InMarketing Today

Euroclear and Strate, South Africa's central securities depository (CSD), have launched Global Funds Access, a gateway that gives South African investors access to about 250,000 international funds through Euroclear's FundsPlace platform, Asset Servicing Times reports today. The service runs over a direct link between the two depositories and was built with Strate's approved participants, so local firms can reach international funds through a single framework.

Both sides reached for the same word. Euroclear's group chief commercial officer, Bernard Ferran, praised Strate's "trusted market infrastructure"; Strate's chief executive, Andre Nortje, spoke of expanding access "through trusted infrastructure". It is the right instinct, because each party brings something the other cannot: Euroclear brings breadth, Strate brings a name South African firms already rely on. Partnership announcements usually blur who contributes what. This one does not.

If you manage funds with international ambitions, check whether your share classes sit on FundsPlace, and whether your factsheets and fee disclosures would make sense to a South African adviser seeing them for the first time. If you are announcing a partnership of your own, write one sentence on what each party brings that the other could not. If you cannot, neither can your clients.

Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, has suspended all withdrawals after hackers took an estimated $6.3bn, the Financial Times reports today. The exchange says an engineer's laptop was compromised, and blockchain analysts TRM Labs linked the attack to a North Korean unit, calling it the largest crypto theft on record. About $3bn of the affected assets, mostly stablecoins, has been frozen, and Binance says it has reserved more than $6.34bn of company funds to cover the loss.

The reassurance was well built. Co-chief executive Richard Teng told customers their "money is safe", Binance said $5bn of its reserve was already held in the exact tokens taken, and it set a target of Sunday to restore withdrawals. A specific number calms people in a way an adjective never can. The risk is early certainty: by this morning Binance was reporting "additional points of breach", and co-founder Changpeng Zhao conceded a gap of roughly $2bn still to cover. In a crisis, every update is measured against the first one.

If you run a digital asset business, draft your incident statement now, with spaces for the figures you would need: reserves, frozen amounts, a restoration date. Promise only what the evidence already supports. If you offer custody, expect clients to ask today exactly where their assets sit and who else could reach them. Have the answer on one page.

Of organisations with customer-facing artificial intelligence (AI) in regular use, 92% say it met or exceeded expectations, but only 27% can show proof, according to a Metric Sherpa study produced with Sprinklr and reported by MarTech today. Almost every respondent (99%) could name an intended outcome, yet only 26% defined success metrics and just 10% also recorded a baseline. Only 17% name an owner for AI business outcomes.

The gap is costlier in a regulated firm. A claim you cannot evidence is a liability with a regulator, a board or a procurement team, and "it feels faster" will survive none of them. The study also warns against letting the platform mark its own homework: a tool can improve its own dashboard while the business result stays flat. Firms that named an outcome owner could quantify results 46% of the time, against 23% for those without one.

Pick one AI application in your marketing team. Record today's baseline, set the threshold that would count as success, and name one person who answers for the result. Then write down what would make you scale it, change it or switch it off. Only 28% of organisations have agreed criteria for that decision.