Monoup News Digest: Main Updates from Fintech Industry
It's Friday o’clock, which means the time has come for weekly digest from Monoup team. Even the holiday season is in full swing, fintech never slows down, and today we have plenty to discuss. Indian payment systems are entering the EU market, underscoring the deepening cooperation between India and Europe: UPI is starting with international payments from tourists, while Paytm is entering through a local entity, as a standalone market player.
At the same time, Tether has had to look for alternatives to European market as company is not willing to to seek authorization under MiCA rules and hold 60% of its reserves in local banks. This requirement has proven a sticking point for Tether's business more than once — both with USDT and with its counterpart EURT. Where the crypto company is headed next, and why, we break down below.
UPI officially launches in Greece
UPI has gone live in Greece through a partnership between local Eurobank and NPCI International. The launch took place on June 30 in the presence of India's Minister of Commerce and Industry, Piyush Goyal, who personally witnessed a live transaction demonstration at Eurobank's headquarters alongside the bank's CEO, Fokion Karavias. Greece has become the tenth country where UPI is available — following Singapore, Qatar, the UAE, Nepal, Bhutan, Cambodia, France, Mauritius, and Sri Lanka.
At launch, the service works in one direction only — outbound transfers from Indians living in Greece to recipients in India, fully integrated into Eurobank's mobile app and online banking platform. As Eurobank explained, this is the first stage of a broader collaboration with NIPL rather than a standalone project — the bank has also opened a representative office in Mumbai, becoming the first Greek and Cypriot bank with a physical presence in India. The Greece launch comes against the backdrop of ongoing negotiations on an EU-India free trade agreement, following UPI's record-breaking May, when it processed 23.2 billion transactions in a single month. Cyprus is next on the map — also through Eurobank.
Paytm secures a license in Luxembourg
Paytm's subsidiary, Paytm Europe Payments S.A., has received a payment institution license from Luxembourg's regulator, the CSSF, effective July 2. The license covers execution of payment transactions, transfers, and payment acquiring services, and thanks to the passporting mechanism, allows the company to offer these services across all EU member states.
The entity was incorporated in Luxembourg in January 2026 as a Paytm subsidiary, and within just six months went on to secure its operating license.
Notably, Paytm is targeting acquiring and merchant services rather than retail transfers or wallet functionality. The company sees Stripe and Adyen as its competitors and intends to leverage its Asian origins as an advantage for merchants looking to do business with Asia.
Revolut reveals details of its PRAGMA AI model
Revolut has rolled out PRAGMA, an end-to-end AI model that brings together every point of interaction a customer has with the bank into a single system: transactions, app usage, investments, subscription payments, and support inquiries. The model was trained on 40 billion events from roughly 25 million users across 111 countries and now serves more than 70 million customers.
Early results show fraud detection accuracy up 64.7%, credit risk assessment quality up 16%, and product recommendation effectiveness up 41%. The AI-powered support assistant built on the same model resolves around 75% of inquiries without human involvement, and PRAGMA will also help with budgeting, subscription management, and travel planning.
The key architectural difference from competitors — Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard all announced comparable models this year — is that Revolut combines data from multiple sources into a single user-level representation, rather than running separate models for each task. This is the core innovation behind the company's approach to customer service and data usage.
From the EU to Brazil: Tether shifts its operational focus
As of July 1, the MiCA regime is now in full effect: any stablecoin listed on a licensed European exchange is required to hold authorization of its own. Since Tether never obtained that authorization, exchanges including Coinbase, Kraken, Crypto.com, and Revolut have progressively removed USDT from their interfaces for EU users.
Against this backdrop, in early July Tether announced a $20 million investment in a strategic financing round for Mercado Bitcoin, Brazil's leading digital asset platform and the largest of its kind in Latin America. Mercado Bitcoin, founded in 2013 as a crypto exchange, serves 4.5 million users and holds more than 10 licenses across Brazil and Europe, including a payment institution license from Brazil's Central Bank.
The funds will go toward developing payment infrastructure, tokenized investment products, lending, and capital markets, as well as international expansion. The deal continues a string of Latin American and Middle Eastern investments by Tether — the company previously put $200 million into Whop, backed Ark Labs (bringing stablecoins to Bitcoin), led a $1.4 billion round for robotics company NEURA Robotics, and signed a memorandum of understanding with Dubai authorities on tokenization.
Tether's earlier attempts to gain a foothold in Europe through subsidiary structures didn't go especially well: the EURT token was shut down late last year for the same reserve-related reasons, while EURR and USDR lost their peg to the euro and dollar respectively after a hack. Its investment in Quantoz's EURQ remains stable but is not comparable in scale to USDC/EURC. In the end, the company chose to scale USDT where regulation is more favorable, even at the cost of the European market, rather than search for workarounds to secure a licensed presence through intermediaries.
That's the news we picked out this week. Subscribe to our Telegram channel to stay on top of everything happening in the payments industry, with updates delivered several times a day. There, we explain industry events, analyzing all based on own expertise, and sharing tips on how businesses can make their payment infrastructure more efficient.
