The Weekly Wrap: all you need to know by Friday COB | Jan 9th

By Puja Sharma

The Weekly Wrap is published every Friday and recaps the week’s main stories and deals, as well as upcoming events and announcements for Prime subscribers only.

The Big Story

Barclays has invested in Ubyx Inc., a US-based provider of clearing infrastructure for tokenised deposits and regulated stablecoins, as financial institutions continue to explore scalable models for digital money within the regulatory perimeter.

Ubyx is developing a global clearing and acceptance network designed to enable interoperability between different forms of regulated digital money, including bank-issued tokenised deposits and stablecoins. The investment reflects growing recognition among banks that fragmented blockchain ecosystems and wallet infrastructures remain a key barrier to institutional adoption.

As tokenisation gains traction beyond crypto-native use cases, interoperability has emerged as a critical requirement. Financial institutions are increasingly seeking infrastructure that allows digital money to move seamlessly across blockchains, wallets and counterparties while maintaining regulatory compliance, settlement certainty and par-value redemption.

The investment aligns with Barclays’ broader digital assets strategy, which has focused on enabling regulated innovation rather than speculative activity. By supporting infrastructure providers such as Ubyx, the bank is positioning itself to participate in emerging digital money ecosystems while mitigating operational and regulatory risk.

Deals of the week

• CredAble, Citi partner to digitise trade finance controls
• Beyon Money, EazyPay enable Wallet-to-POS Payments in Bahrain
• Tamilnad Mercantile Bank taps TechFini to scale UPI infrastructure
• GlobalPay launches transit-led cross-border FinTech platform
• Dfns adds Concordium to enable identity-verified Web3 wallets
• Droit introduces explainable AI for regulatory compliance
• DNB selects Stacc to automate home loan processing
• Mastercard, LoanPro launches card-based installment lending

Be on the lookout for

UK-based payment technology provider Modulr has expanded into the United States through a partnership with FIS, a global leader in financial technology. The collaboration integrates Modulr’s API-driven payments infrastructure into FIS’s Money Movement Hub, a cloud-native platform that consolidates access to multiple payment rails—including real-time, batch, and cross-border systems—through a single API.

This move brings Modulr’s proven expertise in European payment networks such as Faster Payments, Bacs, SEPA, and SWIFT into the U.S. market, where demand for instant, reliable transactions continues to grow. The integration is designed to simplify connectivity for financial institutions, enabling them to modernise operations, reduce complexity, and seamlessly embed payments into business systems such as ERP, payroll, and travel platforms.

The U.S. payments ecosystem has advanced significantly with the launch of The Clearing House’s RTP® network in 2017 and the FedNow® Service in 2023, both of which provide real-time settlement capabilities. Modulr’s entry aims to help institutions fully leverage these networks by offering scalable technology that supports high transaction volumes.