-
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…
-
Bitcoin as an Inflation Hedge: Is it as Simple as This?
Bitcoin’s uses cases are many (self-sovereignty, payments/money movement, social signaling, etc.), but two perhaps float to the top of the narrative pile when you talk to enough people about it: bitcoin as an inflation hedge and bitcoin as a speculative asset. While both are reasons to invest, the reasoning is very different. Bitcoin as an…
-
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?…
-
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…
-
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…
-
The Ultimate Disintermediator of Financial Labor
Labour vs Capital has always had an interesting dynamic in economic theory. They are the two of the three main productive outputs of the economy, at least according to the Cobb-Douglas production function (the third being technology, or ‘total factor productivity’—TFP). In recent times, the dynamic has shifted. Labor’s share of income has fallen while…
-
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…
-
In Praise of HODL: Creating Owners Out of Speculators
We Need More Owners Carta deserves our respect: their mission “to create more owners” is ambitious and subtly takes on the global challenge of income/wealth inequality. Credit unions are in the same boat: they are financial institutions owned by their members that (in some instances) return capital to their members each year in the form…
-
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…
-
Displacement, Not Replacement
#BankLoyalty is strong. Ask the average Baby Boomer how long they’ve had the same bank account with their primary financial institution and 56% will tell you more than 21 years. Call it loyalty, call it inertia. Whatever it is, it makes it incredibly hard for start-ups and new companies to build scalable businesses and bring…
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Paper & Blocks 