Karsten Wenzlaff, Advisor
August 26th, 2025
Karsten Wenzlaff is a Crowdfunding and Fintech Expert from Germany. He is Secretary-General of Digit[...]
A Regulation Revolution In Financial Services
Forbes | | Dec 2, 2018
If your professional interests take you to the crossroads of financial services, regulation, compliance, and digital - especially data analytics and machine learning - which altogether is known as regtech, you are in the right place. You are part of statistically small and very geek-oriented professional community, but you know this, and though you might choose not to admit this to strangers at this year's festive parties for fear of causing great pain by boredom, you are in good company with this Contributor and my interviewee.
I first met Jo Ann Barefoot when I was chairing the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Industry Sandbox Consultation, where she provided excellent guidance and insights. Jo Ann is one of the most dedicated and busiest advocates of the regtech space on the planet and is truly outstanding in both her knowledge and passion in this area.
She dedicates her time to a number of global bodies and initiatives related to regtech: she is a Senior Fellow Emerita at the Harvard Kennedy School Center for Business & Government, a Senior Advisor to the Omidyar network, sits on the fintech advisory committee for FINRA, is an Executive Board Member of the International RegTech Association (IRTA), is a member of the Milken Institute U.S. FinTech Advisory Committee, and chairs the boards of the Center for Financial Services Innovation and FinRegLab.
See: Exploring cryptoasset regulation
A former Deputy Comptroller of the Currency and staff member at the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, she is the CEO of Barefoot Innovation Group, the Co-Founder of Hummingbird Regtech, an angel investor, advises financial companies and governments worldwide, delivers a regular podcast with global industry specialists on RegTech, and if all of that is not enough, she is writing a book on financial innovation and regulation.
If you want to understand how technology and the digital revolution will impact regulation and compliance in financial services, Jo Ann Barefoot should be one of your global gotos.
Jo Ann is in London speaking at the RegTech Rising Summit this week so I took the opportunity to get her views on this often technical subject and get us excited about where retech is going.
Lawrence Wintermeyer: Jo Ann, you do a lot of work in the new field of “regtech.” Can you give us a simple definition of regtech, and tell us who is excited about it?
Jo Ann Barefoot: You’re right about the excitement, which is notable since most people don’t find financial regulation exciting. Something truly new is happening.
“Regtech” is new-generation technology that’s transforming financial regulation and compliance. The same technologies that are remaking everything else, like big data, artificial intelligence, blockchains, cloud computing and voice interface, are revolutionizing the regulatory realm too. They offer the tantalizing prospect of improving regulatory results and cutting costs, at the same time.
Both regulators and regtech firms are attacking pain points in the regulatory chain. Examples include creating “machine-readable” regulations; automating reporting interfaces to enable continuous monitoring of risk; using AI to scan securities market information for signs of misconduct; and equipping mobile phones with chatbots so consumers can report financial scams.
Wintermeyer: I know you’re a former bank regulator. How did you find yourself involved in the regtech space?
See: Crypto Bear Market Gives UK Regulators Breathing Space to Finalize Crypto Regulation
Barefoot: I’ve been a regulator, Senate staffer, and consultant. About five years ago, I started immersing in new technology, partly through a senior fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School Center for Business and Government. I realized that current regulation is failing in areas like consumer protection and anti-money laundering and that new technology could do better. I now focus on helping convert financial regulation to “digitally-native” design, and I’ve co-founded a regtech firm, Hummingbird, which combats money laundering.
Wintermeyer: Anti-money laundering, or AML, is one of the most advanced regtech use cases, and the statistics are frankly shocking. The UN says we currently catch less than 1 percent of global financial crime because of technology which is out of date and unscalable. What are the most promising changes emerging?
Barefoot: AML is probably the most expensive and risky regulatory area for banks -- the industry spends at least $30 billion a year to catch that minuscule fraction of cases. And remember, the crimes funded with laundered money are violent -- terrorism and global trade in drugs, weapons, endangered animals, and human beings. A million children are trafficked every year. This is easy money, highly profitable, with low chance of being caught.
