Tuesday, 20th of September, 2022

Hi,

A few days ago, I had a conversation with one of the Netguru people. She approached me for advice on her career and what she should do.

I shared some thoughts from years of experience in various fields and industries.

1. Don't be afraid of failure; manage the leaders regularly, and demonstrate your goals for yourself, the team, and the organization. Communicate openly that those KPIs will not be met without the assistance of others.
2. Deep dive into the industry in which you work - not only for the task at hand, but also to understand why you are doing it. Then, if you want to advance, learn how to delegate your tasks to others.
3. Recognize the process and system thinking. You will have more room for creative work once you have that.

I thought I could share it with you and start a conversation. What else would you like to add?

Cheers,

Radek

Finance & Tech?

• Mobile banking startup Monese has bagged a $35 million investment from HSBC to support its move into the banking-as-a-service space. London and Tallinn-based Monese targets expats and immigrants who typically struggle to get a traditional bank account. The latest investment brings the total raised by Monese to $208 million and comes on the heels of a September deal and investment from Investec, which intends to adopt Monese's new BaaS platform to deliver its digital current account offering in the UK. Norris Koppel, founder and CEO of Monese, says: “Securing the support of a tier one global bank demonstrates the strength of our platform and the continued appetite from investors in the platform. We look forward to taking this partnership forward.” Read more.?
• Revolut has suffered a data breach that exposed personal details of about 50,000 customers worldwide. Revolut notified the cyber attack to the Lithuanian State Data Protection Inspectorate, saying that access to its database was obtained through social engineering methods. According to the firm the data of about 50,150 customers worldwide (20,687 of them in European Economic Area), such as names, addresses, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, part of the payment card data and account details were ripped from its servers. In a letter to customers affected by the hack that was posted on Reddit, Revolut states: "We recently received a highly targeted cyber attack from an unauthorised third party that may have gained access to some of your information for a short period of time. You do not need to take any action, however we wanted to let you know, and sincerely apologise for this incident." Read more.?
• The White House has put together a framework for the "responsible development" of digital assets that includes a more aggressive push by regulators to take on fraud in the sector. The framework comes six months after President Biden issued a sweeping executive order on the oversight of cryptocurrencies and is based on reports with recommendations on protecting consumers, investors, businesses financial stability, national security and the environment. The reports call for the SEC and CFTC to "aggressively pursue investigations and enforcement actions against unlawful practices in the digital assets space", and also asks the CFPB and FTC to "redouble their efforts to monitor consumer complaints". Read more.?
• Truelayer is the latest fintech to send staff to the chopping block, AltFi revealed this morning. CEO of the open banking company, Francesco Simoneschi alerted staff that their headcount would be cut by 10%. About 40 roles are at risk as Truelayer employs around 400 people across offices in London, Milan, Dublin, and Sydney. In an email posted on the Truelayer public blog by the CEO, Simoneschi stated: “This is not a decision which we have taken lightly. Nor is it an announcement any CEO or Founder wants to make…Transparency is central to our values and culture, so I’ll set out the rationale and context behind today’s announcement and provide some detail on the process which led us to today.” Read more.?
• The European Central Bank has picked five partners - including CaixaBank and Amazon - to help it develop a digital euro prototype. The ECB received 54 expressions of interest after it put out a call for partners in April and has now settled on the Spanish lender and US tech giant, alongside Worldline, Nexi and EPI. Read more.?
• Norway's central bank has made the source code for its CBDC sandbox publicly available and confirmed that the prototype infrastructure for the project is based on Ethereum technology. Having first outlined plans to test a host of CBDC technical options last year, in May Norges Bank brought in vendor Nahmii to help with its sandbox project. Now, the open source code has been made available on GitHub, allowing for the testing of basic token management use cases, including minting, burning and transferring ERC-20 tokens. In addition to deploying the appropriate smart contracts and access controls, the Norges Bank sandbox includes a custom frontend and network monitoring tools. Read more.?
• Goldman Sachs is joining forces with fintech Modern Treasury to bring embedded payments to corporate customers.vThe partners say they will help joint customers seamlessly embed and scale domestic and international payments into their products. Modern Treasury’s payment operations software platform will provide mutual clients with an integrated money movement solution, with payments powered by Goldman Sachs Transaction Banking (TxB). A recent report from Bain predicts that the transaction value of embedded finance will double in the US to $7 trillion by 2026, with payments leading the way. Read more.?
• The Peloton Row hasn’t been a particularly well-kept secret over the last couple of years. After long-standing rumors, the connected fitness firm teased the rowing machine in a member’s video back in May. Today it’s finally back with some firm details on the latest major addition to its home fitness offerings. Read more.?
• Starting next year, Amazon plans to pump electrofuels into some of its diesel delivery vans in a deal with Infinium. Amazon didn’t say what it’s paying, nor for how much synthetic fuel, but the conglomerate intends to cover “approximately 5 million miles of travel per year” using e-fuels, it said in a statement. Read more.?

Number to Remember

17%

• Four days ago, just a few minutes before 3 a.m. EDT, a long-anticipated upgrade to Ethereum was executed. Since then, the second most valuable blockchain’s cryptocurrency, ETH, has tumbled — and some are saying its price hasn’t bottomed out yet. When the upgrade, generally referred to as “the Merge,” transpired, ETH was priced at about $1,600. At the time of publication, ETH is worth about $1,327 down just over 17% from the landmark system change. Read more.?

Reader’s Corner?

• DID YOU KNOW that you can, right now, for free, go to Archive.org, the great online library of all things, and load up within your web browser an ancient, decrepit emulated computer—a DOS box from 1991, a black-and-white Mac, a green-and-black Apple II—and run the WordPerfect of yore, boot old HyperCard stacks, or use 1979’s VisiCalc as God intended? Read more.?