Consumer Banking

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Bitcoin, Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies, Consumer Banking, facebook, governance, libra, nodes, Payments, stablecoin

Who bought a seat at the table of the Libra Association

 Governance, Financial Inclusion, India, Tier 3 economies, remittances, payments, currencies, tokens, coins,…

These and more terms have been tossed around over the past few days, as we consumed facts and interpretations, triggered from the Libra white paper and all the related communications around it. As the dust settles down from the initial reactions, there are several overlooked aspects of the LIBRA plan that merit looking into.

Confession No. 1

There has been an explosion of cynical, partisan, and hyped threads of discussion. I include myself in the humans that reacted rather emotionally to the communication of the LIBRA plan. My `button` was pushed when the `financial inclusion` intention seemed to be the branding and PR storyline.

Dr. Cathy Mulligan and her collaborators called for caution in their Digital Cooperation report for the UN High-level panel  (UNHLP) about using vulnerable communities to experiment on with #digitaltechnologies. Of course, `experimenting` is subject to interpretation and in the case of Facebook, maybe they can argue that this will be their second attempt in financial inclusion – as they did attempt to launch in the booming Indian market to offer seamless, cheaper payments like in any messaging app. Admittedly,  payments are the very heart of any economy and we do live in a world that customers expect payments to be like WhatsApp messages[1].

Confession No. 2

We are not ready yet for DAOs. Thomas Power, rightly says that we need a Face to each and every scalable unicorn (every system needs a Face, at 8:30 BloxLiveTV). And the truth is that there is a problem with the Face behind Facebook, even though #DeleteFacebook led nowhere.

However, sentiment is not on our side, on this one. We, the ones that don’t forget Cambridge Analytica, fake News, propaganda, and what Chris Hughes or Sean Parker or Chamath Palihapitiya said; we are outnumbered. Let’s admit it.

The masses that send and receive remittances, and the masses that spend online to buy inexpensive items – micropayments – value access and convenience. While we, the ones that have a problem with the Face, are in another phase altogether, with more choices and the luxury of discussing governance, social responsibility, public scrutiny etc.

We have to acknowledge that foundations and associations (two different legal entities) setup in Switzerland have credibility and thus, the registration choice for LIBRA association. However, we need to also admit that this Swiss branding that has been deployed in another `alternative` use case – to accommodate legally the needs of blockchain startups to launch ICOs – still has to prove itself in the governance field and in the ways it links to the for-profit businesses that are their raison d` ȇtre.

As Kathryn Haun, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (one of the 28 founding members) pointed out[2], the Libra Association, will focus on governance issues debating decisions around how the new digital currency will be overseen etc. Swiss associations and foundations are not legal structures that were meant to spearhead such large business initiatives and that is the reason that Kathryn Hauna says “I think of it as a constitutional convention; you have all these different states coming in trying to form this union.” Dianne Schepers, a legal executive, explained to me that foundations are supervised by the Swiss Federal Supervisory Board for Foundations (ESA) and are required to be registered in the commercial registry and provide an annual report. Associations are not subject to any of these requirements.

As the 28 founding members will be discussing governance and much more about LIBRA, I feel that the composition of this association was overlooked (as other more basic items needed tending). It was actually – and rightly so – welcomed and the sentiment was positive because it has a decentralization flavor to it.

Confession No. 3

One of my first emotional reactions while reading the facts reported from Verum Capital – Your guide to Libra – on the day it hit the market, was to ask three questions:

Q1: For how many of the 28 founding members has financial inclusion been their business?

Q2: How many of the founding members have unsuccessfully experimented at scale in financial inclusion?

Q3: Which organizations were invited to consider being a founding member? And who decided this?

I share with you today my initial findings (more research and patience is needed to address them all) from looking closer to the founding members that each `coughed up` $10million

There are 7 members from the financial sector and most of them need no introduction.

  1. Visa
  2. Mastercard
  3. Paypal
  4. Stripe
  5. PayU has a large footprint in Latam and India that goes beyond payments.
  6. Mercado Pago, is the financial arm of MercadoLibre an Argentian company incorporated in the US (NASDAQ: MELI) running various online and ecommerce businesses. MercadoPago is a tech enabler with a significant footprint in Latam, for online retailers to provide their customers with payment solutions to pay in installments
  7. Calibra – is the startup, separate Facebook, wallet and dashboard entity

Discussing the composition of the founding members with Verum Capital, it became clear that none of the top 5 remittance players were invited. Xoom ranks 6th and was bought out by Paypal in 2015. LIBRA has included the 6th global remittance player as a founding member.

saveonsendSource: SaveOnSend.com

There are 4 members from the Blockchain space. Coinbase and Xapo, need no introduction. I do confess that I had to check out the others. BisonTails was only setup in Oct 2018 in the US to focus in blockchain interoperability and has only $5.3mil in seed funding[4]. Anchorage is a US start-up launched in 2017 focused on digital asset custody for institutional investors with a Series A funding completed (total funding $17mil).

  1. Coinbase
  2. Xapo
  3. Anchorage
  4. Bison Trails

Where did Bison Trails find the $10million membership fee to participate in the LIBRA association? Why did Anchorage decide to spend 60% of its total funding up to date, on its LIBRA membership?

There are 4 members from the VC world, which a priori seems a sector weight that I cannot rationalize (help is welcome; please comment).

