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The bank technology company is adding offices in the U.S. and India as part of its quest to reach clients outside of its U.K. home base.

The Swedish financial institution has developed an open standard that allows merchants' products to be catalogued and discovered by AI agents. It was designed to complement Stripe and OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol.

The card networks have entered a series of partnerships in Europe and Asia amid signs of growing demand and Apple's waning control over the underlying technology.

Mercantile's pending acquisition of Eastern Michigan is approved by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago; the National Community Reinvestment Coalition and Rise Economy announce a $2.5 billion addendum to Columbia Bank's community benefits agreement following its acquisition of Pacific Premier Bank; the Federal Reserve Board and CFPB raise the thresholds for certain credit and lease transactions; and more in this week's banking news roundup.

Here are the 10 stories our readers paid the most attention to in a year of political, economic and technological change.

The Senate confirmed Travis Hill as the chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. as part of a slate of nominations that were approved late Thursday. Hill has been serving as acting FDIC chair since January.

The Federal Reserve Board voted 6-1 on Friday to seek public comment on a proposed "skinny" master account.

Once artificial intelligence has eliminated all the human-driven volatility from financial markets, will there even be a reason to trade anymore?

The Dallas bank turned down another offer because it thought it could get a higher price from Fifth Third, and also could ink an agreement faster, according to Comerica's latest regulatory filing.

The payment fintech is marketing technology that lets merchants sell through AI agents; Google adds a credit card for India's national real-time payment rail. That and more in American Banker's global payments and fintech roundup.

The megabank cleared a regulatory hurdle when the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency freed it from a July 2024 amendment to a consent order. Two other orders, one from the OCC and the other from the Federal Reserve, remain in place.

Moving cannabis from a Schedule I to a Schedule III drug would not legalize cannabis or remove all barriers to cannabis banking, but it would allow operators to write off expenses, increase cannabis customer cash flow and eligibility for favorable loans.

The Federal Reserve said in a statement that its "understanding of innovation products and services have evolved" since the initial guidance was published in 2023.

The merger with Heritage Financial joins two commercially focused banks, creating a $21.7 billion-asset institution with a presence in all of the Golden State's major markets.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics Thursday indicated that the Core Consumer Price Index indicated that inflation rose by only 2.7% in November versus a year ago, a pace that is the slowest rate of price increases since 2021.