Assurance came on my radar courtesy of Financial Technology Partners, which was the investment banker on Assurance's $3.5 billion sale to Prudential. Notably, the company is just 3 years old -- which comes out to a cool billion of enterprise value per year, likely a record comparable to the very few Ant Financials. Depending on the details, this is about $25 million of value per employee. So what does the company do? Simple, really. It is a destination website licensed to sell all types of insurance product (e.g., life, health, auto), with a clean onboarding questionnaire like any other roboadvisor, which then matches against policies on offer from third parties. AI and data science are used as the recommendation engine. It is a Kayak or Money Supermarket of insurance, simply designed, cleverly wired, with killer founders.
In this conversation, we talk all things embedded finance, platform banking, and APIs with Simon Torrance – one of the world’s leading thinkers on business model transformation, specializing in platform strategy, breakthrough innovation and digital ventures.
There’s an enormous gap between the financial needs of humanity and what the financial sector is able to deliver there. This gap is being filled by tech-savvy solutions and embedded finance plays which are putting into question the role of a bank in this new ecosystem.
This week, we consider the impact of financial infrastructure collapse and who really gets hurt through the lens of Wirecard, Enron, and Lehman Brothers. Yes, there are investors in the entity that will lose value. But there are also clients and counterparties of Wirecard, like Curve, Revolut, and Crypto.com. In the case of Lehman, there was a $40 trillion derivatives notional amount that took twenty years to wind down. We also consider the most recent $500,000 hacking in DeFi of an automated market maker to see if there are common threads to be drawn between the two worlds.
In this video conversation we feature a roundtable by The Defiant exploring how and if the gap between Fintech and DeFi will be bridged.
DeFi Panelists
Lex Sokolin, head economist at ConsenSys
Santiago Roel Santos, angel investor
Spencer Noon, Investor at Variant
Vance Spencer, co founder at Framework Ventures
Fintech Panelists
Keith Grose, head of Plaid international
Nik Milanovi?, founder of This Week in Fintech
Simon Taylor, co-founder of 11:FS
Bruno Werneck, Business & Corporate Development at Plaid
Moderator
Camila Russo, Founder of The Defiant
In news of cross-selling financial products across categories, roboadvisor Wealthfront has gathered a nifty $1 billion of deposit assets for its 2.29% interest-yielding non-bank cash account. Given that the firm has a little over $10 billion in managed investment assets, charges somewhere between 0 and 25 bps on those assets, and took years of wiggly pivoting to get to the current stage, it is fair to consider this influx a big win in terms of client traction. It is also $22 million of annual interest payments. A couple of things come to mind that are worth pulling apart.