  1. Andreessen Horowitz
  2. Union Square Ventures
  3. Ribbit Capital; a US early stage VC with the most fintech unicorns in the portfolio
  4. Thrive Capital another US VC more focused in tech investments and is well known for raising capital from institutional investors, like Princeton University, Wellcome Trust. According to a profile in Forbes, Thrive was one of three firms (joining Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners) to invest in Instagram’s $50 million Series B round at a valuation of $500 million. Forbes wrote that after Instagram sold to Facebook, “Thrive had doubled its money in 72 hours.

Picture1.png

Source: Ribbit, A16Z Lead Fintech Unicorn Hunters, CB insights

Andreessen Horowitz is an investor in Bison Trails (one out of seven) and a lead investor in Anchorage. Thrive is family to the Facebook family. USV is family to Coinbase, and on and on.

Three out of the five top VC are founding members of the LIBRA association. Top VCs can be measured in several ways. What is more relevant here is their Fintech footprint.

There are 3 members from the e-commerce space. Ranging from travel, to luxury fashion.

  1. Booking Holdings
  2. eBay
  3. Farfetch is the online luxury fashion e-commerce business, publicly traded NYSE: FTCH

Two online hailing businesses and one music unicorn

  1. Lyft
  2. Uber
  3. Spotify

Two telecoms with Iliad being a founding member that is losing clients and revenues but has a founder and still majority shareholder (billionaire Xavier Niel) who loves challenging the corporate establishment and is the founder of the StationF, one of the biggest startup campus.

  1. Iliad is a troubled French telecom whose stock price has been in a steady bearish trap over the past 2yrs (-47% yoy). It has launched discount services and expanded recently in Italy.
  2. Vodafone

There are 5 members that are non-profit organizations:

  1. Kiva, Kiva Microfunds is a 501 non-profit organization founded in 2001 in San fransisco that has arranged  $1.3 billion of loans in 78 countries. They have a 96.9% repayment rate which makes them one of the most successful microloan NGOs.
  2. Mercy Corps is another US NGO focused on humanitarian aid launched in 1980s it boasts over 5,500 volunteers members.
  3. Women’s World Banking a US based NGO supporting microfinancing institutions
  4. Creative Destruction Lab; is a seed-stage program in North America launched in 2012 by the Rotman School of Management (the business school of the University of Toronto)for massively scalable, science and technology-based companies.
  5. Breakthrough Initiatives is a scientific non-profit launched in 2015 with several programs that aim to answer big  questions, like life beyond earth, through scientific and technological exploration, probing the big questions of life in the Universe. The Board has two members: Yuri Milner, who funded the initiative and Mark Zuckberg. Stephen Hawkins is still listed.

Wrap up

Confession No. 4

I continue to look into the issues raised by the boldness and the potential of the Libra coin (which has huge regulatory risk). LIBRA has actually a huge PR and branding problem, as even the MIT Tech Review article and many more, refer to the LIBRA Stable coin as the `Facebook coin` Facebook’s Libra: Three things we don’t know about the digital currency.

David Marcus, spearheading the Libra project for Facebook, had to denounce rumors that the $10 million buy-in got the validating firms access to transaction data (Decrypt).

There are 28 seats around the LIBRA table for now (similar to the way Stellar started off with 30 nodes). The LIBRA coin is not a Facebook coin. However, governance in an association is legally non-existent. So, for now we need to be clear that it is in good faith and only by giving the benefit of the doubt, that the LIBRA association has a dream and we should be watching their execution closely.

David Siegel through his new endeavor Cutting through the noise shared several facts and insights on LIBRA, as he is excited about the potential of a Stable coin  that can scale fast as it will be launched in established markets. LIBRA will be offered to all users on Facebook, Booking, Lyft, Paypal, Farfecth, …..

During his webinar on Saturday (recording on youtube) I learnt that 60% of votes are needed in order to make a change in LIBRA. I like to think of this as the 60% attack nightmare.

Can Facebook pull off a 60% attack?

As Bernand Lunn said to Swissinfo.ch the day after,  in What does Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency aim to achieve?: “Facebook has been hugely successful making money from accumulating people’s data and then selling it. It’s hard to see them completely changing their stripes.”

How will the LIBRA association untaint the LIBRA coin so that it is not thought of as a Facebook coin?

[1] Excerpt from `Money is a claim on an Institution and the reason for change`, Efi Pylarinou

[2] Andreessen Horowitz: How Facebook’s Libra Cryptocurrency Will Be Governed

[4] Source from Crunchbase

Efi Pylarinou is the founder of Efi Pylarinou Advisory and a Fintech/Blockchain influencer.

 I have no positions or commercial relationships with the companies or people mentioned. I am not receiving compensation for this post. 

 Subscribe by email to join Fintech leaders who read our research daily to stay ahead of the curve. Check out our advisory services (how we pay for this free original research).

Consumer Banking, facebook, india, Payments, paytm, UPI

$2 Trillion – India payments rise force regulators on data protection

161129150332-india-cashless-payments-780x439

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2016 was a pivotal year in India’s digital economy. Demonetization was deemed a execution failure by many experts. However, it has triggered a digital payment boom in the country. In the last two years, transaction sizes in India have grown 50 times to $2 Trillion (143 Trillion INR). Some claim demonetization wasn’t the reason for the payment boom. If not causation, there is definite correlation between the two.

When we talk about Asia Fintech/Payments, China’s $40 Trillion market perhaps takes precedence over the other economies. However, if India continues to grow at the current pace, we may see yet another leap frogging Asian Fintech economy. I must confess, I was pretty excited when I first read about the 50X growth of the payments market.