Technology can change that. Financial crimes have data typologies, distinctive patterns that become easy to spot if we can consolidate and analyze enough information. Today’s machine learning tools can find the patterns, while new encryption techniques can make it safe to share data much more widely while safeguarding privacy. Technology can also fix the AML “Know-Your-Customer” rules, which currently block millions of innocent people from financial access because they lack traditional identity documents. New digital identity techniques can screen nearly everyone, cheaply and accurately.
We have the technology to do all this well. We need to update the regulations.
Wintermeyer: Regulators currently seem preoccupied with decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges as platforms for money laundering and terrorist financing, which appear marginal next to what is going on in the real global banking system. Does regtech have a role to play here?
Barefoot: Crypto bedevils policymakers because it breaks the molds and because it’s mutating too fast for traditional regulation to keep up. Blockchains arguably have higher promise, and higher risk, than any other innovation except maybe AI. They can accelerate financial processes and reduce costs, whether by moving payments on the internet or enabling new ways to raise capital. Most regulators aim for a balance between over- and under-regulating, but the learning curve is daunting. The road will be bumpy.
Wintermeyer: There is a movement globally toward financial regulators adopting “regulatory sandboxes” to assess fintech innovation in products and processes. Will we soon see regtech sandboxes where regulators could experiment with new technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning and blockchains? Will we see more regulatory sandboxes being launched by US regulators?
See: UK banks publish fintech collaboration toolkit
Barefoot: I hope so! Traditional regulatory change is slow. Technology change is fast, and accelerating. The widening gap between the two is loaded with risk for consumers, the financial system, and regulators themselves. One official has said that if regulators hold still today, they’re actually “accelerating backward.”
We can’t speed up regulatory change, soundly, unless regulators can learn faster, and that requires letting them do small-scale experimentation. Regulators throughout the world are creating sandboxes, greenhouses and reglabs: safe, risk-controlled spaces where they can try things out, study how new products and practices really work, and learn hands-on. In the US, the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection has launched a sandbox-type program, as has the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). All the federal US regulators and several states have innovation initiatives launched or planned. Most focus more on testing fintech than trying regtech, but both are coming.
Wintermeyer: You often highlight a remarkable initiative of the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority to test “machine-executable regulation” -- issuing some regulations in the form of computer code rather than words. Is this possible? If so, what changes will it bring?
Barefoot: The FCA is the world’s most innovative regulator and they’ve taken a breathtakingly creative step, running a test of whether some regulations could be issued in the form of code and become, in effect, self-implementing. That could drastically reduce compliance costs, mistakes, and time lags.
The experiment was held under an FCA-invented process called a “tech sprint,” which is essentially a hackathon. Experts in financial regulation and technology teamed up to translate a regulatory reporting requirement from words into code and run it against a set of test data. When the computer produced a correct report -- in ten seconds -- the participants jumped up and cheered. Think about that. When was the last time we saw banks and regulators cheering together?
Wintermeyer: US regulators participated in one of these FCA tech sprints this year, and I know some have regtech initiatives on the drawing board. What path do you see the US taking along with regtech?
See: 5 ways regulation can be a competitive advantage to British business
Barefoot: America has a uniquely fragmented regulatory structure which, for all its strengths, impedes innovation. We can’t readily change it, so we need to make it work better through more innovation and more interagency collaboration.
That’s happening. The Treasury Department issued a fintech report this year that calls on the federal financial agencies both to innovate and to coordinate. There’s a lot of momentum developing.
Continue to the full article --> here
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
 |  |  |
|---|---|---|
 |  |  |
August 19, 2026 | NCFA Resource | Cybersecurity And Fraud, Risk Compliance And Regtech, Capital Markets And Market Infrastructure 12 Controls For Cyber Risk, Vendors, Access And Recovery In August 2026, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority published Cybersecurity Effective Practices, a 12-part framework for FINRA member firms reviewing cybersecurity programs, controls and operating procedures. A firm can use the resource as a structured checklist for who owns cybersecurity, which systems and vendors create risk, who can access sensitive data, how threats are detected, and whether the business can recover when systems fail. FINRA designed the practices to scale with firm size, business model, technology complexity and risk profile. What It Does In Practice FINRA organizes the resource around 12 areas: governance risk management third party risk management asset management access control and identity management data protection security awareness and training vulnerability and patch management security monitoring threat intelligence and information sharing incident response and reporting resilience and recovery The framework starts with accountability and risk ownership. FINRA recommends a designated cybersecurity lead, regular reporting to senior decision makers, documented policies and periodic reviews, while also making cyber risk part of decisions about new technology, systems and operating changes. From there, ...
