The European Payments Council implemented Version 1.1 of its Verification of Payee scheme rulebook on September 20, 2026, clarifying operations, API specifications and security after feedback from live deployment. Its directory service, operated with SWIFT, has also completed a live transition supporting provider reachability and routing. The changes come as non-eurozone EU payment providers work toward a July 9, 2027, compliance deadline. Required under the EU Instant Payments Regulation for both instant and standard SEPA credit transfers, Verification of Payee checks recipient details before authorization and must be offered free to users. The inter-provider exchange has a five-second operational maximum and can return a match, close match, no match or verification-not-possible result. A close match supplies the verified recipient name for the payer to review. A warning does not necessarily prevent a transfer: liability depends on whether a payer proceeds despite it or a provider fails to perform a required check.

Mural has raised $15 million in Series A financing, bringing its total funding to $28 million. The company provides payment infrastructure that connects traditional banking and blockchain rails while managing the financial licenses, partner bank relationships and local settlement integrations behind them. Since launching its API in 2025, Mural says it has processed $2.1 billion in payments across 128 countries. The company plans to place more engineers directly with enterprise clients to address jurisdiction-specific regulatory and banking requirements. Its platform also uses a policy and compliance engine to apply controls such as approved counterparty lists, transfer caps and additional approvals for large transactions. Mural counts Deel, Opera and Axexo among its enterprise clients. The financing comes as research cited in the verified data points to substantial stablecoin payment activity, although the available figures measure different periods and types of flows. Mural did not disclose a valuation for the round.

FIS made its AML Investigations Agent commercially available on October 15, 2026, to all U.S.-based financial institutions, including those that do not use FIS products. The agent runs on FIS’s private cloud infrastructure using Anthropic’s Claude models. Amalgamated Bank was the design partner and initial institution to test the product. The bank projects substantial reductions in time spent on alert reviews, deeper investigations and Suspicious Activity Report narrative preparation, but those figures are projections rather than reported results from broad deployment. FIS says the agent operates under its Trust Assured governance framework and Control Plane: AI findings must link to source records, and a human analyst must approve any alert closure. Initial launch support covers the FIS Horizon and FIS Systematics core platforms, while integration with FIS IBS is planned. The wider release gives U.S. institutions access to the product, although the research does not establish how many have adopted it.

StraitsX and Visa are expanding their stablecoin-backed card issuing partnership to more than 100 markets. The framework is designed for fintechs, digital wallet providers and Digital Payment Token service providers that want cardholders to spend from stablecoin balances. Merchants would receive payments through traditional card rails, without needing to accept cryptocurrency. Eligible programs will have access to Visa’s network of more than 175 million merchant locations. StraitsX recorded more than US$6 billion in annualized card gross transaction value across its Asian stablecoin-backed card programs before the planned expansion. The framework includes transaction monitoring and screening tools aimed at anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism risks. No market-by-market launch schedule or launch clients have been announced. Live deployments will depend on regulatory approvals in each jurisdiction and Visa network certification, so the partnership’s geographic scope should not be read as immediate card availability in every market.