2026 stories - Page 17

Facewatch says UK retailers' facial recognition alerts more than doubled to over 500,000 in 2025 amid rising theft and abuse in stores.

UK bank Griffin posts fivefold revenue surge as it processes GBP £3 billion in payments and signs more than 50 platform customers.

Widdop launches its first direct-to-consumer eCommerce site for Softies plush toys, marking a major digital shift for the 140-year-old brand.

Isle of Man opens 2026 Innovation Challenge to global health tech teams, offering a testbed to trial tools for care at home and in communities.

REGnosys warns of a fresh 2026 regtech wave as global rule rewrites loom and London fights to defend its fintech edge from rising rivals.

Zama predicts privacy-first compliance tools and quantum-safe cryptography will become standard for regulated onchain finance by 2026.

Global fintech funding jumped 21% to USD $53 billion in 2025, as the UK secured second place worldwide with USD $3.6 billion.

Pax8 accelerates EMEA growth with thousands of new partners, AI agents and MIP services as it expands offices and training across Europe.

Vespertec says AI growth will slam into hard data centre limits by 2026, as chip, memory and cooling bottlenecks reshape infrastructure plans.

Blue Yonder rolls out fresh AI tools to tighten retail planning, boost fulfilment accuracy and speed up warehouse and logistics decisions.

Retailers urged to brace for early-year spike in chargebacks as mobile shopping and buy now, pay later fuel record US holiday spend.

Black Friday still delivered the peak online surge, but AI-driven search stretched shopping demand across a longer November window.

AI coding tools are set for a 2026 reset as enterprises pivot from 'vibe coding' experiments to architecture-first, governed co-developers.

Agentic AI is set to move from hype to frontline tool by 2026, autonomously steering cyber defence workflows and search-led marketing.

The British Army is backing a fast-track drone engineering degree at NMITE to train specialists in autonomous military and civilian systems.

AI SRE, GPU-aware schedulers and autonomous ops are set to overhaul how large enterprises run Kubernetes clusters by 2026.

DTCC maps an ambitious 2026 plan, deepening tokenisation and AI while overhauling risk, collateral and post-trade ahead of Europe's T+1 shift.

Banks are turning apps and accounts into ad space, with SAS tipping media networks to lift non-interest income by up to 30% within two years.

ScotlandIS flags AI, skills, green data centres and cyber basics as critical to Scotland's digital economy amid 2026 uncertainty.

UK firms step up FX hedging as sterling's sharp swings hit earnings, with more businesses extending hedge lengths and raising cover.