SoFi

2016 Predictions

2016

Hello. It’s me. As we kick off 2016, look for consolidation as private companies are forced into the arms of larger players, along lines of last week’s purchase of Jemstep by Investco, or the acquisition of Yodlee by Envestnet, BillGuard’s purchase by Prosper or BlackRock’s acquisition of FutureAdvisor.

It’s incredible how much is written – still – on Robo’s being “on fire” when the facts are so different. Look for capitulation in 2016, among startups in the robo advisor category and continued dominance by a handful in the lending space.

Robo advisors are private, so it’s hard to know how much case they are going through but the themes of recent news (e.g. lowering investment limits) suggest we may see one of the bigger players disappear in 2016, if not 2017.

This development is not specific to digital wealth management, so consolidation and capitulation is my prediction for all areas of FinTech.

pac man In 2016, look for consolidation within the most crowded areas (e.g. alternative lending, robo advisors) with too many ‘me too’ companies. Look also for some acceleration of Product innovation at bigger firms, as they try to respond to the to FinTech startups who’s captures headlines over the last few years.

Advisors: Where the Action Is

The real story is slow demise of the big name firms like Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, as they lose top advisors and clients to RIA’s (not robo advisors).

Less covered by tech media, look for RIA’s to continue to take share from brokerage firms, even as firms like Morgan Stanley explore automated investment services.

What’s behind Morgan Stanley reportedly planning to introduce its own ‘robo advisor’ service is not competing with Betterment, but trying to stay relevant and nimble as it loses share to RIA’s that offer better services, products and technology.

FinTech industry followers are better served to listen to Michael Kitces and Bill Winterberg rather than read press releases from robo advisors.

Financial Data Comes to the Cloud

Is Market Data as exciting as marketplace lending or mobile payments? Maybe not, but it deserves attention, especially as one innovator, Xignite, behind Wealthfront, Betterment, Personal Capital, Motif and StockTwits –is looking to shake up an industry.

xignite

I recently sat down with the Founder & CEO of Xignite, Stephane Dubois, in San Mateo. He noted how robo advisors were among early clients of xIgnite, but that his target market now includes larger financial institutions.

I asked him whether xIgnite was like Stripe for the market data world? My rationale was Stripe has been successful in payments in part due to its focus on developer community.

Stephane_Dubois

Dubois saw the parallel, noting that xIgnite is focused on API’s, innovation and targets developers, while financial data incumbents (e.g. Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, S&P) often seek to sell products, not delivering the actual data clients want.

But he emphasized Xignite targets both developers and businesses (both startup and larger companies at this point in the growth trajectory). As Dubois expressed it, xIgnite’s goal includes growing its business through enabling more responsive front-end tools for financial institutions, and helping it slash back-end costs.

Is Xignite the Stripe of the market data world?

From my experience at Morgan Stanley, I think there’s opportunity. Although there is a lot of focus on controlling market data expense, in light of reduced profits in many trading areas, executives such as Morgan Stanley’s Ken Brady are smart and strategic, looking to control expenditure but also enable the business.

Focus on the Apps, Not the Integration

Screen Shot 2016-01-18 at 10.17.18 PM

This illustration from xIgnite captures the essence of its value proposition and also highlights one issue for large financial institutions.

Banks do a good job managing their third-party expenditures and risk; teams focused on partners on Wall St. (ranging from Operations, Market Data, Tech Risk, Vendor Risk, Corporate Services, COO Teams). What big banks can learn from startups is to focus on the apps, not the integration (and using xIgnite can help with that approach).

Morgan Stanley legend Merritt Lutz jokes that in a post Dodd-Frank world, you can find a risk officer hiding under every desk on Wall Street. But the red tape on risk and expense management, has slowed down execution. Clients using Morgan Stanley Online can’t see basic portfolio performance reporting online, in contrast to most of its competitors.

