Banco Santander and Mastercard have announced that they had completed Europe’s first live payment made by an artificial intelligence agent inside a regulated bank.This was not a test in a lab. The payment was processed through Santander’s real banking system. An AI agent started and completed the payment by itself, but it worked within clear rules and limits set by the bank.

OpenAI has secured $110 billion in a landmark funding round that values the company at $840 billion, underscoring the scale of capital flowing into artificial intelligence infrastructure¹.

Copper remains essential to the global electrification push.

The 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo are shaping up as more than a fortnight of competition. Organisers and economic analysts project substantial long-term structural effects across northern Italy, aiming to turn the Games into a catalyst for regional development rather than a one-off event.

Recent developments in nuclear fusion research signal measurable scientific progress, reinforcing the long-term potential of fusion as a scalable, low-carbon energy source. Experiments conducted on China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) — often referred to as an “artificial sun” — have surpassed longstanding physical limits in plasma density that once constrained reactor performance.

The global obesity drug market is moving into a more structured and competitive phase after several years of rapid expansion driven by GLP-1 therapies.

Japan reports the retrieval of sediment containing rare earth minerals from deep waters near Minamitorishima, an isolated Pacific island roughly 1,900 kilometres south-east of Tokyo. The materials are extracted from seabed mud within Japan’s exclusive economic zone, marking a step forward in the country’s long-running effort to diversify access to critical minerals.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) updates its World Economic Outlook, signalling a resilient global economy even amid geopolitical and trade uncertainties. In its January 2026 update, the IMF projects that global real gross domestic product will expand by 3.3 per cent in 2026 and 3.2 per cent in 2027, slightly higher than previous forecasts and roughly on par with estimated growth in 2025.

At the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos this January, tokenization — the on-chain representation of traditional assets such as funds, bonds and securities — took centre stage in discussions on the future of financial market infrastructure.

Global investment in clean energy continues at historically elevated levels as 2026 begins, reinforcing a structural shift in capital allocation. Industry analysis presented around the January economic meetings indicates that spending on renewables, grid infrastructure and low-carbon technologies remains robust, even amid geopolitical tension and higher borrowing costs.