August 19, 2026 | NCFA Story Intelligence | Competition And Market Structure, Capital Markets And Market Infrastructure, Open Banking Open Finance And Data Sharing Can Canada Turn Access Into Productive Participation? Capital, Payments, Data And Retail Markets Are Converging Into A 2030 Growth Test On March 9, 2026, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission held its 45th Annual Small Business Forum. The agenda moved from early-stage entrepreneurs to growth companies and smaller public companies. Market participants could propose recommendations and vote on which should be prioritized for the SEC and Congress. The U.S. has not solved small-business capital formation. That is partly why the process is useful. Questions around finders, investor eligibility, offering rules, fund structures, secondary liquidity and smaller public-company economics keep returning as markets change. Canada is now opening several parts of its financial economy at the same time. Capital programs, SME financing, payments access, consumer-driven banking and retail private-market initiatives are moving from policy design toward operating tests. The question is no longer whether access exists on paper. It is whether more businesses, investors and challengers can use it economically. The U.S. Keeps Reopening The Participation Question The Forum looks across the financing lifecycle The SEC brings ...
Aug 19, 2026 Canada enters the second half of 2026 with two pieces of payment infrastructure arriving at once. The Real-Time Rail is scheduled to go live in the fourth quarter, and the regulations underpinning consumer-driven banking were published in the Canada Gazette in June. Both have been discussed for the better part of a decade. Neither has yet changed how a Canadian consumer actually pays for something online. That gap between framework and behaviour matters more than either announcement. The most recent full picture of Canadian payment behaviour comes from Payments Canada's Canadian Payment Methods and Trends report, published in October 2025 and covering 2024, which counted 22.5 billion retail payment transactions worth $12.2 trillion. The market grew three per cent in both volume and value year over year. Over five years, volume rose nine per cent and value 22 per cent. Some of the sharpest movement in that behaviour is happening in sectors where account-to-account transfer is already the preferred rail, regulated online gambling among them. Swiper online casino Canada, a casino and sportsbook brand launched into the Canadian market in 2025 and available across the country outside Ontario, is a useful illustration: it runs thousands of casino, ...
```html August 18, 2026 | NCFA Insight | Artificial Intelligence And Data, Payments Infrastructure And Money Movement, Digital Assets Wallet Delegation, Spending Limits And Machine Payments On August 18, 2026, Amazon Web Services made AgentCore Payments generally available, taking the capability from its May preview into production. AI agents can now encounter paid APIs, services accessed through Model Context Protocol (MCP), or other digital resources during a workflow and initiate payment through infrastructure that connects spending controls with external wallets. AWS can enforce how much an agent is allowed to spend and for how long, manage access to wallet providers and coordinate the payment from inside the same infrastructure used to run the agent. Coinbase or Stripe's Privy provides the wallet, while external providers and blockchain networks handle signing, verification and settlement. AWS isn't taking custody of customer money. It is taking a position earlier in the transaction, where software determines whether it has permission to buy something and which payment connection to use. That puts payment authority closer to the AI execution layer. GA Adds More Ways For Agents To Pay During A Task AgentCore Payments already supported Coinbase and Privy wallets, spending controls and x402 payments during preview ...
