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A FLASHY OUTLOOK

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Updated : August 3, 2014 00:15  am,
By Editor

img27Flash continues to gain traction throughout the storage landscape as the technology removes several bottlenecks of I/O performance

Flash storage in the enterprise segment is gaining ground for very obvious reasons. Reduced costs of Flash memory are making it conceivable to have more data stored on Flash arrays. Several bottlenecks in traditional enterprise data center storage have caused an acceleration towards flash storage arrays as a general trend in data centers globally. Leading vendors including EMC, Hitachi, IBM and so on have added flash drives to their existing arrays.

With application performance and availability top priority for Businesses, Flash helps deliver reduced data processing times and faster application service uptime. Keeping more active content on SSD arrays helps retrieve and deliver that data much faster. This is more in the case of critical applications that need high IOPS (Input /Output Operations Per Second) storage performance. Virtualization and demands of cloud computing are further accentuating the need for Flash storage arrays in enterprise data centers.

According to Pure Storage, a vendor focused on enterprise storage Technologies, there are similar trends in all regions of its business including MEA and therefore a growing demand for Flash arrays. The company’s distributor in the region, Global Distribution FZE has already commenced Partner recruitment and enablement, both Technical and Sales.

Steven Rose VP EMEA Pure Storage says, “In the virtualized datacenter, it is now commonly I/O performance that limits server consolidation ratios, not CPU or memory. These bottlenecks can affect customer satisfaction and slow down business processes. Further, Virtualization has the effect of multiplexing multiple logical workloads across a single physical I/O path. The greater the consolidation achieved through virtualization, the more randomized the physical I/O requests become. And random I/O is the Achilles heel of the rotational disk drive, because seek and rotational latency dominate transfer times 20 to 1.”

While Virtualization randomizes I/O as a variety of IO workloads are run together against the storage stack, the legacy storage based on traditional HDDs is mostly designed for sequential I/O. When a multitude of applications and services are competing against the resources of a spinning disk storage array the response times gets higher and higher and the disk array struggles to keep up as result of bottlenecks caused by the disk contention.

Christian Putz, Vice President-EMEA Channel Sales at Violin Memory, a leading provider of all-flash storage arrays and appliances delivering application solutions for the enterprise says, “Flash technology allows to run random workloads without having backend contention, and specifically speaking, the Violin Memory Flash technology provides sustained, predictable and sub-milisecond latencies for any kind of random workload (even with a huge component of writes). With Violin Memory Flash technology running mixed workloads results in no I/O penalty and allows to fully virtualize business critical applications, sustain high performance for all virtualized databases and applications and fully adopt VDI deployments because of an increased VDIs/core ratio. Last but not least, Violin Memory Flash technology dramatically reduces the impact of overcommitting resources, which typically occurs in this space, and allows to even run more VMs per host with low latency storage.”

According to Steven, while the demand for IOPS is growing, the supply is actually shrinking because the I/O rate to a single hard drive has been roughly constant while the capacity of a hard drive doubles every 18 months or so. This means that their performance per GB is actually declining. Therefore Flash is poised to have a disruptive effect on the enterprise storage market by applying solid state storage to tier 1 applications in the data center.

He adds, “A solid state storage solution based on flash removes these bottlenecks because it has no seek time, no rotational latency, and is equally fast on random workloads as on sequential ones, he says. Flash can accelerate virtual server and desktop deployments while affording higher consolidation and greater efficiency. Flash can also accelerate SQL and NoSQL workloads without partitioning or changes to the application. With flash memory, any block of data can be fetched in nearly constant time. This means that applications can be designed to expect sub-millisecond latency no matter what the I/O stream (random or sequential) or data distribution. Also, Solid state storage uses 10x less power and space than rotational hard drives, allowing you to substantially expand capacity in place. Further, with all flash arrays, customers spend much less time planning and tuning their arrays to remove bottlenecks.”

