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.
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.
DBS Bank’s new vision for private banking stresses safety in an uncertain world and offering bespoke services where relationship managers understand business expansion and funding
Private banking often conjures images of sterile boardrooms and endless spreadsheets, but DBS Bank is flipping that stuffy script. For Carol Wu, managing director and head of private banking for North Asia at DBS Bank in Hong Kong, the future of wealth management is as much about curating experiences as it is about crunching numbers. During Art Week in March, Hong Kong’s gourmands descended on Club Bâtard for ARTable, a one-of-a-kind soirée presented by DBS and Tatler that blurred the lines between gastronomy and art, featuring chef Edward Lee, star of the South Korean show Culinary Class Wars. ARTable was the inaugural event under DBS Culinary Delights, a new initiative introducing the city’s best dining experiences to clients. In the same week, DBS hosted an exclusive fireside chat with Lee at the Four Seasons Hotel, where he shared insights from his 2024 book Bourbon Land: A Spirited Love Letter to My Old Kentucky Whiskey, with 50 Recipes. While celebrity chefs and bourbon might seem out of place in banking, Wu sees such cultural engagements as the human side of private banking. She notes that 70 to 80 per cent of her client conversations are about life experiences—travel, dining, events, and art—rather than just wealth planning. DBS supports this with a rich calendar of exclusive events, including meet-and-greets with sports legends and astronauts. With her roots in both finance and hospitality, Wu views banking as understanding people behind portfolios. Different clients have different needs—older clients focus on wealth preservation, while younger ones show interest in aggressive options like crypto. DBS also facilitates investments in alternative assets such as European and American sports teams, a sector growing about 20 per cent annually. Beyond the glitz, Wu emphasizes substance: “We are the safest bank in Asia,” a title held for 16 consecutive years per Global Finance as of October 2024. Safety, she says, is the ultimate luxury in today’s uncertain environment. But DBS builds far beyond safety—offering bespoke services where relationship managers understand business expansion and funding, which is vital when 80 per cent of clients are business owners. DBS’s strategy reflects a human-centric approach to wealth, where luxury is defined not by yachts or penthouses but by quality, personalisation, exclusiveness, and rare value.
Advisors question SEC push to extend private equity and alts investing in view of the opaque nature of these products, and the barriers investors have to pulling money out, make them ripe for abuse
Advisors and securities lawyers are raising a collective eyebrow at a big push now underway by large firms and regulators to make private equity and other alternative investments more accessible to retail investors. Top industry watchdogs showed a general inclination to allow more ordinary investors to put their money into the sort of private funds that once were more or less the exclusive preserve of large institutions and the extremely wealthy. Natasha Vij Greiner, the director of the SEC’s investment management division, noted that many types of private equity, private credit and hedge fund opportunities remain open only to so-called accredited investors or qualified purchasers. Greiner suggested opening up private market opportunities to investors beyond those in those two categories. Adam Gana, the president of the Public Investors Advocate Bar Association, said the opaque nature of these products, and the barriers investors have to pulling money out, make them ripe for abuse. Erik Nero, the founder and president of First Step Wealth Planning, noted that the high returns many times promised by private investments are often eaten up by high fees charged to investors. Alternative assets should remain more or less exclusive to clients who can afford to pay the associated costs, Nero said. “Retail investors will not miss out on anything, as they will not be able to experience the returns due to the fee structures,” he said. “Making private markets available to retail investors will only benefit the firms offering the products to them.” Alex Caswell, a financial planner at Wealth Script Advisors said there are many reasons private markets can “create a dangerous environment for an investor. Most importantly, the lack of liquidity is something that I think even advisors don’t pay close attention to when it comes to choosing private investments,” he said. Morgan Stanley CEO Ted Pick said many of his firm’s clients’ portfolios are “underweight” in alternative assets like private equity and credit. Now hovering around 5% of the firm’s assets under management, the allocation could easily be increased to 15% or even more, Pick suggested. Pick said the SEC is now reviewing a proposal for a “fund of funds” Morgan Stanley wants to start offering to accredited investors as a way to give them greater exposure to alternatives. Pick said Morgan Stanley is positioning itself as an expert in the “distribution of alts in a different way, in a diversified way, to clients.” Greiner and other regulators called particular attention to how a type of investment vehicle known as a closed-end fund can be used to provide exposure to private markets. Unlike open-ended funds, whose managers can issue and buy back their own shares as much as they want, closed-end funds issue shares only once. They also have greater latitude to borrow money with the goal of boosting returns for investors but come with higher risks as a result.