As a result, wealth management units of banks suffer from too long development cycles. Instead of navigating bureaucracies, expense approval and risk teams, developers should be able to focus on apps and the data they need to serve clients.

Bigger banks should be more API-centric approach and embrace Agile in order to enable faster time-to-market on Wall St. and compete with FinTech firms.

2016

Final thoughts on 2016? I’m looking forward to incumbents moving faster, adopting API solutions like Xignite, during consolidation since as one executive from J.P. Morgan Chase said, ‘Do we really need 1,000 mobile wallet startups?’

I also don’t foresee any big IPO’s in the FinTech space, given the state of the markets, although SoFi and Stripe have all the right pieces in place. For now, I can see Financial Technology Partners being busy with lots of deals focused on the middle market.

2016 should offer a few surprises. I look forward to telling you about them.

FinTech’s Zeitgeist

Recent conversations have led me to think that some of the zeitgeist of fintech is changing.

I think the focus on the hype and funding levels is shifting as both startups and mid-stage firms are pivoting from aspirational, even naive plans, to more strategic conversations.

For me, the decision of FutureAdvisor and its investors to fold its cards is but one data point. It’s arguably been both a case of capitulation on both sides, recognizing the challenges to achieve scale, and the difficulty of innovation at incumbents.

honest dollar

More than ever, it’s a card game, and playing your cards right can mean holding them close to your vest. The CEO of Honest Dollar, for example, spoke candidly on the gap between what people think they’re building versus what they’re actually building.

There’s smart and right out of Steve Jobs playbook. There’s a time and place for putting it all on the table – and it’s best not to do so too early.

Finovate

I wasn’t able to attend the recent Finovate event in New York due to a last-minute conflict, but was able to see themes from afar and through conversations with those in New York.

finovate

Mobile continues to be the key driver of the conversation. As Karen Webster, one of the most compelling voices on payments today, says: “More than any other, mobile is the ecosystem that has given rise to the sea change taking place in payments today.”

As she wrote on the @PYMNTS blog: “You can’t talk FinTech without talking payments, and you can’t talk payments without talking FinTech. They’re an inseparable marriage.”

I thought it was interesting that we both had seen Sprint Money’s partnership with Urban FT was one piece of news from the event.

sprint

As mobile gurus like Benedict Evans point out, although we in the US don’t often grok it, outside the US, telco companies operate more like banks or have a closer relationship with them.

In developing markets, phones can serve as the de facto means of payment. It will be interesting to see if the model will come to the US.

I think it will be a challenge given the Sprint brand and other options in the US, but demographic changes and aversion to banks might make it work in certain segments.

Payments News

Outside the marketplace lending space, other big news was the huge growth in payments processed by PayPal‘s Braintree unit. Just two years after its acquisition by PayPay this week it announced its authorized payment volume will be $50B this year.

braintree

Impressive, but with that growth factored in, the stock is still trading broadly flat to down from its IPO in July. The open question is whether the Dan Schulman can get PayPal to a place where it can compete with Stripe.

It’s interesting that Dan’s professional career includes little time in financial services (with time at AT&T, Sprint and Virgin Mobile vastly exceeding his time at American Express). I wonder what Dan thinks of Sprint Money? I suspect his attention is elsewhere.

Only about 1.6% of retail purchases are made online, though a majority research prices online or with our phones before making a purchase decision. That behavior may be changing….

Recently Stripe announced Stripe Relay, which reduces friction for in-app purchases. It’s big news, and could usher in more online and in-app purchases over time.

stripe relay

The New Zeitgeist

Today’s zeitgeist is shifting from how big the opportunities are to being smart and strategic. (For that reason, there was a wariness about many startups at Finovate this week.)

Honest Dollar’s whurley going beyond what many think are its modest plans is one example. Being ambitious and holding your cards close is the mark of a company you want to work for – and a startup that the best venture firms want to back.

I like the story he tells of an employee at Honest Dollar being asked what he’d done to achieve a big win for the startup, replying: “My job,” and walking away.

