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digital transformation

digital transformation mega banks neobank roboadvisor

·Oct. 7, 2019

Fintech Price War — Goldman’s $1.3B Marcus burn, Neobank £200MM loss, ETrade’s $75MM trading fees

We are like the hungry at the all-you-can-eat buffet. In the beginning, there is not enough! Let's democratize access to food; to music; to transportation; to healthcare; to finance; to payments; to banking; to lending; to investing. The billions in institutional capital across universities, pensions, and sovereigns are delegated to smart portfolio managers. The day before yesterday, it was allocated by small cap stock pickers (hi Warren!). Yesterday, it was the alternative managers of hedge funds and private equity. Today, it is the trading machine and the venture capitalist. Tomorrow, it is the cryptographic artificial intelligence.

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decentralized finance digital lending digital transformation philosophy

·Aug. 19, 2019

Robocop vs. Terminator in Fintech; Comparing DeFi originations to Digital Lenders in the early years

I've got a gentle, data-backed story this week inspired by a great distinction made in this Techonomy article by the Chief Digital Officer at Schneider Electric. The thesis tracks three key lessons from attempting to bring large companies into the 21st century: (1) transform the core of your business instead of fumbling around at the edges, (2) digitize your processes and separately figure out a distinct digital model, and (3) catalyze a digital ecosystem from the new model. You can think about the distinction as either taking the existing business and slowly swapping out parts from human to machine (e.g., like RoboCop), or building the robot from scratch utilizing the latest platforms, markets, and artificial intelligence (e.g., like Terminator).

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China digital transformation Embedded Finance insurtech

·Jan. 22, 2021

Embedded Finance as a $7 trillion market opportunity for banks in the business of suffering, with Simon Torrance

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.

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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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central bank / CBDC digital transformation generational change mega banks narrative zeitgeist philosophy visual art

·Jan. 25, 2021

What 1840s “Free Banking” and the 1910s Cubist movement suggests about DeFi and economic machine evolution

This week, we look at:

The nature of innovation hubs, and how close groups of actors within a particular environment can be massively, fundamentally productive. Take for example the 30 million years of the Cambrian explosion.
The difficulty of experimenting with banking and money frameworks, the limits of traditional econometrics, and an overview of “free banking” in the 1840s.
How evolutionary theory can help us think about selection of economic models, and the hyper-competition and hyper-mutation that we see in crypto. DeFi protocols, like BadgerDAO and ArcX among hundreds of others, are experiments in designing different monetary policies and banking regime experiments in real time.

We have never before had such acceleration in the design space of the economic machine, subject to evolutionary pressures, built by a closely-wound nexus of developers. It is a fortune for the curious.

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digital transformation Investing IPO / SPAC macroeconomics mega banks monetization / commercial neobank

·Mar. 22, 2021

Understanding the Fintech user growth behind the $10.4 billion eToro SPAC and coming Chime IPO vs. the melting Megabanks

This week, we look at:

Chime, eToro, and Wise targeting the public markets through IPO and SPACs, and their operating performance
The overall growth in fintech mobile apps, their install rates and market penetration (from 2.5 to 3.5 per person), and whether that growth is sustainable
The implications for incumbents from this competition, and in particular the impact on money in motion vs. money at rest
Broader financial product penetration and an anchoring in how the technology industry was able to get more attention that we had to give

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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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digital lending digital transformation Embedded Finance mega banks neobank paytech

·Nov. 19, 2021

Digitizing banks with better BNPL, Underwriting, and Anti-Fraud Tech, with Amount CEO Adam Hughes

In this conversation, we chat with Adam Hughes – the Chief Executive Officer at Amount, a technology company focused on accelerating the world’s transition to digital financial services via its digital retail banking platform, world-class digital authentication & fraud prevention tools, and ecommerce point-of-sale financing technology.

More specifically, we touch on digital lending industry Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), as well as the trends of working with large banks and enabling their digital transformation to access some of these themes as part of embedded finance and banking-as-a-service.

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decentralized finance digital transformation Metaverse / xR NFTs and digital objects

·Oct. 16, 2020

Virtual communities and digital worlds are the difference between Finance Incumbents, Fintech, and DeFi

This week, we look at:

How the medical reality is accelerating remote work and digital commerce, including the success of buy-now-pay-later companies like Affirm and Klarna
The emergence of virtual worlds and video game environments that generate $ billions in revenue and have millions of participants, with examples of Zwift, Fortnite, Tomorrowland, Roblox, Genshin Impact
How to connect digital environments to digital communities and their economic activity, including through mechanisms like non-fungible-tokens in Rarible and Async Art
Advice for shifting thinking from manufacturing financial product, to starting with the customer, to leveraging the community

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acquisition digital transformation Investing roboadvisor

·Jul. 10, 2020

Personal Capital is Acquired for $1 Billion, Lemonade IPOs and PayPal Joins the Crypto Club

Robo 1.0 success Personal Capital was acquired for nearly $1 billion by Empower, a major retirement savings manager. Softbank-backed insurtech darling Lemonade IPOed at less than $2 billion, in a successful fundraise and listing, and has since seen its market cap rise to over $4 billion. The IPO is a landmark for an insurtech industry in desperate need of successes. And PayPal announces the impending launch of crypto trading to its 325 million users. The move isn’t overly interesting in its own right, but the implications for the crypto space are worth exploring.

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