Crypto Policy Pressure (India): India’s finance and tax authorities are backing the RBI’s push for a crypto stance “leaning towards prohibition,” citing hard-to-track offshore trading and underreporting, while banks are urged to avoid crypto and privately issued stablecoins. Digital Payments Cost Cuts (Philippines): The BSP welcomed banks reducing or waiving interbank digital transfer fees, aiming to bring costs closer to zero and boost affordable, inclusive e-payments. EU Crypto Resilience Rules: ESMA launched a Common Supervisory Action on CASPs’ digital operational resilience for custody, and published final technical standards on CCP admission criteria elements under EMIR 3. Banking Tech for Trust (Malaysia): Malaysia’s banking leaders urged moving from AI adoption to trusted implementation, with stronger governance, assurance, resilience, and talent. M&A Watch (Europe): UniCredit disclosed it now owns 48% of Commerzbank shares as its hostile bid nears control, keeping the euro-zone consolidation fight in focus. Payments Product Launch (US): U.S. Bank rolled out “Enhanced Payments” to help small businesses move money faster with bundled ACH, wires, and instant payments. Banking Modernization (AI Orchestration): Profile launched ProfileOne, a governed agentic AI orchestration platform for financial institutions to connect AI to live workflows with approvals and auditability. Interbank/Platform Governance (AI Agents): Salesforce is leaning on MCP interoperability to make Slackbot a “super agent,” while Eltropy opened an early access program for credit unions and community banks to deploy governed AI agents.