DeepSeek, diversification and digital assets: PWM Tea Break
Crypto expert and AKJ chief strategy officer Oskar Åslund offers some refreshing views about technology, Trump and investing in Asian start-ups and culture, sharing his views on Squid Game and K-pop with PWM's Ali Al-Enazi and Yuri Bender.
Ali Al-Enazi: Hello and welcome to this week’s Tea Break here at the FT Studios in London, alongside my co-host Yuri Bender. Joining us today is Oskar Åslund, a tech entrepreneur and chief strategy officer of AKJ Group, who has travelled from his HQ in Oslo, Norway to see us today. Oscar, how are you?
Oskar Åslund: I’m very fine, thank you.
Ali Al-Enazi: I’ve heard you’ve gone for the coffee today.
Oskar Åslund: I did. We Norwegians, we love our coffee. But I’m also not that into the British tea culture. So I don’t know what signals I’m sending. So when you say pick a tea, I picked coffee because I’m crypto, I’m rebellious by nature.
Yuri Bender: Excellent. I’ve actually gone for the ginger tea today, Oscar, rather than the coffee to revitalise and maintain the energy levels to help tackle the fast moving news agenda that we’re seeing in recent weeks.
Oscar, you are obviously something of a crypto expert and you’ve written an opinion piece for us this week about this vibrant sector.
Much of the optimism about crypto is based on president Donald Trump’s enthusiasm for the sector. But this man has a famously short attention span and a habit of turning on his previous allies. Do you feel that it’s only a matter of time before the tech bros and banks fall out with the president?
Oskar Åslund: If you knew how deep the crypto rabbit hole is, you wouldn’t be too worried. Once you get into that rabbit hole, you do not really get out. Especially with his mindset of deregulation and free markets and whole rhetoric that rhymes really well with the essence of crypto. I do not think he will come out of that rabbit hole. I think he will be aligned to a large extent with the crypto sector. You’ve got a lot of politics or policies that may go in a different direction. And everyone in crypto doesn’t really love Trump as a person. He’s put himself in the same boat, also, by issuing these meme coins.
Yuri Bender: One for him and one for Melania.
Oskar Åslund: Exactly, maybe more. One for each of the family but we’ll see. But he’s in the crypto boats. I don’t really see how he can leave that or why he would suddenly turn around and go back to regulating crypto or trying to initiate a new choke point from the regulators.
Ali Al-Enazi: As a fan of all things high tech, Oskar, you may have been interested in an interview which our colleague Elliot Smither conducted with the group head of innovation at Indosuez Wealth Management, Lydie Percier. She told Elliot that AI is not just tinkering at the edges of wealth management, but will be a total game changer. What sort of innovations are taking place, Oskar, at some laboratories, which will be hugely transformative, but we may not see them in action until a few months or years down the line?
Oskar Åslund: Well we did actually see it, last week, there was something brewing in the laboratory somewhere and it leaked out and then the tech stocks collapsed. It will change not just business operations but more than that. We at AKJ, we’re also having to really reassess what are these products that we offer? How are they going to look? Because I think this video focuses more on the day-to-day business operations. My articles go that one step further because you can see in the crypto space, how this is already starting to be experimented with.
If you merge this with crypto, you put these LLM agents on chain, meaning they can be made more autonomous and they will have their own agenda. But I definitely think that financial actors can gain a lot from first getting this into the day-to-day operations, save costs but its not going to stop there. That’s just the start.
Ali Al-Enazi: Yuri, you’ve been looking at some of the investment trends falling into sharp focus after the election of Donald Trump as US president. What are some of the key highlights?
Yuri Bender: Let me just have a think as I sip my ginger tea and show off these rather splendid PWM mugs to the camera. As you know Ali, being a keen football fan, the highlights don’t really give you the full picture. They don’t give you the full story at all.
But in my recent interview with Edmund Shing, the chief investment officer at BNP Paribas Wealth Management, he was very much urging investors to diversify away from those Magnificent Seven stocks. And he made that prediction, I think, a week before Nvidia lost $600bn of its value. And not only does he suggest moving into the smaller and mid-cap US stocks but also geographically to Asia, Oscar, should we have known that the Chinese were building a new business model, which you referred to earlier with DeepSeek. And will this firm, do you believe, become involved in the customising of wealth management strategies as well?
Oskar Åslund: This wasn’t really a big surprise that it would happen at some point. There were others using more open source tools and that the open source movement will catch up with some of the bigger players. The genie is a little bit out of the bottle here. It’s going to be really hard for someone to really monetise and have a close source product that is going to compete with open source. And also what the Chinese have demonstrated now is this can be done a lot cheaper. You don’t really have to have billions of dollars to develop this. You can be smart about what you do. By putting the Chinese in this situation, they had to work with what they had and they couldn’t access the best of the modern chips and so forth.
OpenAI had a great lead but that’s not going to last forever. And also by using these open source tools now everyone can build products upon it and do so cheaper and develop on these open source tools. So it’s going to be a game changer. It’s going to be hard for OpenAI to build a successful business model around this LLM.
Ali Al-Enazi: We have another piece by Paul Jackson, head of asset allocation at Invesco, who suggests US tech names have been overvalued and that European and Asian economies and stocks are much more likely to benefit from a global growth upsurge in 2025. Do you agree Oscar?
Oskar Åslund: Looking at the crypto sector, I definitely see that in places like Singapore and also Hong Kong and Dubai. There are a lot of both money and talent moving to these areas. The Chinese, from a crypto standpoint, are different because the Chinese government hasn’t really endorsed crypto. There were a lot of big actors like Binance in China but they have now moved elsewhere. So it’s really difficult to say about China. I would compare it to putting your assets on a sketchy centralised exchange and you don’t really know if your money is there or if they will be rug pulled. Everyone investing in China needs to do with that kind of caution. Asia is big. There are a lot of other interesting hubs.
Yuri Bender: Ali, you’ve been writing quite a bit about Asia recently. Looking at India and you’ve been looking at Singapore. What do you feel is persuasive about Asia at the movement? Is it the demographics which will boost consumption and make investments look more attractive.
Ali Al-Enazi: Well HSBC analysts have highlighted an overweight position in India, Japan, SIngapore to capitalise on strong domestic growth while maintaining geopolitical risks. And HSBC expects India’s GDP to grow 6.7 per cent in 2025 supported by rural demand and as you said structural tailwinds. And of these structural tailwinds is a technology boom. Oscar is there a whole new generation of rising tech champions in Asia that will eventually challenge the Mag Seven?
Oskar Åslund: I think there will be a lot of rising stars coming out of Asia. I think it's not only about the core tech but also the cultural vibes and the memes coming out of Asia. Just look at what’s being produced by South Korea — Squid Game. Massively popular. I mean K-Pop as well. They really vibe with the younger generations. That’s a signal that something is brewing there. We are use to looking at the US. All culture comes from the US in recent history. But it feels different now.
Yuri Bender: Ali, we always have something brewing!
Ali Al-Enazi: Yes definitely, on a weekly basis! Oscar, thank you for joining us today!
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Further reading
AI not just a buzzword but a game changer for wealth management
BNP Paribas urges investors to diversify