August 18, 2026 | NCFA Feature | Regulation And Policy, Digital Assets, Capital Markets And Market Infrastructure New Offering Rules, Crypto Resales And Investment Contract Exit On August 18, 2026, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission proposed Regulation Crypto Assets (download 402 page PDF Proposed Regulation Crypto Assets document), a tailored securities framework for certain investment contracts involving crypto assets. The 402-page proposal would create a startup exemption of up to US$5 million over four years, a larger fundraising exemption with US$20 million and US$75 million tiers, crypto-specific disclosures, new SEC forms, secondary-market provisions, state-law preemption and a process for determining when an investment contract has ended. The scope is narrower than the name might suggest. Regulation Crypto Assets would apply to what the SEC calls a covered investment contract. A crypto asset must be subject to the investment contract, the crypto asset itself must not be a security and no other asset can be subject to that contract. That builds on the SEC's March 2026 crypto interpretation. The March action addressed when transactions involving a non-security crypto asset can create an investment contract and when that relationship can end. Regulation Crypto Assets would add an operating framework around that ...
August 18, 2026 | NCFA Insight | Capital Markets And Market Infrastructure, SME Finance And Business Banking, Competition And Market Structure Canadian Capital Embraces Private Credit Abroad While Domestic Business Lending Remains Bank Led On August 2026, the Bank of Canada mapped Canada's private credit market and exposed an unusual divide. Private credit remains a relatively small source of financing for Canadian businesses, yet Canadian pension funds, insurers, investment funds and banks have built approximately C$500 billion of exposure to the asset class, much of it outside Canada. Non-bank loans have accounted for about 15% of external funding for Canadian non-financial businesses for roughly a decade. Banks and public debt markets still provide about three-quarters of external business financing. By contrast, private credit has become a much larger alternative to traditional lending in parts of the United States. The interesting question for Canada isn't whether private credit exists. It clearly does. It is why Canadian institutional capital has embraced the asset class globally while Canadian businesses continue to use it relatively little at home. Canadian Capital Is Already Deep Into Private Credit The C$500 billion estimate shows that Canadian exposure to private credit is already material even though the domestic ...
Aug 18, 2026 One word sits at the core of all online casino marketing strategies: ‘engagement’. Casinos continually seek ways to keep customers playing their games for extended periods. They also want players to enjoy the experience enough to return repeatedly. Length of play and frequency of logins are the key metrics for measuring player engagement. It is not enough just to attract players in the first place; casino sites need to retain them if they wish to thrive. The online casino sector is incredibly competitive. This article will take a close look at some of the cutting-edge techniques that are being used to boost engagement levels. Why modern engagement techniques are important to game developers The operators of online casinos have always been aware of the need to attract and retain customers. From the start, they have used quite traditional methods such as bonus offers and loyalty schemes to achieve that goal. Those methods are still very much part of the online casino engagement armoury, but they are being supplemented by modern techniques. This is because there are so many casino sites offering bonuses and promotions – so they are no longer enough on their own. A casino site ...
August 18, 2026 | NCFA Market Activity | SME Finance And Business Banking, Banking And Credit, Capital Markets And Market Infrastructure US$100M Macquarie Facility Tests Clearco’s Rebuilt Ecommerce Funding Model On August 18, 2026, Toronto-based Clearco secured a US$100 million Macquarie asset-backed facility that it expects will support approximately US$900 million in funding to ecommerce brands over the next two years. Macquarie's New York Fixed Income and Currencies team provided the financing. The facility expands Clearco's capacity to provide qualified brands with up to US$10 million and estimated terms of four to 12 months. Clearco says the funding can support inventory, marketing, major purchase orders and expansion across direct-to-consumer, wholesale, retail, marketplaces and social commerce. The US$900 million target is a scaling opportunity now, meaning Clearco has to convert institutional funding capacity into sustained customer financing while controlling credit performance and capital costs. US$100M Facility Sets A US$900M Funding Test The two headline numbers measure different things. The US$100 million is the size of the Macquarie asset-backed facility. The US$900 million is Clearco's expected customer funding over two years. That expected funding volume is nine times the facility's headline size. The announcement doesn't disclose the borrowing base, advance rate, asset ...
