Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/970554
maltatoday WEDNESDAY 18 APRIL 2018 11 Business Today www.creditinfo.com.mt info@creditinfo.com.mt Tel: 2131 2344 Your Local Partner for Credit Risk Management Solutions Supporting you all the way Coinbase acquires Earn, appoints fi rst CTO Google interested in Nokia digital health unit Digital asset exchange platform Coinbase has acquired Earn, a start-up that enables sending and receiving of digital cur- rency payments for targeted mi- crotasks. The deal, valued at $100 million, will put Earn CEO and co-founder Balaji Srinivasan at the helm as Coinbase's first CTO. Calling Srinivasan "one of the most respected technologists in the crypto space" and "one of the technology industry's few true originalists", Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong says that Srinivasan will be "the technological evangelist" for the company. "Srinivasan will evangelise for both crypto and for Coinbase, educating the world and recruiting crypto-first talent to the company," Armstrong says. Earn, the company Srinivasan co-founded, works by enabling senders to pay users in digital currency for replying to emails and completing tasks. Large- scale commercial email senders and average email users alike benefit from Earn's paid email platform. Commercial senders can use the technology to pay email recipients to respond to surveys and messages recruiting, fundraising, and marketing products and services. Average email users can make money via their Earn accounts by replying to these emails, as well as use the prices on incoming email to prioritise and manage inboxes. Srinivasan was a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz when he became CEO of the Bitcoin mining company that would become Earn. In 2015, he helped the company pivot to take advantage of the growing feasibility of Bitcoin micropayments by creating a new solution, paid email, that offered a new direction for the company and a clear use case for digital assets in micropayments. "As of today, Earn is a fast- growing, cash-flow positive business with a multimillion dollar revenue run rate," Srinivasan says. "I think it's fair to say that it's one of the first truly useful blockchain-based applications, where users can earn money in their spare time while senders can pay people to actually reply to their emails and fill out their surveys." "We're going to be doubling down on the Earn business within Coinbase," Armstrong says. "Earn has built a paid email product that is arguably one of the earliest practical blockchain applications to achieve meaningful traction." The Earn acquisition and new CTO come amid a busy spring for the cryptocurrency platform. Earlier this month, the company announced the launch of Coinbase Ventures, a new venture fund to support early-stage cryptocurrency and digital asset-based startups, and added Rachael Horwitz as VP of communications. In March, Coinbase unveiled a set of new tools to help cryptocurrency investors and traders remain compliant with tax laws, and introduced its Coinbase Index Fund to give crypto investors exposure to all digital assets listed on its exchange. Coinbase began the year with another successful talent grab: acquiring the engineering team from Memo.AI. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in San Francisco, Coinbase has a valuation of more than $1.6 billion. It has raised more than $225 million in funding and includes Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), Bank of Tokyo- Mitsubishi UFJ, and Andreessen Horowitz among its investors. Google's subsidiary Nest is re- portedly interested in bidding for Nokia's digital health division, which the Finnish company has decided is surplus to requirements after only two years. The unit is actually the wearables firm Withings, bought by Nokia in 2016 for $170 million. But after failing to find ways to integrate Withings products into its business and the botched development of a virtual reality camera, Nokia announced in February that it was considering selling or closing the business. According to the French news site Les Echos, Nokia is now close to finalising a sale of the digital health division. Among the potential bidders is Nest, the Alphabet smart home subsidiary that is being merged back into Google. Two other French companies and one other non-European company are also said to be interested according to Les Echos. According to another report from the website Wareable, the French government is keen for Nokia to sell to a French bidder following an initiative to boost the country's efforts in artificial intelligence. But the situation is complicated by the General Data Protection Regulation, which comes into effect in the EU on May 25 and will give EU citizens more control over their personal data. There are also concerns about whether a sale to a large data company like Google will be received badly by voters in the wake of the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal. Google is also expanding its presence in France, and one source speculated that the US firm could invest in the French companies bidding for the unit than buy it outright. It has been public knowledge that all is not well at Nokia's digital health unit since late last year when the firm axed development of the high-tech but high-cost virtual reality camera that could have had applications in digital health. After laying off most of its digital health workforce, the company also wrote off the value of the digital health business, setting the value of the Withings acquisition at zero. HSBC Bank Malta has announced the launch of an employee pension plan that has been developed in collaboration with the Malta Union of Bank Employees (MUBE). Work on this initiative has been ongoing for the past year and the new plan will create an efficient way to save money for retirement. HSBC Bank Malta Chief Executive Officer, Andrew Beane said: "HSBC has the well-being of its employees at heart, including their financial well-being. We are committed to support our colleagues with their financial future and believe this pension plan is an important new benefit that will help colleagues plan for tomorrow as well as today." The plan involves contributions from employees that are matched by the bank while ensuring that overall levels of contributions agreed between HSBC and MUBE are achieved, and then invested through HSBC Life Assurance (Malta) Ltd, which could result in growth over the years. At retirement, employees can utilise the money available in their respective plan. The pension plan was designed together with MUBE via a joint HSBC-MUBE working committee that has been actively meeting over the past months to make this initiative possible. HSBC Malta employees will receive more information on the pension plan through internal communications and roadshows held in branches and offices. In the bank's recent townhall for all employees, a specific workshop was held on pensions and the changing demographics of developed societies. "Being an employee representative organisation, we always believed it is important that MUBE supports employees not only when they are in employment but also when they retire. We are proud to have supported this first pension plan for HSBC Bank Malta employees and encourage many colleagues to get the information and benefit from this plan. MUBE also hopes to promote similar plans in organisations in which it is represented," said William Portelli, President of the MUBE. HSBC Malta fi rst major bank to announce pension plan for staff MUBE President William Portelli (left) with HSBC Malta CEO Andrew Beane after addressing the employees at Qormi