Category: Financial Services
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Online Brokerage Goes Crypto: How the Past Informs the Future of Regulated Crypto Trading in Canada
[Update: This post was originally written on November 1st, ten days before FTX filed for bankruptcy. Subsequent to the fallout, the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) strengthened its approach to oversight of crypto trading platforms by expanding existing requirements for platforms operating in Canada. This included strong words for unregistered trading platforms (including those located outside…
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Knocking Down The Wall of Switching Costs: Acquiring Customers in Mature Industries
Have you ever smashed a TV with a baseball bat…? Yeah, me neither. But thousands of people have in the safety of a controlled environment known as a ‘rage room’. Every single day, a collection of frustrated executives, divorcees and whoever else requires a little cathartic release pay money to go destroy some objects and…
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Strategic Alpha, Strategic Beta: Winning by Escaping the Obvious
Thought experiment: If you took the corporate strategy departments of the Big Five banks in Canada and asked them to come up with a 5-year strategic plan calibrated to today’s environment, how much variance would exist in the five plans produced? How about if you did the same with the Big Four banks in Australia?…
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Crypto Rewards: A Formula Fusing the Superpower of Digital Assets with Traditional Products
Crypto digital banking firm Juno has raised $18 million in a Series A funding round to expand products and operations and launch its first tokenized loyalty program… -CoinDesk This is eye catching. Juno, for all intents and purposes, is the world’s most crypto-friendly checking account. Backed by Evolve Bank & Trust, like a traditional…
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Feature-Elasticity: Why 1% Financial Advice Fees Are Safe, But Trading Revenue is Not
I was recently listening to Michael Kitces (Financial Advice Industry Guru) talk to Joe Duran (Head of Goldman Sachs Personal Financial Management) about the competitive dynamic in the financial advice industry and how it had shifted over the past few years. Joe provided commentary on three big predictions he had made that have started to…
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Abstracting Away Complexity: The Underappreciated Service in Financial Services
Most consumer-facing financial services firms (from banks to wealth management companies to insurance agents) perform the same service for their clientele. They compete primarily on this service day-after-day, it is heavily embedded in their corporate strategy decks and product roadmaps, and it sits quietly as the primary activity for frontline staff (tellers, financial advisors, and…
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Competing on Advice: A Framework for Looking at the Strategy at the Center of Financial Services
This past summer, Canada celebrated its 155th birthday. It was all the way back in 1867 that Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were officially tied together under the British North America Act that proclaimed Canadian Confederation and independence from the British. A full fifty years prior, in 1817, the Montreal Bank (now known…
Paper & Blocks 