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Affairs
Notes on events that matter across our economy and society
19.03.26
According to Klarna, a digital bank and payments provider, its Klarna Card has reached five million active customers globally, underscoring rapid adoption as consumers shift towards new forms of payment which provide more control over day-to-day money management. The card draws from the customer's own funds for everyday spending, with the option to spread the cost of a specific purchase, like a large appliance or a flight, when it makes sense to do so. The result is a card that offers spending control without the long-term debt obligations that come with traditional credit cards.
Advisors dominate 70 per cent of conversation time in first prospect meetings and ask factual or closed-ended questions more than 90 per cent of the time, according to new research from Horsesmouth's Discovery Lab. The five-year study, one of the largest qualitative analyses of advisor-prospect conversations in the industry, reviewed over 100 recorded first meetings and found a consistent pattern: what advisors call "discovery" is functionally an intake meeting. The findings help explain a widespread challenge highlighted by a separate Horsesmouth survey, which found that more than half of advisors never received formal training on how to run a discovery meeting - meaning prospects stay surface-level and prospects don’t reveal their true situation, with many prospects hesitating to move forward or walking away entirely.
BZI, a steel and construction company, has achieved three proprietary construction breakthroughs - ExoClip, ExoWall and EntroDeck, which are now available for architects and engineers to incorporate into building designs from the earliest planning stages. The new suite of innovations spans substructural seismic protection, unitised wall systems, and prefabricated structural panels - each designed to bring measurable improvements in safety, speed, and build quality.
Pyth Network, a provider of institutional market data, has launched Pyth Pro X, market data designed exclusively for exchanges operating multi-asset markets. Pyth Pro X delivers the data required to price everything from crypto to equities, supporting live markets, new product launches, and complex risk frameworks without the overhead of traditional market data licensing. Leading trading venues including Bitget, BitMEX, Coinbase, Crypto.com, DreamCash, LMAX, and TradeXYZ are among the exchanges already using Pyth Pro X to power their operations.
Airrived has launched AetherClaw, a new capability on its Agentic AI platform. According to Anurag Gurtu, co-founder and CEO of Airrived: "Early frameworks enabled agentic execution and proved the concept. What enterprises needed next was a platform that could govern it - with fine-grained access control, policy enforcement, human oversight, and a complete audit trail built in from the start. That is what AetherClaw delivers."
