Digital Financial News

Crypto-friendly congressman Patrick McHenry has temporarily assumed the role of US House Speaker after Kevin McCarthy was ousted by Congress. 

₹30,000 on their smartphone 2 or 3 years ago are now looking at around ₹50,000 as a price point for their new phone—or even doubling or tripling their budget, notes Faisal Kawoosa, founder and chief analyst, Techarc. He further adds, "Of late, thanks to multiple Android brands, a mid-premium segment has emerged that is priced at around ₹30,000-40,000. For these customers, the mind map is that the next upgrade has to scale up in price to ₹50,000 and above.

(Exciting news! Mint is now on WhatsApp Channels :rocket: Subscribe today by clicking the link and stay updated with the latest financial insights! Click here!) The report revealed that 76% of the commuters want multiple modes of payment in public transit. Among those surveyed, 66% wanted to use their bank cards at transit entry or exit points whereas 69% preferred QR-based payments. 63% of the commuters said that bank cards (debit and credit cards) would improve convenience and save time.

cryptocurrency is used. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) project, codenamed Atlas, began at the Dutch central bank more than five years ago, but its potential value has been underscored over the last 18 months by a series of chaotic collapses across the crypto industry.

Tata Consultancy Services said on Wednesday that it has won a multi-year deal from British retail giant Asda to support its digital transformation and to implement a new organisation-wide IT operating model, following its divestiture from Walmart. Deal financials were not disclosed. TCS Has been a long-time vendor to Walmart as well. The strategic partnership will leverage TCS’ cloud, AI, and security solutions to help Asda deliver the divestiture smoothly, on time and securely, it said in a statement. TCS will further enable Asda to enhance its customer experience and innovation capabilities to help increase their market share and retain price leadership.

Mint is now on WhatsApp Channels Subscribe today by clicking the link and stay updated with the latest financial insights! Click here! The unveiling wasn’t merely ceremonial. The event involved the presentation of the Release to Service (RSD) and the Signalling Out Certificate (SOC). These formalities were witnessed by luminaries from the defence sector, including the Chief of Air staff- IAF, the Chairman and Managing Director of HAL, and the Chief Executive of the Centre for Military Airworthiness and Certification (CE-CEMILAC), to name a few.

Sam Bankman-Fried's trial on charges that he defrauded thousands of customers and investors in his FTX digital coin exchange began with a full day of jury selection

«We think that the capex cycle is surely looking good and typically in an election year, these companies and these sectors tend to do very well so one should have a positive bias on this space,» says Hemang Jani, Independent Market Expert. Curious to get in your thoughts. What is the outlook on the capital goods space, the likes of a Siemens etc? I think within the capital goods space, what stands out for us is L&T because of the recent business updates and the fact that this open offer which got concluded, the floating stock from the retail side has reduced considerably and different business verticals are showing good traction. So L&T would be the number one pick and apart from that, I think the sector may go through a little bit of correction and depending on how the quarterly numbers pan out for companies like Siemens, ABB and whole host of midcap companies, one should be able to kind of take a call based on the inputs.

NewsClick site and its journalists on 17 August, weeks after a New York Times report alleged that the NewsClick website had received funds from an American millionaire who, the Times wrote, had funded the spread of “Chinese propaganda." Delhi Police on Tuesday searched 30 locations connected with online news portal NewsClick and its journalists in a case filed under the anti-terror law UAPA following allegations that it received money for pro-China propaganda and later in the day sealed its office. Police said the Special Cell searches began early in the morning and were concentrated in the Delhi-NCR region.

On Wednesday, Bitcoin faced a modest decline of nearly 0.50%, with its trading price settling at $27,412. However, this slight dip belies the cryptocurrency's resilient performance over the past week, witnessing an impressive surge of nearly 4%. 

Russian corporations are starting to make use of the digital ruble, the country’s central bank digital currency (CBDC).

Pankaj Tibrewal, Senior EVP & Fund Manager (Equity), Kotak MF, says “our sense is that consumption around the second half of this year should start picking up, led by festive season as well as election spending and do not forget that this time the wedding dates in the second half are about 35-36 days which is one of the highest over the last four-five years. So, broadly speaking, in the near term, markets may face headwinds. However, if you take a three- to five-year view, India is very nicely positioned from an economic cycle perspective.” Tibrewal also says, “a lot of money is probably chasing little stocks and now market participants are navigating from higher to lower quality. This is something we need to be a little worried about and hence our cautious stance on mid and smallcaps in the near term. But if you take a three-five-year view, the space is always exciting. There are bottom-up opportunities.” With the negative undertone that we are seeing across on the Wall Street with rising bond yields, etc, do you believe that it poses a major threat for our own markets or do you think that we will continue to hold out and these are just mere bumps along the way? In the near term, there are headwinds both from global and local economic data which are emerging.

