Tag: Fintech
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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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Crypto Inception: A Theory of Mainstream Adoption from NFTs to Institutional DeFi
Crypto is LOUD. Headlines, trials, frauds, scams, degens, lambos, WAGMI, million dollar jpegs, maxis… the last wave of crypto was brash and ‘in your face’. Every industry headline seems to come with an exclamation point next to it! That’s a feature, not a bug. Early days-crypto was on a mission to replace money itself and…
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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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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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Why Staking Matters
Question: Why does staking matter? Answer: Financial asset productivity. Let me explain. What is Staking? Staking is a process by which a crypto asset owner can lock up their coins in order to participate in running a blockchain and maintaining its security. Of course, this is only true for blockchains that use a proof-of-stake (POS) consensus…
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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…
Paper & Blocks 