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big tech

big tech China digital lending digital transformation paytech

·Jul. 31, 2020

Growth of brand banking, tragedy of OnDeck vs. Kabbage, and the Indian Fintech war between WhatsApp and WeChat

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.

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artificial intelligence big tech digital transformation enterprise blockchain identity and privacy India regulation & compliance telecom & infrastructure

·Oct. 23, 2020

How IBM spinning-out $18B of managed infrastructure revenue, or Reliance Jio growing to 400MM mobile users, creates a chassis for digital finance

This week, we look at:

IBM spinning out its managed services division with $18 billion of revenue in order to focus on hybrid cloud and digital transformation
Reliance Jio, the Indian mobile telecom provider with 400 million users, contemplating financial services with backing from Google and Facebook
The role that technology infrastructure plays in the delivery of financial services

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asset management big tech digital transformation Investing roboadvisor

·Nov. 25, 2019

Implications of Schwab’s $26 billion acquisition of TD Ameritrade, and Tesla’s black swan truck

Well this morning started out as a bit of a bummer! See -- Charles Schwab to buy TD Ameritrade in a $26 billion all-stock deal. The $55 billion market cap Schwab is gobbling up the $22 billion TD Ameritrade at a slight premium. Matt Levine of Bloomberg has a great, cynical take on the question: Schwab lowering its trading commissions to zero is actually what wiped out $4 billion off TD's marketcap a few months ago. For Schwab, the revenue loss from trading was 7% of total, while for TD it was over 20%. Once Schwab dropped prices, TD started trading at a discount and became an acquisition target. You can see the share price drops reflected below in the beginning of October.

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big tech China Investing IPO / SPAC paytech

·Sep. 21, 2020

Is Ant Financial the best Fintech in the world? Let’s analyze the IPO!

In this conversation, Max Friedrich of ARK Invest, Will and Lex break down Ant Group’s highly anticipated IPO.

Ant, a spinout from Alibaba and the parent of Alipay, one of China’s leading payments companies, filed papers to IPO in Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Max, Will and Lex dig into Ant’s business, from the origins to today, discuss growth opportunities and potential headwinds and explore the multi-faceted relationships between Ant and other big tech companies and national governments.

We cannot understate how impressive Ant Financial has become, connecting 700 million people and 80 million merchants in China, with payments, savings, wealth management and insurance products integrated in one package. The company also highlights the likely road for traditional banks — as underlying risk capital, without much technology or client management.

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big tech

·Sep. 29, 2023

Is targeting Big Tech a bad idea?

BigTech has entered the sights of regulators worldwide, in a bid to boost competition. But perhaps small business stimulation is better.

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big tech decentralized finance enterprise blockchain

·Sep. 1, 2020

J.P.Morgan’s Quorum becomes part of ConsenSys, putting Ethereum at heart of commercial and financial infrastructure

The main driver of today's entry is the news -- which has largely percolated -- that ConsenSys acquired Quorum from J.P. Morgan, as well as received an investment from the bank in the company. There is a lot of jargon in the blockchain industry, and I want to try to pull this news apart to explain why it is interesting both to incumbent financial services players, as well as meaningful to the developing decentralized finance industry.

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big tech Crypto

·Sep. 14, 2020

Learnings from Microsoft & Visa integrating personal financial data into Excel, and the open ecosystems of Google Sheets and MetaMask

At $13 billion of revenue and 800 million users in 2016, Office 365 roughly generated $20 per user. That's like Monzo, but with the user foot print of Ant Financial.

You might think the comparison is daft. But let's dig a bit deeper. Excel, and spreadsheets more generally, are the default behavior for managing personal finances. Even for financial advisors, who are supposed to be the precise niche leveraging financial planning software, Excel is the default "do nothing" option. If you are not paying for digital wealth software as an advisor, you are doing it in Excel.

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big tech marketing paytech philosophy

·Jun. 24, 2019

Lessons from Uber’s JUMP bikes on evolution in capitalism, Facebook’s crypto money monopoly

Jump is an electric bike that is being distributed by Uber, and it just happened to be launching 350 of them in the London borough of Islington. You can rent a bike for 5 minutes at £1, and pay £0.12 per minute thereafter. That's generally cheaper than a taxi, on average more expensive than a public bike subscription. So why am I going on an on about these bikes? Two things come to mind as jumping off points for deeper discussion: (1) the incentives and tactics of economic organisms under capitalism to gather and retain attention, and (2) the monopoly powers of Uber and Facebook, leading to the impact of Libra's cryptocurrency on open competition, as well as the public responsibilities of supra national corporations.

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artificial intelligence big tech chatbots & other robots digital transformation

·Sep. 17, 2021

NVIDIA’s Kevin Levitt on Artificial Intelligence, deep learning, and its role in financial services

In this conversation, we chat with Kevin Levitt who currently leads global business development for the financial services industry at NVIDIA. He focuses on global trends in accelerated compute and AI for consumer finance – including fintech, retail banking, credit card and insurance. Prior to joining NVIDIA, Kevin served as Vice President of Business Development at Credit Karma, and Vice President of Sales for Roostify.

More specifically, we touch on the role data plays in the financial industry, how the needs of financial institutions have changed, the age of big data, the definitions between artificial intelligence and machine learning, how to train an AI algorithm, the reasoning behind the incredible amount of parameters machine learning solutions consume, the fundamental purpose of AI/ML in financial services, what NVIDIA’s platforms comprise of, and lastly the future of AI/ML.

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artificial intelligence big tech China civilization and politics Metaverse / xR visual art

·Jul. 27, 2020

OpenAI, backed with $1B+ by Elon Musk & MSFT, can now program SQL and write Harry Potter fan-fiction

This week, we look at a breakthrough artificial intelligence release from OpenAI, called GPT-3. It is powered by a machine learning algorithm called a Transformer Model, and has been trained on 8 years of web-crawled text data across 175 billion parameters. GPT-3 likes to do arithmetic, solve SAT analogy questions, write Harry Potter fan fiction, and code CSS and SQL queries. We anchor the analysis of these development in the changing $8 trillion landscape of our public companies, and the tech cold war with China.

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