redefining how programmable money is used without relying on crypto-native infrastructure. The interplay between Project Agora’s outcomes and the potentially broader integration of stablecoins across the U.S. market could represent a potential inflection point in the evolution of digital money. While stablecoins offer speed and global reach, their lack of regulation and transparency invites scrutiny, and Project Agora raises the bar by embedding compliance and trust into digital money systems, pressuring stablecoins to evolve or risk obsolescence in institutional finance. Project Agora is seeking to address the wholesale heart of cross-border systems. By offering tokenized central bank money alongside commercial tokens on a shared digital infrastructure, banks may be able to crowd out private stablecoins for interbank and institutional transfers, without ceding oversight or public trust. Agora doesn’t kill stablecoins. But by offering a credible, supervised alternative, it raises the bar, forcing private issuance to compete on compliance, resilience and institutional usability rather than just speed.
Bloks integration with Wealthbox CRM enables financial advisors to sync AI-generated meeting summaries, tasks and relationship profiles straight into Wealthbox contact records; creates always-fresh profiles by pulling context from emails, calendars and the web
Bloks unveiled a native integration with Wealthbox, enabling financial advisors to sync AI-generated meeting notes and enriched client data directly into the CRM they already trust—all while maintaining the highest standards for security and compliance. Bloks connects to leading CRMs such as Salesforce, Affinity, HubSpot (beta), and now Wealthbox—plus your email, calendar, every major meeting platform, and curated internet sources to deliver the most comprehensive client intelligence available today. Even better, it takes under two minutes to set up and runs quietly alongside the tools advisors already use. What the Integration Delivers: Structured sync in a click – Send Bloks’ meeting summaries, tasks, and relationship profiles straight into Wealthbox notes and contact records. 360° data gathering – Pulls context from conversations, emails, documents, calendars, and the web to create deep, always-fresh profiles. Ask Bloks — your Relationship GPT – Prep for meetings, surface hidden opportunities, or run quick analyses with natural-language prompts. Two-minute setup, 5–8 hours saved weekly – Early adopters reclaim nearly a full business day—without changing workflows.
Societe Generale’s dollar-backed stablecoin launch points to the global landscape for issuance beyond the US, underpinned by worldwide demand for U.S. dollars and expanding use cases in FX, cross-border payments and cash management
Societe Generale-FORGE (SG-FORGE) is to launch a new stablecoin, the USD CoinVertible, on both the Ethereum and Solana public blockchains (ticker code: USDCV). The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation, will act as reserve custodian, enabling seamless integration between traditional and digital financial ecosystems. The USD CoinVertible is the second stablecoin issued by SG-FORGE after the EUR CoinVertible (ticker code: EURCV) launched in April 2023, allowing investors to benefit from a robust access to stablecoin markets and a seamless trading experience on two major currencies. SG-FORGE will propose to its clients instant 24/7 conversion between fiat currencies and stablecoin, enabling immediate, around-the-clock transactions in both USD and EUR. USD CoinVertible and EUR CoinVertible are designed to support a wide range of client activities, including crypto trading and cross-border payments, on-chain settlement, foreign exchange transactions, and collateral and cash management. The stablecoins will be listed on various crypto exchanges and available to institutional, corporate and retail investors through different crypto brokers and payment service providers, with liquidity provided by several reputable market makers. Trading of USDCV is expected to start early July. Both USD CoinVertible and EUR CoinVertible are Electronic-Money Tokens (EMT) fully compliant with the European Markets in Crypto-assets (MiCA) regulation.