Yuno gives merchants more control at checkout by bringing multi-acquirer routing to in-store payments. Sep. 29, 2026, 09:00 AM * In-store and online payments now run on one AI-native omnichannel stack, with one ledger and one shared view of known customers. * POS Orchestration puts several acquirers and alternative payment methods (APMs) behind one compatible terminal, so merchants can choose who processes each sale, manage their merchant discount rate (MDR), and approve more sales. * Tap to Pay turns a compatible Android phone or iPhone into a card reader - no POS terminal needed. * Both products run on the same routing engine, vault, and ledger as Yuno's online payments, so merchants can start in-store only or run both channels as one. SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 29, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) - Yuno, the AI-native intelligence system of global payments and financial services, powering the financial infrastructure of enterprise merchants, banks, and wallets, today launched In-Person Payments, bringing routing, approval increase, and reconciliation to the physical point of sale. The offering gives merchants more control via one connection for multi-acquirer routing across compatible terminals and Tap to Pay acceptance on mobile devices. Yuno merchants are now able to bring online and in-person payments into one omnichannel platform. Most physical terminals remain tied to a single acquirer, limiting a merchant's ability to route transactions based on cost, approval performance, or provider availability. That means each sale goes to whichever acquirer a given terminal was set up for, with no routing and no backup when a host fails. Yet physical systems are where most money moves. Only 15% of what consumers pay merchants goes through online channels, according to Worldpay's Global Payments Report 2025. The other 85%, about $37.8 trillion a year globally, still happens in person, which means online-only payment infrastructure leaves most of a merchant's revenue unoptimized. In-store payments also tend to sit in separate reporting and reconciliation systems, distinct from those used for online commerce. With Yuno's new in-person payments offering, merchants can bring their supported online and in-store payments onto a single omnichannel platform. Yuno's POS Orchestration puts several acquirers behind one terminal. Each sale is routed according to the merchant's own priorities for cost, approval and availability, and if an acquirer goes down, the sale can automatically be routed through another. Routing volume across connected acquirers, based on agreed pricing and performance, gives merchants more control over their merchant discount rates. Yuno's solution works on the compatible terminals that merchants and banks already own, and beyond cards, lets merchants accept APMs at the terminal, the same methods their customers already use online. Merchants will manage online and in-store transactions through one integration, with unified omnichannel reporting and reconciliation. "The terminal should not dictate the payment provider. The merchant should," said Juan Pablo Ortega, co-founder and CEO, Yuno. "In-person payments brings Yuno to the counter, so merchants can benefit from dynamic routing, keep selling when a provider goes down, and manage online and in-person payments through one platform. The physical checkout should be as flexible and dynamic as the online one." Online, a merchant knows who bought what. At the register, the same person often arrives anonymously. With in-store and online payments on one AI-native stack, merchants reconcile both channels in a single ledger and can link store purchases to known customers, building an omnichannel view of each buyer. For merchants without a terminal fleet, Yuno is also introducing Tap to Pay, which turns a compatible Android phone or iPhone into a card reader, with no POS terminal to buy or maintain. Banks and acquirers can offer it to the merchants they already serve, under their own brand, giving them a way to modernize their in-store experience. Transactions accepted on the phone will enter the same reconciliation environment as every other payment flow on Yuno. Yuno built both products with input from enterprise merchants and financial institutions to address their needs globally. In-Person Payments also brings Yuno's AI agents to the physical world: the Payment Concierge Agent, which learns from every transaction on the network, now optimizes routing and approval at the terminal - not just at the online checkout. The expansion allows customers that already manage online payments on Yuno to add physical acceptance without building or operating a separate system. Yuno will go deeper on the launch in a live webinar