Utila, a leading digital asset operations platform for institutions, has announced a strategic integration with Chorus One, a leading staking infrastructure provider in the Web3 ecosystem. This collaboration enhances Utila’s staking capabilities, allowing users to delegate digital assets across various Proof-of-Stake (PoS) networks in a secure environment. The partnership simplifies staking for institutional clients, reducing operational friction and improving accessibility and transparency. Utila’s enterprise-grade wallet and Chorus One’s proven validator performance provide a powerful toolkit for participating in network consensus and earning rewards without compromising security or compliance. The platform offers in-depth visibility into validator performance, network conditions, and staking rewards, empowering portfolio managers, risk teams, and operations personnel to make informed decisions. Chorus One’s partnership reflects its mission to make staking accessible and safe for professional investors and institutions. The integration enables institutional users to access Chorus One’s trusted infrastructure seamlessly within a unified platform that combines custody, compliance, and performance.
Microsoft’s new family of 4D geometric codes require very few physical qubits, can check for errors in a single shot, and exhibit a 1,000-fold reduction in quantum error rates
Microsoft Quantum is advancing the global quantum ecosystem by developing powerful error-correction codes for various types of qubits. These codes require very few physical qubits per logical qubit, can check for errors in a single shot, and exhibit a 1,000-fold reduction in error rates. Microsoft’s qubit-virtualization system, a core component of the Microsoft Quantum compute platform, enables the creation and entanglement of reliable logical qubits from high-quality physical qubits. Microsoft’s new 4D geometric codes require very few physical qubits to make each logical qubit, have efficient logical operations, and improve the performance of quantum hardware. This family of codes reduces the number of steps required to diagnose errors, resulting in low-depth operations and computations. Incorporation of these codes into the Microsoft Quantum compute platform will enable the creation and entanglement of 50 logical qubits in the near term, with the potential to scale to thousands of logical qubits in the future. Microsoft is bringing the capabilities for quantum advantage forward by coupling state-of-the-art quantum hardware with the Microsoft Quantum compute platform, which includes error correction, cloud high-performance computing, and advanced AI models. Microsoft’s team of experts is available to provide insight and technical expertise on use cases, industry challenges, and opportunities for innovation and collaborative research projects. Microsoft and Atom Computing have co-designed a pairing of neutral-atom qubits with the Microsoft Quantum compute platform, offering extensive scalability, low susceptibility to noise, and high fidelities needed for quantum error correction. The most groundbreaking use cases of quantum computing are likely to be achieved when quantum is used to improve and accelerate other technologies, such as high-performance computing and AI.
Project Nemo’s report shows 32% of people with a learning disability don’t have a bank account in their own name and 61% say banks don’t always meet their needs
Project Nemo, a not-for-profit initiative, has released a report revealing the financial exclusion of adults with a learning disability. The report, ‘Safe Spending for Adults with a Learning Disability: A Call to Action for Financial Services’, highlights the challenges faced by these individuals in managing their finances. The study found that 87% of adults with a learning disability and their supporters resort to informal workarounds, often without disclosed statutory authority. The report also revealed that 32% of people with a learning disability don’t have a bank account in their own name and 61% say banks don’t always meet their needs. The report highlights the difficulty of making, receiving, and managing payments for the 1.5 million people in the UK living with a learning disability. The research explored a range of potential money management features to aid safer spending for adults with a learning disability, and identified that: To aid independent user understanding, any features should use clear and simple language, supported by visual explanations where possible; The ability to customise to suit individual needs is critical to success of any products built for this community; Notifications or settings that give supporters oversight of spending and the opportunity to intercept risky purchases provide reassurance for both supporters and users and have potential to enable greater independence.; Accessible and specialist customer support must be available to boost confidence and support longer term independence goals; Priority features for products built for this community include saving pots, the option to turn on a Calm Mode that reduces overwhelm, and wearable alternatives to payment cards.
Monzo’s UI features a clean, uncluttered interface that shows the daily spend, displays trends in monthly spending by categories and allows transferring money to someone using just their phone number with a payment link
Monzo’s clean UI and uncluttered interface was revolutionary and the bright orange branded cards made me feel like I was part of a special club. Here’s what I like about the UX/UI.
- It shows you what you’ve spent: This might seem obvious but it’s not a given on banking apps. My Nationwide app doesn’t show me how much I’ve spent in a day, it just shows me what my balance is. This makes it more difficult to tally up what I’ve spent on a particular day and work out how much my monthly direct debits cost, for example.
- Transferring money is easy: In other banking apps, adding a new payee can be a pain. There are card readers to contend with and what seems like endless identity checks. In Monzo, it takes a limited number of clicks to transfer your cash. You can transfer money to someone using just their phone number, and you can send them a link to pay you with.