So here’s my advice to startups: don’t get caught up in the hype; focus on the job; and don’t show your hand too early.

It’s a smart strategy that will work better than raising too much, too soon and tilting at windmills. Remember, it’s business – you’ll need to think a few moves ahead.

2015 Predictions

OK, I’ll admit it. I’m already over all the New Year predictions…. I’ve read thoughtful predictions that contradict themselves, such as ApplePay will not succeed (or that it will), so I’ve decided not to make a list of predictions.

What I’ll predict, however – pretty confidently – is that the year 2015 will bring a lot of exciting developments in FinTech.

It’s been difficult to be upbeat lately, with the negative news coming from the Middle East, the slowdown of European economy (and rise of the extremist parties there), hacking and security incidents, the chasm between left and right in the US.

But I’ve been reading Abundance, the book by founder of the X Prize, Peter Diamandis, co-authored by Steven Kottler, who wrote The Rise of Superman, on the science of high performance sports (and concept of entering a ‘flow state’).

One key take-away from the book was the inbuilt bias we have to see risks, and to focus on negative events, which drives both media (since we tend to read bad news more than good news) and influences everything from politics to career decisions.

For instance, companies like LendingClub had successful IPO’s, and innovations like Apple Pay are unveiled in 2014, yet instead of focusing on the positive, VentureBeat publishes articles like “Are We in a FinTech Bubble?”

Just because something like financial services technology is doing well as industry, doesn’t mean we need to be looking around the corner for bad news to come. Speaking personally, I’m excited to be living in such interesting times in San Francisco:

“We’re living through a tech revolution. We get to work with the most exciting companies in the world..” (Michael Grimes, Global Head of Tech Banking quoted in New York Times article of 2014)

During my time at the 2725 Sand Hill Road offices of Morgan Stanley, I was glad to interact, even briefly – since the bankers are always busy – with its pantheon of talent, such as bankers Dave Chen, Paul Kwan, Paul Chamberlain and Andy Kearns.

Returning to predictions, will ApplePay be successful in 2015 or not? I do think so, but as I’ve said, I believe we have a tendency to focus on winners vs. losers, and I really don’t think that’s the most important question of the new year (or even FinTech).

A16Z’s Benedict Evans was spot on last year calling for an end to the debate over whether iOS or Android will “win.” I think 2015 will be an amazing year for FinTech, whether ApplePay achieves rapid growth or not, is my prediction.

What excites me? As someone who worked early on in my career launching an online bank in the UK, I’ll always be looking to see what startups will be doing, but the ‘FinTech bubble’ article in VentureBeat gets it wrong, when it says since Millennials do not trust Banks, therefore startups will be favored to win over the incumbents in the long term.

Give me a customer-obsessed, strong value proposition incumbent – such as Vanguard or BlackRock – that has completely revolutionized investing, disrupted industry cost models, and create low-cost, superior investment products, anytime.

I’d gladly do business with these incumbents – versus FinTech startup like Wonga, a much-hyped UK peer-to-peer lender that charges high interest rates to low-income borrowers…. and has been criticized by everyone in the press, even the Church of England, for what it does to those who are least advantaged in UK society.

Back in the US, Silicon-Valley’s Personal Capital is an innovator in wealth management, like Motif, plus I was impressed by CEO Bill Harris’s talk at The Future of Money in San Francisco last month.

But I was surprised by its hyping $1B in AUM after five years in business. Seriously? Morgan Stanley’s star advisors like Mark Curtis and Greg Vaughan manage $27B and $14B+ (see Barrons report) while the Firm manages $2 trillion for its clients. I do wonder if some of the startups will achieve sufficient scale. Their value proposition and execution need to be compelling.

Turning to lending, given the momentum from last year IPO of LendingClub and OnDeck, I will be keeping an eye on the plethora of interesting peer-to-peer lenders trying to make things better for people and businesses who need credit.

