TOKENISATION: London Stock Exchange moves towards tokenised public equities
The London Stock Exchange announced on 1 September that it is assessing a UK tokenised equity structure, partnering with Payward to explore tokenised public-equity markets.
The model would preserve existing shareholder rights, protections and governance standards while using digital infrastructure for settlement and asset servicing, potentially through LSEG's Digital Securities Depository. Regulatory approval would still be required.
Why it matters
Tokenisation is splitting into two very different markets. One is crypto-native: issuers create tokens, then ask how securities regulation applies. The other is institution-led: regulated market infrastructure takes an existing security and asks how blockchain can improve issuance, settlement, distribution or collateral mobility.
The second model is gaining momentum. For RWA businesses, competitive advantage may increasingly come from legal architecture and distribution rather than merely putting an asset on-chain.
The question is no longer whether shares can be tokenised. It is:
Can tokenised shares retain legally robust ownership rights while becoming interoperable enough to benefit from digital-asset infrastructure?
UK CRYPTO: The FCA authorisation gateway is about to open
The FCA's new authorisation application period for regulated cryptoasset activities opens on 30 September 2026 and runs until 28 February 2027.
The regime itself is scheduled to commence on 25 October 2027. Firms conducting activities brought within the new FSMA perimeter will need the relevant FCA authorisation or permissions.
The FCA expects substantive applications, and has warned that pre-application engagement requires meaningful supporting information rather than a promise to provide it later.
Why it matters
For crypto businesses targeting the UK, “we will deal with licensing later” is becoming an expensive strategy. The key work now is not filing the application, but deciding:
which activities sit inside the new perimeter; which entity will conduct them; where governance and senior management sit; what stays outsourced; and whether the firm's capital, systems, safeguarding, AML, consumer-protection and operational-resilience framework can survive FCA scrutiny.
The application window lasts five months. Building an authorisable business model can take considerably longer.
PREDICTION MARKETS: Yes, you can insider-trade a prediction market
The CFTC has brought a useful enforcement case for anyone still inclined to treat prediction markets as another form of online betting.
On 28 August, the CFTC settled charges against a former White House teleprompter operator who used advance access to presidential speeches to trade event contracts relating to words or phrases the President would mention.
The CFTC found he had misappropriated material non-public information in breach of a duty of trust and confidence. He was ordered to disgorge approximately $107,539, pay a $65,000 civil penalty and accept a three-year trading ban.
Why it matters
Prediction markets create genuinely unusual market-abuse scenarios. The inside information need not concern a company's earnings or an acquisition: it might be a speech, political decision, sporting event or regulatory announcement that determines settlement of an event contract.
As these markets institutionalise, operators should expect market surveillance, MNPI controls, employee dealing policies and suspicious-activity monitoring to matter far more.
Calling something a “prediction market” does not make conventional market-integrity concepts disappear.
FINTECH: Revolut gets conditional approval for a U.S. national bank charter
The OCC approved Revolut's application to establish Revolut Bank US, National Association on 2 September. The approval is conditional and only one of several approvals the proposed insured bank requires.
It matters because Revolut has historically entered markets through a mix of licences, partnerships and local regulated entities rather than operating as a bank everywhere it offers services.
Why it matters
For mature fintechs, owning the regulated infrastructure is an economic question as much as a compliance one. Bank partnerships accelerate launch but create dependencies on sponsor-bank risk appetite, product approvals, economics and regulatory oversight.
At sufficient scale, becoming the regulated institution buys greater control over product design and unit economics — at the cost of substantially heavier capital, governance, prudential and supervisory obligations.
There is no universal “fintech → bank” trajectory, but Revolut is another reminder that licence architecture eventually becomes part of business-model architecture.
U.S. CRYPTO: Market-structure legislation enters another decisive phase
Crypto companies and banks are intensifying competing lobbying around U.S. digital-asset market-structure legislation ahead of a Senate procedural vote expected on 15 September.
The legislation seeks certainty on how digital assets are classified and how jurisdiction is allocated between federal regulators. Banks remain concerned about stablecoin competition for deposits; parts of the crypto industry argue that failing to legislate a market structure would prolong uncertainty.
Why it matters
The strategic question for crypto companies in the United States is changing. For much of the last decade it was:
How do we structure around regulatory uncertainty?
Increasingly it may become:
Which regulated category are we prepared to operate within?
That is a materially different structuring exercise. A clearer perimeter normally reduces legal uncertainty — and can also remove business models that depended on it.
AI: Financial regulators are starting to look beyond model risk
BIS General Manager Pablo Hernández de Cos warned this week that the scale of the AI investment boom itself may have financial-stability implications.
The concerns go beyond bias, explainability or model governance: debt-funded AI infrastructure investment, market concentration, elevated valuations, and the possibility that markets have priced in productivity gains that take longer to materialise than expected.
Separately, the United States and China are preparing bilateral discussions on AI safety, including risks from increasingly autonomous systems and AI-enabled cyber activity.
Why it matters
AI regulation is developing across three layers at once: models and their deployment; specific AI-enabled activities such as payments, lending or investment decisions; and, now emerging, AI as a source of systemic financial and operational risk.
For financial institutions, an “AI policy” sitting inside the technology function is unlikely to be sufficient for long. AI governance is becoming interconnected with operational resilience, outsourcing, cybersecurity, conduct risk, financial crime, model risk and board-level risk management.
ONE THING WE'RE WATCHING: Agentic finance
The emergence of “Know Your Agent” infrastructure may become one of the more consequential fintech developments of the next 12–24 months.
Once software agents can autonomously initiate economic activity, financial infrastructure needs a way to distinguish:
identity — who or what is interacting with the system;
authority — on whose behalf it acts and what it is permitted to do;
and accountability — who bears responsibility if the transaction is unauthorised, erroneous or harmful.
Payments are likely to be the first large-scale test. Investment management, DeFi, treasury management and autonomous B2B commerce will be harder.
This is also the topic of our upcoming Legal Nodes panel.
Reserve your place "When AI Agents Meet Financial Services: Who Is Responsible?"
📅 23 September 2026 | 5:00 PM EEST / 4:00 PM CEST | Online
👨💻 With Edwin Mata, CEO & Co-Founder of Brickken; Ross Kolodyazhnyi, Senior Vice President — AI & Crypto at Sokin; and Leslie Kivit, Co-Founder of Amadeus Protocol.
Register for the panel:👇
