Food and Finance blurring through technology

As technology blurs business lines and `forces` incumbents to get rid of silos, Wealth Management & Capital Markets become broader.

Wealth Management & Capital Markets are being re-imagined as we speak.

Stay with me in this transformation.

My vision of Wealth Management is a holistic service that surely includes the future of Food and how we eat.  We didn`t touch on this topic with Paolo Sironi, when we discussed the principles of the Theory of Financial Market Transparency (FMT) in `Sustainable Banking Innovation`. Limited (and irreversible) time constraints were the reason that I didn`t raise the issue, which otherwise would be a very suitable topic to discuss with the Italian thought leader @thespironi.

My belief is that Food, Finance, and Fun are essential domains to our health and wealth. So, we will soon add to budgeting, borrowing, insurance, investing, trading, all sorts of others non-conventional `assets` and services.

Vivek Gopalakrishnan, head of brand & communications Wealth Mgt at BNP Paribas in South East Asia,  shared a Reimagine food infographic about What and How we will be eating.

reimagine food

Source: DECODING THE FUTURE OF FOOD

The way I see the broadening of wealth management with Food is through AI algorithms that we will eventually trust, as we become convinced that they know us better than we know ourselves. Once this cultural shift happens, then food AI advisory will become ubiquitous. We will entrust the mathematics, the algorithms to advise us on Diversification, risk management, and investing around food.

All this will be 100% linked to our customized insurance policies naturally. It will also affect our risk appetite in financial investing as science will put us in more control of our life expectancy and Immortality will become in. Audrey de Grey, the renowned biomedical gerontologist, wants to increase human longevity to the point that death could become a thing of the past. Medical technology could soon be able to prevent us from falling sick. Yuval Noah Harari, also talks about the `Last Days of Death` in Homo Deus.

Even if this doesn’t happen in the next 50yrs, food AI advisory will happen and the best way will be to integrate these services with the advisory of today`s conventional assets in wealth management. My US dollars, my Canadian dollars, my euros, my Swiss francs[1], and my food consumption, risk management, diversification; all in one place.

In the US, the USDA issues a monthly report on what food should cost families nationwide, presented in four different priced plans: thrifty, low cost, moderate cost, and liberal. Food costs, as a % of income, have been declining dramatically in the US (not the case in emerging markets). Whether food costs are 10% or 40% of household incomes, the point is there is a huge opportunity to manage `what and how I eat`, and just looking at the food budget which misses the entire opportunity.

My vision is that there is no distinction between PFM, robo advisors, private banking for HNW and health. Our wealth and health have to be managed in one place. Ideally, lets deploy blockchain technology to manage our data in a `personal locker` fashion and then let’s outsource the processing and the insights from this data to the best algorithms that act in our interest and advise us on what to eat, what to buy, how to diversify, how to rebalance, what risks match our goals etc. Whether it is food or money.

Tokenization can also unlock value in this context by creating communities linked by incentives built-in the tokens, that share similar food habits and or financial goals.

Blockchain can protect us from the data monopoly slavery and enable us to unlock value.

Fintech can empower us as asset owners of these new values.

[1] These are my personal actual holdings since I have lived in each of these currency places and still hold accounts. Still looking for an aggregator to view and manage all these on a single dashboard. Fintech is not done.

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

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