Flash all the way

Vendors are delivering hybrid arrays that include Flash and hard drives as well as all flash arrays which contain multiple flash memory drives instead of hard disk drives. Industry experts suggest that deployments must take into account use case scenarios. For instance, typical application workloads will see a considerable improvement in performance as well as savings in power, cooling etc with marginal inclusion of flash technology. Therefore, the hybrid approach works out as a viable option to accelerate workload performance. However, there are also application scenarios that demand dramatic improvements in response-time performance (latency) or high IOPS which are well taken care of all Flash array options.

All-flash arrays have been designed from the ground up to work with flash media unlike traditional arrays that have been built to work with the relatively slower spinning hard drives.

Christian says, “All Flash is one of the fastest growing markets in IT infrastructure. Nowadays, real-time data access and operational efficiency are the new norms and IT forces are starting to drive a transformation of the datacenter pushed by the demands of Business Critical Applications, full Enterprise Virtualization adoption, Data analytics, etc. “

He adds, “As Flash storage is a proven and mature technology and we are seeing Tier 1 apps and virtualization driving adoption of flash arrays. VDI, Transactional databases, Data analytics, ERPs, and Cloud initiatives are being moved towards an All-Flash storage to make real-time data access and operational efficiency become a reality: a tremendous boost in performance with dramatically reduced response times allows not only guaranteeing the future business growth pace, but it also provides higher consolidation ratios, to be able to fully embrace business critical application virtualisation, to reduce over-provisioning, to reduce licensing costs by increasing compute node utilization, and an impressive datacenter footprint reduction.”

A great example of the impact of Flash instead of legacy hard disk drives is in a Virtual Desktop environment. According to Pure Storage, one of the biggest challenges VDI presents to storage is the variable and spikey nature of IO requirements throughout the day. Typical use is write-heavy (often 80/20), but boot storms and anti-virus scans introduce huge read spikes. Overnight maintenance tasks (patches, recomposes) introduce even more heavy write bursts. You need storage that keeps up with it all without sacrificing end-user experience the way a caching solution can. This is another great example of where flash really outpaces hard disk drive based hybrid arrays.

Steven elaborates, “Many VDI pilots go well– until it is time to scale-up the deployment and move into production. That’s where too often deployments hit the IO wall – exceeding the IO capabilities of traditional disk storage and requiring expensive additional storage purchases which blow the VDI ROI case. Pure Storage scales seamlessly from pilot of a few hundred to 1,000s of users, all with non-disruptive incremental capacity and resiliency expansion. If all the benefits of VDI (security, consolidation for managent, etc.) can meet or exceed the performance of local laptop performance, then more and more customers will consider to move to Virtual Desktop.”

Salil Dighe, the CEO at Meta Byte Technologies, a regional partner for FusionIO, that was recently acquired by SanDisk claims that the region has been slow and cautious in its adoption of Flash storage as they haven’t seen significant gains from traditional Flash storage options available from different vendors.

He says,The Middle East region is a followers market. The other parts of the world have already tried to utilize flash storage arrays and have not seen much benefit in terms of performance increase or IOPS.  For the investments vs performance the gains are minimal hence now they are turning towards what is known as Flash on PCIe. One such product is FusionIO which seems to turn heads and provides significant throughput in terms of IOPS. Today many of the customers prefer FusionIO due to its flexibility in supporting various scenarios be it increasing the IOPS on a standard tier1 server to server virtualization or to provide significantly high VDI and VM densities on the same servers.“

PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) based solid-state storage has better performance than server-based SATA, SAS or Fibre Channel (FC) solid-state drives because of the direct connections.

He adds, “If you are using a disk controller to write on hard drives whether flash or non-flash the bottle neck is still the controller. The difference can only be significant if you use Flash as a memory tier. FusionIO uses Flash memory in its best suited architecture that is flash on PCIe, meaning CPU has faster access to data. As a result the CPU is efficiently utilized and can process many more operations or support more connections.”

