Google and Amazon’s mixed reality advertising could become digital lending and payments platforms; plus 12 short takes on top developments

Hi Fintech futurists —

Today the long take focuses on the convergence of mixed reality, digital lending and payments, and the social media advertising unit. Will you be shopping, paying, and borrowing inside of a video ad? The latest short takes on the Fintech bundles, Crypto and Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, and Augmented and Virtual Reality are below.

Long Take

Finance is everywhere, and everywhere is finance. Smart city supply chains, self driving car insurance, video game real estate markets — no matter which frontier technology you touch, it will have embedded implications on the delivery of financial services. And why wouldn’t it? Like the use of language, finance is a human technology that allows societies to coalesce and compete with one another (in the Yuval Harari sense). It lifts people out of poverty and into entrepreneurship through microloans, providing generational sustenance for their families. And of course it also throws them into pits of corruption and greed, as they drink too deeply from the rivers of securitization and political power.

But enough poetry! I want to talk about augmented reality, attention platforms, and the re-formulation of payments and lending propositions in a global context. First, let’s state the digital lending vector of evolution. It used to be that in order to lend money, you needed to have it. So, for example, you were a bank that took in depositor assets, then kept some of it and lent out the rest. For this pleasure, your bank made net interest income, and you went golfing. With the advent of digital lending, driven by startup tech firms that did not want to be tied to a regulated financial entity, the balance sheet side of the business got lopped off. Digital lenders “merely” tied demand for loans with people or organizations that could provide them.

First, this happened in lending categories that weren’t particularly well served after the 2008 financial crisis — personal loans, education financing, small business cash flows. But as the model matured, early pioneers went public, and the Web became…