Aug 18, 2026 Markets have a few gauges that traders keep open even when they are not planning to trade them. The Nasdaq 100 is one of those gauges. It tends to get attention before the US session, during earnings weeks, and on days when rates or technology shares move hard. Part of that comes from the companies inside the index. The Nasdaq 100 includes many of the names people already know from software, chips, cloud services, online retail, and consumer devices. When traders change their view on those companies, the index often shows it quickly. That is why the index can be useful even for people who are not trading it that day. Why Traders Watch the Nasdaq 100 The Nasdaq 100 tracks 100 large non-financial companies listed on the Nasdaq exchange. Because the index leans toward technology and other growth businesses, it can move differently from broader benchmarks that include more banks, utilities, and industrial stocks. A broad index may look calm while the Nasdaq 100 is already showing stress in growth shares. That mix gives the index a sharper edge. It may rally when traders feel more confident about growth and future earnings. It may also sell ...
August 17, 2026 | NCFA Market Activity | Banking And Credit, Artificial Intelligence And Data Construction Lending Workflow Modernization In Canada On August 17, 2026, Montréal-based Brdg confirmed a C$850,000 pre-seed round to expand its construction finance platform. One week earlier, Toronto-based Mortgage Automator launched Construction Draw Management, bringing construction budgets, draw schedules and approvals into the active loan file. Brdg organizes project information across developers, cost consultants and lenders. Mortgage Automator brings draw control into the lender's loan system. Brdg Structures The Information Lenders Need Brdg isn't a lender. Its software organizes the documents, budgets and project information used to prepare and review construction financing. The platform accepts documents through email or upload, classifies them and organizes them into a project record. It tracks budgets, project progress and funding information, checks draw readiness across legal, contract, construction and financial categories, and produces lender-ready reports. Brdg provides separate workflows for developers, lenders and cost consultants. Its construction finance platform also shows document ingestion, project dashboards, cash-flow tracking and draw-disbursement readiness. Brdg reports 30,000+ construction-related documents processed, more than C$300 million in development and active construction, and an average 5.5-day reduction in draw cycle time. The document volume and reported time ...
August 19, 2026 | NCFA Resource | Cybersecurity And Fraud, Risk Compliance And Regtech, Capital Markets And Market Infrastructure 12 Controls For Cyber Risk, Vendors, Access And Recovery In August 2026, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority published Cybersecurity Effective Practices, a 12-part framework for FINRA member firms reviewing cybersecurity programs, controls and operating procedures. A firm can use the resource as a structured checklist for who owns cybersecurity, which systems and vendors create risk, who can access sensitive data, how threats are detected, and whether the business can recover when systems fail. FINRA designed the practices to scale with firm size, business model, technology complexity and risk profile. What It Does In Practice FINRA organizes the resource around 12 areas: governance risk management third party risk management asset management access control and identity management data protection security awareness and training vulnerability and patch management security monitoring threat intelligence and information sharing incident response and reporting resilience and recovery The framework starts with accountability and risk ownership. FINRA recommends a designated cybersecurity lead, regular reporting to senior decision makers, documented policies and periodic reviews, while also making cyber risk part of decisions about new technology, systems and operating changes. From there, ...
August 19, 2026 | NCFA Story Intelligence | Competition And Market Structure, Capital Markets And Market Infrastructure, Open Banking Open Finance And Data Sharing Can Canada Turn Access Into Productive Participation? Capital, Payments, Data And Retail Markets Are Converging Into A 2030 Growth Test On March 9, 2026, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission held its 45th Annual Small Business Forum. The agenda moved from early-stage entrepreneurs to growth companies and smaller public companies. Market participants could propose recommendations and vote on which should be prioritized for the SEC and Congress. The U.S. has not solved small-business capital formation. That is partly why the process is useful. Questions around finders, investor eligibility, offering rules, fund structures, secondary liquidity and smaller public-company economics keep returning as markets change. Canada is now opening several parts of its financial economy at the same time. Capital programs, SME financing, payments access, consumer-driven banking and retail private-market initiatives are moving from policy design toward operating tests. The question is no longer whether access exists on paper. It is whether more businesses, investors and challengers can use it economically. The U.S. Keeps Reopening The Participation Question The Forum looks across the financing lifecycle The SEC brings ...
