I've been seeing a lot of Fintech headlines recently that make me raise my hands in the air, and go "Come on, are you for real!?". I imagine a lot of people feel similarly frustrated by Lemonade looking to go public at a $2 billion valuation on $50 million of revenue, Initial Exchange Offerings on crypto exchanges raising over $500 million this year, Facebook's tone deaf Silicon Valley club crypto money, or SoftBank talking about selling its overpriced $100 billion Fintech unicorn fund in an IPO. So other than getting crankier with age (Happy Father's day everyone!), I want to dig a little bit into the concept of fairness, asymmetric information, economic rents, and how this can help disentangle feelings from thoughts on these news items.
Allianz has invested in Lemonade, an insurance startup powered by artificial intelligence and behavioral economics; Solmaz Altin, chief digital officer stated: "Allianz is committed to staying at the cutting edge of insurance. We follow the insurtech space closely and globally, and have seen nothing to match Lemonade in terms of technology, user experience and business model innovation. We're thrilled to become a stakeholder in Lemonade, and will do what we can to accelerate their rapid expansion throughout the US and beyond." Source
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.
ZhongAn starts trading tomorrow and raised $1.5bn last week, valuing the group at up to $10bn; the IPO has begun pushing insurtech into the mainstream as the company has seen growing interest across the world; the use of AI & big data have been driving forces behind the company and a main reason for investor interest; this might help to give momentum to other insurtech firms like Lemonade and Oscar. Source.
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