on October 15, 2026: In-Store and Online Payments as One Stack: Routing, Approval and Reconciliation. Register at https://landings.y.uno/in-person-payments-webinar. More on In-Person Payments at https://y.uno/en/product/in-person-payments. About Yuno Yuno is the AI-native intelligence system of global payments and financial services, powering the financial infrastructure of enterprise merchants, banks, and wallets. Through one API, Yuno connects them to payins, payouts, fraud prevention, KYC/KYB, and stablecoins at global scale, so they can operate everywhere through a single integration. Agnostic by design, Yuno offers connectivity to 1,000+ payment methods and 460+ integrations in 190+ countries, optimizing acceptance rates, reducing costs, and strengthening security through specialized AI agents that learn from every transaction on the network. Global brands run their payments on Yuno, including McDonald's, NetEase Games, GoFundMe, inDrive, and Rappi. Banks, acquirers, PSPs, and wallets use Yuno to modernize their infrastructure without replacing core systems, and to prepare for the next generation of commerce, including agentic payments. Media Contact Kate Gundry [email protected] 617-797-5174 Markets Insider and Business Insider Editorial Teams were not involved in the creation of this post. Sponsored Financial Content

Yuno partners with Cyclops to become first AI-native orchestrator offering global stablecoin payments. Stay updated with real-time coverage of global trade developments, policy changes, and market movements affecting international commerce. 2 live stories 24/7 coverage Expert analysis * Mizuho Bank and the International Finance Corporation announced a US$1 billion risk-sharing facility to expand access to supply chain finance for suppliers and distributors in Asia-Pacific markets. * The partnership was formalised at Sibos 2026 in Miami, combining IFC's development finance expertise with Mizuho's international trade finance platform and global corporate client network. * Over the next three years, IFC will provide up to US$500 million in risk-sharing for supply chain finance instruments, including payables finance, receivables financing, and pre-shipment financing programmes. * The facility is designed to address working capital constraints faced by small and medium-sized enterprises in Asia-Pacific, enabling businesses to obtain financing linked to the credit strength of their buyers. * The facility was structured through IFC's Global Supply Chain Finance programme, which has supported over US$3.8 billion in supplier finance transactions since its launch in 2023. * Supply chain finance allows eligible suppliers to receive earlier payment on approved invoices, reducing the gap between delivering goods or services and receiving payment whilst supporting inventory purchases and business continuity. Filters. Cross-Border Payments Foreign Exchange East Asia & Pacific North America South Asia The Indonesian rupiah closed at IDR 17,978 per US dollar on 28th September 2026, trading near the psychological Rp. 18,000 threshold, having depreciated approximately 7.1% year-to-date from Rp. 16,694 at end-2025. Devanshee Dave Cross-Border Payments Digital Assets Digital Payments Channels Payment Processors Stablecoins Europe and Central Asia North America * Yuno, an AI-native commerce intelligence system, partnered with Cyclops to bring stablecoin payments and settlement capabilities to its financial institutions and merchants. * The partnership enables Yuno's customers to leverage stablecoin capabilities across settlement, payins, payouts, and treasury use cases without building new integrations. * Customers can access stablecoin capabilities through the same single integration used for traditional payment methods on Yuno's platform. * The partnership addresses growing merchant demand for stablecoins as a complement to traditional payment methods, particularly for businesses operating across multiple currencies and markets. * The collaboration focuses on reducing complexity by providing cost-effective, flexible payment infrastructure with unified access to both traditional and stablecoin payment rails. Devanshee Dave Development Finance Export Agency Finance Risk Management East Asia & Pacific Europe and Central Asia North America Mizuho Bank and the International Finance Corporation announced a US$1 billion risk-sharing facility to expand access to supply chain finance for suppliers and distributors in Asia-Pacific markets. Devanshee Dave Corporate Treasury Cross-Border Payments Digital Payments Channels Europe and Central Asia North America Bank of America announced the launch of Payments Insights, a new CashPro capability providing corporate and commercial clients with intelligence on payment efficiency, cross-border