The Big Talk
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,
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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
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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The Big Whale: You run a tech unicorn. What has AI concretely changed in the way you manage Zama? Rand Hindi: The most visible decision is how we manage headcount. We've stopped hiring until every team has integrated AI into their day-to-day work. When someone tells
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Kaiko's acquisition of Cometh caught part of the market off guard. On paper, it's hard to see where a data provider and a DeFi infrastructure specialist converge. What's the logic here? You have to understand that Kaiko is built on three pillars. The first
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BNP Paribas has been running digital asset experiments for several years now. What is your assessment? We are focused on the tokenization of financial instruments. We have tested several formats: project finance, debt, money market fund units, and we participated in the ECB's experiments on wholesale central bank