The Big Talk

TBW - Jody Mettler (BitGo): “Custody is a loss leader: you need it to participate in everything else, but the margins alone don't sustain a standalone business.”

BitGo started as a multi-sig wallet pioneer. When did you realize that custody on its own wasn't enough as a standalone product? There wasn't a specific moment. It was an evolution. Mike Belshe built the company from the ground up as a wallet infrastructure play,

The Big Talk

TBW - Idan Ofrat (Fireblocks): "No reasonable bank will try to build the same infrastructure we do"

Custody was Fireblocks' original wedge. When did you realize it wasn't defensible on its own? From day one, actually. Custody was always a means to an end. Our mission is to enable every enterprise to support digital assets, and when we started, custody was simply the biggest

The Big Talk

TBW - Sabih Behzad (Deutsche Bank): "Europe is spreading its efforts thin on the future form of digital money”

Germany is often cited as one of the most advanced markets in Europe for digital assets. How do you view the German ecosystem today? It's a very healthy market, and that's down to several factors. First, there was a dynamic retail crypto market well before the

The Big Talk

TBW - Julien Maldonato (Deloitte): "Stablecoins are money with legs that never sleeps"

You have been working in the infrastructure sector for nearly thirty years. You seem to harbour a certain frustration with the pace at which technology standards penetrate the world of finance. How do you view this evolution? My frustration is real and it goes back to 1994. At the time,

The Big Talk

TBW - Henri Stern (Privy/Stripe): "Use Cases I'd Mapped Out Over a Decade Materialized in Under a Year"

Privy was acquired by Stripe in June 2025. What does this acquisition let you do that you couldn't as an independent startup? Three things, essentially. The first — and probably the most important — is that we're entering an era where stablecoins and digital assets are becoming a

The Big Talk

TBW - Su Yang (BNP Paribas): "Agentifying a bad process just burns tokens"

‍Everyone's talking about AI. Where does BNP Paribas actually stand? The hype dates back to ChatGPT in late 2022, but the bank started around fifteen years ago, with credit scoring and fraud detection. Today three families of projects coexist: classic, generative, and now agentic. The Evident AI Index,

The Big Talk

TBW - Julian Sawyer (Zodia): "Crypto-Native Custodians Will Have to Pivot"

Standard Chartered just announced the acquisition of Zodia Custody. We hear about Zodia Custody, Zodia Markets, Zodia Solutions. Can you walk us through what each of these entities actually does? Zodia Custody was the first entity created by SC Ventures. Zodia Markets is a separate business with different shareholders, focused

The Big Talk

TBW - Jan-Oliver Sell (Qivalis): "We May Need Ten Banks Just to Manage the Reserve"

The U.S. is advancing two major pieces of legislation — the CLARITY Act and the GENIUS Act. What should we take away from them? Two big themes stand out from the CLARITY Act. First, yield: everything points to some form of remuneration being authorized in the U.S., though not

The Big Talk

TBW - Ferdinand Dabitz (Augustus): "The expensive thing in banking is the people"

The Big Whale: What's the difference between an agentic workflow and regular AI? Ferdinand : Where you want to go with AI inside a financial institution is to make processes either faster or less error-prone, and to take over the manual work humans used to do, executing it

The Big Talk

TBW - Laurent Marochini (Standard Chartered Luxembourg): "Most transactions will happen on-chain — we need to be ready to support that entire value chain"

Standard Chartered opened its Luxembourg office in December 2024. Why did you pick this country as your gateway into Europe for digital assets? We received our VASP registration on December 16, 2024 — the very same day I started my role and we officially launched the entity. Several factors guided the

The Big Talk

TBW - Emma Pecenicic (Fidelity International): “Tokenized funds could be to ETFs what ETFs were to previous structures”

You launched FILQ on May 6th with a Moody's AAA-mf assessment from day one. Was that assessment a precondition for the launch? At the genesis of this product, we identified what was missing in the market: institutional-grade credit assessment to establish high-quality collateral on-chain.

The Big Talk

TBW - Christopher Grilhault des Fontaines (Dfns): "In times of war, a data center is an irresistible target"

Starting July 1, European players without a MiCA licence will no longer be able to operate. Dfns registered as a DASP with France's AMF for the custody component back in 2023. Was that a defensive bet? Absolutely. We see ourselves as a technology provider, not a financial services