Hong Kong authorities are planning to issue digital banking licenses to Tencent, Ant Financial and Xiaomi; Goldman Sachs estimates there...
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.
This week, we look at:
What it means to ask questions and find answers
From asking simple questions that result in neobanks and roboadvisors. Who will win — Schwab or Robinhood?
To asking macro questions about the finance / high-tech competition. Who will win — Goldman Sachs or Google?
To asking profound questions about the nature of the work, and the art of finding your own questions.
We can't formulate the questions for you. But we can give you a framework of needs for both the individual, and the organization.
The questions that you ask are the answers that you will get.
China’s government has tried for many years to establish a credit system that rivals the U.S. and Europe, but has...
German Digital bank N26 has raised $160mn to fund their U.S expansion plans; Tencent and Allianz were lead investors in the round and it could set the stage for a future IPO according to N26 co-founder and CEO Valentin Stalf; “It's a good round to be as independent as possible,” Stalf said to TechCrunch. “This funding round really brings N26 to a pre-IPO stage. I think we see a clear path to a very sustainable company with this funding round. Maybe in the next five years there will be an IPO.”; the bank currently has eight staff members in NY and customers have been signing up on the waiting list since October 2017. Source.
In this conversation, we chat with Richard Turrin – an award-winning executive, previously heading FinTech teams at IBM, following a twenty-year career, heading trading teams at global investment banks. He’s also the author of the number one international bestseller, Innovation Lab Excellence. One of his books is Cashless: China’s Digital Currency Revolution, which brings the story of China’s incredible new central bank digital currency to the west. He lives in Shanghai, China, where he’s had the privilege of living in China’s cashless revolution firsthand.
HSBC has launched a digital wallet in Hong Kong that targets startups and other small businesses; the bank said they...
WSJ published a story on China’s consumer credit rating ecosystem: the fact that China doesn’t have a widely accepted system to gauge individual’s creditworthiness leads technology giants (Ant Financial, Tencent among others) to developing their own credit-rating systems, but none of these projects has emerged as a single nationwide standard either yet; problems with generating credit scores in the private sector include data accuracy and privacy; the story says the lack of a single accepted standard is holding back the growth of borrowing among rising middle class in China. Source
WhatsApp, Brazil Central Bank In Talks To Restore Payments Service Volcker Rule reforms expand options for raising VC funds CMG...
Naspers is the most valuable listed company in Africa and is now selling $10 billion worth of shares in Tencent to invest in fintech, classified and online food delivery businesses; Naspers stake in Tencent is estimated at $545 billion; this is the first time the company has sold shares in the company after initially investing in 2001. Source