Cloudflare and Mastercard Partner to Extend Comprehensive Cyber Defense
Weekly news up to Thursday, 19th of February 2026.
Hey FinTech Fanatic!
This last week, I covered how cybersecurity is becoming embedded directly into the payments ecosystem rather than sitting beside it.
Cloudflare and Mastercard announced a strategic partnership aimed at strengthening cyber defense for small businesses, critical infrastructure, and governments.
The collaboration combines Mastercard’s risk intelligence capabilities with Cloudflare’s application security stack to map, prioritize, and automate remediation of vulnerabilities across internet-facing assets.
On the surface, this looks like another enterprise security partnership.
Zoom out, and it’s something bigger.
As payments, digital identity, and financial infrastructure move deeper into cloud-native environments, cyber resilience becomes part of financial stability itself. Networks can’t just process transactions. They have to actively defend the ecosystem.
When security becomes integrated at the infrastructure layer, it stops being optional insurance and starts becoming operational necessity.
Curious what else is shifting across FinTech, Payments, and Digital Banking? Scroll down 👇
Cheers,
👀 NEWS HIGHLIGHT
These new capabilities will enable businesses to securely receive, hold, and send stablecoins as part of their day-to-day global financial operations.
NOW, ON TO THE SUMMARY OF LAST WEEK’S NEWS
🇺🇸 NATIONAL HIGHLIGHTS
⭐️ Cloudflare and Mastercard partner to extend comprehensive cyber defense across critical infrastructure and small businesses. The partnership intends to develop tools to help small businesses, critical infrastructure, and governments protect themselves from today’s most pressing cyber threats without putting the brakes on innovation.
⭐️ Sphinx raises $7.1m to build every financial institution's last compliance hire. The funding will be used to scale Sphinx’s agentic compliance workforce as banks and FinTechs increasingly rely on it for core AML, KYC, and KYB operations. Continue reading
⭐️ Airbnb expands its Reserve Now, Pay Later globally. This allows users to cancel their bookings if their plans change without losing money upfront. With this option, users get charged closer to their check-in date rather than at the time of booking.
⭐️ Plaid and Backbase tackle banks' multi-day customer onboarding problem. The collaboration allows banks to onboard customers faster, aggregate account data seamlessly, and deliver personalized financial journeys without wrestling with outdated integrations.
FINTECH
FinTech Clear Street postpones US IPO citing market conditions. Clear Street had already downsized its offering on Thursday to 13 million shares offered between $26 and $28 apiece. It had previously been offering 23.8 million shares for $40 to $44 each.
FinTech lending giant Figure confirms data breach. The company said it is notifying affected partners and individuals and offering free credit monitoring. The hacking group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility and has reportedly published 2.5GB of stolen data after Figure refused to pay a ransom.
Ramp unveils AI Accounting Agent to speed month-end close. Customers can set what actions the product is allowed to take, from coding and review to syncing transactions into an accounting system. Low-risk transactions can post automatically once required checks are complete, according to Ramp.
PAYMENTS
‘X Money’ to launch limited external beta within two months. Musk said during an ‘All Hands’ presentation at his AI company xAI that “X Money is currently running as a closed beta internally,” adding that it will “be introduced as a limited external beta in one to two months.”
DIGITAL BANKING
John Delaney's Forbright confidentially files for a US IPO. The move follows a recovery in bank listings over the past year as the sector stabilises after the 2023 regional banking crisis and stronger stock prices reopen public market opportunities.
CRYPTO
Coinbase posts $667 million net loss, revenue declines 20% in fourth-quarter revenue to $1.8 billion as falling crypto prices hit trading activity. The downturn reflects broader market pressure, with rivals like Gemini cutting staff and other exchanges also seeing weaker revenues.
Nexo returns to the U.S. The company’s official U.S. relaunch is being executed in partnership with regulated partners, providing a U.S.-compliant framework for the company’s investment and credit product offerings. As part of its U.S. offering, Nexo is introducing a comprehensive suite of digital asset services designed to support advanced portfolio management and liquidity needs.
PARTNERSHIPS
Truist launches secure open banking experience with Mastercard. These clients can now seamlessly connect to the apps of their choice through direct connections to Mastercard's open finance platform. This experience offers clients secure, tokenized access to manage which applications can view their financial data.
Yuno partners with BVNK to power stablecoin payments for global commerce. The integration provides Yuno customers with direct access to BVNK's digital asset infrastructure, allowing businesses to accept and process stablecoin transactions alongside traditional payment methods through Yuno’s unified global payments platform
zerohash integrates Monad to power real-time USDC stablecoin payments. The integration allows FinTechs and payment platforms to launch stablecoin-powered flows through zerohash’s APIs and SDKs without managing blockchain infrastructure, custody, liquidity, or compliance themselves.
Sabre, PayPal, and Mindtrip partner to deliver the industry’s first end-to-end agentic AI experience for travel. Together, the companies are replacing today’s fragmented multi-step booking processes with a single, intelligent experience that moves seamlessly from inspiration to action, with the product set to launch in Q2 2026.
BitGo and 21shares accelerate global ETF partnership across staking and custody. Building on their existing collaboration, the firms have agreed to deepen their partnership across staking and custody services to support 21shares’ growing suite of crypto ETP products, serving investors across the US and Europe.
Payabli and Huntington Bank join forces to bring seamless payments to the digital banking experience. This integration empowers businesses to accept, issue, and manage transactions entirely within Huntington's digital ecosystem. This will deliver a unified, end-to-end financial experience powered by Payabli's infrastructure.
DONEDEAL
Uptiq raises $25M to add AI agents to bank workflows. The company intends to use the funds to expand operations and its development efforts. Uptiq allows organizations to move to AI via pre-packaged, production-ready AI applications and digital workers designed specifically for financial services.
M&As
Gennius XYZ acquires majority stake in Utoppia to expand financial infrastructure. Through the integration, Utoppia will leverage Gennius’ global payments, rewards, tokenization, and treasury capabilities while maintaining regulatory and operational independence.
Payments processor Stripe acquires the PartyDAO team. According to a notice published on the PartyDAO website, the PartyDAO team is joining Stripe to help shape a new generation of crypto products. PartyDAO began with the belief that crypto could unlock new forms of social and economic coordination on the internet.
MOVERS & SHAKERS
Robinhood hires Gaëtan Thabot to head crypto partnerships. Gaëtan Thabot joins Robinhood after spending the past year as VP of Sales and Partnerships at Reown and VP Business Development of related crypto payments company WalletConnect.
JPMorgan Chase names Guy Halamish as new COO for its commercial and investment banking division to drive AI expansion. He will be responsible for the oversight of the bank’s expansion of AI tools across these business areas. Read more