Aug 19, 2026 Canada enters the second half of 2026 with two pieces of payment infrastructure arriving at once. The Real-Time Rail is scheduled to go live in the fourth quarter, and the regulations underpinning consumer-driven banking were published in the Canada Gazette in June. Both have been discussed for the better part of a decade. Neither has yet changed how a Canadian consumer actually pays for something online. That gap between framework and behaviour matters more than either announcement. The most recent full picture of Canadian payment behaviour comes from Payments Canada's Canadian Payment Methods and Trends report, published in October 2025 and covering 2024, which counted 22.5 billion retail payment transactions worth $12.2 trillion. The market grew three per cent in both volume and value year over year. Over five years, volume rose nine per cent and value 22 per cent. Some of the sharpest movement in that behaviour is happening in sectors where account-to-account transfer is already the preferred rail, regulated online gambling among them. Swiper online casino Canada, a casino and sportsbook brand launched into the Canadian market in 2025 and available across the country outside Ontario, is a useful illustration: it runs thousands of casino, ...
```html August 18, 2026 | NCFA Insight | Artificial Intelligence And Data, Payments Infrastructure And Money Movement, Digital Assets Wallet Delegation, Spending Limits And Machine Payments On August 18, 2026, Amazon Web Services made AgentCore Payments generally available, taking the capability from its May preview into production. AI agents can now encounter paid APIs, services accessed through Model Context Protocol (MCP), or other digital resources during a workflow and initiate payment through infrastructure that connects spending controls with external wallets. AWS can enforce how much an agent is allowed to spend and for how long, manage access to wallet providers and coordinate the payment from inside the same infrastructure used to run the agent. Coinbase or Stripe's Privy provides the wallet, while external providers and blockchain networks handle signing, verification and settlement. AWS isn't taking custody of customer money. It is taking a position earlier in the transaction, where software determines whether it has permission to buy something and which payment connection to use. That puts payment authority closer to the AI execution layer. GA Adds More Ways For Agents To Pay During A Task AgentCore Payments already supported Coinbase and Privy wallets, spending controls and x402 payments during preview ...
August 18, 2026 | NCFA Feature | Regulation And Policy, Digital Assets, Capital Markets And Market Infrastructure New Offering Rules, Crypto Resales And Investment Contract Exit On August 18, 2026, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission proposed Regulation Crypto Assets (download 402 page PDF Proposed Regulation Crypto Assets document), a tailored securities framework for certain investment contracts involving crypto assets. The 402-page proposal would create a startup exemption of up to US$5 million over four years, a larger fundraising exemption with US$20 million and US$75 million tiers, crypto-specific disclosures, new SEC forms, secondary-market provisions, state-law preemption and a process for determining when an investment contract has ended. The scope is narrower than the name might suggest. Regulation Crypto Assets would apply to what the SEC calls a covered investment contract. A crypto asset must be subject to the investment contract, the crypto asset itself must not be a security and no other asset can be subject to that contract. That builds on the SEC's March 2026 crypto interpretation. The March action addressed when transactions involving a non-security crypto asset can create an investment contract and when that relationship can end. Regulation Crypto Assets would add an operating framework around that ...
August 18, 2026 | NCFA Insight | Capital Markets And Market Infrastructure, SME Finance And Business Banking, Competition And Market Structure Canadian Capital Embraces Private Credit Abroad While Domestic Business Lending Remains Bank Led On August 2026, the Bank of Canada mapped Canada's private credit market and exposed an unusual divide. Private credit remains a relatively small source of financing for Canadian businesses, yet Canadian pension funds, insurers, investment funds and banks have built approximately C$500 billion of exposure to the asset class, much of it outside Canada. Non-bank loans have accounted for about 15% of external funding for Canadian non-financial businesses for roughly a decade. Banks and public debt markets still provide about three-quarters of external business financing. By contrast, private credit has become a much larger alternative to traditional lending in parts of the United States. The interesting question for Canada isn't whether private credit exists. It clearly does. It is why Canadian institutional capital has embraced the asset class globally while Canadian businesses continue to use it relatively little at home. Canadian Capital Is Already Deep Into Private Credit The C$500 billion estimate shows that Canadian exposure to private credit is already material even though the domestic ...
