🇯🇵 Masayoshi Son Bets Big on Crypto By Snapping a 40% Stake in Binance Japan

Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank is making its biggest crypto bet yet. PayPay, the mobile payment app owned by SoftBank’s Japanese telecom arm, just acquired a 40% stake in Binance Japan.

This gives PayPay’s 70 million users direct access to buy and sell cryptocurrencies through their existing accounts using PayPay Money. While unknown outside of Japan and South Korea, PayPay is a household name in Japan, where it lets people make QR code payments at shops and send money to each other for free, similar to Venmo or PayPal.

PayPay corporate officer Masayoshi Yanase emphasized the value of partnering with “the world’s largest digital asset exchange by trading volume” in the press release announcing the deal.

The investment follows the classic Masayoshi Son playbook. The SoftBank founder uses his dominance over Japan’s telecom market to help international tech companies expand there in exchange for taking a stake. He famously did this with Yahoo Japan, where his stake eventually became more valuable than Yahoo itself. He also did something similar with OpenAI, creating a joint venture called SB OpenAI Japan that sells OpenAI’s enterprise products exclusively to major Japanese corporations.

Source: Global Fintech Insider & Bloomberg

🇬🇧 Revolut’s Storonsky Becomes Latest Billionaire to Leave UK Over Taxes

Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky relocates to the UAE after the UK scraps tax break often leveraged by the ultra wealthy.

Revolut co-founder and CEO Nik Storonsky is the latest billionaire to shift his residence away from the UK after the government axed a tax break that saved the ultra-wealthy millions.

Corporate filings cited by Forbes show Storonsky’s family office changed his residence from the UK to the United Arab Emirates in October 2024. Forbes estimates his stake in Revolut is now worth over $7.9 billion, with the London-based digital bank reportedly in talks to raise funds at a $65 billion valuation.

The move follows the British government’s decision in April to scrap special tax privileges for “non-domiciled residents,’’ a 200-year-old rule that allowed the wealthy to avoid UK taxes on overseas earnings for up to 15 years.

Since the change, several high-profile figures have departed, including Egyptian billionaire Nassef Sawiris, startup investor Christian Angermayer, and property developers Ian and Richard Livingstone.

Source: Forbes

🇺🇸 Prediction Markets Go Mainstream as NYSE Parent Invests $2B in Polymarket

Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan welcomes ICE’s planned $2b investment, calling it a milestone for mainstream adoption of prediction markets.

One of Wall Street’s major establishments is going all-in on crypto gambling.

Intercontinental Exchange or ICE, which runs the New York Stock Exchange, is investing up to $2 billion in Polymarket, valuing the prediction market at $8 billion.

Under the deal, ICE will become a global distributor of Polymarket’s data, expanding the platform’s reach.

The deal represents a sharp jump from Polymarket’s $1 billion valuation in its August funding round and “marks a major step in bringing prediction markets into the financial mainstream,” said founder and CEO Shayne Coplan to the New York Times.

Prediction markets, which allow users to bet on outcomes ranging from politics to sports and entertainment, surged into the mainstream last year after correctly predicting the US presidential election outcome.

Source: The New York Times

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🇺🇸 Billionaire Mark Cuban Backs Yendo’s $50M Round for Vehicle-Secured Credit Cards

Mark Cuban led a $50 million round in Yendo, a startup offering vehicle-secured credit cards to subprime borrowers.

Texas-based Yendo has raised a $50 million round, in which billionaire Mark Cuban participated, to expand the first-ever vehicle-secured credit card for subprime borrowers.

The company targets consumers with credit scores of 600 or below, often locked out of traditional credit and pushed toward payday loans. Yendo’s cards carry a 29.88% fixed annual interest rate, with credit limits up to $10,000, secured by the borrower’s vehicle even if not fully paid off.

Founder Jordan Miller (pictured below) told Bloomberg in an interview that “I think people are really missing out,” adding that non-prime US consumers hold over $1 trillion in untapped vehicle equity.

