InMarketing Today

The FCA today set out clear standards for firms that help people buy, trade and hold crypto. Every firm must meet financial-resilience requirements — capital and stress testing — while new market-integrity rules tackle insider trading and manipulation, and stablecoin issuers get simpler capital rules. Authorisation applications open this September; the mandatory regime takes effect in October 2027.

The marketing lesson is in the framing. David Geale, the FCA's executive director of payments and digital finance, said the regime spares firms a choice "between regulatory certainty and room to innovate". That is not regulatory language — it is positioning. Britain is selling itself as "a stable, competitive home to build and grow", a deliberate pitch against jurisdictions that offer one or the other. When the referee starts competing for your business, certainty becomes an asset you can market.

If you operate in crypto or adjacent payments, prepare now: the FCA's pre-application meetings open in July, and early authorisation is itself a trust signal worth putting in front of customers. Treat compliance not as a cost but as a credential. In financial services, "regulated" remains one of the most valuable words you can earn.

The Trump administration now controls who may use the most capable AI models. OpenAI's newest model, GPT-5.6 Sol, has been restricted to a handful of "trusted partners"; Anthropic's Mythos may be shared with roughly 100 approved American firms. An administration that took office railing against AI regulation has, in The Economist's words, gone "from implausibly libertarian to increasingly draconian and opaque" in a matter of weeks.

For fintech leaders, this is dependency risk dressed up as a vendor decision. The model you build on may, overnight, become unavailable, restricted, or politically radioactive — through no fault of your own. There is a brand dimension too: tie your product story tightly to one frontier lab's name and you borrow its volatility. Many firms have already prepared to switch to cheaper Chinese open-weight models, roughly six to ten months behind, if disruption continues.

Build for substitution. Abstract your AI layer so you can swap models without rewriting your product or your messaging. And resist making any single supplier's brand central to your own — when their certainty evaporates, you do not want yours going with it.

Riverside, the video and podcast recording platform, today added newsletters. Rather than challenge Substack or Beehiiv head-on, it gives its existing users an AI tool to turn videos and podcasts they have already recorded into newsletter-ready copy, sent from within the app. The company has raised over $60 million.

The positioning is the story, and it is textbook empathy. Chief executive Nadav Keyson put it plainly: "Substack and Beehiiv start you at a blank page. But our creators and business customers are already producing rich, information-dense spoken content." Riverside is not selling a newsletter tool; it is removing the friction between work a customer has already done and a channel they have not yet used. That is the difference between shipping a feature and understanding a customer.

Look hard at what your customers already produce, then build the shortest possible path from that to the outcome they want. The blank page is the enemy. Whoever removes it — in a product, an onboarding flow, or a piece of content — earns the customer's gratitude, and usually their money.