The Weekly Wrap: all you need to know by Friday COB | Oct 30th

By Puja Sharma

Today

AI
Cross Border Payments
Deals of the Week

The Weekly Wrap

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

CIBC, a North American financial institution, has partnered with Thought Machine, a cloud-native core banking technology provider, in a multi-year agreement aimed at modernising its retail banking infrastructure across Canada.

Under the partnership, CIBC adopted Thought Machine’s Vault Core platform as the foundation for its retail banking transformation strategy. The move is expected to help the bank develop and launch simpler, faster and more personalised banking experiences for customers while improving operational agility.

The announcement follows CIBC’s participation in Thought Machine’s Series E funding round earlier this year, where the bank co-led the investment with a £30 million commitment. The investment aligned with CIBC’s broader technology strategy and digital transformation goals.

By implementing Vault Core, CIBC enabled its product and engineering teams to build, test and launch banking products directly on a scalable cloud-native platform. The approach replaces traditional batch-based legacy systems, giving the bank greater flexibility and control over product development and deployment.

One of the first innovations launched under the initiative is The Simplii Account™, which introduces features such as customisable folders and automated savings goals. The capabilities allow customers to organise spending, bills and savings within the bank’s mobile application, making money management more intuitive.

Deals of the week

Zvilo launches South African operations with $120m SME funding
US-based collective raises $100m to expand banking, insurance and accounting services
PhotonPay secures $40m Series C to expand global payments
Piermont Bank partners with MassPay for cross-border payment
American Express and TBC Georgia expand card acceptance
BetaNXT partners with Pave Finance to expand portfolio management
Quirin Privatbank selects Tuum to modernise core banking platform
I&M Bank partners with Otoma to modernise payments
Nasdaq launches Eqlipse Digital to help exchanges

Be on the lookout for

Tencent and Visa have expanded their partnership beyond cross-border payments, signing a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to enhance payment connectivity and explore emerging AI-powered commerce use cases.

The agreement aims to improve payment experiences for travellers entering and leaving China while enabling greater connectivity between the companies’ payment ecosystems.

As part of the collaboration, Tencent and Visa plan to develop solutions that allow travellers to make payments at participating merchants across the Weixin Pay and Visa networks through Tencent’s TenPay Global platform and Visa Pay. The initiative is intended to provide consumers with more seamless payment experiences when travelling internationally.

The companies also plan to expand cooperation through Visa Direct, allowing more overseas users to transfer funds into the Weixin Pay ecosystem and improving cross-border money movement capabilities.

Beyond traditional payments, the companies will explore the role of artificial intelligence in commerce. Tencent and Visa will examine how Visa Intelligent Commerce can enable AI agents to discover products, select items and complete purchases on behalf of users while maintaining security and consumer control.

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