The transition in effect

The transition from to flash arrays is bound to accelerate. This would suit the growing virtualized environments as Flash helps customers eliminate bottlenecks of applications delivery in virtual environments. So will hard disk drives have a place in the data centres in the long term?

Responding to that question, Steven says, “In some areas such as deep archive, or areas where performance isn’t a requirement, then hard disks may be here to stay for some period of time. But with the pace of innovation and focus on the flash industry, its anyone’s guess as to how soon even large footprint slow hard disk drives might be replaced by SSD(solid state drives). Consider that in early 2014 the standard Enterprise All flash array SSD was 512GB and by the beginning of 2015 this could be 2TB per SSD and you can see why we could be rid of hard disk drives much faster than most Enterprises anticipate. Therefore we recommend highly that all customers when making their storage refresh plans consider the benefits of an All-flash approach to storage.”

Combining the speed of flash SSDs with the capacity of HDDs has enabled faster access to hot data, while keeping cold data that is not critically needed on high-capacity HDDs. The Flash manufacturers are emphatic that the trend is bound to accelerate.

“We clearly see flash memory as the Tier-1 storage for the enterprise datacenter, as it needs to be offer the highest sustained performance with the lowest possible latency while keeping the lowest cost per I/O. And this is actually starting to be a reality for Violin Memory customers. Traditional hard disk based storage will be still the preferred solution for reference data as it needs to be capacity optimised and needs to offer the lowest possible cost per GB (at the expense of inducing a high cost per I/O),” says Christian.

According to him, the cost benefits of Traditional disk based storage needs to be relooked as traditional disk storage offers the best possible cost per GB but the worst $/Transaction ratio compared to Flash. So price and cost is still a concern when all the variables are not properly set into the equation.

He adds, “Nevertheless, Flash storage is evolving very fast and the fact is that Violin Memory´s technology is even exceeding Moore´s law: flash density and performance is doubling every ~16 months.

Violin Memory´s unique intellectual property is leading the market by continuously developing the next generation of flash technology. This will guarantee continuing the same pace of doubling or even quadrupling the capacity and performance, and when combined with additional data efficiency mechanisms like compression and de-duplication this results in many PBs of Flash with dozens of millions of IOPS per Rack with a lower CAPEX/GB than performance disk. “

According to Dighe, Cost is definitely a big concern and a bottleneck. In order to take advantage of Flash in the most limited budgets, enterprises must look at different architectures and not go by legacy storage providers. They should consider hybrid storage which allows enterprises to take benefit of both Flash as well as HDD’s and can outperform any standard flash enabled enterprise storage in a single appliance.

He says, “Definitely we see customers replacing hard disk and standard enterprise storage with flash technology provided they are able to deliver high performance in a small hardware infrastructure footprint. For example, FusionIO has proved recently that they can achieve 1.1 Billion IOPS using 8 standard tier one servers with one FusionIO drives in each server leading to a quantum leap in terms performance and acceleration, which has never seen before.”

Pure Storage claims that a number of customers that have completely eliminated their legacy hybrid hard disk drive-based arrays in exchange for All Flash Arrays.

“We continue to engage with the thought leaders in many of our Enterprise customers that are seeking advice in terms of planning to eliminate hard disk from their data centres because of the many benefits of All flash storage arrays. Thanks to data reduction techniques such as compression and deduplication implemented by Pure Storage, flash has already become the preferred choice of business critical applications, and that trend is increasing.  Nearly 50% of all flash storage for Pure Storage is made up of database applications because of the ability to get data reduction 3-10X. “

So there it is. Flash enabled datacenters are likely to be one of the major shifts on the IT Infrastructural roadmap.

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2025 Hospitality Tech Trends

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By Prince Thampi, Founder and CEO, Hudini

As we approach 2025, the hospitality industry is poised for transformational growth, driven by evolving traveller preferences and advancements in technology. The future of hospitality promises enhanced convenience, personalisation and sustainability, with a significant focus on creating memorable experiences for guests. Let’s dive into five key trends that will shape the hospitality tech landscape in 2025 and beyond.

