Category: Financial Services
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ESG Investing: Kick-starting the Shift From Shareholder to Stakeholder
ESG is one of the most discussed topics in investment management today. If you do a tour of the industry’s largest conferences in 2023, that three letter acronym—which stands for environmental, social, and (corporate) governance, btw—is likely to appear on each event’s agenda multiple times. Sustainable investing is #trending and almost every major asset manager…
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The Conveyor Belt of Finance and the Evolution of Alternative Investments
Today, it is hard to write about business without any mention of technology companies. From Apple to Amazon to Facebook, today’s tech giants are arguably the largest and most impactful organizations ever built. But when it comes to understanding this broad category, I’ve found myself asking: what exactly is a technology company? According to Investopedia,…
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Stacks of Discretion: Who is Making Decisions About Your Money?
It is hard to choose a financial advisor! ~44% of financial advice relationships today start from a referral. Most people have trouble evaluating a financial advisory practice from the outside, so instead of spending hours scouring the internet and checking references, many people outsource the decision of whether or not a financial advisor is ‘good’…
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The Comfort Factor: Why Cost Leadership is a Not a Practical Strategy in Retail Financial Services
For years, fintech has pushed the narrative that the existing financial stack is inefficient, built for an analog paper-based age with entrenched business models that have significant room to modernize. An assumed by-product of this inefficiency was increased costs for financial services customers. The higher the layers of people, intermediaries and batch processes were stacked,…
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Enhancing Financial Legibility: A Technological Upgrade for Financial Services
Quick question: what is your credit score? Can you answer this on the spot? If so, my guess is that you are one of the millions of people who have accessed and tracked their credit scores for free through forward-thinking services like CreditKarma and Borrowell. Their work has made it possible for anyone to better…
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The Default Path: A Moat Worth Defending
Life is busy, the world is noisy, and it seems to get more so each year. When attention is increasingly scarce, we rely more heavily on the default path. The default path is the option that is automatically selected unless an alternative is specified. It is the first thing to come to mind when making…
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Context is Everything: The Hidden Driver Behind Most Financial Services Innovation
Finance is a means to an end, not an end in itself. This is hard to remember sometimes when you have your head down working in the industry. The financial system exists to move, store and transform value for its various users. It is the circulatory system enabling most forms of economic activity across the…
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Investment Tribes and the Rise of Social Trading
Investing is inherently social. Why is that the case? Well, let’s start by asking the question: What is a security? When it comes to the general applicability of the federal securities laws in the United States, the definition is quite simple. A security is: These are the four prongs of the famous ‘Howey Test’, a…
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The Temporal Theory of Disruptive Innovation
Back in my research/consulting days, I made the rounds with a presentation titled: The Attention Imperative in Financial Services. To briefly summarize its contents: Wealth management firms have a hard time acquiring clients. Customer acquisition costs (CAC) can be upwards of $2,000. Why? Because clients do not live their lives with the ‘long-term’ top-of-mind. That…
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Finance Tiktok: Bringing the #Money Conversation into the Light
People do not like to talk about finance on a personal level. How much did your significant other make last year? What does your cousin’s investment portfolio look like? How much debt did your newly wed friends take-on to afford a house… in that neighbourhood? Money is a taboo topic in culture today. It can…
Paper & Blocks 