Cross River Bank, a global financial infrastructure platform, partners with Hatch as it expands internationally. November 2, 2026 4min 112 Cross River, a global financial infrastructure platform founded by fintech pioneer Gilles Gade, has brought its global expansion efforts to Sri Lanka, with EVP and Chief AI Officer Pravesh Rijal visiting Colombo recently. Rijal's visit, facilitated by Hatch, one of Sri Lanka's leading startup and innovation hubs, and its founder Jeevan Gnanam, included meetings with senior executives from several of the country's major banks, the Fintech Forum, the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, and the Presidential Secretariat. Discussions focused on enabling faster cross-border payments, expanding access to modern financial infrastructure for Sri Lankan businesses, and exploring how artificial intelligence is reshaping the movement of money and the future of financial services. The visit marks a significant step in exploring opportunities to connect Sri Lanka's financial ecosystem with global payment networks and next-generation financial technology. Cross River's strategy centres on building regulated US dollar infrastructure that banks, fintech companies, and businesses worldwide can access to support international transactions and financial innovation. By connecting payment networks across currencies and markets, the platform aims to reduce friction in cross-border transactions while working alongside local financial institutions rather than replacing them. Cross River already powers some of the world's leading technology and fintech companies, including Stripe, X Money, Coinbase, Affirm, and Upgrade. The company pioneered embedded finance through a technology platform built on its own real-time banking core. Today, Cross River operates at the intersection of banking, fintech, artificial intelligence, and agentic commerce, as it continues to expand its global reach. Hatch: Building Bridges Between Sri Lanka's Startup Ecosystem and Global Innovation Hatch plays a central role in strengthening Sri Lanka's startup ecosystem by connecting entrepreneurs with corporates, investors, development partners, and international markets. Through its incubation and acceleration programmes, corporate innovation partnerships, and investment-readiness initiatives, Hatch supports startups in validating business models, accessing markets, attracting investment, scaling their solutions and continues to build pathways for Sri Lankan innovation to connect with global opportunities. Its role in facilitating Cross River's visit reflects this broader mission of bringing international expertise, capital, and technology partnerships into Sri Lanka's financial and innovation ecosystem. The engagement opens the door for further dialogue on how global financial infrastructure can support Sri Lanka's evolving digital economy, including opportunities for fintech innovation, cross-border commerce, and collaboration between international financial technology providers and local institutions. As Cross River continues to expand into new markets, Sri Lanka presents an opportunity to explore how established financial infrastructure and emerging local innovation can work together to create more connected, accessible, and efficient financial services. Discover more Business news subscription Business news reports Economic analysis reports Views: 112

Important Ripple news and XRP price update: October 22. CryptoPotato 1 day ago 130 BitRss will also check to see what has happened with the XRP ($1.28 · Live) ETFs, as there's finally some good news, but in a very modest manner, and BitRss will talk about the underlying asset's price. Ripple and XRPL. Let's begin with a report from earlier this week, which informed that Ripple has backed the proposed Regulation Crypto Assets framework made by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The company argued that the industry needs clear legislation instead of case-by-case enforcement. Ripple was particularly supportive of the principle that the investment contract, rather than the token itself, should determine whether the asset is a security. It also pushed back against several classifications it believes could recreate regulatory uncertainty. The firm also expanded its institutional presence through 24/7 RWA perpetual swaps via its own prime brokerage, Ripple Prime. Additionally, Cross River Bank partnered with Ripple to bring the latter's stablecoin, RLUSD ($1.00 · Live), into its banking platform. There are also some new developments on the latest XRP Ledger upgrade. As reported recently, the fixCleanup3_4_0 amendment was expected to be activated on Friday, October 23, provided validator support remains above the required 80% threshold. However, the threshold briefly dropped below that percentage yesterday, just two days before implementation, delaying it until November. On the adoption front, Ripple's cross-border token finally got its own official X account. It attracted almost 50,000 followers in just a couple of hours after launching, but the number is above 150,000 as of press time. Some of the first major official accounts that welcomed it included Ripple's CEO, Brad Garlinghouse, Gemini, Uphold, Flare, MoonPay, and others. XRP ETFs broke their streak. CryptoPotato reported over the weekend that one of the longest crypto ETF weekly streaks finally came to an end. After 13 consecutive green weeks, in which net inflows dominated, the spot XRP ETFs recorded minor outflows of less than $2 million in the week that ended on October 15. This was a sharp contrast to the massive $75 million in net inflows recorded just a few weeks earlier. The reversal didn't erase the strong run the products enjoyed beforehand, but it signaled that institutional appetite cooled alongside the broader market's stagnation. The beginning of the current business week solidified this belief, as the XRP ETFs saw two days with no reportable flows. The first green day was October 21, which was the good news, but the bad news was that the actual inflow was less than $1 million. XRP price rejected again. The native token of the Ripple ecosystem tried to break out yesterday alongside the rest of the market. While BTC ($80,723.00 · Live) headed toward $85,000 and ETH ($2,371.32 · Live) briefly exceeded $2,500, XRP jumped to almost $1.40 for the first time in ten days. However, the market's weakness translated into another rejection for XRP, which is down to $1.33 as of press time. The asset's current