  1. The Continued Rise of Frictionless Technology

The increased demand for frictionless experiences is set to dominate the industry, with more and more travellers preferring hotels that offer touch-free check-in, check-out, and room access via mobile apps. This trend reflects a broader shift towards easy interactions powered by seamless digital integration. Mobile apps have been an essential tool for a few years now, enabling guests to manage their stays, order room service, and access hotel information effortlessly. With the introduction of Gen AI, those apps have become more powerful than ever and are now able to provide highly personalised recommendations and speak in different languages.

Hotels embracing this trend will gain a competitive edge, as tech-savvy travellers prioritise convenience and efficiency during their stay. According to a recent survey by Deloitte, around 72% of travellers are more likely to choose a hotel that offers mobile check-in and check-out services over those that don’t.

  • Hyper Personalised Guest Experiences

In 2025, personalisation will continue to be at the core of hospitality services but will finally be taken to the next level thanks to Gen AI. Guests expect hotels to anticipate their needs and offer tailored experiences, from customised room settings to personalised dining recommendations. Apps powered by AI are now able to predict guest needs based on a wealth of data, ingested from the hotel systems or fed externally.

Leveraging guest data and insights, hotels can create unique offerings that cater to individual preferences. This level of personalisation not only enhances guest satisfaction but also fosters loyalty and repeat bookings. According to Oracle’s findings, biometrics and AI are set to play pivotal roles, with 62% of guests valuing automated recognition for personalised interactions. Biometrics will experience a breakthrough into mainstream hospitality in 2025. Facial recognition technology has matured significantly and is ready to be weaved into the guest experience. It will enable better security and guest recognition while protecting their privacy at the same time.

  • AI-Enabled Customer Service

Artificial intelligence is revolutionising every aspect of the hospitality industry, but will be by itself a new way of providing customer service. Chatbots and virtual assistants are becoming standard tools for handling common queries, offering instant support, and streamlining operations at any time and in any language.

AI-driven solutions not only enhance efficiency but also provide guests with 24/7 assistance, ensuring a smoother and more satisfying experience. By integrating AI technologies, hotels can free up staff to focus on delivering exceptional in-person service.

  • Sustainability and Eco-Friendly Practices

Sustainability is no longer optional, it’s a necessity often enforced by regulation. Travellers are increasingly favouring hotels that adopt eco-friendly practices, such as using locally sourced food, implementing energy-efficient operations, and reducing waste.

By prioritising sustainability, hotels not only meet guest expectations but also contribute positively to the environment. This commitment to green initiatives enhances brand reputation and attracts environmentally conscious travellers. A recent survey by Booking.com found that 83% of global respondents believe more sustainable travel is vital, with 49% believing there aren’t enough sustainable travel options and 53% saying they get annoyed when a hotel prevents them from being sustainable.

Smart use of technology is key in the sustainability journey of hotels. Technology can accurately measure the reduction in carbon footprint, it will help reduce energy and adopt renewable energy sources, and will enable the effective management of food waste. Many hospitality apps allow guests to apply green energy settings to a room, some will even exchange your energy savings to loyalty points.

  • The return of ‘real’

With Gen Z – the first generation grown up with everything digital – becoming the next large group to travel, the craving for ‘real’ experiences is bigger than it ever was. Hotels focusing on truly unique and hyper local experiences; a great meal, cultural outing, or wellness treatment will win the hearts of this generation.

Fortunately hotel apps, AI, automation of processes, sustainability tech and the removal of cumbersome processes like checking-in and studying paper manuals will free up hotel staff to allow them to do what they do best: providing unforgettable, personalised and sustainable experiences.

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With DMTT into effect from Jan 1st, 2025, a tax expert explains everything businesses in Bahrain need to know!