Most applicants receive a credit offer within a minute of submitting vehicle information and Miller said Yendo’s repossession rate remains below 2%, compared to the 2.3% national average for auto loans.

Source: Bloomberg

🇧🇲 Crypto Insurer Raises $22M to Launch World First’s Ethereum-Based Life Insurance

Anthea CEO Alex Pei raises $22m to launch what the firm calls the world’s first Ethereum-denominated life insurance product.

Want your life insurance payout in Ethereum?

Bermuda-based crypto life insurer Anthea just raised $22 million to make that happen, launching what it claims is the world’s first crypto-denominated life insurance product.

The Series A funding, led by Hong Kong-based Yunfeng Financial Group, will accelerate product development, expand Anthea’s footprint across Asia, and support operations as it builds out its crypto-linked in .

Anthea, led by CEO Alex Pei, has received in-principle approval from the Bermuda Monetary Authority to offer insurance denominated in digital assets.

The policy structure mirrors traditional life insurance, except that premiums, claim payments, maturity payouts, and loans will all be handled in cryptocurrency.

Source: CoinDesk

🇬🇧 UK Banking Faces “Shadow AI” Threat as Two-Thirds Use Unapproved Tools

DeepL chief revenue office David Parry-Jones says UK financial staff are turning to unsanctioned AI tools as official systems fail to meet their needs.

The growing use of unsanctioned generative AI tools by employees, known as “shadow AI”, is fast emerging as a cybersecurity risk across the UK’s financial sector.

According to a new study by AI firm DeepL, cited by Finextra, around 65% of UK finance professionals admit to using unapproved AI tools when communicating with customers. Despite the potential breaches of internal policy and data protection rules, 70% said such tools had improved their response times and accessibility.

“In financial services, where every interaction is highly regulated and reputational risk is acute, staff will inevitably look for workarounds if the tools provided don’t meet their needs,” DeepL chief revenue officer David Parry-Jones told Finextra.

Currently, 37% of banking interactions are powered by AI, with multilingual support and transaction monitoring among the most common applications.

A separate study by Cybernews, also cited by Finextra, found the trend extends globally, with 59% of US workers using unapproved AI tools. “If employees use unapproved AI, there’s no way to know what kind of information is being shared,” said Cybernews security researcher Mantas Sabeckis.

Source: Finextra

🇨🇳 Ant Group Releases Open-Source AI Model Claiming Edge Over OpenAI, DeepSeek

Ant Group CTO Zhengyu is part of the team driving the company’s trillion parameter AI model, Ling-1T.

Chinese payment giant Ant Group has entered the trillion-parameter race with Ling-1T, its new open-source AI model touted to outperform DeepSeek and OpenAI.

In a recent company announcement, it says the LLM model surpass rivals in mathematics, coding, and logical reasoning.

Ant said Ling-1T, features over one trillion parameters and demonstrated “superior complex reasoning ability” across benchmarks, achieving 70.42% accuracy on the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME), matching Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro.

Ant’s chief technology officer Zhengyu He, who leads the company’s AI division, was also part of its elite “Plan A” team of researchers mentoring top graduates through an internal talent programme, in a bid to attract leading AI minds to the firm, according to a separate news report by the SCMP last May.

The launch adds fresh momentum to China’s intensifying AI race. DeepSeek recently introduced its V3.2-Exp model, halving API costs, while Alibaba unveiled Qwen-3-Max-Preview last month, another trillion-parameter model aimed at rivalling Western AI heavyweights.

Source: South China Morning Post

Upcoming Fintech Events

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🇨🇳 Insurtech Insights Asia will be held in Hong Kong on December 3–4, 2025 ($299–$1,999), with speakers such as Huynh Thanh Phong (Group CEO, FWD), Edward Moncreiffe (CEO, Insurance, HSBC Life), and Masashi Namatame (Group Chief Digital Officer, Tokio Marine).

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Masayoshi Son Bets Big on Crypto By Snapping…