Lloyds

Monzo becomes the first UK digital bank to surpass 1 million business customers, signaling strong SME adoption and competitive pressure on incumbents.

UK bank payment outages hit several lenders (Lloyds, Barclays, HSBC/Halifax, Monzo) due to a Faster Payments issue, causing delays and potential duplicate transfers.

The piece argues that money laundering is a multi-trillion-dollar, under-regulated global phenomenon driven by cash and trade-based schemes, with AML rules costly and largely ineffective, and it advocates radical reforms like demonetising high-denomination notes and reallocating compliance spend to research.