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DMTT

Last September, the Kingdom of Bahrain introduced a new law to implement a Domestic Minimum Top-up Tax (DMTT) at a rate of 15% on businesses operating in the Kingdom that meet certain criteria.

With the new tax  into effect in time for the new year, Mr. Nilesh Ashar, an international tax specialist with more than 25 years of experience, serving as Senior Managing Director & Head of Tax Middle East at FTI Consulting, provided a comprehensive overview of the new law and its implications for businesses in Bahrain.

Mr. Ashar stated that the Kingdom’s decision is a significant milestone in the Middle East, with Bahrain emerging as a front runner to implement the DMTT on large multinational enterprises (MNEs) having presence in the Kingdom.

“The new law underscores Bahrain’s international commitment as part of the inclusive framework of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), to address base erosion and profit shifting by MNEs,” stated Mr. Ashar.

“Effect from January 1st, 2025, onwards, the law is largely based on the OECD Model Rules on global minimum tax (GMT) in terms of calculation of the tax, exclusions, and reliefs. Additionally, the new law contains specific provisions on procedures, enforcement, and anti-avoidance measures applicable in the Kingdom.”

While explaining who will be affected by this tax, and what the law actually entails, he added that the new law applies a 15% tax on the income of Bahrain entities (including permanent establishment, joint venture, and JV subsidiaries) that are part of an MNE group with annual consolidated revenue exceeding €750 million, for at least two out of four preceding fiscal years. However, the tax does not apply to foreign subsidiaries of a Bahraini-headquartered group or other foreign group companies that are part of the same MNE group. The DMTT is also not applicable to certain excluded entities as specified in the law, including government bodies, international organizations, non-profit organizations, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and certain investment funds.

Mr. Ashar explained that the law lists specific transitional and permanent reliefs from the levy of DMTT, including transitional country-by-country safe harbor relief, exclusion for the initial phase of international activity, de-minimis exclusion, and simplified computation safe harbor relief.

Describing key considerations for businesses, Mr. Ashar said that, detailed rules (Executive Regulations) are expected to be published in the coming months, it is now imperative for businesses to assess the impact of the DMTT on their Bahrain presence, evaluate the availability of any reliefs, and prepare for the compliances to be undertaken based on the law read in conjunction with the OECD Model Rules.

Mr. Ashar described, “In terms of taxable income, this is defined in the law as the financial accounting net income or loss for the fiscal year, before making any consolidation adjustments eliminating intra-group transactions, in accordance with the local accounting standards. Detailed rules on calculation of taxable income will be prescribed in line with the OECD Model Rules. Several compliance obligations are specified in the law including obtaining a registration, filing of annual tax returns, and paying taxes in advance over the relevant fiscal year. These compliances are expected to be in addition to the notifications and filings as required by the MNE Group under the OECD Model Rules.”

In addition, the law also provides specific provisions on enforcement via conduct of tax audits, assessments and procedures in relation to litigation and appeals. Mr. Ashar noted that a Tax Objection Committee will be formed for this purpose. Also, penal consequences are laid out in case of defaults, like failure to obtain registration, file tax returns, or submitting incorrect data. Such defaults may trigger stringent administrative fines, without prejudice to criminal liability.

Mr. Ashar further explained that a general anti-avoidance rule empowers the National Bureau of Revenue to disregard any transaction if it is not genuine or its primary purpose is to obtain a tax advantage against the objective of the law. Furthermore, the law specifies certain acts to qualify as ‘tax evasion,’ resulting in onerous consequences including criminal liability for legal persons, if held responsible for such evasion. Dispute resolution through a settlement process is acknowledged.

Mr. Ashar concluded that the Executive Regulations to the law are yet to be issued and are expected to prescribe detailed rules, controls and manner of calculation and application of DMTT in a manner consistent with the Model Rules. He also noted that since the law is published in the Arabic language, his views are based on an unofficial translation of the law.

