In the long take this week, I try out a contrarian point of view on personal finance chatbots. Trim, a savings chatbot, just withdrew support from Facebook Messenger. While lots of other chatbots are still invested in conversational banking, what could we take away from the counterfactual of chatbots failing to get B2C traction? What is the impact on the rest of the platform wars waged by Amazon, Google, and Tesla for connected homes, cars, and the Internet of Things?
In their latest edition of Confessions, TearSheet talks to an analyst at a startup attached to a large bank about innovation, trying to get tech talent and why more fintech companies should partner with banks; about half of the talent at the startup came form inside the bank and as the analyst points out it was more because of convenience as hiring from the outside could take months; banks have trouble keeping top talent because the projects are not as interesting as projects at Google or Facebook; other areas discussed include default rates ticking up, marketing practices and expanding product offerings. Source.
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.
Since the financial crises banks, for the most part, have focused their time and effort on complying with new regulations and building up capital ratios in case another crisis hits; while they were doing this another industry, fintech, emerged and has eaten into some of the core profit making businesses of the banks; banks have started to catch up with technology and as countries like the US look to pare back some crisis era rules the banks see the next few years as the perfect opportunity to invest wisely in technology; the one thing the banks might not be able to handle is if Amazon, Facebook or Google begin to encroach further into fintech, potentially bring in competition who can immediately match up in size and strength. Source.
Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, or GAFAM as they are beginning to be know are continuing their move towards financial services; payments have become one area in particular where they have seen the tech giants making inroads; mobile wallets for in-store payments, money transfers between friends and even loans to small businesses; tech giants have only started to disrupt fintech as they look to become bigger players in consumers financial lives. Source.
In this conversation, we talk with Robert Leshner of The Compound Protocol about the early days of crypto and how a fascination with Ethereum smart contracts drove him to build one of the largest DeFi projects to date.
Additionally, we explore the nuances of lending and interest rates, consumer privacy software and data monetization, floating interest rate pools of capital across different token pairs, DAO evolution and its influence on mechanism design, the role Compound plays in chain interoperability, and the discovery of yield farming as a means for user incentivisation.