Several global players have set up shop in India. Google, Amazon and Alibaba have all taken part in the payments boom in different ways. While these tech giants keep clashing, the Indian government has led the way in setting up the core infrastructural elements through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). This is perhaps one of the few instances where a government has pioneered innovation at this scale.

I recently spoke to Elizabeth Chapman, CEO of ZestMoney – a fintech lender in India. As a Westerner, now running a startup based out of India, she is perhaps best suited to assess the developments there, especially in comparison to the west. There were two key developments she was very pleased about.

One, getting a digital identifier for 1.3 Billion people. Getting the Aadhaar programme up and running in under two years, was no mean feat. The data base has been linked to several governance aspects, like tax for example. The other development Liz was impressed about was the UPI, which has catalysed the payments boom.

Now coming back to India payments, Facebook is a key player. Whatsapp payments was tested with a limited audience in India. While the uptake was very good for the functionality, regulatory support was missing. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) initially came up with a rule that customers’ payments data can’t be stored outside of India.

The Government of India also imposed a rule that any data classified as critical personal data cannot be stored outside of India. Most international technology firms have expressed their dissatisfaction with these data protection rules. One of the key reasons why Whatsapp Payments didn’t take off in India was because of this rule.

In an emerging markets context, consumers care less about data protection and privacy. As long as they get to be part of the banking system and the financial ladder, getting paid is all they care about. Which is why QR codes and PayTM wallets have become so commonplace on Indian roadside shops.

cashless_Reuters

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In a recent Linkedin conversation, one of the comments were about decentralised ways of storing assets in a wallet. It is a great concept in the west, and I love to talk about it till the cows come home. However, this was hyped as a great development in an emerging markets context. I don’t believe that is true.

Emerging markets consumers DO NOT care about decentralisation. I am not talking about the college graduate in south east Asia who is writing a Blockchain and has 10 different wallets to store cryptos.

I am talking about the lady who is selling the turmeric in the picture above. All she cares about is an easy way to get paid, so that she can cook dinner for her kids, and pay their school fees. They care about how inflation could take away all their wealth in Latin America and parts of Africa. Therefore, a solution that solves their day to day problems will see massive uptake.

We have already seen the rise of digital payments in India. With the removal of these data localization rules by RBI and the Government of India, there will be more explosive growth. With Facebook’s Libra (Sorry, couldn’t help mentioning it) around the corner, getting rid of the data localization rules, may not necessarily be a bad thing.

For Facebook, India is the biggest market – be it based on population or internet growth, or middle class income or financial inclusion. All the metrics point to India for Facebook.

For me, Financial Inclusion comes ahead of Data Protection. We thought Identity with Aadhaar – we didn’t think decentralisation. Let’s get them all on to the next generation payment network, get an economic identity created for them. Data protection, privacy and decentralisation will soon follow as awareness of the risks of the digital economy becomes more prevalent. For now, let us just help the lady selling the turmeric get paid.

Arunkumar Krishnakumar is a Venture Capital investor at Green Shores Capital focusing on Inclusion and a podcast host.

I have no positions or commercial relationships with the companies or people mentioned. I am not receiving compensation for this post.

Subscribe by email to join Fintech leaders who read our research daily to stay ahead of the curve. Check out our advisory services (how we pay for this free original research).

 

Banking, Consumer Banking, emotional banking, retail banking, Small Business Banking, Small Business Fintech

How Emotional Banking can look like

Emotional bankingIt is Spring and officially in three days summer, so this is the time to open up and bring up topics like Emotional Banking. Several influencers have covered this topic – Chris Skinner, Brett King, Ron Shevlin – and Duena Blomstrom has been focused 100% on Emotional banking in her work and with her book `Emotional Banking : Fixing Culture, Leveraging FinTech, and Transforming Retail Banks into Brands`.

The core issue underpinning Emotional banking is the relationship we humans have with money. Undoubtedly not a simple one and clearly an emotional one.

When was the last time any of the three financial institutions you have relationships with, checked in with you as a person? The reality is that we each engage with at least three financial institutions but often with seven (consumer banking, business banking, wealth management, insurance, broker, etc) and the touch point is ONLY when and if we are ready to transact.

Sadly, most neobanks or challenger banks or Fintechs with banking services, are no different than the traditional financial institutions in that respect. And I am not referring to the fact that Revolut does remember my birthday whereas UBS doesn’t. I am referring to the fact that neither Revolut nor UBS, have any idea of what makes my heart beat, what would make me feel more secure, how I dream about the future, why I trained as a Kundalini Yoga teacher etc.

HOW Emotional banking looks like

Here is a concrete example of HOW Emotional banking can look like. Frost Bank is a 150-year-old Texas-based bank that started off as a small mercantile store and is now one of the 50 largest banks in the US. Frost bank has also been receiving the Greenwich Excellence award in the middle market and small banking category.

What caught my attention is their Optimism campaign called Opt for Optimism. They chose to link Optimism with financial health.

First, Frost Bank embarked on a research study about the link between Optimism and financial health. Here are some of their findings:

 Optimists experience 145 fewer days of financial stress per year

Optimists are 7x more likely to experience better financial health

They published their research in Mind over Money showing how attitude and mindset toward money impact financial health.

Screen Shot 2019-06-17 at 12.15.20

At the same time, they launched a campaign about Optimism through a 30 day challenge during which people can join in performing 30 acts of optimism. They also created a community sharing portal to inspire each other, explore the financial habits of optimists,  watch inspiring films the bank produced for the campaign and find out why Frost Bank cares about something like optimism in the first place.

Share in the comments other examples of HOW Emotional Banking looks like.

