Checking someone’s ID at the door of a nightclub tells you who they are, but it does not tell you how they will behave once they are inside. Lionel Grosclaude, CEO of Fime, used that analogy to explain a challenge emerging in agentic commerce, where AI agents are beginning to search, shop and make payments on behalf of consumers. The comparison comes as agentic commerce moves rapidly from concept to live infrastructure. OpenAI has introduced Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT, Google launched its Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), while just recently, Visa and Mastercard joined in, with their Intelligent Commerce and Agent…

Conversations revolving around digital asset finance often return to the blockchain, but Shaun Chen’s concern sits closer to the point where value actually moves. Behind every digital asset transaction sits a private key, and Shaun, AVP, APJ Advisor – Quantum and AI Security at Thales, sees that key as the authority behind the asset. When someone compromises a private key, the institution faces more than a security breach because a validly signed transaction can move value before anyone fully understands what went wrong. Security around those keys helps determine whether digital asset infrastructure can move from experimentation into real commercial activity.…

Discussions about the future of banking often revolve around digital channels, cloud migration and mobile apps. At Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona, Huawei placed the spotlight on what comes next. During its Digital Finance session, the company gathered financial institutions and technology partners to discuss how artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape the foundations of modern banking. The event carried the theme “Powering Resilient Intelligence, Co-creating Finance Future” and served as the backdrop for Huawei to introduce upgrades to its Banking AI and Foundation Model Solutions aimed at supporting the next phase of industry transformation. Attention quickly turned to…

Digital assets were designed around decentralisation, yet the responsibility for securing them increasingly sits with institutions. Banks, fintechs, and specialised platforms now safeguard billions of dollars in cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and tokenised assets on behalf of customers. As digital asset markets mature, conversation is shifting from innovation to infrastructure, and, more importantly, security. Yet the biggest risks rarely originate from the blockchain itself. Most major breaches stem not from flaws in blockchain protocols but from the surrounding infrastructure, particularly the systems responsible for managing private keys. Recent data illustrate the scale of the problem. According to Chainalysis, more than US$2.2 billion…