Converge

March will be an interesting month in financial markets, driven by three major themes: inflation, paring back of interest rate cut expectations, and the lack of volatility despite underlying risks. Upcoming events in March, including central bank rate decisions, will be significant and could induce price action.

Will we see a continuation of the disinflationary trend, a potential end to the US exceptionalism sentiment, and possible changes in central bank policies?

Global Macro Analyst Boris Kovacevic breaks down this week's most notable macroeconomic news.

Payments in Africa are "1% built," presenting a massive opportunity to unlock growth for businesses and improve lives - not just on the continent itself but also around the globe where migrants proliferate and prosper.

Join Benjamin Fernandes, CEO of Nala, a cross-border payments and remittances fintech focusing on building Africa's modern payment infrastructure, to discuss the challenges and opportunities in African payments. With unconscionably high costs and complexities, payments within and to/from Africa illustrate the pressing need for infrastructure and regulatory improvements - and Benjamin and Nala are at the helm.

Co-hosted with Money2020's Micky Tesfaye.

Disclaimer: Converge is Convera’s new podcast that discusses a range of financial services topics. We want to remind our listeners that the information shared on this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. Please note that the opinions expressed on Converge are solely the opinions of the host and the guests, not Convera’s.

Register for Convera Live! https://convera.com/events/convera-live/

Last week's economic data deluge, including the latest inflation reports that called into question the timing of rate cuts, triggered some significant volatility across financial markets, creating a modest case of whiplash. Could this become more frequent as central banks begin policy easing this year?

Meanwhile, the carry trade has become more popular, benefitting the high-yielding dollar which has already climbed 6% against the yen this year on top of the massive gains in 2023. But the pound is also in demand, reaching its highest level against the Japanese yen since 2015. Evidence like this shows that low volatility like we’ve had has helped promote risk appetite and a hunt for yield or rather a higher return from risk assets. Will it continue?

Join Lead FX Strategist George Vessey as he breaks down the latest in the global macroeconomic and FX landscapes.

Disclaimer: Converge is Convera’s new podcast that discusses a range of financial services topics. We want to remind our listeners that the information shared on this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. Please note that the opinions expressed on Converge are solely the opinions of the host and the guests, not Convera’s.

Listen to more episodes

Fraud feels like one of the inevitabilities of our financial system - if we had a system that was 100% fraud free, it would be so restrictive and buttoned down that it would be almost impossible to use.  And because we still rely on many antiquated systems to confirm the identity of customers, fraud continues to be a major problem.  

Passwords persist as the dominant auth method despite their fragility, and newer, more promising auth methods like Passkeys championed by the FIDO alliance for a few years now are just beginning to take foot. WebAuthentication has added a lot of rigor to the security mix with biometrics, multi-factor, multi-device methods – but there are still gaps, and maintaining a customer-centric UX has been a crucial challenge to solve. 

Enter knowledge-based authentication (KBA). Hear from Alloy CTO and co-founder Charles Hearn on how KBA integrates with diverse data sources, leverages AI and stays "a few step ahead" to provide accurate identity verification in financial services - one of the industry's most stubborn challenges.

Disclaimer: Converge is Convera’s new podcast that discusses a range of financial services topics. We want to remind our listeners that the information shared on this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. Please note that the opinions expressed on Converge are solely the opinions of the host and the guests, not Convera’s.

This past week, in a rare mainstream media appearance, US Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell joined 60 Minutes and within that time sent expectations for a US March rate cut plunging. Regardless, major global financial markets are broadly looking for around the same moves over the next 18 months – about 200 basis points of cuts.

Yet not all conditions are moving in parallel, and while wages are easing lower in the US, they continue to press higher in Europe and the UK.

If some central banks cut as other stay on hold, this could drive some big moves in the form of more volatility.

Tune in for Head of Market Insights Steven Dooley's always insightful breakdown of the current state of our global markets on this week's Converge Market Update.

Fintech has always been an exciting space for venture capital investors, but it’s no secret that today's environment remains a challenging one for the venture capital industry. During the previous era of low interest rates, investors were competing to back startups at increasingly high valuations, but now future ROI remains uncertain for many. Many funds are sitting on record amounts of capital ready to deploy but startups are reluctant to take on reduced valuations.

This has led to valuations moving from "art" to "science," or hard data and fundamentals, requiring pre-seed companies to return to "mechanics" in order to understand what VCs are really solving for. Many in the industry are welcoming these conversations as they reflect a healthy shift towards pragmatism.

But where are VCs still willing to take risks? What innovations in fintech are catching the eyes of the next generation of investors to get them across the line, and sparking the most interesting conversations?

Join Katie Palencsar, Partner at VC fund Anthemis Group, as she shares her perspectives on the current VC environment, which parts of the fintech stack and what issues being solved that she's most passionate about as an investor, her interest in B2B space innovations, and how she's using data and deploying capital to help bring more female founders into fintech.

January has been all about the broad pushback of policy makers and the economic data against the trend of lower bond yields that started in November. Central bankers have won the first round against investors that had hoped to see the first rate cuts from the Fed, ECB and BoE already in March.

However, the month-to-date advance of bond yields and the US dollar have not been able to dent the attractiveness of US equities, which continued to outperform their global peers, reaching a new all-time high this week.

At the same time, China is nearing a watershed moment, as policy makers are starting to get uncomfortable with the 40% drawdown in Chinese equities. Are we getting closer to the peak of US outperformance vs. Europe and China?  

Join Convera Macro Analyst Boris Kovacevic as he breaks down the latest in global markets.

In the past, finance teams didn’t always benefit from innovation in software like sales and marketing teams did. Now, a group of fintechs are bringing new technologies to market for CFOs and their teams - leveraging the disruptive power of AI.

Erica Dorfman, Head of Financial Products for spend management platform Brex, joins us to discuss the strategy behind her company's push to deploy AI & the latest tech to streamline company spend and expense management, "transforming finance teams from reactive no-sayers to proactive growth drivers."

It's been a year already! Join Convera Macro Analyst Boris Kovacevic for the first episode of the year as we re-cap 2023 and deep-dive into potential market and macro risks for the year ahead, covering geopolitics, inflation, central banking, Germany, China and global FX outlooks.

Disclaimer: Converge is Convera’s new podcast that discusses a range of financial services topics. We want to remind our listeners that the information shared on this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. Please note that the opinions expressed on Converge are solely the opinions of the host and the guests, not Convera’s.

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time, and the concept of Environmental, Social & Governance investing (or ESG) is at the heart of corporate efforts to reduce it. But

We discuss how carbon marketplaces work, and why they an important and increasingly popular option for consumers and businesses to take action towards preventing the climate crisis. We also cover the important emerging role that blockchain and digital assets can play in these marketplaces and why they are the perfect fit to assure data integrity, permanence and transparency.