Efi Pylarinou is the founder of Efi Pylarinou Advisory and a Fintech/Blockchain influencer.

 I have no positions or commercial relationships with the companies or people mentioned. I am not receiving compensation for this post.

 Subscribe by email to join Fintech leaders who read our research daily to stay ahead of the curve. Check out our advisory services (how we pay for this free original research).

Challenger Banks, Consumer Banking, monzo, neobanks, revolut

Neobanks – Game changers, but do they really care about their customers?

new-digital-banking-wireduk

Image Source

Neobanks, digital banks, challenger banks – I don’t want to get into the exact specification of how and why we classify Fintechs across this complicated taxonomy. Neobanks have gone from strength to strength in the last three years. Especially in Europe, progress has been phenomenal.

Revolut, Starling, Monzo, N26, Tide and the list goes on. But apart from a cool customer journey at onboarding, better digital banking experience, do they offer anything meaningful? Do they really care more about their customers than the traditional high street banks?

Based on the news release yesterday about Revolut launching in Australia, their customer base was set to surpass the 5 Million mark. Monzo hit 2 Million users and are growing at about 150,000 customer per month. Starling have a relatively modest customer base of 600000, and also have a reputation that their services were as good as Monzo if not better.

I think atleast some of them have grown to a scale where they can be considered as operational banks. Let us therefore quickly go through how they are doing across different aspects of digital banking.

Onboarding: This is perhaps what digital banks have all been amazing at. A few months ago, when I moved from an iPhone to an Android phone, it took me about a minute or two to move my Revolut account to the new phone. My Barclays app is still not completely set up on my new phone.

This is true if you looked at business banking accounts as well. I had to wait for weeks to get a Barclays or a HSBC business bank account, whereas opening a Tide business banking account was a breeze. This is nothing new about Neobanks – we always knew they were champions at the onboarding customer journey.

Product Offering: I have found Neobanks good at their core proposition. Revolut for example, had a phenomenal uptake for the FX card and the app they have with it. However, they have taken a narrow and a deep approach to their product offering. That’s a very startupish way of developing a proposition.

I think, it’s high time Neobanks started to cross-sell products to their clients. Their product suite has been shallow in comparison to mainstream banks. Interest rates on accounts have been lower, business bank account balances have been lower, and some of the more advanced multi-user functionalities a business bank account needs are still work in progress – and those are just a few examples in already existing products.

They have all been focusing on growth and it’s understandable why they haven’t got the breadth of product offerings. However, the execution of their core offering has been excellent. For example, the user experience on tagging and managing transactions is good on these platforms. However, integration with ATMs or services like Paypal have been missed out by some of these Neobanks.

Customer Service: This is perhaps one area that decides if Neobanks are really providing the service quality they claim. Revolut have been making headlines for several wrong reasons recently and have almost got the “Spoilt Child” tag amongst Neobanks. Monzo recently had a breakdown of systems and that caused some noise on social media. Complaints data give us a bit of a perspective of what customers feel.

With 5 Million customers Revolut had 171 FOS complaints registered

With 2 Million customers Monzo had 82 complaints registered

With 600,000 customers Starling bank had 51 complaints registered

I have seen some illogical comparisons between them and the high street banks based on the number of complaints. Some high street banks have 100,000s complaints registered with the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS). But they also provide so many different product lines which the Neobanks don’t.

Therefore, it can’t be a like for like comparison. Comparisons could be at a product line level between a high street bank and a Neobank, however, I am not sure if that data is available.

With a simple AUM like calculation, Barclays at £1.13 Trillion AUM is 23 times bigger than Revolut that is £50+ Billion. Revolut’s 171 complaints feels pretty low even in that sense as 171*23 is ~4000 complaints. Although Revolut took some negative PR for its recent misadventures, the number of complaints per customer is not too different between them and the other top Neobanks.

Financial Inclusion: Let us look at some of the steps towards inclusion that the Neobanks have taken. 50% of UK bank branches have shut down in the past 30 years. However, Neobanks are creating new on the ground contacts to allow for more inclusion in a seamless way. Starling bank have partnered with Royal mail to accept cash from their customers. Monzo used paypoint in a similar manner creating over 30,000 points for customers to deposit cash.

They are also looking to be more inclusive from an age perspective. Less than 5% of Monzo’s customer base are over 60 years old, and that data can improve. Monzo, Revolut and Starling bank are all ramping up efforts to reach out to people of all age groups. This also makes commercial sense as people in their 60s generally are richer than people in their 20s.

As we can clearly see that, based on the data, Neobanks have just arrived. They have a long way to go before data can categorically drive conclusions on how well they have done (or not). With China’s Techfins piling money into the Neobanks of the west, may be it will not be long before we see Neobanks punching above their weight against high street competition.

Whether they compete with the mainstream banks is one question, but whether they will keep their culture of innovation and customer centred approach intact as they grow is yet another question.

Arunkumar Krishnakumar is a Venture Capital investor at Green Shores Capital focusing on Inclusion and a podcast host.

I have no positions or commercial relationships with the companies or people mentioned. I am not receiving compensation for this post.

Subscribe by email to join Fintech leaders who read our research daily to stay ahead of the curve. Check out our advisory services (how we pay for this free original research).

 

africa, alibaba, amazon, Consumer Banking, ecommerce, ipo, Jumia, Market Transparency

Jumia – Africa’s Alibaba and its IPO roller coaster

Feels like a long time since I posted an article on Africa. Every time I research to write about the African Fintech segment, I invariably stumble upon a story that leaves me with one emotion – hope. The youngest continent of the world is all about hope.