Aug 18, 2026 One word sits at the core of all online casino marketing strategies: ‘engagement’. Casinos continually seek ways to keep customers playing their games for extended periods. They also want players to enjoy the experience enough to return repeatedly. Length of play and frequency of logins are the key metrics for measuring player engagement. It is not enough just to attract players in the first place; casino sites need to retain them if they wish to thrive. The online casino sector is incredibly competitive. This article will take a close look at some of the cutting-edge techniques that are being used to boost engagement levels. Why modern engagement techniques are important to game developers The operators of online casinos have always been aware of the need to attract and retain customers. From the start, they have used quite traditional methods such as bonus offers and loyalty schemes to achieve that goal. Those methods are still very much part of the online casino engagement armoury, but they are being supplemented by modern techniques. This is because there are so many casino sites offering bonuses and promotions – so they are no longer enough on their own. A casino site ...
August 18, 2026 | NCFA Market Activity | SME Finance And Business Banking, Banking And Credit, Capital Markets And Market Infrastructure US$100M Macquarie Facility Tests Clearco’s Rebuilt Ecommerce Funding Model On August 18, 2026, Toronto-based Clearco secured a US$100 million Macquarie asset-backed facility that it expects will support approximately US$900 million in funding to ecommerce brands over the next two years. Macquarie's New York Fixed Income and Currencies team provided the financing. The facility expands Clearco's capacity to provide qualified brands with up to US$10 million and estimated terms of four to 12 months. Clearco says the funding can support inventory, marketing, major purchase orders and expansion across direct-to-consumer, wholesale, retail, marketplaces and social commerce. The US$900 million target is a scaling opportunity now, meaning Clearco has to convert institutional funding capacity into sustained customer financing while controlling credit performance and capital costs. US$100M Facility Sets A US$900M Funding Test The two headline numbers measure different things. The US$100 million is the size of the Macquarie asset-backed facility. The US$900 million is Clearco's expected customer funding over two years. That expected funding volume is nine times the facility's headline size. The announcement doesn't disclose the borrowing base, advance rate, asset ...
Aug 18, 2026 Markets have a few gauges that traders keep open even when they are not planning to trade them. The Nasdaq 100 is one of those gauges. It tends to get attention before the US session, during earnings weeks, and on days when rates or technology shares move hard. Part of that comes from the companies inside the index. The Nasdaq 100 includes many of the names people already know from software, chips, cloud services, online retail, and consumer devices. When traders change their view on those companies, the index often shows it quickly. That is why the index can be useful even for people who are not trading it that day. Why Traders Watch the Nasdaq 100 The Nasdaq 100 tracks 100 large non-financial companies listed on the Nasdaq exchange. Because the index leans toward technology and other growth businesses, it can move differently from broader benchmarks that include more banks, utilities, and industrial stocks. A broad index may look calm while the Nasdaq 100 is already showing stress in growth shares. That mix gives the index a sharper edge. It may rally when traders feel more confident about growth and future earnings. It may also sell ...
August 17, 2026 | NCFA Market Activity | Banking And Credit, Artificial Intelligence And Data Construction Lending Workflow Modernization In Canada On August 17, 2026, Montréal-based Brdg confirmed a C$850,000 pre-seed round to expand its construction finance platform. One week earlier, Toronto-based Mortgage Automator launched Construction Draw Management, bringing construction budgets, draw schedules and approvals into the active loan file. Brdg organizes project information across developers, cost consultants and lenders. Mortgage Automator brings draw control into the lender's loan system. Brdg Structures The Information Lenders Need Brdg isn't a lender. Its software organizes the documents, budgets and project information used to prepare and review construction financing. The platform accepts documents through email or upload, classifies them and organizes them into a project record. It tracks budgets, project progress and funding information, checks draw readiness across legal, contract, construction and financial categories, and produces lender-ready reports. Brdg provides separate workflows for developers, lenders and cost consultants. Its construction finance platform also shows document ingestion, project dashboards, cash-flow tracking and draw-disbursement readiness. Brdg reports 30,000+ construction-related documents processed, more than C$300 million in development and active construction, and an average 5.5-day reduction in draw cycle time. The document volume and reported time ...
Leave a Reply