You may or may not have come across this principle before, but the chances are you’re a victim of it. Human fracking describes the way in which Big Tech companies treat our attention spans: as a resource, to be mined and monetised. So, what does human fracking look like in the context of financial services, and how do digital banking apps and investment platforms can gamify user experiences to drive engagement and product sales?

With concerns around AI’s environmental impact mounting – as tech firms remain guarded over the data – it is time to ask whether this technology will hinder or help the economy’s progress toward decarbonisation. In this instalment of Finextra’s Explainer series, we weigh up the potential positive and negative impacts of AI on the climate.

As the wave of digitisation washes across the globe, open source software proliferates, and the sheer value of data continues climbing, cyberattacks are becoming one of the biggest threats to financial stability. In the past 12 months, consumers, financial institutions (FIs), and entire industries fell victim to massive cyberattacks by highly sophisticated criminal rings and technologies. With 2025 drawing to a close, I look back at the most impactful cybersecurity breaches o

With the advantage of hindsight, the financial landscape of 2025 can be characterised by the enforcement of transformative payment regulations, the rise in support for stablecoins, and the moment the rubber hit the road for artificial intelligence (AI). As the year draws to a close, it’s time to reflect on the financial news topics that were discussed most keenly, and the transformational fintech stories that underpinned them.

In the last year, tech giants like Meta, Microsoft and Oracle have been taking on tens of billions in debt to finance their artificial intelligence (AI) projects and data centres. The key supplier of these firms is Nvidia, the most valuable company on the planet, which designs and manufactures the graphics processing units (GPUs) and chips needed to power AI models.

The United Kingdom has placed fourth in the Global Artificial Intelligence (AI) Index – the first of its kind to benchmark nations on their investment, innovation, and implementation of AI. Yet despite this potential, much of our homegrown tech talent is moving abroad.

Three years ago, on 30th November 2022, ChatGPT was released and the world was given an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered large language model (LLM) that can understand and respond to human language by processing vast amounts of multimedia data.

A regulatory filing has revealed that in Q3 2025 Peter Thiel offloaded all his AI stocks. The move – coupled with SoftBank's selloff of its own Nvidia holdings – is fuelling speculation that the tech industry is due an uncomfortable correction.

Whether AI’s stock prices crash soon or later, the technology itself is not going away. Though the dotcom bubble severely dented confidence, the technology and business models behind it still thrive today. In fact, thanks to increased smartphone and internet penetration, ecommerce is booming. In 2023 its global market was valued at $20 trillion – a figure which will swell to around $100 trillion by 2032, according to Statista. Perhaps a similar trajectory will be followed by

What does the future of journalism look like as a result of AI? In focusing on change, do we risk overlooking principles that underpin the ways that journalists and communications professionals work together?

Nvidia, among others, has been accused of working to artificially engineer demand, by investing in firms like Mistral, Figure AI, and xAI – which, in turn, redeploy some of the venture capital to buy Nvidia’s chips.

I am proud to have worked alongside the Chartered Institute of Journalists' council to formulate an industry announcement pushing for the use of a ‘kitemark’ to signify when AI has been used by journalists.

On 14th October, Sir Winston Churchill's granddaughter, esteemed editor and author, Emma Soames, gave a keynote speech at the Chartered Institute of Journalists’ 2025 AGM, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the great statesman’s passing.

A global pattern is emerging: extreme right-wing organisations and state actors are using cryptocurrencies to make clandestine donations to likeminded political movements.

The article doesn’t acknowledge that the surface of a sphere cannot be represented on a plane without distortion. This was proved mathematically by Carl Friedrich Gauss in the early 1800s...

Is boss-tech merely a means to modernise the age-old clock-punch process, or does it herald something more draconian for the already-dampened UK labour market?

Whatever you make of the Home Secretary's proscription of Palestine Action, here is an example of how significant political disagreement - at the national level - can be hashed out

In recent years the shores of sustainable finance have been battered by the choppy waters of geopolitics. Despite a surge in growth, public interest, and market momentum between 2020 and 2022 (a result of progressive policy, disclosure frameworks, and an explosion in environmental, social and governance [ESG] investment products) sustainable finance feels as though it is slowing. From 2022 onwards the energy crisis drove international investment in fossil fuels, and ESG retre

US-based public cloud service providers – particularly the ‘big three’, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) –  capture a substantial portion of the global cloud market; with some estimates reaching almost 85%.

A counterbalance to claims of trans-Atlantic ESG de-prioritisation, Finextra’s investigation into the UK’s top financial institutions prove that some industries are keeping ESG front of mind.