Meta’s V-JEPA 2 model teaches robots to understand their surroundings- understanding and predicting how concepts like gravity will impact
Meta unveiled its new V-JEPA 2 AI model, a “world model” that is designed to help AI agents understand the world around them. V-JEPA 2 is an extension of the V-JEPA model that Meta released last year, which was trained on over 1 million hours of video. This training data is supposed to help robots or other AI agents operate in the physical world, understanding and predicting how concepts like gravity will impact what happens next in a sequence. Meta depicts examples where a robot may be confronted with, for example, the point-of-view of holding a plate and a spatula and walking toward a stove with cooked eggs. The AI can predict that a very likely next action would be to use the spatula to move the eggs to the plate. According to Meta, V-JEPA 2 is 30x faster than Nvidia’s Cosmos model, which also tries to enhance intelligence related to the physical world. However, Meta may be evaluating its own models according to different benchmarks than Nvidia. “We believe world models will usher a new era for robotics, enabling real-world AI agents to help with chores and physical tasks without needing astronomical amounts of robotic training data,” explained Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun.
Zencoder automates testing of agents- sees and interacts with applications as users do—clicking buttons, filling forms, navigating flows, and validating both UI state and backend responses
Zencoder announced the public beta of Zentester, an AI-powered agent that transforms end-to-end (E2E) testing from a bottleneck into an accelerator. This breakthrough enables development teams to move from “vibe coding” to production-ready software by accelerating quality assurance and providing instant verification within developer workflows. While AI coding assistants have revolutionized code generation, the gap between writing code and shipping reliable software remains vast. Teams need faster feedback loops, and E2E testing – the final verification that software actually works – continues to be a manual, brittle process that can add days or weeks to release cycles. Zentester sees and interacts with applications as users do—clicking buttons, filling forms, navigating flows, and validating both UI state and backend responses. The agent can take scenarios in plain English without wrestling with scripting frameworks. This brings comprehensive E2E testing directly to the engineer’s fingertips—both in their IDE through Zencoder’s existing integrations and in CI/CD pipelines via Zen Agents for CI. It enables five mutually supportive use cases: Developer-Led Quality, QA Acceleration, Quality Improvement for AI Coding Agents, Healing Tests, and Autonomous Verification.
Mosaic Agent Bricks platform automates agent optimization and tuning without the need for labeled data
Many enterprise AI agent development efforts never make it to production and it’s not because the technology isn’t ready. The problem, according to Databricks, is that companies are still relying on manual evaluations with a process that’s slow, inconsistent and difficult to scale. Databricks launched Mosaic Agent Bricks as a solution to that challenge. The Mosaic Agent Bricks platform automates agent optimization using a series of research-backed innovations. Among the key innovations is the integration of TAO (Test-time Adaptive Optimization), which provides a novel approach to AI tuning without the need for labeled data. Mosaic Agent Bricks also generates domain-specific synthetic data, creates task-aware benchmarks and optimizes quality-to-cost balance without manual intervention. Agent Bricks automates the entire optimization pipeline. The platform takes a high-level task description and enterprise data. It handles the rest automatically. The platform offers four agent configurations: Information Extraction; Knowledge Assistant; Custom LLM; Multi-Agent Supervisor. Databricks also announced the general availability of its Lakeflow data engineering platform. Lakeflow solves the data preparation challenge. It unifies three critical data engineering journeys that previously required separate tools. Ingestion handles getting both structured and unstructured data into Databricks. Transformation provides efficient data cleaning, reshaping and preparation.