Westpac will maintain a presence in the South Pacific after the federal government indicated it wants to see Australian companies playing a role in the region.

Spotify's business was stagnating. Apple had overtaken it as the top paid music service in the United States, losses were mounting and customer growth was slowing. Daniel Ek, the company's CEO, decided that Spotify needed to transform from a music service into the everything store for audio. The first missing piece was podcasts.

By Satawasin Staporncharnchai and Chayut Setboonsarng

It is a system that has barely changed since the nineteenth century. But that dependence on bits of paper being flown from one party to another has become a vulnerability for companies which move and finance the world’s resources around the globe.

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son said he believes artificial general intelligence (AGI), artificial intelligence that surpasses human intelligence in almost all areas, will be realised within 10 years. Speaking at the SoftBank World corporate conference, Son said he believes AGI will be ten times more intelligent than the sum total of all human intelligence. He noted the rapid progress in generative AI that he said has already exceeded human intelligence in certain areas.

Gautam Shah, Founder & Chief Strategist, Goldilocks Premium Research, says “it does seem that over the next many weeks, maybe even many months, the Nifty just broadly stays in a range and digests the news flow around elections and oil and global markets whereas stocks and sectors continue to do well. There will be pockets that will stand out like auto ancillary, sugar, infrastructure, power. There will be pockets that will stand out like unlock trade, hotel stocks. So concentrate on these pockets and not on the typical usual top 50-100 names.” The entire engine or the propeller of this market are banks. But banks have not participated. Now, the technical theory is that the weakest sector would always lead the decline. Banking, which was supposed to be the strongest outperforming sector for 2020, has turned out to be the weakest sector. Could it be that the banks surprisingly could actually lead the decline because technically, that is a setup? The writing is on the wall, banks will lead the market down.

Daljeet Singh Kohli, Head — Strategy & Research, Vasuki India Fund, says We have some small amount of IT, very small allocation as of now. Mainstream IT, the two enabled services, we already have a good allocation there. But in mainstream IT, we would like to wait for this quarter’s number. The commentary from Accenture was that probably things will take much longer than what many of the analysts and the Street was expecting. That revival will happen sooner. Everybody was saying that H2 of this year will be much better but that does not seem to be the case. So maybe after the Q2 numbers, once the managements give their commentary, we will have a little more idea about it. What is your take regarding some of these new-age tech names? Zomato is finally seeing a bit of the upside but it is now past the level of 100 comfortably but you have Nykaa and the others which continue to languish? What is your view for the entire space? We continue to avoid them as of now mainly because we want to see some more numbers coming in – a lot of ESOP related and many one-offs extraordinary items.

Deepak Shenoy, Founder, Capital Mind, says “technically, Vedanta is not a great play. If you bought it for fundamental reasons, then you probably want to wait to see how the demergers evolve into the results which should start coming in and more colour should start coming in once they announce results. So you might as well wait for that to make a decision. The reason to exit is probably related to why you entered in the first place.” What do you make of this move coming in from Vedanta? Earlier it was all about merging and now it is all about demerging? Yes, it is a little crazy.

mutual funds through SIPs. A deeper look at what it means: A mandate is an instruction provided by an account holder to the bank to automate his recurring payment. E-mandate is a digital payment service introduced jointly by RBI (Reserve Bank of India) and NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India). Almost all large banks in India provide these facilities. They are hassle-free and reduce the burden on individuals to make timely payments. Typically, these are often used by investors who invest in mutual funds using systematic investment plans (SIPs). Earlier, investors filled a physical form to make recurring payments through SIPs, which was time-consuming and challenging. Once an E-mandate is set up it reduces the SIP registration time from earlier 21 days to 5-7 days now and hence is becoming popular. How can you set up an e-mandate ? Investors need to complete a one-time registration process for setting up a mandate with the fund house, registrar or through third-party portals that distribute mutual funds. In the case of sending a physical mandate a request form needs to be submitted and this process could take 3-4 weeks. Investors can set up an E-mandate digitally with their net banking authentication and it is completely paperless. Registration is done through internet banking of respective banks using net-banking credentials, while in some banks, even debit cards can be used. Some portals also use ‘E-sign’ using Aadhaar to set up mandates.