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Trump’s Deregulation Bets, AI Shakeups, and Digital Assets: 2025 in Focus

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Affor Analytics

By Koen Ripping, CEO, Affor Analytics

It is that time of the year again when your mailbox gets filled with outlooks for 2025 from all sides. And it’s no surprise that, again, the year’s outlook comes with a high degree of uncertainty. I’ll refrain from actually giving targets this time, as you can read them from any Wall Street’s bank outlook. And mostly, because it’s hard to get them right. In the past eight years, actual market returns were outside the range of all forecasts compiled seven times, of which the market outperformed five times (source: Bloomberg).

Still, a good case can be made for uncertainty this year. If Trump actually holds up to some of his statements, we could see deregulation on multiple aspects, lower corporate taxes, and of course, tariffs. This will obviously not only impact the US, but could affect economies globally through tit-for-tat tariffs or, for longer term effects, geopolitical actions. Our expectation is that deregulation will happen, and this will feed into a more accommodative and friendly environment for small-to-midsize companies.

This does, however, not mean an end to the Magnificent Seven’s dominance for the coming year. The driver of the outperformance has been a superior earnings growth compared to the rest, which was 33% for Mag7 in 2024 compared to 3% for the rest resulting in an outperformance of around 24% (depending on when you read this). Consensus earnings growth for next year for Mag7 and the rest are respectively 18% versus 12%, resulting in an expected outperformance of 8% for the megacaps from our equity team.

Lower corporate tax could be a potential bull case for the US market, but given the wider pro-growth strategy from the new Trump administration, we don’t see much room for this. Then tariffs are the most significant risk on the otherwise good growth outlook, but we are not expecting an outright tariff war. The tactic will probably be precisely targeted tariffs, where we see an increase in China tariffs and possibly auto tariffs on the EU and Mexico, so retaliatory tariffs will also be the answer. This would add a one-time premium on price levels, as we’ve seen in the first Trump administration, but doesn’t feed through to sustained inflation.

In general, both in the US and EU, continued easing is expected, with falling policy rates supporting economic growth in both areas. This, together with policymakers poised on enhancing growth, and with companies having, like we say in Dutch, cash that is splashing against the baseboards (flush with cash), builds towards a bull case for 2025. Amongst other trends, this will also flow towards three trends I am most familiar with: Digital Assets, Artificial Intelligence, and M&A.

Digital assets – A serious asset in 2025

2024 has been a good year for digital assets. Especially for Bitcoin, where the new BTC spot ETF cleared the way for institutional investors and others that were bound from trading on less conventional exchanges. This inflow of capital made the BTC ETFs surpass the Gold ETFs in AUM within a year, which has been around for over a decade.

Another important factor for digital asset performance is Trump’s election. Since its arrival,  the risky asset class has been met with suspicion and disbelief, mainly because of regulatory unclarity and negative publicity. With Trump pledging support to the industry and even mentioning a strategic Bitcoin reserve for the US, markets have been rallying.

A strategic reserve would drastically improve the legitimacy of the asset class as a whole. Though this is still far-fetched, our view is that the new US government will definitely be accommodative in this area. They seem to have gathered a team of experts around him that looks suited to walk the thin line of implementing new regulations while not restricting market participants and early adopting businesses.

After a very dominant Bitcoin in 2024, our digital assets team expects this dominance to decline, while still growing in value, leaving room for alternative tokens to outperform. The first signs of this shift are visible in the pick-up in Ethereum spot prices. This shift correlates with previous cycles of the market, where Bitcoin initially leads, followed by other assets higher on the risk curve. We identified two trends to gain more traction in 2025.

The first trend is tokenization as part of the Real-World Assets sector. This is one of the areas we are also exploring for our funds, like institutions such as BlackRock and JP Morgan already explored for traditional assets such as stocks, bonds, or real estate. By tokenizing these assets on a blockchain, they become more liquid and can be fractalized. The assets become tradable 24/7, and the transaction settlement is fast, cheap, and transparent, allowing for more financial opportunities.

