Financial Services Industry
IBM shares suffered their worst day in 25 years after Anthropic said its Claude Code tool could modernise COBOL – the language still behind 95% of US ATM transactions – in quarters rather than years, stoking fears AI will erode IBM’s mainframe business.
SpaceX’s market debut jumped 19% on day one, lifting Elon Musk’s fortune past $1 trillion and making him the world’s first trillionaire, according to the Bloomberg index.
Two decades after being ousted from PayPal, Elon Musk is launching X Money, a payments service inside X that analysts say could disrupt his old company and reshape US payments.
Elon Musk has called Bitcoin an ‘energy currency’ whose value is rooted in physics and electricity rather than government policy, and mused that AI and robots could one day make money itself obsolete.
China has made ‘ciyuan’ the official translation for AI ‘token’, a move widely read as the seed of a token-based currency for the AI age, and a long-term challenge to the US dollar.
America’s biggest banks, led by JPMorgan and Bank of America, are building a tokenised deposit network to settle payments on a blockchain around the clock, their answer to the rise of stablecoins.
Lloyds Bank has used IBM quantum hardware to successfully flag a money mule hidden in transaction data, an early sign quantum computing could sharpen banks’ fraud defences.
Worldline, ING and Mastercard have run Europe’s first live agentic payment, with an AI agent assembling a purchase the shopper still has to approve — showing agent-led buying can clear existing bank security and authorisation.
Robinhood now lets customers spin up a dedicated account and wallet for AI agents that can analyse portfolios, place trades and — via a new virtual card — make payments, with human approval and spending limits in the loop.
ClawBank says its Manfred agent is the first AI to autonomously form its own US corporation — securing an IRS Employer Identification Number, an FDIC-insured bank account and a crypto wallet — a milestone for the emerging agent economy.
A non-developer built a production-grade autonomous trading system in a day using Claude Code — exposing how thousands of identical AI models could converge and destabilise global markets faster than regulators can react.
From corporate stablecoins to programmable CBDCs and AI-driven money, this is a look at how currency could soon move faster than regulators and slip beyond purely human control.