We look in detail at the state of marking recently-private-fintechs to the public market in mid-2021. Multiple industry segments have seen IPOs, direct listings, and SPACs transition fintech darlings into traditional stocks. How is performance doing? Is everything as magnificent and rich as we expected? Have multiples and valuations fallen or held steady? The analysis explores the answers and provides an explanatory framework.
We’ve had this write-up in some various mental states floating around for a while, and better done than perfect. So treat this as a core idea to be fleshed out later.
Payments and banking companies should be looking at how people purchase and store digital goods and digital currency in video games. That experience has been polished over 40 years, and is what will be the default expectation for future generations.
For those interested, here is a website that collects user experiences of shopping across hundreds of designs.
We are like the hungry at the all-you-can-eat buffet. In the beginning, there is not enough! Let's democratize access to food; to music; to transportation; to healthcare; to finance; to payments; to banking; to lending; to investing. The billions in institutional capital across universities, pensions, and sovereigns are delegated to smart portfolio managers. The day before yesterday, it was allocated by small cap stock pickers (hi Warren!). Yesterday, it was the alternative managers of hedge funds and private equity. Today, it is the trading machine and the venture capitalist. Tomorrow, it is the cryptographic artificial intelligence.
We are syndicating a deep conversation across roboadvice, high tech and payments, and fintech bundling that we had with Craig Iskowitz of Ezra Group Consulting.
Check out Ezra Group Consulting here to learn more about digital wealth and Craig’s consulting practice. He is one of the sharpest software consultants in the RIA space, and his firm works with wealth management firms and fintech vendors to provide technology strategy and market research.
We had a lot of fun in this conversation and cover TD & Schwab, Wealthsimple, M1 Finance, Ant & Tencent, and Robinhood, among others. The full transcript is provided along with the recording — worth a read for the illustrations alone.
The suicide of a 20 year old who was using the popular trading app Robinhood has set off alarm bells...
In this conversation, we talk with Brian Barnes of M1 Finance, about finance “super apps”, the cost-efficiencies of robo-advisors, fractionalized share trading, and tackling the titans of the Wealth Management industry. We also discuss the nuts and bolts of the financial infrastructure making this possible.
M1 Finance bundles together roboadvisory, neobanking and lending into a single “super app”, allowing for combined pricing power (i.e., charging nothing on asset allocation). The firm currently has $3 billion in AUM, a growth of 50% in the past four months and tripling their total in just over a year. Notably, the company has its own broker/dealer and offers fractional shares, and partners with Lincoln Savings bank on the deposit accounts. That makes for a compelling business model from securities lending, interchange, and order flow.
Robinhood has announced details of its latest funding round which raised $110 million for the firm giving it fintech unicorn status with a valuation of $1.3 billion; investors in the Series C funding round included DST Global, NEA, Index Ventures, Ribbit Capital, Thrive Capital and Greenoaks Capital; the firm also announced that it now has over two million users; the firm says: "Our two million users have transacted over $50 billion and saved nearly half a billion dollars in commission fees. Robinhood Gold, our margin and extended hours service, is also experiencing significant growth, with signups surging 17% month over month."; the firm plans to use funds from the Series C funding round for expansion of the platform's products and services. Source
In this conversation, we chat with Paul Rowady is the Founder and Director of Research for Alphacution Research Conservatory and a 30-year veteran of proprietary, hedge fund and capital markets research, trading and risk advisory initiatives. Alphacution is a digitally-oriented research and strategic advisory platform focused on modeling and benchmarking the impacts of technology on global financial markets and the businesses of trading, asset management and banking. This data-driven approach allows Alphacution to reverse-engineer the operational dynamics of these market actors to showcase the most vivid and impactful themes among the field of available research providers and platforms.
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