- Check trends in spending: Monzo has changed the way it displays trends in spending and I must admit I preferred the previous interface, but it is still handy to be able to see at a glance how much you’ve spent in different categories, such as Transport, Shopping and Eating Out in a month or a year (though whether anyone needs to know how much they’ve spent on Eating Out in a year is debatable).
- Splitting the bill is fun: I don’t use this function often but you can easily split a bill within the Monzo app, and you can also do this for ongoing household expenses. Fun little animations show how it works and the amount each paying and who you’re splitting with is really clearly laid out on the screen. This is another case where the user interface makes it really clear what’s going on, which is exactly what you need in a banking app.
Google’s new AI screen-selection tool for Chromebook Plus devices explains complex text and NotebookLM and lets users select text and quickly add an event to the calendar
Google’s adding a slew of AI features to its productivity-focused Chromebook Plus line of devices, including a screen-selection tool for search and text capture, a tool that explains complex text, and NotebookLM. The new screen-selection tool works similarly to Google Lens and the “Circle to search” feature in Chrome on smartphones: long-press the launcher button or use the screenshot tool to select what is on your screen, and Google will instantly search for it. The tool also lets you select text and quickly add an event to the calendar. Users can now access Google’s AI image-generation features with the quick insert key, as well as AI-powered writing tools. The new “Simplify” feature lets you use AI to explain, simplify, or summarize any text you have selected. Google’s also giving all new Chromebook Plus users one year’s subscription to the Google AI Pro plan, which includes access to the Gemini app; video editing tool Flow; image-to-video creation tool Whisk; Gemini in Gmail, Docs, and Chrome; and 2TB of storage. Alongside these features, Google is launching two exclusive AI features for Lenovo’s new Chromebook Plus 14: One uses AI to recommend tab and document organization, while the second lets users edit images using the Gallery app to remove backgrounds or make stickers. Lenovo’s new Chromebook comes with an OLED touch screen and runs on an ARM-based MediaTek Kompanio Ultra chip.
iOS 26 Beta 2 improves the readability and differentiation of Control Center on Liquid Glass by adjusting the background blur, which better obscures the Home Screen content underneath
As SBA and USDA lending surges nationwide, Community Bankshares is scaling rapidly by outsourcing the heavy lifting through its Phoenix Lender Services unit. Community Bank & Trust launched what it called a “refund anticipation loan” to allow small business owners and self-employed individuals to access their tax refund faster. Chris Hurn, president and chief executive officer of Community Bankshares revealed that the refund anticipation loan was just one part of a larger innovation effort at the $217 million bank. Beyond refund lending, the bank is investing in a new banking-as-a-service offering for banks, credit unions, fintechs, and even other lenders potentially, through which they can launch and scale government-backed lending without building a team from scratch. Community Bank & Trust’s refund anticipation loan was created for self-employed entrepreneurs, who often have few options when it comes to borrowing. Steve Jeffries, President of Community Bank & Trust. “By offering a refund anticipation loan on the SLFL tax credit, we are giving self-employed individuals the financial flexibility they need without having to wait on extended government processing times.” Businesses apply for refund loans through Community Bankshares’ partner, a company Hurn founded, called Lendesca. The fintech handles the Sick Leave and Family Leave (SLFL) tax credit, also known as the Self-Employed Tax Credit (SETC), which is utilized by Community Bank & Trust to provide the loan. These tax credits are among the last remaining from the pandemic and are set to expire during the 2025 tax season. “We saw that a tax credit can take a long time to come from the IRS. We saw an opportunity to take a fairly complicated government process and make it much simpler,” Hurn said. “Consumers often can get what’s called ‘refund anticipation loans,’ but with these we could get business folks, who are badly in need of support, help faster.” With the launch of its first digital product under its belt, Community Bank & Trust now hopes that these micro businesses will grow and become small business prospects for the bank’s SBA and USDA programs as well.