AFRICAEcommerce

Africa is a “mobile-first” market, where consumers access the internet from their mobile first. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest per-capita mobile money accounts in the world. Financial Inclusion has been achieved at scale, that the number of mobile money accounts have gone past bank accounts. Most of the numbers are humble when compared to the China Juggernaut. But the opportunity to scale is immense with over 1 Billion consumers gradually moving to cities by 2050.

One African firm that has captured headlines in recent times is Jumia. In short, Jumia is said to be Africa’s Amazon and is the first African firm to list on the NYSE. They listed on NYSE on the 12th April this year, and saw their share price close 75% higher at close of business. The shares rose from $14.50 at listing to $46.99 in early May and was one of the top 10 performers of IPO’d shares of 2019. So why is an e-commerce player relevant to Fintech?

That seems to be the trend in emerging markets, as firms use e-commerce and lifestyle business models for growth, and throw in Fintech services as value add. Fintech also helps the stickiness and improves margins.

Jumia have launched their marketplace for 14 African markets. As per their SEC filing, Jumia they talk about their payments platform JumiaPay.

“We have also developed our own payment service, JumiaPay, in order to offer our consumers a safe, fast and easy payment solution, whether they shop using a desktop computer or a mobile device. JumiaPay is currently available in four markets”

For this very reason, I am not sure if they should be instead tagged “Africa’s Alibaba”. They also are catering to customers who prefer cash with on-delivery transactions. They had 81 thousand active sellers as of December 31, 2018 and over 29.5 million product listings on the marketplace.

Considering ~450 Million internet users in the continent, there is a huge market to conquer. Jumia claim they are currently the largest marketplace platform in the continent.

They have a competitor in DHL, who have launched an e-commerce platform. DHL’s logistics business has served as a catalyst of growth. They have launched in 20 African countries and are seen as formidable competition to Jumia. Alibaba are also dipping their toes into the African market, but haven’t yet taken a plunge like DHL.

The Jumia IPO day wasn’t just a big day for the firm, but should be viewed as a breakthrough for the continent’s business community, as they join main stream markets.

However, the IPO was shortly followed by a claim by Citron Research that alleged that “the firm was Fraudulent”, and their “shares were worthless”.

Jumia’s shares hit $24 in early May following these allegations. Citron research have a reputation for reports claiming such frauds in the past. Their strategy was to short the stocks and make quick bucks from the price action post the report. This has got them (Citron) into trouble in the past too.

An analyst in Citi came to Jumia’s defence with a detailed analysis of Citron’s claims. The gist of the defence was that Citron’s claims were baseless, and Jumia just had to respond to a couple of several claims with a bit more detailed disclosure.

  • Citi highlighted that it was not uncommon for firms to update their usage statistics before a key financing round
  • Citi suggested that Jumia should highlight the details of their churn, with plans to address it.
  • Several allegations of Fraud by Citron were pushed back by Citi, citing that Jumia had disclosed fraudulent employee activities in its SEC filing. Citron chose to interpret these disclosed incidents as fraud that the entire company and its management were involved in.
  • Several other points on Citron’s report on the growth of the firm were not just baseless, but contradicting to data that showed healthy growth of the firm.

We are going through a period where several emerging markets businesses are growing in stature and an IPO grabbing the headlines every week. These firms need to understand the importance of market transparency and disclosures. As financial services firms advise them with their IPO, they should also provide enough advise on the right framework for disclosure.

I am hopeful that Jumia has sailed through the initial blips post IPO, and I genuinely hope they become Africa’s Alibaba. Good times ahead for Africa.

Arunkumar Krishnakumar is a Venture Capital investor at Green Shores Capital focusing on Inclusion and a podcast host.

I have no positions or commercial relationships with the companies or people mentioned. I am not receiving compensation for this post.

Subscribe by email to join Fintech leaders who read our research daily to stay ahead of the curve. Check out our advisory services (how we pay for this free original research).

 

Consumer Banking, Fintech General

‘Something’-as-a-service, the new fintech paradigm

Something-as-a-service lights up the eyes of most VCs and investors.

Mainly because it sounds far easier and simpler than going after the juggernaut of core-anything. The thesis behind SaaS in fintech is premised around letting the banks and existing incumbents get on with what they are good at – financial plumbing – and enabling the fintechs and flashy experience layers and product teams to build cool stuff.

One excellent example of this in action is German business Raisin, a deposits-as-a-service play. They’re not dissimilar to Cashwerkz, a local player in Australia. Both operate a model that allows consumers to access a marketplace of deposit and saving products from multiple brands, in one place.

In February this year, Raisin announced it had closed a Series D round with Index Ventures, PayPal, Ribbit Capital and Thrive Capital injecting $114 million into the business. To date the business has brokered $11 billion worth of deposits to 62 partner banks, and generated savers $90 million in interest earnings.

Fintech SaaS businesses, like Raisin, are often free to the user. Raisin charges no fees for opening accounts with one of its partner banks, and provides a single online interface from which to manage all your accounts.

While SaaS is lower risk and investment from an infrastructure perspective, it can also be lower margin, and under threat from regulatory pressure regarding conflicted commission structures and independence. Raisin receives a commission from partner banks, essentially establishing itself as a very good lead generation tool for banks, and a great commercial model, until the taps turn off.

Which of course, they very well may not. With marketing budgets under pressure, and lead generation from traditional media hard, to near impossible to measure, outsourcing marketing to fintech-as-a-service is probably a smart investment, from a bank or financial incumbent’s perspective.