The other one is Artificial Intelligence. Many of the current platforms, such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini are centralized, coming with risks such as privacy issues, potential biases, and single points of failure. Decentralized solutions could be a solution for those who are unwilling to be exposed to those kinds of risks.

If the US takes the lead in accommodative regulation, other nations will follow. Because of this, 2025 could be the year general adoption is accelerated, leaving the digital asset market positioned to do very well.

Artificial Intelligence – Show me the customers

It almost feels like a must mentioning AI as a 2025 trend. Obviously, it has been one of the most traded and talked about trends in past years, but it feels like there is a shift coming. Spending on AI will likely increase, as overall corporate capital investment has been at an annual 2.5%, whereas the average peak capex in the last three trends (energy, housing, and dot-com) was around 8%. So there seems to be enough room there, but valuations in AI are even higher both in public and private markets. Investors will start to look more for ROI and proof-of-concept through a growing customer base.

This will feed into the trend that the focus of investment within the AI sector will change. Where in the past years we’ve seen companies in the infrastructure part of the ecosystem do very well. Our expectation is that emphasis in 2025 will shift more towards the mid- and downstream of AI, focussing on the products and services, and especially to companies where revenues actually get enhanced by the use of AI. That being said, also energy supply for these solutions will become a more important topic.

As a sub-trend, we expect identity to be a hot topic going forward. AI-generated news, images, text, and speech are spreading more and more around the internet. The need for an actual confirmation of real human output (or conversation) will increase. Ironically, this can only be solved by AI.

We have seen adaptation of multiple tools like ChatGPT, but more in a ‘getting-to-know-the-product’ kind of way. More structured solutions built on these LLMs are getting traction now that models are improving at such a fast pace, with an accuracy increase from 10% to 90% from 2021 to 2024 for competition-level math questions (source: Jensen, G., Narayan, A., Greene, A., & Simon, L. (2024). Is an AI Bubble Ahead of Us or Behind Us? Bridgewater.). Beneficiaries will be sectors where the share of tasks that can be handled by AI can reduce labor costs and increase revenue by incorporating this into their business.

All of this does not mean replacing employees, as you have probably read before, but increasing the share of value-added hours. For example, we now utilise AI-ensembles to provide our fundamental team with trading signals. This allows us to react faster to investment opportunities, and also signal more opportunities that are overlooked by humans in the first place.

In general, capital will continue to flow towards AI as a sector, but with a more stricter view on market adoption and value-addition. Ultimately adoption and ability to incorporate these tools efficiently will lead to productivity gains, but in my opinion, this will be a much longer-term trend and won’t crystallize in 2025.

M&A – Consolidation on all fronts

Last but not least, falling interest rates, cash-rich companies, and a less restrictive regulatory environment from a new Trump administration is a fertile ground for a lot more M&A activity, which has already seen a pick-up in 2024. Beneficiaries would be banks that are big in M&A, private equity and credit firms, and private business owners.

In my experience, consolidation, if rightly managed, not only leads to a better market position but can also help companies let their teams focus on their strong suits. To give a personal example, our core strength is creating AI solutions which we apply in fund management. Now, with our partnership with Dutchyard, we can outsource fund management and fundraising, leaving more time to focus on our expertise.

With the upcoming US administration giving a boost to entrepreneur confidence through a less restrictive environment, this is a trend that we expect to continue in 2025.

In conclusion, 2025 shapes up to be generally a decent year for equities globally, but with a bit more unknowns. On the digital assets front, the outlook is good, as Trump might legitimize the asset class as a whole. While AI spending will increase, the focus will shift to actual use cases as users are past the discovery phase.

2025 will belong to those with the muscle to flex less traditional assets and the foresight to leverage innovation, driving value in an evolving financial landscape.

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