I’m a fan of Prosper, that show vision and execution, going after a new market, and trying to deliver something demonstrably better, through its pricing, product innovation and UX.

While I also respect how Prosper’s marketplace has made $2B in loans, I like even more its message of having empowered 250,000 borrowers, through better rates than banks and increased transparency. Take that, Wonga!

As for SoFi, based in the Presidio section of the city (right by LucasFilm’s offices), I like how they began as a way to reduce the interest rates paid on student loans by leveraging the power of alumni to give people a better deal. To me, it’s a solid innovation like affiliate marketing, when places like MBNA, a former consulting clients of mine, signed people up for credit cards based on their membership in groups, passing on the savings derived from lower default rates and acquisition costs.

Today, SoFi is expanding into mortgage lending. While in US, mortgage rates are low now, just as gas prices have swung from high to low over the last two years, I think SoFi is smart to go after the huge mortgage market and diversity from student loans.

What else will be exciting in 2015? Workflow and connected services have my vote. I’ll address this in detail in a future post, but everything I see points to a more API and app-centric world of financial services beyond anything we’ve seen to date.

Here’s a glimpse… Last month, The Verge announced WorkFlow as one of the most exciting new apps to appear in the App Store. Essentially, it enables you to create customized workflows, using a simple drag-and-drop interface, so that you don’t need to follow repetitive, multi-step processes for multiple apps anymore, among other things.

Take the example of texting someone to let them know when you’ll be home. Using Workflow for iOS you can create a workflow to: 1) Open the Maps app; 2) Use app to see how long it will take for you to get home; 3) Open up your Messaging App (or email) and then text or write saying, “On my way. Be home in xx minutes” You can run it anytime using a single tap on your phone.

The possibilities are endless. The above use case is a simple example, but there are many in FinTech I can envision, i.e. you don’t want to open the online banking or brokerage app on your phone, but would like to check something, without multiple steps, using your fingerprint authorization and getting a quick summary of your balances and YTD time-weighted return.

I sense innovation coming here, especially as providers like Yodlee, Intuit and others continue their focus on API’s and enabling developers using financial data. Using API’s and workflow, I see lots of cool solutions to be envisioned and built.

Here’s to an exciting future we all watch unfold in 2015!

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Lending Club IPO

Last week, the biggest news in FinTech was Lending Club (NASDAQ: LC) went public in an IPO that was significant for 3 reasons:

First, it’s now one of the best-known public names in FinTech, and more specifically is new proof point that traditional financial services, such as credit, can be disrupted by a technology-focused startup.

Second, the size of the offering and the amount raised – which was over $1B, since the underwriters exercised their full option for 8.7 million shares – put it among the largest US technology IPO’s in recent memory. This is significant since the scale both generated headlines and calls attention to category.

Third, the business model: peer-to-peer (P2) or marketplace lending, is a key category for a range of players in FinTech, such as Prosper, OnDeck and SoFi.

The business model has been explained sufficiently elsewhere, but the essence is that the Internet enables customers to borrow more cheaply than they might have using traditional sources. On the other side of the balance sheet, lenders (‘investors’) can receive a higher return for a fairly transparent amount of risk than they would otherwise. A win-win.

And what growth….

Source: Company Filing

On a personal note, as a San Francisco area resident, I was also glad to see the success of Lending Club as a validation of this new emerging category of business to be based here.

Its HQ is right in heart of South of Market (SoMa) alongside Twitter, New Relic, Google, GitHub, DropBox, Quid and Hired.com

Note: Lending Club was once based in Sunnyvale and Redwood City, moving to SF in 2011, so also constitutes an example of recent migration from Silicon Valley to SF.

As a former Morgan Stanley executive, Cynthia Gaylor, who worked at the office I did at Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, tweeted in 2013 when she left the bank to head up Twitter’s corporate development team, “Let the migration north begin!”

