Amdocs’ Personalization and Multigenerational Banking Survey shows the more customers know about personalized banking, the more they want it.
This week, we put on the Goldman hat and go shopping for companies. We buy a little bit of Folio and sell some Motif. We look at Personal Capital and the $1 billion it wants for its $12 billion of assets. We examine the private markets with Addepar / iCapital and SharesPost / Forge, and then move over to the banking sector. Should we buy Wells Fargo, as rumored, or some digital wallet apps? Read on for how to acquire a best-in-class Fintech.
The fintech world is not taking the summer off. New developments are coming fast and furious, from fundraisings to product launches to government intervention.
Banking for brands startup Bond raised $32 million to capitalize on the exploding trend of B2B2C banking.
Samsung Money launched, leveraging SoFi’s infrastructure. As SoFi again seeks a national banking charter, they could become the de facto leader in this space.
Kabbage and Intuit launched small business bank accounts as extensions of their already deep relationships with SMBs.
And WhatsApp is trialing all sorts of financial services in India just as Chinese fintech super apps are being banned from the country.
Uber has entered finance! The end is nigh! The boogeyman is here!
Oh. So what's involved? There's a debit card and a "debit account" powered by Green Dot, the same bank that's behind Apple Pay's person to person service. That means that Uber isn't a bank, but is renting shelf space on one. There's a wallet that will be integrated into the Uber app, within the driver's experience. So tracking your earnings and spending will be a feature that is part of the app -- not unlike what Amazon has had for years for merchants. There is a credit component, letting drivers withdraw money against their payckeck. And there's a Barclays credit card, private labeled for Uber, riding on the VISA rails.
Hear ye, hear ye, beware the disruption and tremble under its glory!
The web of investment bank technology, there are 20 or more core vendors on which systems run. Adding Blockchain to the mix merely adds a 21st system, which is by design incompatible with everything else. Thus enterprise chain projects have been focusing on integration and proofs of concepts, not re-engineering the core. But we know how this plays out -- as it has over and over again across Fintech. Digitizing "unimportant" channels and hoping for them to succeed simply doesn't work. See JP Morgan giving up on Finn, or Northern Trust capitulating its pioneering idea into Broadridge, or any other number of examples from Bloomberg to LPL Financial. Even the struggles of Digital Asset could be used as an example of the danger of working oneself into an existing web of solutions, and trying to preserve their dependencies.
The tech companies will become the storefront to absolutely everything.
There is no Internet, there is only Google.
There is no commerce, there is only Amazon.
There is no finance, there is only WeChat / Tencent?
I don't know about you, but I cannot pay for anything in cash in London anymore. COVID has made the city go cashless. For China, QR codes have long replaced the need for paper money. And if there is no cash, what is the point of ATMs, and ATM fees, and bank branches, and bank branch staff? Financial firms no longer need to be the place where you shop for financial product.
This week I discuss SpaceX, and its Dragon rocket carrying American astronauts to the International Space Station for the first time in 9 years. The 20 year old company is a testament to the incredible iron will and absolute insanity of the most visionary capitalist alive -- Elon Musk. We walk through various attributes of the company and recent launch to derive lessons for the financial industry and the entrepreneurs rebuilding it.
Anyone watching Fintech over the last decade has recognized an increasing shift of power from product manufacturers to the platforms where those products are sold. In the case of Amazon, Google, and Facebook -- finance is just a feature among thousands of others. I've made this point since 2017, when Amazon launched lending into its platform. Brett King has been a bit more generous in the categorization, calling the shift "embedded banking". This means that banking products are built into you life's journey, not accessed in a separate customer center location. The financial API trend is a tangible symptom of this vector.
Alkami’s Digital Sales and Service Maturity Model shows banks and credit unions how they digitally stack up against the competition.
decentralized financedigital securities / STOdigital transformationenterprise blockchainexchanges / cap mkts
·In this conversation, we talk Ajit Tripathi, currently the Head of Institutional Business at Aave and a former colleague of mine at ConsenSys, about the path from traditional finance, to enterprise blockchain and “DLT” consulting, to full-on decentralized finance.
Thinking about how to connect these worlds and different available journeys? Or the timeless risks developing in tranched DeFi that look like mortgage-backed securities? We even touch on hegelian dialectics! Check out our great conversation.