The only thing that could stop these businesses in their tracks is tightened regulation and an increasingly risk-averse regulator that has had to deal with too many human financial advisors and brokers willing to push financial products onto consumers that come with conflicted commissions (i.e. I sell you this because it pays me the most, rather than it being the best product for you). In theory, technology should make this transparent to all involved, including the regulator, and put the shine back on commission led structures.

For marketplace businesses in fintech to achieve longevity, it must be unequivocal that the marketplace is designed for fairness and puts the customer at the centre. It’s an inherently conflicted idea, because both parties are in a sense driven by opposite goals – one to sell high and the other to buy low. But it is not impossible, if there are other value-added features beyond the pure vanilla transaction. In my view, this is still unchartered space, and lots of scope for innovation and ideas. My guess is Raisin will be one of the early ones to deliver it.

Daily Fintech Advisers provides strategic consulting to organizations with business and investment interests in Fintech. Jessica Ellerm is a thought leader specializing in Small Business and the Gig Economy and is the CEO and Co-Founder of Zuper, a new superannuation startup in Australia.

I have no commercial relationship with the companies or people mentioned. I am not receiving compensation for this post.

Subscribe by email to join the 25,000 other Fintech leaders who read our research daily to stay ahead of the curve. Check out our advisory services (how we pay for this free original research)

alibaba, amazon, china, Consumer Banking, digital banking, hongkong, Payments, tencent

$41 Trillion in Mobile payments – China tech target digital banking

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$41 Trillion was the size of China’s mobile payments market in 2018. It is perhaps counter-intuitive when the payments market is more than three times the size of China’s GDP ($12 Trillion). That’s because GDP is based on value creation, not on transaction volumes.

Let me explain it with a crude example. A couple of weeks back, two of my friends and I went into a sports shop in Chislehurst, and bought a cricket bat for £240 for the summer. We knew we were going to share the costs at £80 each. I paid the shopkeeper £240, and then my friends paid me £80 each.

While the value created/exchanged in this case was for £240, payments happened for £240+£80+£80 = £400. GDP is calculated based on the £240, and payment volumes would account for £400.

In the initial days of my discussions about China Fintech, I would often praise China’s Fintech businesses as perhaps the largest in the world. China is doing Trillions in mobile payments, and the US is still groping its way towards $200 Billion. Purely from a size perspective China is light years ahead, but the business models there are different.

Fintech is used as a business model by lifestyle firms in China and broadly Asia. Fintech is not their core value proposition, at least it is not until they onboard a few million customers. Their core lifestyle business is then augmented by Fintech services for their customers, and that makes their life style business stickier.

I have touched upon this in detail in one of my previous posts on how lifestyle businesses have evolved into Fintech heavy hitters in Asia. And payments is the lowest common factor between ecommerce/lifestyle businesses and financial services. Therefor, firms like Alibaba, Tencent, Grab and Bykea have integrated payments to their core service offering.

However, the Chinese tech giants have identified that it was time to upgrade from payments into banking. Earlier this month Alibaba, Tencent, ZhongAn and Xioami were granted a virtual banking license in Hong Kong.

Alibaba applied for a banking license for its Ant SME services, which is a subsidiary of Ant Financial. Tencent and Xiaomi did a Joint venture to go for the banking license. Xiaomi is the fourth largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world with over 120 Million smart phones in 2018.

When Amazon began offering lending to its SME base, there were headlines that they would soon go for their banking license. However, the trend these days is that the East would lead and the West and the rest would follow. Now that China tech giants have upped the ante with a banking license, would the US peers respond? Watch this space.

Arunkumar Krishnakumar is a Venture Capital investor at Green Shores Capital focusing on Inclusion and a podcast host.

I have no positions or commercial relationships with the companies or people mentioned. I am not receiving compensation for this post.

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Consumer Banking, investments, silicon valley, venture capital, wall street

Silicon Valley Stock Exchange and the Saints of Wall Street

A week ago, the news of the Long Term Stock Exchange (LTSE) backed by some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley emerged. The Elites in the valley, including
Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel have joined hands to set up a stock exchange where firms do not have to worry about “Short Termism”. It is seen as the tech world’s open war against Wall Street’s modus operandi.

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Some hail the move as a masterstroke. The features of the LTSE make it more attractive for investors who stick around longer with a firm. Voting rights are directly proportional to how long an investor held a firm’s stocks. But this is also a double edged sword as it makes founding teams too powerful. It could make bubbles bigger, and wave riders could get a smoother ride to exit.

Many questions come to mind when I think about where this could take us. Let us explore each one of them.

  1. Recent disasters of Uber and Lyfts – is Wall street better at identifying good business models?
  2. How long can patient capital be, errrr, patient?
  3. Does Wall Street need to be more tolerant of Visionary Founders?
  4. Growth vs Profitability conundrum – Won’t LTSE make profitability and a good business model rarer?
  5. Creation of monopoly – Good way to make money for businesses and investors? But what about the consumer?

Uber’s IPO earlier this month is arguably the worst opening ever as investors lost $650 Million on the first day. This also happened with Lyft and the stock hasn’t recovered yet. Analysts claim that the ride hailing business model is broken. Softbank’s stocks has taken a beating since then. Would LTSE have minimised the losses that Softbank made since the Uber IPO?

However, with investments (of ~25 Billion) in Ola in India, and Grab in South East Asia, SoftBank’s fund controls 90% of the ride hailing market in the world. One of them (Wall street or Softbank) is definitely wrong about the market and the business models in this space. Is LTSE needed to bridge this gap in perception of business models?

