Fintech Focus For April 1, 2021

Quote To Start The Day: International Business Machines Corp. expects 80% of its employees to work in a hybrid model after the pandemic, a setup that offers flexibility but also poses challenges for community-building and upward mobility for staff in a virtual workspace.

The majority of workers “will spend at least three days a week, maybe not all eight to 10 hours, but at least some fraction of those three days, in the office,” Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna said Wednesday in an interview during the Bloomberg Future of Work seminar.

Source: Bloomberg

One Big Thing In Fintech: Goldman Sachs aims to offer bitcoin and other crypto investment vehicles to private wealth management clients in the second quarter.

Source: The Block

Other Key Fintech Developments:

• Clocktower intros LatAm fintech fund.
• Metromile unpacks growth prospects.
• Unifimoney, Gemini team over crypto.
• Spiral adds $14M in funds for growth.
• Peyton Manning will attend MX event.
• Uphold is acquiring US broker-dealer.
• Refinitiv intros content management.
• Paysafe listed its stock on the NYSE.
• CBDCs may resolve payment issues.
• Prometheum, Anchorage launch ATS.
• Deribit launches BTC volatility index.
• AllianceBlock launching Data Tunnel.
• Fetch.ai innovates with mainnet v2.0.
• BlackRock fund bought bitcoin futures.
• CoinSmart enters esports in Canada.
• Next Insurance is raising new funding.
• PFL, Chiliz launches digital fan token.
• eMoney adds to Monte Carlo features.

Watch Out For This: Can the Archegos blow-up trigger a wider financial conflagration, as LTCM did two decades ago?

Luckily, the answer is probably no — with some caveats. LTCM was far bigger, more woven into the fabric of several systemically important markets. The Archegos losses will be humiliating to many banks, and in some cases ruin their financial year, but they are much better capitalized since 2008.

Source: Financial Times

Interesting Reads:

• Historical Views: The global economy.
• Microsoft gets a contract for Army AR.
• Collective savings and social support.
• Discord launching Clubhouse-like tool.
• Bubble or no bubble? NFTs unpacked.

Market Moving Headline: President Joe Biden presented a $2.25 trillion U.S. infrastructure plan on Wednesday, setting the stage for a drawn-out battle over his second big economic program after his pandemic-relief package’s relatively smooth sail through Congress.

Source: Bloomberg