VantageScore’s use of open banking transaction data to support building real-time, FCRA-compliant credit score sees 33% of subprime and 41% of near prime members move to higher credit tiers
VantageScore successfully completed two independent pilot programs using VantageScore 4plus™, the newest VantageScore credit scoring model leveraging the power of industry-leading VantageScore 4plus™ alternative open banking data. Pilots conducted with Patelco Credit Union and Michigan State University Federal Credit Union (MSUFCU) each demonstrated significant quantitative improvements in credit risk prediction, as well as a significant expansion in access to credit for underserved consumers. “These results show that open banking data, when used responsibly and in combination with credit file data, can dramatically improve both risk management and financial inclusion,” said Dr. Andrada Pacheco, Executive Vice President and Chief Data Scientist at VantageScore. The solution builds on the industry-leading performance of the VantageScore models by adding bank transaction data to deliver a real-time, FCRA-compliant credit score. It offers enhanced risk separation among populations with limited credit histories, according to analyses performed by VantageScore. Because it is compatible with all three major credit bureaus and aggregator APIs, lenders can easily adopt it without overhauling credit policies. Michigan State University Federal Credit Union saw strong results in VantageScore 4plus™ testing, including: 33% of subprime moved to higher credit tiers; 41% of near prime members moved to higher credit tiers. In testing its portfolio, Patelco Credit Union found that VantageScore 4plus™ delivered: 12% of subprime and 15% of near prime members moved to higher credit tiers; 4.8% improvement in predictive power over VantageScore 3.0 in originations.
Alipay+ partners Meizu to roll out e-wallet payments through smart glasses that lets users scan QR codes and authorise payments without accessing their mobile devices by combining optical waveguide display, voice interface and QR codes
Ant International’s Alipay+ has completed the first e-wallet payment transaction conducted through smart glasses, working with Meizu to process the payment in Hong Kong using the AlipayHK platform. The transaction was conducted on Meizu’s StarV Snap smart glasses, with users able to scan QR codes and authorise payments without accessing their mobile devices. Behind the scenes, Alipay+ has integrated AI-powered voice interface, intent recognition, and voiceprint authentication technologies to support the payment process. For Alipay+, smart glasses offer another channel as hardware evolves. The platform has introduced other innovations, including NFC integration that combines QR and card payments, plus AI features built on its GenAI Cockpit platform for financial technology companies. The glasses utilise the company’s optical waveguide displays and advanced voice processing to create what executives describe as a natural payment experience. The partnership materialised in April when Meizu announced it would integrate Alipay+’s software development kit across its entire smart glasses range. This combines Meizu’s optical waveguide display technology, voice noise reduction systems and camera-based code scanning technology with Alipay+’s payment authentication systems. Meizu’s decision to embed payment capabilities directly into its smart glasses reflects the company’s broader strategy of creating an integrated ecosystem spanning smartphones, augmented reality devices and automotive technology.
Albertsons is creating daily rhythms that involve reading customer sentiments and ratings, and understanding call center complaints at the start and end of each day inform the product roadmap to improve the omnichannel fulfillment
Now that Albertsons has become an omnichannel retailer, expectations are rapidly evolving, and the customers have control of the goalposts, said Albertsons Cos.’ SVP of digital shopping experiences, Jill Pavlovich. Albertsons sees its employees and company purpose as advantages. Bringing people together on the joys of food and inspiring well-being sets a different tone, she said, and it’s easier to snowball that tone into customer obsession. For example, the digital team has created daily rhythms and habits that start and end each day by reading customer sentiments and ratings, and understanding call center complaints. The information, used as a trend line, informs Albertsons’ product and technology roadmap to ensure the retailer is solving the most urgent customer pain points first. She described the digital roadmap as living and breathing and quite aggressive, noting it can change from sprint to sprint. At the top of the CX list is improving the digital fulfillment experience for customers, particularly the points between checkout and delivery, or checkout and pickup. The retailer is giving customers more control over their orders, including choosing substitutions that can be saved for future orders or directly communicating with store associates via chat while the orders are being picked. Within retail media — another key priority — the digital experience team views it as an intuitive discovery opportunity for new brands, which can be hard to replicate online and something it has struggled with, she said. Retail media can do this in a more intuitive and personalized manner. Its retail media arm unveiled an in-store display network — it’s inviting brands to participate even earlier. Pavlovich also sees future opportunities with in-store digital surfaces, including mobile apps and digital screens connecting to cart technologies.
Disney is adding virtual ‘storefronts’ to its popular streaming outlets to allow viewers to order snacks or pick out products they’ve seen in their favorite shows by clicking through specific interactive ads
Disney hopes to meld streaming and selecting by adding new virtual “storefronts” to its popular broadband venues that will allow viewers to order snacks or pick out products they’ve seen in their favorite shows, all while continuing to keep their binge on. Subscribers will be able to access them by clicking through when prompted by specific interactive ads The company is the latest to experiment with ways to harness the interactive nature of streaming, which allows viewers to control their experience with a few clicks of their remote. Disney will partner with ad-tech startup Shopsense to create new virtual storefronts that will be linked to some of the commercials it shows on its streaming outlets. Viewers can move to purchase fashions, products and offers tied to the series, movies or sports they are watching. The company is teaming up with Gopuff, a digital delivery service, to offer a virtual “concession stand” that will allow subscribers to order snacks, drinks and candy while streaming programs.