FinTech Weekly - Fintech News Issue #345

Emily Chang - host of Bloomberg Technology - meets Sam Bankman-Fried: the CEO of FTX, the popular trading platform, talks about what to expect for the crypto market in 2022, with a focus on regulation.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg interviews Jeff Seibert, co-founder of Digits - a fintech platform that provides real-time accounting for small businesses. They discuss how the pandemic changed the focus of small business and of the fintech firm, and what are the challenges for the future.

Despite adversities, El Salvador is continuing to improve its Bitcoin program. After the first crypto became legal tender in the country, El Salvador is now thinking about new solutions to reward Bitcoin investors and increase the number of financial instruments based on the cryptocurrency.

FTFT Capital Investments LLC - a subsidiary of the Future Fintech Group Inc. - launches a new crypto markets price aggregator - ftftx.com: the platform will provide real-time data and information, tracking not only major cryptos but also hundreds of altcoins, gathering data from hundreds of crypto exchanges.

If we have to see the upside, the pandemic forced firms to focus more on people needs, and to find easy and useful solutions to overcome the many issues that people and businesses were facing - and are facing. Some of the solutions found may continue to be improved even after pandemic, and Fintech Futures covers the main three in this article.

Even if 2021 came to an end, we retrace the most important fintech events of the past year with The Fintech Times: the magazine shares the most important funding success stories month by month.

London is one of the cities with more fintech firms and EMIs, electronic money institutions, but the amount of illegal activities in which some of them are involved may prevent the city from becoming a trustworthy authority in the fintech space.

If financial institutions have so far guarded our financial assets, they could now be able to guard another kind of asset that is becoming more important in our lives: digital identities. Rod Boothby, Global Head of Identity at Santander, is also the co-chair of the Open Digital Trust Initiative and is cooperating to create the Global Assured Identity Network (GAIN).

Among the innovative solutions found by fintech firms there is the frictionless checkout technology, which allows customers to just walk out of a store after purchasing. Zippin is becoming one of the best providers of this technology, and it could even rival Amazon.