In the space of just five years, a little-known company on the outskirts of London has grown into a payments-industry powerhouse, processing more than 1 billion euros ($1 billion) in transactions every month, Bloomberg News reported. Backed by licenses from regulators in the UK and Lithuania, Transactive Systems Ltd. touted itself as “one of the fastest-growing fintech companies in Europe,” with an ability to service clients from “compliance-intense industries” including cryptocurrencies, gambling and foreign-exchange trading, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg.

Euro zone inflation was only a touch higher in January than earlier estimated, Eurostat said on Thursday, confirming that price growth is now well past its peak, even if underlying price pressures still show no signs of abating, Reuters reported. Consumer price inflation in the 20 nations sharing the euro eased to 8.6% in January from 9.2% a month earlier, coming in just above the 8.5% estimated earlier this month, when figures from Germany, the bloc's biggest economy, were not yet included.

Shares of Cineworld slumped as much as 22% on Wednesday after media reports said the world's second-largest cinema operator had received 40 non-binding bids, but none for its UK and U.S. assets or nearing its $6 billion secured debt load, Reuters reported. The reports cited company counsel Joshua Sussberg's comments to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Houston on Tuesday, where he also said the initial bids received by a Feb. 16 deadline were all for the rest of Cineworld's global assets, mainly for theatres in central Europe, eastern Europe and Israel.

The European Parliament´s budget control committee said Wednesday it has found no evidence of deceit or fraud in Spain’s handling of the 31 billion euros ($33 billion) it has received so far in special European Union post-pandemic recovery funds, the Associated Press reported. But a visiting delegation urged the Madrid government to be more transparent and flexible in its use of the funds and in providing public information about them.

Markets may have overshot in recent days when placing bets on the peak for European Central Bank interest rates, according to Governing Council member Francois Villeroy de Galhau, Bloomberg News reported. The ECB is “in no way” obliged to raise borrowing costs at every meeting between now and September, with the deposit rate already at a level that restricts the euro-zone economy, the Bank of France Governor told the Les Echos newspaper. The Bank of France confirmed Villeroy’s comments to Bloomberg.

Germany’s government is in talks to pay more than €20 billion ($21 billion) for the local unit of power grid operator TenneT Holding BV in a deal that could mark the starting point for a consolidation of the country’s power grids, Bloomberg News reported. Officials are hashing out the structure of a potential deal with Dutch state-controlled TenneT, and negotiations could take several months, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. The deal would come on top of an equity need of about €15 billion to upgrade the net.

Europe’s biggest economies beat expectations as business activity returned to growth, boosting the chances they can stave off recessions, Bloomberg News reported. Gauges of private output in Germany and France both signaled expansion in February after pullbacks in January, while the UK’s purchasing managers’ index showed the first positive reading in six months — jumping to 53 from 48.5. In the 20-nation euro zone, activity rose at the fastest pace since May 2022.

Financial leaders of the Group of Seven (G7) will meet on Feb. 23 to discuss measures against Russia that will put pressure on it to end the Ukraine war, Japan's Finance Minister Shunichi Suzuki said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Japan will chair the meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors from the G7 nations in the Indian city of Bengaluru. The meeting will come almost a year since Russia invaded Ukraine, calling it a "special military operation". The war has raged on despite a slew of punitive measures G7 and other countries have taken against Russia.

Russia’s economy contracted 2.1% last year, defying the worst fears of a major recession as surging commodity exports helped offset the impact of US and European sanctions imposed over President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Bloomberg News reported. The preliminary result was better than the 3% decline officials expected as recently as the early fall and far short of the 10% drop some forecasters saw when the sanctions first hit just over a year ago.