Mar 28, 2025

News provided by Share this article Share toX A roundup of the most newsworthy financial press releases from PR Newswire this week, including the latest Consumer Confidence Index®, data on teen financial literacy and U.S. Bank's new debit card for tipped employees. NEW YORK, March 28, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- With thousands of press releases published each week, it can be difficult to keep up with everything on PR Newswire. To help finance journalists and consumers stay on top of the week's most newsworthy and popular releases, here's a recap of some major stories from the week that shouldn't be missed. The list below includes the headline (with a link to the full text) and an excerpt from each story. Click on the press release headlines to access accompanying multimedia assets that are available for download. "Consumers' expectations were especially gloomy, with pessimism about future business conditions deepening and confidence about future employment prospects falling to a 12-year low. Meanwhile, consumers' optimism about future income—which had held up quite strongly in the past few months—largely vanished…," said Stephanie Guichard, Senior Economist, Global Indicators at The Conference Board. CME Group and Google Cloud announced that they are piloting solutions for seamless and secure wholesale payments and tokenization of assets. CME Group has successfully completed the first phase of integration and testing of Google Cloud Universal Ledger (GCUL), a novel distributed ledger from Google Cloud. Home sellers who did not list their properties on the Multiple Listing Service (MLS)—a database that allows listings to be openly marketed to all home buyers and agents—lost out on more than $1 billion collectively over the past two years. New research from Zillow® finds that the harm to home sellers is greater in communities of color. A new study of teens ages 13-18 conducted by Junior Achievement and MissionSquare Retirement's Foundation reveals that more high school students are being offered financial literacy courses, yet significant knowledge gaps in the curriculum must be filled. According to the study, 42% of teens are "terrified" they won't have enough money for the future. Grazzy, a leading digital tipping platform, has joined with U.S. Bank to offer a prepaid debit card program for hourly employees to easily access tips. Employers enrolled with Grazzy's digital tip service and the prepaid debit card program can issue employees a physical debit card and route tips and wages to the card, enabling access to tipped wages at the end of each shift. With money habits forming as early as age seven, Greenlight's family finance app can give kids and teens hands-on money management interactions with parental supervision, while providing a channel for banks and credit unions to grow deposit accounts. Through this collaboration, Alkami's clients can now offer their account holders access to Greenlight. Jolly, a workforce optimization platform, announced a $16.5M Series A fundraise led by Zach Kirkhorn, former CFO of Tesla. Similar to earning Miles on airlines or Cashback on a credit card, Jolly gives employees an opportunity to Earn Points at Work™. The platform incentivizes actions that are value-accretive to the business such as picking up extra shifts or showing up on time. JLL will acquire Javelin Capital, a North America-based renewable energy investment banking firm. "Welcoming Javelin Capital to the JLL team expands our ability to guide clients with end-to-end support through the clean energy transition, bolstering our team in the U.S. to match our leading work in the space across Asia and Europe," said Richard Bloxam, CEO, Capital Markets at JLL. Mesh, the first global crypto payments network, announced the launch of its crypto payments app on the Shopify App Store, enabling more than five million Shopify merchants to seamlessly accept crypto payments and settle transactions in stablecoins like USDC, USDT, and PYUSD. "Traditional business loans are not only difficult to secure for small businesses, but the application process can be challenging and prohibitively time consuming. PayPal's financing solutions have a streamlined online application process with no lengthy paperwork or extensive credit checks, and approved PayPal loans are funded within minutes," said Michelle Gill, EVP and GM of SMB and Financial Services at PayPal.