Iniesta feels the pain in Spain because of the bony advertising

Discover headlines from all over FT with our new three-minute audio-news-digest .

Hello from Chennai, where I was spoiled with tropical rainstorms on my family vacation.

It was an interesting experience to observe how the crypto debate here in India reached its peak in the country with a draft law for the "ban on all private cryptocurrencies".

In this week, the market news editor Adam Samson makes his debut at Fintechft and writes about a football legend that failed to disclose an advertised tweet for the Binance cryptocurrency exchange and the strange correlation of crypto and traditional markets. In the meantime, I spoke to Thought Machine, the cloud banking company, which today announced that it entered the Unicorn Club with a round of financing.

Your emails and thoughts are very much appreciated. Do not hesitate to send an email to sid.v@ft.com or Imani.moise@ft.com. Have a great week!

The advertising and hedging potential of cryptocurrencies is put to the test

Make a ride on the London subway and you will see many ads for new cryptocurrency credit services, trading platforms and even a digital token that is named after Elon Musk's dog.

In many legal systems,

crypto advertising is not subject to the same control as traditional financial products. This often means that market guard are unable to monitor these ads directly. This has made it possible for crypto shops-many of which are rich in money thanks to the booming interest in the industry.

Spain's market supervisory authority attacked football legend Andrés Iniesta last week because of a tweet that applied the Krypto exchange Binance. My colleagues Joshua Oliver, Samuel Agini and Daniel Dombey followed the weekend that Iniesta, who has 25 million Twitter followers, did not announce that he was paid by Binance due to a "misunderstanding", according to the stock exchange. Iniesta refused to comment.

We've been here before. A few years ago, sports stars such as Usain Bolt were paid to advertise small investors for differential contracts - until the authorities take up hard. How national regulatory authorities and legislators opt for crypto advertising will be of crucial importance for both consumer protection and the general acceptance of the technology. Several surveys have shown that many private investors do not fully understand the risks associated with digital tokens, many of which are subject to extreme volatility.

Lucy Kellaway's excellent essay "crypto in the classroom", in which it is emphasized how many young people act crypto and even convince their parents to do allocations, underlines why rules urgently need to be determined.

You have undoubtedly seen that the traditional financial markets were shaken on Friday when the worries about the Coronavirus' Omicrona tribe heavily burdened investors. But what I find really fascinating is how cryptocurrencies reacted to the sudden recurrence of pandemic jitter: they fell.

With the return of a classic "risk-off" scenarios, in which stocks and oil have been the most than a year, Bitcoin, the largest digital token according to market value, fell 8 percent on its worst day since September. The rest of the market for digital assets also came under considerable pressure, since an FT Wilshire index, which caught five important tokens without Bitcoin, lost a tenth of his value on Friday.

The market mood in traditional finance recovered on Monday and the same thing happened in Kryptoland.

There are several observations from this pattern. Crypto is often advertised as a potential diversification instrument in investor portfolios, at least partially on the basis of the idea that the returns of digital assets are not excessively correlated with traditional risk systems such as stocks or junk bonds.

For some, this decoupling is one of the main sales arguments of digital currencies.

If Krypto falls during important “risk-off” events, the question arises to what extent it actually works as a bulwark against abrupt shifts of the perceived risks.

The other question is whether the correlation between traditional and digital assets will increase when institutional investors begin to add crypto to their holdings. A survey among hedge fund managers in June showed that these fund managers expect to keep an average of 7.2 percent of their assets in cryptocurrencies in five years. This would probably give you more influence on a market that is strongly influenced by retailers today. (Adam Samson)

Quick-Fire Questions and Answers

Every week we ask the founders of rapidly growing fintechs to imagine and explain what they distinguish in an overcrowded industry. Our conversation, easily edited, appears below.

I recently spoke to Paul Taylor, CEO and founder of Thought Machine, a cloud banking company based in London, which today announced that it led the returned investor Nyca Partners together with several global banks, including JPMorgan, Standard Chartered and Lloyds Banking. Financing round. To date, Thought Machine has collected around $ 340 million. Taylor, a former Google employee who led a team to develop a text-to-speech system at the search engine giant, founded 2014 Thought Machine.

What motivated you to leave Google and get into cloud banking? I founded Thought Machine because I wanted to use the same cloud technologies and engineering principles that I got to know on Google and wanted to apply it to the problem of the legacy infrastructure of the banking industry. The central banking engine of Thought Machine, Vault, is completely free of Legacy code. It was developed to free banks from decades -old systems.

How did pandemic affect the demand for your products at various banks? without warning, banks were forced to expand digital customer support, introduce new functions and offer new product conditions - while working remotely. Large banks were paralyzed by their legacy systems, which are expensive and resistant to changes-and so the demand for the modern core banking platform from Thought Machine rose. Underpayed through cloud native technology, Vault is a highly configurable platform that trust the most competitive banks in the world, including JPMorgan Chase, Lloyds Bank, Standard Chartered and Seb.

There were

unexpected trends during the Pandemie period that will probably continue? Pandemic has changed the way people do banking, especially due to the acceleration of digital acceptance across all channels. This has shown banks around the world that they cannot rely on outdated banking technology. With a cloud-native technology, banks can benefit from highly automated, efficient and resilient technology that can support them in times of unexpected shocks and changes. The banks of the future will be a mixture of established banks, fintechs and technology giants, all of which are supported by new cloud native, purely digital technology stacks.

How has the cloud banking area developed in recent years? Banking changes quickly, as is its underlying technology. In recent years, the largest and most ambitious banks in the world have quickly replaced their legacy systems due to the pressure from new competition and customers who need highly personalized and optimized products. Fourth generation Cloud-Native software, such as Vault from Thought Machine, offers banks scalability and flexibility to create extraordinary customer experiences. These cloud-native systems differ significantly from previous systems that have been created with decades-old programs. By the end of the decade, banks will look radically different and offer a much better customer experience-everything supported by a cloud native technology stack.

What are the next steps of your business development? In the past 12 months, Thought Machine has opened a new London headquarters, a New York office and further expanded its presence in the Asian-Pacific area. The demand for modern technology in these markets will only accelerate if the competition is intensified and new market participants are gaining market shares.

fintech fascination

The slump in public listing PayTM throws shadows on India's ipo pipeline Benjamin Parkin, Mercedes Ruehl and Hudson Lockett have dealt intensively with the effects of the largest IPO of India to date. FinTech experienced one of the worst debut in the history of the market and could endanger a number of planned stock exchange tours in India.

for Kazakhstan's crypto-miner has come Martha Muir reports on the misery of the miners of the blockchain, which are flows into the Central Asian state after the recent Chinese approach. The only problem? Their mass migration has a significant impact on the country's power grid, which caused the government's shortage and growing threats.

FREETRADE wants to double his evaluation Joshua Oliver and Akila Quinio wrote about how the British fintech freetrade through crowdfunding strives for an evaluation of £ 650 million and started its seventh funding round last Wednesday. As one of the beneficiaries of the boom in retail stock trading during the pandemic, Freetrade plans to offer cryptocurrencies.