The question that immediately followed was, how long can Patient capital be patient? Early stage investors go largely with gut instincts, where as later stage and public market investors are generally more data driven. If all data points to continued losses (Uber’s Q4 2018 EBITDA loss was at $842 Million), should analysts still give the firm a thumbs up based on the market potential of the firm?

LTSE in this scenario could make Wall Street look good, if the intention was to stay long despite continued losses.

The other side of the argument is also valid. Markets have misjudged visionary founders. Michael Dell took his firm private at ~$25 Billion in 2013 and led the transformation of his firm. The firm has re-positioned itself, and it’s estimated valuation today is ~$70 Billion. When Tesla had pressure from the markets, Elon Musk, took to twitter and spoke about taking the firm private – and of course got into trouble with the regulators for doing so.

If LTSE went live, founders like Dell and Musk could operate in the public market more comfortably.

If LTSE went live, firms like UBER could keep growing and take more of the market, without having to demonstrate a sound business model underneath.

One of the approaches that private investors like to see is “Going for Growth”

“If your growth plan doesn’t scare me, I do not want to invest in you” – That’s another famous VC one liner.

This approach has given rise to centralised tech monopoly over the years. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber are all leaders in their market segment. If LTSE backed them with public money, they have to worry less about profitability, if at all. They can continue with growth and their market conquest.

As an investor who is just looking for an exit, I would love this approach. But as a consumer, who cares about accountability and healthy competition, this is definitely not the way forward. The “Winner takes all” approach has made tech look like the new banking.

LTSE can be a boon to some visionary founders. If it had been announced during times of low liquidity in the market, it would have come across as a genuine attempt by proven Silicon Valley elites. It is coming at a time when market is rich with cash, and it feels like LTSE will make the bubble bigger, and the fall harder.

Arunkumar Krishnakumar is a Venture Capital investor at Green Shores Capital focusing on “Sustainable Deeptech Investments” and a podcast host.

I have no positions or commercial relationships with the companies or people mentioned. I am not receiving compensation for this post.

Subscribe by email to join the 25,000 other Fintech leaders who read our research daily to stay ahead of the curve. Check out our advisory services (how we pay for this free original research).

Consumer Banking, financial inclusion, Fintech General, mobile money, mobile payments, telecoms

Telecom Fintech innovation is spreading

Africa-Mobile-Money-Market

MPesa`s early success in Kenya, will remain the mobile money business case study of payment innovation in Emerging markets[1]. It was 12 years ago; in 2007 when Vodafone launched the service.

Africa continues to be the continent where `Necessity is the mother of invention`.

Africa brings to market further efficiencies, improving the MPesa business model and pushing innovation in financial inclusion (be it remittances, micro-payments, or microinsurance). However, it is not as easy as it may seem. As Chris Skinner notes:

Not only was M-Pesa a roaring success, but its concept was copied in most countries across Africa, Asia and South America. I say concept because M-Pesa itself has failed to repeat its success in other countries.[2]

Today, EcoCash, is a success story in Zimbabwe. It is a rich mobile payment platform hosted by local telco, Econet. Despite recent tech glitches on the Ecocash platform[3], Econet the parent telco continues an expansive digital strategy. It spun off Cassava Smartech, an entity that offers more financial services than just mobile money. From remittances, digital banking and all kinds of insurance.

Orange Money, started in 2008 in Côte d’Ivoire and has currently 40million customers in Africa in 17 countries (francophone and anglophone). Late last year MTN Money[4] and Orange Money, teamed up to create a JV, called Mowali[5]. They are targeting the 300 million mobile money users in Africa. MTN and Orange alone operate in 22 African countries. Mowali is built on the open-source software payment platform Mojaloop, of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The aim is Interoperability at a pan-african level.

South African startup, Wala, has launched its own mobile money solution, with the Dala utility token, using blockchain technology. Wala provides no-fee banking services and is creating a decentralized financial platform (Defi) functioning with the Dala coin. Listen to my interview with founder Tricia Fernandez on the unique approach of the Wala foundation.

Dala is one example of the opportunity that Telecoms can grasp by using tokens, be it stablecoins or some such, in order to offer their existing customers ways to manage their digital lives. Alex Mifsud, Co-founder and CEO, Open Payments Cloud emphasizes this point[6] and uses the example of Dala in South Africa and another approach used in Mongolia. The Mongolian telecom company, Mobicom, has received approval to issue a stablecoin (pegged to the national currency), called “Candy”.  Every Mongolian citizen will be able with a mobile phone to pay bills, shop online, transfer funds, and take out microloans. The pilot will start in the capital, Ulaanbaatar[7].

Now back to the West – US and Europe. The recent T-Mobile announcement of a bank account offering did create some talk. For me, it is a move from a Telecom to extend services to non-T-Mobile customers. But the business innovation is lacking, as it is backed by a conventional bank  – Customer Bank is behind the Baas service of T-Mobile Money. This is actually very different to Orange Money, that has also a bank of its own that was launched in 2017. Orange bank is built from the start with a customer relationship model based on AI technology. It has signed up 200,000 customers as of the start of Q1 2019. It has set a target of reaching 4 million customers and €500 million of net income from banking within five years.

Telecoms and banking

`My conclusion was that banks would merge with telecommunications firms and become hybrid institutions. Twenty years later, it hasn’t happened.` excerpt from Chris Skinner`s vision Banks and Telcos? Two become one!  

