InMarketing Today

Christine Lagarde will step down as president of the European Central Bank (ECB) in February, nine months before her term ends, the Financial Times reports today. She announced it hours before the ECB held rates at 2.5% and signalled a likely rise in December. She told the governing council she wanted "greater freedom to express her views" because she could not "remain neutral" over developments in France, and she is the leading candidate to chair the World Economic Forum.

The sequencing was careful. The exit landed on a rate-decision day, alongside unusually plain guidance ("the direction of travel is clear"), and Berenberg's Holger Schmieding said it "does not change the outlook" for policy. Bonds rallied regardless. The sharper lesson is in her reason. A role that demands neutrality eventually costs its holder a voice, and senior people sometimes leave precisely to get it back.

If you advise clients with euro exposure, send a short note now on a probable December rise and the leadership contest running alongside it, with Klaas Knot and Pablo Hernández de Cos the early names. Then test your own succession plan. If your chief executive announced an early exit tomorrow, you should be able to say in one statement what changes and what does not.

OpenTrade, a London platform that lets fintechs and digital asset firms offer dollar- and euro-denominated yield backed by real-world assets, has appointed Lázaro Campos as chair, Finextra reports today. Campos spent nearly 25 years at Swift, the last five as chief executive until 2012, and has since sat on the boards of Starling Bank, Payoneer and PPRO. The appointment follows a $17m strategic funding round.

A chair appointment is a positioning statement. OpenTrade's chief executive, David Sutter, says businesses building on stablecoins "expect the same resilience and trust they get from the traditional system", and the quickest way to signal that is to hire someone who ran it. The Bank of England opened a consultation today on letting clearing houses accept tokenised collateral, so the gap is closing from both sides. A borrowed reputation opens doors; only an operating record keeps them open.

If you run a digital asset business, make the governance behind each board name visible on your website and in your due diligence pack, not just in the announcement. If you run an incumbent, track where your former leaders go next. Senior talent moves before the money does.

One in four business-to-business (B2B) websites may block artificial intelligence (AI) crawlers without knowing it, according to analysis cited by Sam Beddall of Articulate Marketing. Buyers now research suppliers with ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Copilot, and old robots.txt rules, content delivery network settings and pages that only assemble through JavaScript can leave a firm absent before the shortlist is drawn up. Ahrefs analysis cited in the piece found near-zero correlation between page word count and AI citations.

Financial services firms are unusually exposed. Factsheets live in PDFs, performance data loads through scripts, the best research sits behind a registration form, and security teams block bots by default. Each choice made sense on its own; together they make a firm hard for a machine to read. Ranking well and being read are now different achievements, and the second decides whether you are named when a buyer asks an assistant who is credible in your category.

Ask your web team to fetch your homepage as an AI bot and show you what comes back. Make search access and training access two separate decisions, not one blanket block. Then publish an ungated version of your strongest research, with the PDF as the download rather than the only copy.