flows and working-capital performance. Devanshee Dave 29 Sept, 2026 Correspondent Banking Cross-Border Payments Digital Payments Channels Europe and Central Asia North America Finastra announced the launch of Repair Recommendations at Sibos 2026 in Miami, an AI-powered capability within AI OperatorAssist designed to help banks resolve payment processing issues more efficiently. Devanshee Dave 29 Sept, 2026 Cross-Border Payments Digital Assets Digital Payments Channels East Asia & Pacific Europe and Central Asia North America KB Kookmin Bank signed a Strategic MOU with BNY on 28th March at SIBOS 2026 in Miami to explore cross-border financial services leveraging digital payments and digital assets. Devanshee Dave 29 Sept, 2026 Cross-Border Payments Digital Payments Channels Payment Processors Europe and Central Asia North America Oracle is integrating with Swift's blockchain ledger to enable financial institutions to participate in payment flows and use their own tokenised deposit infrastructures across institutions. Devanshee Dave 29 Sept, 2026 Cash Management Correspondent Banking Cross-Border Payments Europe and Central Asia North America HSBC announced the launch of HSBCnio, a digital solution designed to simplify banking for corporate and institutional clients by integrating services, data and intelligence into their existing platforms and workflows. Devanshee Dave 29 Sept, 2026 Published: 28 Sept, 2026 Cash Management Digital Payments Channels Europe and Central Asia Lloyds launches Get Paid invoicing tool to help business customers manage payments and reduce administrative burden at no additional cost. Enjel De Guzman Cross-Border Payments Instant Payments Payment Processors Europe and Central Asia North America Swift is connecting domestic instant payment systems including Bizum, PayID from Australian Payments Plus, and Pix to enable cross-border payments using familiar identifiers such as mobile phone numbers, emails and virtual payment addresses. Devanshee Dave 28 Sept, 2026 Cross-Border Payments Digital Payments Channels Instant Payments Europe and Central Asia North America BNY announced the launch of a Pay-to-Wallet capability enabling banks to send cross-border payments from bank accounts to participating retail digital wallets using existing SWIFT payment messages and correspondent banking infrastructure. Devanshee Dave 28 Sept, 2026 Published: 28 Sept, 2026 Digital Trade Risk Management Trade Finance East Asia & Pacific Europe and Central Asia Middle East and North Africa HSBC launches Smart Checking, an AI-powered solution to standardise trade finance documentation processing and accelerate payment times for clients. Devanshee Dave Published: 28 Sept, 2026 Company News Trade Finance East Asia & Pacific Europe and Central Asia Middle East and North Africa BAFT and Trade Treasury Payments enter global strategic partnership spanning joint publications, events and industry dialogue. Deepesh Patel Published: 28 Sept, 2026 Cash Management Supply Chain Finance Trade Finance East Asia & Pacific Europe and Central Asia Latin America & the Caribbean Finastra launches supply chain finance solution at Sibos 2026 to help banks scale working capital programs and accelerate time to market. Devanshee Dave Trade Finance Trade Policy East Asia & Pacific Europe and Central Asia North America Brussels has warned British Prime Minister Andy Burnham that Britain needs to raise tariffs on Chinese cars and align more closely with EU trade policy to avoid "made in Europe" barriers on key exports. Devanshee Dave 28 Sept, 2026 Development Finance Supply Chain Finance Trade Finance East Asia & Pacific North America South Asia Vietnam's Minister of Finance Ngo Van Tuan held working sessions with major corporations and financial institutions during his trip to the United States from 20th to 25th September. Devanshee Dave 28 Sept, 2026 Published: 27 Sept, 2026 10 updates Company News Trade Finance North America TTP reports live from Sibos 2026 in Miami, covering the BAFT Global Councils Forum and industry updates throughout the week. Deepesh Patel Supply Chain Finance Trade Finance East Asia & Pacific Europe and Central Asia Middle East and North Africa The World Trade Report 2026, issued on 15th September, finds that a strengthened multilateral trading system could increase global GDP by roughly 3% or $3 trillion by 2050. Devanshee Dave 25 Sept, 2026 Cross-Border Payments Instant Payments Payment Processors East Asia & Pacific North America South Asia HSBC and Conferma have extended their virtual card partnership into supplier payments across Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia, expanding beyond their initial focus on corporate travel payments. Devanshee Dave 24 Sept, 2026 Development Finance Trade Finance Europe and Central Asia The Export and Investment Fund of Denmark (EIFO) announced a €66.7 million investment in DTCP's €455 million Defence Fund I, joining investors including Porsche and Deutsche Telekom in the first close. Devanshee Dave 24 Sept, 2026

