Top 5 Stories of the Week in FinTech

Accenture Backs Hedera to Power the Agentic Economy

Trust is one of the most prevalent challenges when it comes to AI and autonomous decision-making, particularly in financial services.

Accenture has made a move that can be seen as a decisive step toward addressing that gap by joining the Hedera Council.

By doing so, the tech consulting giant aims to help shape governance frameworks for the agentic economy – positioning both Accenture and Hedera at the forefront of building trusted infrastructure for AI-driven enterprise systems.

Handing Control to Banks: FIS and Project Keystone

Six US financial institutions will join FIS for participation in Project Keystone, a digital network allowing settlements to either settle in totality or not at all. 

The institutions include Citizens Bank, Fifth Third, KeyBank M&T Bank and Huntingdon Bank. 

Project Keystone, a network for moving money, is designed to operate across different portfolios. FIS says that the collection of financial institutions is reflective of the breadth for which project Keystone is “designed to operate”.  

Money moving through the network is regulated and bank-issued ensuring that the network is not only compliant but also keeping in step with digital asset legacy. 

Participating banks will be able to transfer, issue and settle regulated deposits in digital form on the shared network. 

The company says its aim is to make settlement more efficient by eliminating “partial failures” that are associated with conventional interbank settlement. The network supports this through the action of either simply settling or not settling at all.

Coinbase Lays Off 700 Employees to Become AI-Native Firm

Major cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is cutting 700 roles in what its chief executive describes as preparation for an AI-driven operational model.

The company says the reduction is 14% of its total headcount.

CEO Brian Armstrong tells staff in an email that artificial intelligence has "dramatically" changed the pace of work within the organisation.

He says this is leading up to an "inflection point" for the company.

“We are adjusting early and deliberately to rebuild Coinbase to be lean, fast and AI-native,” he says. “We need to return to the speed and focus of our startup founding, with AI at our core.”

The announcement comes as fintech companies face pressure to demonstrate how emerging technologies like AI can improve margins and operational efficiency. 

FIS and Anthropic Pair for AI in Banking and AML

FIS, the financial technology heavyweight responsible for powering nearly 12% of the global economy, has announced a strategic collaboration with AI safety and research company Anthropic. 

The partnership aims to integrate agentic AI into the core of banking operations, beginning with a specialised Financial Crimes AI Agent designed to overhaul anti-money-laundering (AML) workflows.

This new agent is engineered to compress the timeline of AML investigations from several hours down to a matter of minutes. 

By automatically assembling evidence across a bank’s core systems and evaluating activity against known typologies, the tool surfaces the highest-risk cases for human review. 

BMO and Amalgamated Bank are set to be among the first institutions to deploy the technology, with a wider roll-out scheduled for the second half of 2026.

NatWest: Chat, Should I Buy This House?

NatWest Group announce it is the first bank in the UK to offer an app within popular conversational AI platform ChatGPT. 

As part of the bank’s tech strategy, the use of AI is intended to engage consumers with the technology, enhancing the customer experience. 

Conversational AI is the latest wave of technology that banks are using to enhance customer experience and in some cases improve financial literacy.