Will this blurring become true soon?

Will Orange become the business case or some African entity?

Who will customers trust for their financial digital business?

Will blockchain be the enabler or will AI banking be enough?

[1] Why is M-Pesa the foster child for Financial inclusion? Faisal Khan

[2] Getting the Infrastructure Right for Financial Inclusion, Chris Skinner 2018

[3] A two-day crash in Zimbabwe’s mobile money system shows the vulnerabilities of going cashless

[4] MTN is Africa’s largest telecoms operator

[5] Unlocking mobile money interoperability and merchant payments across Africa through Mowali

[6] Telecoms need not sideline cryprocurrencies, by Arti Mehta, TMForum

[7] Mongolia Starts Off 2019 With Its Eyes On Crypto Payment Adoption

Efi Pylarinou is the founder of Efi Pylarinou Advisory and a Fintech/Blockchain influencer.

 I have no positions or commercial relationships with the companies or people mentioned. I am not receiving compensation for this post.

Subscribe by email to join the 25,000 other Fintech leaders who read our research daily to stay ahead of the curve. Check out our advisory services (how we pay for this free original research).

apple, Consumer Banking, credit cards, data, goldman sachs, Marcus, WealthTech

`You Can Marcus`

Goldman Sachs is one to watch.

It is an example of how sticky a banking brand name is – It has shredded off scandals in the past and the recent Malaysian state-run fund scandal seems no different. Sack Goldmans – a 2010 slogan – did not stick.

Goldman Sachs is an example of how an incumbent builds a Fintech business positioned in the value stack below its established competence – an investment bank getting into retail banking and wealth management for mass affluent & the hoi polloi.

Goldman Sachs is an example of how an incumbent financial institution can grow Data pools by offering free access to its analytical tools SecDB – explained in my article in the 2018 WealthTech Book  `Empowering Asset Owners and the Buy Side`.

Goldman Sachs is an example of how an incumbent financial institution can grow Data pools by partnering with Apple on a credit card – Apple has 900 million devices and it is expected that the Apple Card will bring 21 million users to GS by year end[1].

Goldman Sachs is a publicly traded company that is trading right now below book value and there are more than enough GS analysts out there to get estimates on the revenues from the different GS `consumer banking` new initiatives.

For now, Goldman Sachs has been building up aggressively deposits (the usual way of offering above-market deposit rates when entering a new market). The 3yr old deposit business has accumulated now $46billion across the US and the UK! The expected growth is in the order of $10billion per year going forward.

Marcus has issued $5billion in personal loans. These are unsecured loans that naturally, may worry shareholders, who typically get nervous easily (even though this is crumbs when taken in context).

The credit card part of the Goldman Sachs business is newer and could also grow at double-digit annual rates. Goldman Sachs knows well that credit card lending gets favorable regulatory treatment – less capital is required against this kind of debt – and as long as this holds it is a win-win situation. Why? Simply because Goldman Sachs will get their hands on valuable data from retailers and their shoppers, in order to process the Apple credit card application.

Goldman Sachs hits two birds with one stone. It gets to issue consumer debt on a global scale with lighter capital requirements, and it gets to process new, valuable consumer data globally.

The Apple & Goldman Sachs card economic terms are not known. Even if they are not that juicy for Goldman Sachs and even though the GS logo is on the back of the Apple card; the consumer data access and processing from 40 countries that this brings to the table is invaluable.

The Apple & Goldman card will grow an important global data pool for Goldman Sachs to leverage in its planned WealthTech offering.

In case you haven’t noticed, Marcus has been moved into the Goldman Sachs asset management unit, which will be renamed the consumer and investment management division. The October 2018 memo says that Marcus has plans to “launch a broader wealth management offering.”

A global consumer outreach is being built in preparation of this broader wealth management offering. And for all those concerned about a growing unsecured loan book, Goldman has great risk management experience and could with great elegance securitize part of this debt, once there is enough to do so. Elizabeth Dilts and Anna Irrera, raise this point too in ` Goldman’s Apple pairing furthers bank’s mass market ambitions`.

Marcus is a brand whose heritage is in risk management and investment banking. They will use these competences to manage growth in their retail-focused wealth management offering. This is a huge advantage compared to Fintechs that started with unbundling a specific financial service (be it loans, or deposits, or investments) and is now, growing by rebundbling additional services (e.g. adding robo-advisors to loans, or deposits to trading, ect).

I have no positions or commercial relationships with the companies or people mentioned. I am not receiving compensation for this post.

I have written about Marcus several times.

Just after the launch of Marcus in late 2016, Will Goldman become a verb? Watch the Marcus ads!

Just after the Marcus rebranding and UK launch in Fall 2018, Welcome Marcus to the rebranded Goldman asset mgt division and to the UK

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I must however, confess that I have no idea how to interpret the new Marcus Campaign ‘You Can Money’.  Is this an example of new Fintech language? If you have other such rarities, please send them to me, as I collect them. Maybe we can tokenize them, with the hope that they become the next non-fungible craze.

[1] A Seeking Alpha article that includes several links, for anyone who wants to dive into more details https://seekingalpha.com/article/4251792-buy-goldman-sachs-apple-card

Sources: CNBC, Barrons, Financial Brand, Crowdfundinsider, The economist

Efi Pylarinou is the founder of Efi Pylarinou Advisory and a Fintech/Blockchain influencer.

Subscribe by email to join the 25,000 other Fintech leaders who read our research daily to stay ahead of the curve. Check out our advisory services (how we pay for this free original research).