Autonomous finance takes root: MENA startups embrace ai-powered investment platforms. From Yuno's £45m Series B to Saudi Arabia's sovereign AI push via MOZN and HUMAIN, MENA startups are building AI-native financial platforms from the ground up. Sovereign capital is seeding the infrastructure - and the ecosystem is moving from pilots to scale. Across the Middle East and North Africa, a quiet but decisive shift is underway. Artificial intelligence is moving beyond back-office automation and customer-service chatbots into the core of financial decision-making - portfolio construction, payment routing, risk assessment, and sovereign AI infrastructure. The region's startups are not merely adopting AI tools. They are building AI-native financial platforms from the ground up, and the capital markets are taking notice. The scale of the opportunity is substantial. MENA's fintech sector attracted £1.72 billion in venture capital during 2025, a 145 per cent increase on the prior year, with fintech accounting for roughly two-thirds of all regional venture funding by H1 2026. Within that torrent, AI-native financial companies have emerged as the fastest-growing sub-category - drawing capital from sovereign wealth funds, global venture firms, and regional specialists alike. Yuno: AI-native payments infrastructure at scale. The most significant funding round in this space came in August 2026, when Yuno, a payments infrastructure company, closed a £45 million Series B led by Global PayTech Ventures. The investor roster is striking: Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, QuantumLight Capital - the AI-focused firm founded by Revolut chief executive Nik Storonsky - alongside regional players including Rasmal Ventures (backed by the Qatar Investment Authority), Further Ventures (Abu Dhabi sovereign-linked), and GrowthX Capital. Yuno operates an AI-native payments operating system that connects enterprise merchants, banks, and wallets to more than 1,000 payment methods across 190 countries through a single API. Over the past twelve months, the company recovered over £5 billion in transaction volume that would otherwise have failed, boosted authorisation rates by approximately five per cent, and helped merchants cut processing costs by more than £500 million. It is not a payments company that uses AI. It is an AI company that does payments - a distinction that matters in terms of defensibility and margins. Founded in Colombia in 2022, Yuno's Gulf expansion is strategic rather than opportunistic. The region's cross-border trade corridors - connecting Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia - demand exactly the kind of local-everywhere infrastructure Yuno provides. As Rasmal Ventures partner Soumaya Ben Beya Dridje put it: "The Gulf is now one of the fastest-growing payments markets in the world." AppliedAI: sovereign AI for regulated finance. If Yuno represents the commercial-facing edge of autonomous finance, AppliedAI represents the sovereign-facing one. The Abu Dhabi-based company, which operates with over 350 employees across four continents, secured a pre-Series B investment in January 2026 led by Mubadala's MENA VC Fund and Arbor Ventures. AppliedAI's product, Opus, integrates agentic AI with human oversight for regulated industries - banking, insurance, and healthcare. The platform automates mission-critical, document-heavy workflows while maintaining embedded governance controls. For MENA's financial regulators, who have been cautiously progressive in their approach to AI adoption, this human-in-the-loop architecture represents a model that could define how sovereign AI is deployed in capital markets across the region. MOZN: Saudi Arabia's sovereign AI play. Saudi Arabia is building its own sovereign AI capabilities with equal urgency. MOZN, a Riyadh-based enterprise AI startup, received a strategic investment from HUMAIN - the PIF-backed AI company - in August 2026, alongside a partnership to develop sovereign AI solutions for financial institutions and public-sector organisations. The first jointly developed solutions are scheduled for unveiling at LEAP Riyadh, with broader commercial availability planned for H2 2026. The MOZN investment represents one of the first strategic engagements under HUMAIN's newly launched Banking, Financial Services and Insurance sector vertical. The collaboration is designed to accelerate the adoption of sovereign AI across banks, insurers, and government bodies that operate under strict security, compliance, and