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philosophy

artificial intelligence digital transformation neobank philosophy

·Jul. 15, 2019

Deutsche Bank to fire 18,000 people while Amazon upskills 100,000

Today's corporations and governments are in the business of defining the balance of these aspects of our participation in society and the economy. Beliefs about the immutability of different attributes about what makes a person (or an employee) and how economies are built (cutting the pie, vs. growing the pie) determine the policy decisions you make, top down. As the core example this week, let's take Deutsche Bank. Facing pricing pressure and headwinds in several of its businesses, Deutsche is responding with a plan to fire 18,000 employees by 2022 and an announced investment of €13 Billion in technology and innovation by 2022. They even spun up a hipster-colored neobank as a proof point. Wall Street ain't buying it.

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cybersecurity microeconomics philosophy

·Aug. 5, 2019

Losing our Sacred Data – how to make sense of Capital One, Equifax, and Facebook

Capital One recently suffered a data breach resulting from poor security practices that exposed 100 million credit card applications and accounts. They expect the breach to cost the company $150 million. Two years back, Equifax lost 140 million identities, again from poor security practices. At the time, I said that according to GDPR this should cost them $150 million. They have since settled for about $600 million -- though some of that seems to be in-kind services coverage like free credit monitoring (lol!). Separately, Facebook has settled for a $5 billion fine associated with the Cambridge Analytica privacy "breach".

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decentralized finance digital lending digital transformation philosophy

·Aug. 19, 2019

Robocop vs. Terminator in Fintech; Comparing DeFi originations to Digital Lenders in the early years

I've got a gentle, data-backed story this week inspired by a great distinction made in this Techonomy article by the Chief Digital Officer at Schneider Electric. The thesis tracks three key lessons from attempting to bring large companies into the 21st century: (1) transform the core of your business instead of fumbling around at the edges, (2) digitize your processes and separately figure out a distinct digital model, and (3) catalyze a digital ecosystem from the new model. You can think about the distinction as either taking the existing business and slowly swapping out parts from human to machine (e.g., like RoboCop), or building the robot from scratch utilizing the latest platforms, markets, and artificial intelligence (e.g., like Terminator).

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covid pandemic identity and privacy philosophy

·Mar. 30, 2020

Creativity and courage are the vaccine — from molecular technology, to digital workspaces, to solving for global health data

This week, we look at what positive innovations could arise from the pressure cooker of the pandemic. I touch on health care data and privacy, molecular technology, digital work- and play-spaces, and their financial implications. Channeled productively, the next decade could see advances in these fields that we can't yet imagine.

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decentralized finance Embedded Finance paytech philosophy

·Jun. 29, 2020

Wirecard’s collapse hurts Fintech & Crypto start-ups, like Lehman and Enron burned the economy

This week, we consider the impact of financial infrastructure collapse and who really gets hurt through the lens of Wirecard, Enron, and Lehman Brothers. Yes, there are investors in the entity that will lose value. But there are also clients and counterparties of Wirecard, like Curve, Revolut, and Crypto.com. In the case of Lehman, there was a $40 trillion derivatives notional amount that took twenty years to wind down. We also consider the most recent $500,000 hacking in DeFi of an automated market maker to see if there are common threads to be drawn between the two worlds.

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Crypto decentralized finance Investing philosophy roboadvisor

·Jul. 20, 2020

How Robinhood makes $90MM from order flow, and how DeFi is different

Looking into the statistics of gambling is illuminating and depressing. The UK, where gambling is more widely accepted than in the US, sees rates of 40-60% across all adults according to 2016 research. Revenues for casinos are over $100 billion annually, and global gambling revenues, including sports betting and the national lotteries, amount to over $400 billion. That's like the equivalent of the entire software cloud industry. And it asymmetrically addicts and disadvantages the already disadvantaged (see academic research here, here, and here).

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central bank / CBDC digital transformation generational change mega banks narrative zeitgeist philosophy visual art

·Jan. 25, 2021

What 1840s “Free Banking” and the 1910s Cubist movement suggests about DeFi and economic machine evolution

This week, we look at:

The nature of innovation hubs, and how close groups of actors within a particular environment can be massively, fundamentally productive. Take for example the 30 million years of the Cambrian explosion.
The difficulty of experimenting with banking and money frameworks, the limits of traditional econometrics, and an overview of “free banking” in the 1840s.
How evolutionary theory can help us think about selection of economic models, and the hyper-competition and hyper-mutation that we see in crypto. DeFi protocols, like BadgerDAO and ArcX among hundreds of others, are experiments in designing different monetary policies and banking regime experiments in real time.

We have never before had such acceleration in the design space of the economic machine, subject to evolutionary pressures, built by a closely-wound nexus of developers. It is a fortune for the curious.

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China civilization and politics Fractals & reflexivity philosophy

·Nov. 13, 2020

The system versus the individual — a meditation on the American election, Alibaba’s dethroning, and Fintech theater

This week, we look at:

The relationship between an individual and a system, and how that applies to the power games of politics and economics. Did Trump change the system, or did the system generate Trump?
The difference between fighting and signalling, and what creates fragility and flexibility in governance structures
Why the Communist Party stopped Ant Financial's IPO, and how Jack Ma bears a resemblance to Mikhail Gorbachev

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covid pandemic Embedded Finance identity and privacy macroeconomics philosophy

·Apr. 13, 2020

Apple and Google help with government contact tracing, setting stage for war over Data

This week, we dive into the social, economic, and financial implications of data in a post-COVID world. As Apple and Google work to build out the government's contact tracing apps to combat pandemic, what Pandora's box are we opening without consideration? As Plaid reaches into payroll data to accelerate small business bailouts, what power do we hand to aggregators? Will dignity-preserving solutions come to market in time? The opportunity for decentralized identity and data storage is clearer than ever. Or will fear drive us to make permanent compromises?

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