price setup remains quite mixed. Santiment's latest 365-day MVRV data puts XRP around 0.92, meaning the average buyer over the past year is sitting at a loss. Historically, that places the token in a comparatively more favorable, lower-risk zone, although MVRV alone does not guarantee a rebound. Exchange activity, though, is less encouraging, as smaller Binance withdrawals have surged to their highest share since October 2024, while the relative share of whale-sized transfers has declined. Overall, the combined XRP reserves across Binance, Upbit, and Bithumb have increased by roughly $120 million. On the technical side, $1.33 remains a crucial level, especially after the latest rejection. Analyst ChartNerd warned that continued weekly closes below the 20-week EMA could expose a retest of $1.00, while reclaiming $1.33 could reopen the path toward $1.50-$1.55, and potentially up to $2.00. The post important Ripple news and XRP price update: October 22 appeared first on cryptopotato. BitRss shares this Content always with License. Screenshot generated in real time with SneakPeek Suite

Cross River Bank acquires digital wallet firm Accrue in embedded finance push. Cross River Bank moves to deepen its embedded finance stack by acquiring Accrue, a fintech firm whose branded digital wallet powers rewards and loyalty programs. Cross River Bank, the Fort Lee, New Jersey-based financial infrastructure firm that has positioned itself at the intersection of traditional banking and fintech, has agreed to acquire Accrue, a fintech startup that operates a branded digital wallet built around rewards and loyalty functionality. The transaction, announced on October 20, 2026, is being characterized by Cross River as a meaningful step forward in its ongoing effort to expand its embedded finance capabilities - though the bank has chosen not to disclose the financial terms of the deal. For an institution that has made embedded finance the cornerstone of its growth narrative, the Accrue acquisition is a logical, if carefully timed, move. Cross River has spent the better part of the past decade building itself into an indispensable rails provider for fintechs, offering banking-as-a-service, lending infrastructure, and payment processing to a broad portfolio of technology-driven clients. Acquiring a company whose core product is a consumer-facing branded wallet - one specifically engineered to support loyalty mechanics and merchant reward structures - plugs a meaningful gap in that stack. Accrue's product occupies an increasingly strategic corner of the digital payments landscape. Branded digital wallets that anchor consumer behavior through rewards and loyalty programs have proven to be powerful retention tools, and the demand for such technology from retailers, marketplaces, and financial services platforms continues to intensify. By embedding Accrue's wallet infrastructure directly into its service offering, Cross River positions itself to offer enterprise clients a more complete, end-to-end solution - one that spans from loan origination and payment processing all the way through to consumer engagement and retention mechanics. The timing of this acquisition reflects broader momentum in the embedded finance sector. As non-financial brands continue to integrate financial products directly into their platforms - a trend accelerating across retail, e-commerce, travel, and healthcare - the appetite for turnkey wallet and rewards infrastructure has grown sharply. Cross River, by owning Accrue outright, can bundle these capabilities with its existing suite of banking-as-a-service products, deepening client stickiness and increasing its revenue surface area per customer relationship. Notably, the absence of disclosed deal terms is not unusual in acquisitions of this type, particularly when the target is a venture-backed fintech startup at an early-to-mid stage of its commercial trajectory. What the lack of disclosed figures does underscore is that Cross River's interest here is almost certainly strategic rather than financial arbitrage - the bank is buying capability and product-market fit, not a mature revenue stream it intends to run independently. Cross River has made a pattern of such strategic technology and capability acquisitions as it seeks to differentiate itself from both traditional community banks and the growing field of pure-play banking-as-a-service providers. Embedded finance, once a nascent buzzword, has matured into a competitive battleground where the winners will be determined not merely by price or regulatory positioning but by the depth and coherence of the product suite they can offer to platform partners. Owning a consumer-grade wallet with built-in loyalty functionality gives Cross River a product layer that most of its direct infrastructure competitors do not currently possess. The rewards and loyalty dimension of Accrue's wallet deserves specific attention. While digital wallets themselves have become commoditized, the ability to configure and operate merchant-funded or platform-funded rewards programs within a wallet environment is a technically and commercially distinct capability. It requires robust partner management tooling, real-time transaction categorization, and sophisticated offer redemption logic. These are not trivial engineering problems, and building them in-house would have taken Cross River considerably longer than acquiring a company that has already solved them in production. What this means for the embedded finance market. Cross River's acquisition of Accrue sends a clear signal to the broader embedded finance ecosystem: the competitive bar for infrastructure providers is rising. Platforms and brands evaluating banking-as-a-service partnerships are no longer satisfied with basic account and payment rails - they want engagement tools, loyalty infrastructure, and consumer retention mechanics baked into the same relationship. Cross River is moving to meet that demand directly, and its peers will be watching closely. For fintechs like Accrue, this deal also illustrates the continued appetite among scaled banking infrastructure players to acquire rather than build when speed to market is the priority. The acquisition reflects not just Cross River's ambitions but the accelerating consolidation of a fintech sector in which differentiated point solutions are being absorbed into larger, more integrated platforms. Klaus hartmann. Banking infrastructure correspondent. 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