data-governance requirements. For Saudi Arabia, where Vision 2030 has placed digital sovereignty at the centre of economic policy, MOZN's mandate is not merely commercial - it is strategic. Epic Markets and Cobi: the next wave. The pipeline extends well beyond the established players. Epic Markets, founded in Dubai in 2026 by former Citadel Securities executives Kevin Kimmel and Brian Seegers, raised £10 million in pre-seed funding from Karatage to build a multi-asset brokerage platform that brings institutional-grade trade execution to retail investors. The thesis: the same AI-driven execution and liquidity infrastructure that powers quantitative trading desks can be democratised for individual investors across the MENA region. Meanwhile, Cobi, a Dubai-based AI customer intelligence platform, raised £1 million in pre-seed funding led by Lunara Partners, with participation from Plug and Play, Annex Investments, and Spring. Cobi analyses behavioural, transactional, product, and engagement data to identify changes in customer activity and recommend business actions. In a region where retail banking penetration remains below global averages, the ability to predict churn, personalise product offerings, and automate customer lifecycle management represents genuine commercial value. Further along the maturity curve, Sarwa, the UAE's pioneering robo-advisory platform, surpassed £1 billion in client assets in May 2026. Originally licensed through the DFSA's regulatory sandbox, Sarwa has evolved from a simple ETF portfolio allocator into a comprehensive wealth management platform offering both automated investing and self-directed trading - including halal-compliant portfolios that serve the region's significant Muslim investor base. Capital architecture: sovereign funds lead the way. What distinguishes the MENA autonomous finance ecosystem from its peers in London, Singapore, or Silicon Valley is the architecture of its capital. Sovereign wealth funds and government-linked vehicles are not passive limited partners. They are strategic investors that shape product roadmaps, open regulatory doors, and provide the patient capital that AI-native financial infrastructure requires. Mubadala's direct investment in AppliedAI. HUMAIN's strategic stake in MOZN. Qatar Investment Authority-backed Rasmal Ventures leading into Yuno's Series B. Abu Dhabi's Further Ventures participating in the same round. The pattern is consistent: sovereign capital is seeding AI-native financial infrastructure with the explicit aim of building domestic capabilities that reduce reliance on foreign technology providers. This is not venture capital as the West understands it. This is industrial policy expressed through startup equity - and it has implications for any global fintech company that hopes to compete in MENA markets. The challenges ahead. The trajectory is not without headwinds. Regulatory fragmentation remains a persistent obstacle. Each MENA jurisdiction maintains its own financial services regulatory framework, and while harmonisation efforts are underway, a startup that is fully licensed in the DIFC may face an entirely different compliance regime in Saudi Arabia's SAMA or Qatar's QCB. For AI-native platforms that rely on large, unified datasets, these jurisdictional silos create operational complexity. Talent scarcity is another constraint. Building AI systems for regulated finance requires a narrow intersection of skills - machine learning engineering, quantitative finance, and regulatory compliance - that remains in short supply across the region. The startups that are winning, notably AppliedAI with its 350-strong team, have invested heavily in talent acquisition and retention, often competing with global technology firms for the same engineers. Data localisation requirements, particularly in Saudi Arabia, add another layer of complexity. Sovereign AI solutions must be built on infrastructure that keeps sensitive financial data within national borders - a constraint that raises costs but also creates a natural moat for companies that have already invested in compliant local infrastructure. The verdict. MENA's autonomous finance sector is at an inflection point. The ingredients are in place: substantial and growing capital flows, sovereign strategic backing, a regulatory environment that is cautiously permissive, and a market of over 400 million underserved consumers. What was a collection of promising pilots twelve months ago is now a funded, scaling ecosystem with clear category leaders. The question is no longer whether AI-powered financial platforms will reshape MENA's financial services landscape. The question is how quickly - and which of today's startups will become the region's next generation of financial infrastructure incumbents.