Latest news with #paymentsystems
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Stablecoin Boom Has Made Crypto Ramps 'Sexier' M&A Targets, Says VanEck VC
Companies that serve as connective tissue between digital assets and legacy payments systems are getting a glow-up from stablecoins this year, according to VanEck Ventures Managing Partner Juan Lopez. As companies continue to explore new use cases with dollar-pegged tokens, those that help customers swap between cash and crypto are becoming some of the hottest targets for mergers and acquisitions, he told Decrypt in a recent interview. Although they were mostly perceived as a way to let customers easily purchase crypto in the past, Lopez said that on-and-off ramps are increasingly being viewed as valuable touch points for facilitating everyday transactions through stablecoins. 'On-and-off ramp companies initially were the ones that were connecting the legacy payment systems with the sort of blockchain-adjacent systems that exchanges pioneered,' he said. 'Now they can go from simply calling themselves on-and-off ramps to full-fledged payments providers built on this really novel infrastructure, which is a lot sexier.' With last month's passage of stablecoin legislation in the U.S., experts anticipate an explosion of stablecoins under the GENIUS Act. With a federal framework in place, Citigroup said this week that it's exploring a stablecoin, months after Bank of America signaled the same. Lopez said that stablecoins emerged within the crypto industry primarily as a way for exchanges to overcome long settlement times that customers faced when funding accounts, but experimentation has pushed their utility far beyond that. 'On-and-off ramps have been a large driver for some of the new use cases that we hear around stablecoins,' he said, pointing to cross-border remittances and business-to-business payments. Earlier this year, crypto payments service MoonPay acquired Helio and Unstoppable Finance, "underscoring the vision for crypto payments,' according to a report from Architect Partners. The move followed payment giant Stripe's acquisition of stablecoin platform Bridge last year, one of the largest deals in the industry's history valued at $1.1 billion. Ripple said earlier this month that it would purchase Rail, a Toronto-based payments platform, for $200 million. Ripple highlighted the firm's ability to offer 'comprehensive stablecoin pay-ins and pay-outs' without requiring a company to hold crypto on its balance sheet. Fed Ends Supervisory Program Overseeing Banks' Crypto Activity Lopez noted that the licenses on-and-off ramp companies own could be a factor as well, letting companies expand into new businesses or jurisdictions than they could otherwise. 'It's really a time-to-market value,' he said. 'If there's a particular player that wants to enter a particular business, they can do so much faster they can acquire a business that's gone through all the regulatory hurdles to actually be licensed to operate.'
Finextra
06-06-2025
- Business
- Finextra
Bank of England tests AI to spot real-time payment fraud
A project by the Bank of England and the London BIS Innovation Hub to use AI to spot unfolding and novel financial crime patterns in real-time retail payment systems showed promise but threw up a number of limitations to its efficacy. 0 To evade detection, criminals operate in complex networks which include many accounts across multiple financial institutions. Electronic payment systems process transactions across many participants, which gives them a network-wide view. The bank of England's Project Hertha tested the application of modern artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to help spot complex and coordinated criminal activity in payment system data. The experiments were conducted using a state-of-the-art simulated synthetic transaction dataset, developed as part of the project. It includes data for 1.8 million bank accounts and 308 million transactions. The dataset was built by using an advanced AI model trained to simulate realistic transaction patterns. It found that payment system analytics could be a valuable "supplementary tool" to help banks and payment service providers (PSPs) spot suspicious activity. Banks and PSPs participating in the project uncovered 12% more illicit accounts than they would otherwise have found. The experiment also proved particularly valuable for spotting novel financial crime patterns. When trying to spot previously unseen behaviours, it helped achieve a 26% improvement. "The results demonstrate promise but also show there are limits to the application and effectiveness of system analytics," states the BofE. "It is just one piece of the puzzle. The introduction of a similar solution would also raise complex practical, legal and regulatory issues. Analysing these was beyond the scope of Project Hertha." The central bank says the results also highlight the importance of labelled training data, robust model feedback loop and explainable AI algorithms to maximise effectiveness.
