InMarketing Today

Revolut plans to launch its own venture capital fund from 2027, finews.com reported yesterday, citing an internal memo seen by Handelsblatt. The fund, a European Long-Term Investment Fund on its Revolut Ventures platform, will back technology companies approaching a potential listing and will be open only to "eligible" customers. Since July, the Revolut app has offered private equity funds managed by Apollo, Ares, Hamilton Lane and Partners Group.

The sequence is the strategy. Revolut rented credibility first, putting four of the best-known names in private markets on its shelf, and only now puts its own name on the product. The plumbing is named too: Carne Group manages the fund, Alter Domus administers it and BNY holds the assets. The downside is stated in plain words, as investments "significantly less liquid than exchange-traded stocks" that "carry a substantial risk of capital loss". That warning and the eligibility gate protect the brand as much as the customer.

If you are launching under your own name in a market where you are new, borrow credibility first and name the institutions standing behind you. Put the custodian, administrator and manager on the product page, and write the risk warning in the same plain English as the sales copy, not in a footnote.

Ripple, the digital asset infrastructure firm, has received final approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the US bank regulator, to establish Ripple National Trust Bank, Finextra reports. The bank will manage the segregated reserves behind RLUSD, Ripple's US dollar stablecoin, act as collateral trustee for its holders and provide fiduciary digital asset custody. Ripple has also widened its work with BNY, which now supports XRP and RLUSD on its custody platform, and signed a deal making RLUSD a key stablecoin across Robinhood's digital asset services.

Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple's chief executive, did not sell the charter as a product. He sold it as proof: "We've spent over a decade building regulated financial infrastructure that institutions can actually use at scale." For a crypto firm courting banks, a federal supervisor is the most persuasive endorsement available, and BNY as reserve custodian is the second. Neither can be bought with a campaign.

List the third-party proofs your buyers trust most: licences, supervisors, custodians, auditors and named clients. Then count how many appear in your first sales meeting. If it is fewer than all of them, rewrite the deck so the proof comes before the product.

Anthropic, the developer of Claude, devotes 92 pages of its initial public offering prospectus to risk, roughly three times the length of SpaceX's disclosures, City AM reports today. The warnings run from "catastrophic or existential risks to humanity" to models that resist shutdown. PitchBook has cut its valuation to $1.42tn, nearly 30% below the mooted $2tn, citing about $90bn a year in computing costs from 2027 that the company cannot easily exit, equal to 133% of its current annualised revenue.

Candour has a price, and the market has started to set it. The analysts are reading past the extinction warnings to the plumbing: computing agreements that could exceed $800bn with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Broadcom and SpaceX, and key figures still left blank. Harrison Rolfes of PitchBook said the next amendment "should fill in a lot". The founders' admission that their spending "may seem irresponsibly large at first glance" is honest positioning for a brand built on safety. It is also an invitation to check the arithmetic.

Assume sophisticated readers will go past your headline numbers to the commitments underneath them. Before your next results statement or investor presentation, list every long-term contract, supplier dependency and blank figure an analyst could ask about, and answer each one in the document rather than on the call.