Issue #320 July 8th, 2021

Raghuram Rajan, former India central banker and ex-IMF chief economist, explains to CNBC podcast "Beyond the Valley" what central bank digital currencies could look like — and what they would mean for commerce.

The #1 business podcast for fintech innovators, influencers, and those eager to learn.

Wise, one of Britain’s biggest fintech companies, is about to go public. And it will be a major test for post-Brexit London.

Barclays has suspended debit and credit card payments from UK customers to Binance, citing recent Financial Conduct Authority action against the crypto exchange.

Latin America and the world are embracing the fight against COVID-19. Despite this challenge, Fintech demand in the Region has been accelerated. More than ever, financial institutions are facing the need to provide digital financial services. Every day increasingly, it is becoming clearer the importance of solid cross-country digital financial strategies.

According to a leak by Alessandro Paluzzi (leaker and mobile developer), Instagram is planning to adopt its own version of NFTs soon. Instagram is still working on Collectibles (Instagram posts offering NFTs will be labeled as “Collectible”) The “Collectible” name will alert users that the given post contains a purchasable NFT. In the past, Instagram has mentioned the possibility of introducing payment features in the future.

UBS (Swiss banking giant) has warned its clients that the regulatory crackdowns can make Bitcoin unsuitable for professional investors. In the report, it is stated that China’s crackdown on mining already hurt the market but UK’s and US’s tougher rules will be bad for crypto as well. According to Nirmala Sitharaman (Indian Minister of Finance), the cabinet note for the country’s crypto bill is ready, saying that “from our side, I think one or two indications that I have given is that at least for fintech, experiment and pilot projects a window will be available".

BlockFi’s Reward Visa Signature Credit Card has concluded its Beta testing period. The company has already started inviting people from the top of the waiting list to apply for the card and start using it in the real world.

Patrick Shyu (famous YouTube and an ex-Google tech lead) launched the Million token (MM) via an initial DEX offering on Thursday on Uniswap His channel is called TechLead and it has 1.1 million subscribers. The launch price was $1.00 and it sky-rocketed 3,500% within just three days (it hit $36.87 on Sunday). The price has crashed since than to $15.26 (at the time of the writing). The immediate crash led to speculations and accusations on Twitter that MM might be a pump-and-dump project What can potentially back up this is that a large amount was pulled from the liquidity pool by the same address that minted the MM tokens

Zurich Insurance Group has announced the appointment of Frank Verkerk to the newly created role of group chief platform officer. In his new role, Verkerk will work to accelerate the company’s development of digital services.

Moroccan fintech startup Yalla Xash, a money transfer platform operating between North America and Africa, has raised MAD6 million (US$675,000) in funding from the Maroc Numeric Fund II to extend its services to other countries.

Backed by capital from Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, QED, and others, OpenInvest was founded in 2015 with a core focus on helping advisors unlock the social and environmetal impact of their clients' investments.

With Covid-19 leading to an uptick in digital banking, nearly two thirds of industry executives from around the world think that the branch-based model will be dead within five years, according to an Economist Intelligence Unit survey.

“My older children know that we have shorter hours and they often say something like ‘Is it Tuesday today, dad? Do you finish early today? Can I come home directly after school?,’” says one happy father, “and I might reply ‘Of course’. We then go and do something — we have nice quality time. ✨

Your body is a data goldmine. From the way you look to how you think and feel, firms working in the burgeoning biometrics industry are developing new and alarming ways to track everything we do. And, in many cases, you may not even know you’re being tracked.