Category: Strategy
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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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Quality Control: A Mental Model for Regulation
Regulation has a bad rap. It is regularly vilified as a barrier to innovation and as a contributor to costs. But every so often, we are starkly reminded of the important purpose it serves: to protect consumers and ensure industries operate as they are supposed to. There is a large part of the crypto industry…
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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…
Paper & Blocks 