NIST-led team uses quantum mechanics to make a factory for random numbers; Bell test measures pairs of “entangled” photons whose properties are correlated
NIST and the University of Colorado Boulder have launched CURBy, a publicly available random number generator based on quantum nonlocality, offering verifiable, truly random numbers. At the heart of this service is the NIST-run Bell test, which provides truly random results. This randomness acts as a kind of raw material that the rest of the researchers’ setup “refines” into random numbers published by the beacon. The Bell test measures pairs of “entangled” photons whose properties are correlated even when separated by vast distances. When researchers measure an individual particle, the outcome is random, but the properties of the pair are more correlated than classical physics allows, enabling researchers to verify the randomness. Einstein called this quantum nonlocality “spooky action at a distance.” This is the first random number generator service to use quantum nonlocality as a source of its numbers, and the most transparent source of random numbers to date. That’s because the results are certifiable and traceable to a greater extent than ever before. CURBy uses entangled photons in a Bell test to generate certifiable randomness, achieving a 99.7% success rate in its first 40 days and producing 512-bit outputs per run. A novel blockchain-based system called the Twine protocol ensures transparency and security by allowing users to trace and verify each step of the randomness generation process. CURBy can be used anywhere an independent, public source of random numbers would be useful, such as selecting jury candidates, making[A1] [A2] a random selection for an audit, or assigning resources through a public lottery.
Xactus integrates flood compliance solution with ICE’s mortgage servicing system, to receive automated flood zone determination updates directly into their systems
Logitech’s new Flip Folio makes it easier than ever to turn your iPad into a comfortable, portable workstation. Logitech’s new Flip Folio fuses portability with adaptability. Its case combines a Bluetooth keyboard with a magnetic folio, making it perfect for anyone who wants the freedom to work the way they like. This is especially great if you want to place your iPad on a higher surface than your keyboard to reduce neck strain while working. Logitech also gives you the option to work in portrait mode — perfect for Pages projects. The kickstand adjusts to multiple angles, allowing you to find the perfect position for writing, watching videos, making FaceTime calls, and more. When it’s time to pack up, the Bluetooth keyboard magnetically attaches to the Folio, making it a breeze to stash it in a bag or carry it with a single hand. Unlike Apple’s Magic Keyboard, there’s no passive charging; in fact, there’s no charging at all. The included Bluetooth keyboard is powered by four replaceable coin cell batteries, which Logitech says should last for two years, assuming two hours of daily use.
Overhauled Shortcuts app in iOS 26 supports Apple Intelligence models for actions like summarizing PDFs, generating recipes, answering questions, and more
Apple overhauled the Shortcuts app in iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS Tahoe, and there are now Apple Intelligence options that users can take advantage of. The app supports Apple Intelligence models for things like summarizing PDFs, generating recipes, answering questions, and more. Here’s what Apple offers, along with the descriptions: Morning Summary – Use Model to describe the day ahead of you. Action Items From Meeting Notes – Use Model to grab action items from meeting notes. Summarize PDF – Use Model to summarize the open PDF in Safari. Is Severance Season 3 Out? – Use Model to find out if something has been released. ASCII Art – Use Model to draw you some ASCII art. Document Review – Use Mode to help you compare and contrast documents. Reminders Roulette – Use Model to punt an unimportant reminder to tomorrow. Get Started With Language Models – A tutorial for Use Model with examples. As the last pre-made Shortcut suggests, you can create your own shortcuts that incorporate Apple’s AI model, and Apple’s offerings serve as examples. When you go to create a Shortcut, there’s a new Apple Intelligence section. You can opt to use an on-device model, a cloud model that takes advantage of Private Cloud Compute, or ChatGPT. There are some pre-determined options, so you can do things like open Visual Intelligence or generate an image with Image Playground. There are several Writing Tools features for adjusting the tone of text, proofreading, creating a list from text, summarizing text, or rewriting text. When you tap on Cloud, On-Device Model, or ChatGPT, there’s an open-ended prompt where you can write in what you want to do. You need to work within the confines of the model that Apple provides, pairing it with other functionality in Shortcuts. You can pull in data from the Weather app, your Calendar, and Reminders, then ask the model to prepare a summary, for example. AI models can be incorporated into any Shortcut.