Новости за 09.02.2026

Households’ perceptions of inflation and the labor market improved slightly in January, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said Monday (Feb. 9). When considering inflation, households’ short-term expectations improved while their medium- and long-term expectations remained unchanged, the New York Fed’s Center for Microeconomic Data said in a Monday press release outlining findings […]

Artificial intelligence companies rarely dominate the Super Bowl advertising narrative, but this year’s game marked a turning point as AI firms moved into the spotlight. The move turned one of the world’s largest media stages into a public battleground over competing visions for the future of AI. At the center of the debate was […]

An overload of customer requests has reportedly led Alibaba’s AI chatbot to pause issuing coupons. The issue with the Chinese tech giant’s Qwen chatbot has marred the company’s campaign to promote the tool’s abilities beyond answering questions, Reuters reported Monday (Feb. 9). According to the report, the artificial intelligence chatbot last week began offering coupons to customers […]

The idea of a bank-issued digital asset was once an oxymoron. Today, it’s one that’s gaining momentum. On Friday (Feb. 6), the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) clarified that national trust banks may issue payment stablecoins. And since the start of this month, other financial institutions have made moves in the digital asset space. A […]

Venture capital continued to flow into the artificial intelligence (AI) sector in early February, though the targets are changing. Investors are now prioritizing the durability and economics of the technology over simple scale. Building the AI Backbone Several of the largest raises centered on the technical foundations required to make AI systems faster, cheaper […]

Crypto venture capital funds are shifting their focus to other opportunities, including stablecoin infrastructure, prediction markets, FinTech and artificial intelligence, Bloomberg reported Monday (Feb. 9). This change is being driven in part by a drop in digital asset prices that has seen bitcoin lose nearly half of the record-high price it reached in October, […]

South Korea plans to step up its regulation of digital assets after cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb accidentally gave away over $40 billion in bitcoin, Reuters reported Monday (Feb. 9). Lee Chanjin, governor of the country’s Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), said at a press conference that the incident showed the need for legislation to apply regulatory […]

U.K. banking giant NatWest is acquiring wealth manager Evelyn Partners for 2.7 billion pounds (approximately $3.6 billion). Purchasing Evelyn Partners from private equity operations Permira and Warburg Pincus will allow NatWest to bolster its savings and investment business, the bank said in a Monday (Feb. 9) news release. “At a time when the benefits of saving and investing are increasingly part of […]

Toyota’s next CEO isn’t an engineer, a product visionary or a car guy. He’s a numbers guy. An operations specialist. The automaker announced Friday (Feb. 6) that its current chief financial officer, Kenta Kon, will be promoted to CEO, effective April 1. In another era, the elevation of a CFO to the top role […]

The Middle East is proving itself as fertile ground for FinTech investment and innovation. The region combines high smartphone penetration, young demographics and state-backed modernization of payment rails. Governments across the Gulf have treated digital channels and faster money movement as economic infrastructure. As a result, payments, lending and treasury functions are increasingly built […]

Grocery giant Kroger named former Walmart executive Greg Foran as its new CEO. Foran took the job Monday (Feb. 9) and succeeds Ron Sargent, who had been acting as the company’s interim CEO since March, Kroger said in a Monday news release. “Greg is a highly respected operator who knows how to run large-scale […]

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) clarified Friday (Feb. 6) that national trust banks may issue payment stablecoins. The agency did so by reissuing CFTC Staff Letter 25-40, which was originally issued Dec. 8, 2025, it said in a Friday press release. The reissued letter is CFTC Staff Letter 26-05. In the reissued letter, […]

Uber is expanding its payments partnership with FinTech platform Adyen. “The expanded partnership reflects Uber’s growing use of Adyen’s global payments platform to enhance performance and offer more alternative payment methods to support Uber’s continued international growth,” the companies said in a Monday (Jan. 9) news release. Among the new territories where Uber is […]

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become more intertwined with daily life and decision-making, a pressing question looms: Can AI truly grasp the values that guide human choices? Traditional AI is engineered to optimize efficiency, accuracy and speed. Humans, by contrast, make decisions shaped by culture, social norms and lived experience, factors that are rarely captured […]

European competition regulators say Meta’s artificial intelligence (AI) assistant policy violates antitrust regulations. The European Commission (EC) announced Monday (Feb. 9) that it sent a statement of objections to the tech giant, stating the watchdog’s “preliminary view” that Meta breached EU antitrust rules by preventing third-party AI assistants from accessing WhatsApp. The commission said in its announcement that […]

Is Europe too reliant on international payments companies such as Visa and Mastercard? The head of the European Payments Initiative (EPI) thinks so, according to a Monday (Feb. 9) interview with the Financial Times (FT). “We are highly dependent on international [payment] solutions,” said Martina Weimert, chief executive of the EPI, an alliance of […]

“I think [our] arrogance and disruption got us into trouble,” Scott Painter tells PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster. It is a rare admission from a founder who spent nearly two decades insisting that the car-buying process was broken and that radical price transparency was the fix. He was right about the diagnosis. But the fix, […]

Watch more: Visa Protect With Visa’s Jeremiah Dewey  The word “cybersecurity” can imply a defensive, even reactive discipline. But effective cybersecurity has never truly been either of those things, and as fraud scales faster, attack surfaces sprawl across ecosystems and consumer trust hardens into a competitive moat, treating cybersecurity as merely a protection is […]

What began as a checkout convenience for sneakers and sofas is now threading its way into grocery aisles, utility bills and subscription renewals, as paying over time assumes a regular place in household budgeting. According to PYMNTS Intelligence’s February 2026 Pay Later Ecosystem Report, buy now, pay later (BNPL) and card installment plans have […]

Digital bank users are not simply early adopters of new payment methods. They represent a distinct slice of the U.S. banking population, shaped by age, income, education and daily payment habits in ways that set them apart from customers of traditional banks. That portrait comes through clearly in “Pay by Bank Deep Dive: Digital Bank Users Are Ready to […]

“FinTechs Tap Embedded Payments to Deepen Customer Relationships” finds that embedded finance has become a competitive differentiator, enabling FinTechs to weave payments and other financial functions directly into their digital ecosystems, creating more complete customer relationships and increasing lifetime value. Just as importantly, embedded finance is reshaping the business case for growth. The report describes […]

One of the underplayed areas of The Prompt Economy is the supply chain. But new developments around procurement and logistics have brought agentic AI to the fore in this area with a promise that bottlenecks in the last mile can be smoothed by this technology. Case in point: Agentic AI is making progress in […]

Regulators in China have expanded their cryptocurrency crackdown to cover stablecoins and tokenized assets. “Recently, influenced by various factors, speculative activities related to virtual currencies and the tokenization of real-world assets have occurred frequently, posing new challenges and situations for risk prevention and control,” regulators including the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) and the […]

A South Korean cryptocurrency exchange is facing regulatory investigation following a $40 billion bitcoin-related mistake. That exchange, Bithumb, announced this weekend it had accidentally given out $40 billion in the world’s most popular crypto to customers as part of a promotional rewards program. The company said it has since recovered nearly all the coins […]

Anthropic is reportedly close to finalizing a $20 billion-plus funding round. The round could close in the next few days and would value the artificial intelligence (AI) startup at $350 billion, Bloomberg News reported Friday (Feb. 6), citing sources familiar with the matter. The funding would almost double Anthropic’s previous valuation and comes just […]