While one could certainly argue – and analyst coverage would definitely support this view – that Lending Club is a financial services company, to me the company is also very much a tech company for 3 reasons: origins, culture and vision.

First, remember… this was literally one of the first apps you could use on Facebook! Further, the founders were not bankers, but rather included CEO Renaud Laplanche as a former the entrepreneur who had a successful exit, and then worked at Oracle).

The culture is also typical of that at most technology companies, in terms of what’s seen as positive about working in tech, i.e. open and collaborative culture, non-hierarchial, focus on engineering, importance of product, and “quirkiness” (e.g. offices to encourage a sense of play and collaboration).

In terms of culture, Glassdoor gives Lending Club gets a 4.6 / 5 star rating. Just compare that to traditional banks like Morgan Stanley, where it’s about 3.5: Lending Club gets ratings more like a well-run tech company or startup.

More importantly, the vision. As John Battelle said this fall at NewCo Silicon Valley’s kick off event at Survey Monkey’s HQ, the latest crop of tech firms based are looking more than just to make money – they want to change the world, or at least improve something that is broken. Lending Club definitely has that vision.

In fact, it was born of the founder’s frustration that typical credit card rates were 18%, which seemed altogether too high to him, so he envisioned a way to match borrowers and lenders directly. There’s obviously much more to it, but the best business idea also has a simple “story” to it, and clearly this is true for Lending Club.

This blog does not provide investment advice, so I’m not going to provide a view of their valuation, but I applaud their success. CEO Renaud Laplanche is not someone I know, but connected with when I when I moved to San Francisco, as a fellow graduate of London Business School.

It’s good to see a fellow graduate succeed, especially when these days an MBA carries less weight than being a full stack engineer. The world needs both!

From my experience in launching new products at established banks and startups, Lending Club provides a compelling example of how to embrace the value of technology in a really smart way, and deliver value to several market participants.

And the timing couldn’t be better. The IPO market is back on track in 2014, with recent successful IPO of Alibaba earlier this fall. Just today, another, albeit smaller marketplace lender, OnDeck focused on small business lending, went public.

Well done, Lending Club – here’s hoping many other FinTech firms will find similar success, rewarding entrepreneurship and risk-taking, and hopefully providing a push towards innovation among the larger financial services companies, as well as a shift in the corporate cultures of banks – both here in the US and around the world – towards a more inclusive, collaborative culture.

Not all banks will fully embrace user-centric design or Scrum, but I hope some do, along with view that making things better is more than just delivering a slightly better loan or APY…

“We want to transform the banking system into a marketplace that is more competitive, more consumer-friendly, more transparent.” CEO Renaud Laplanche

Welcome news, and a model to emulate….. it takes more than just ping pong tables and pet-friendly environment!

Happy Holidays!

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Tuesday Recap: Money 20/20

Money 20/20 continued today, starting with a keynote by Ken Chenault, longtime CEO of American Express. What was interesting was both how much Ken embraced disruption, and versed he seemed in technology and his views on prospects that many conference attendees would be seeking to take market share from American Express. Beyond noting he welcomes competition, he stressed that he was not at all afraid to cannibalize his own business in order to reinvent AMEX.

Chenault said he “could care less” if plastic eventually goes away – eliciting a strong response from the audience, and sees AMEX as poised to continue to succeed in today’s more digital world. He also said he was disappointed to see Dan Schulman leave American Express to run PayPal, but expressed confidence he had a deep bench on his management team.

Chenault was excited that American Express was part of launch of ApplePay, and dismissed a question asking whether Apple could eventually disintermediate them, saying he doubts Apple sees that as their core business and seemed fairly unconcerned about MCX and CurrentC. I think that both sentiments are correct, although it is early stages of the game.

Next up was Tom Taylor, VP of Amazon Payment Services, extremely compelling speaker, and lot of the session was dedicated to a case study of a UK retailer, AllSaints, that essentially does everything (design, make & sell its own clothes; design, build and operate all its stores and web site using its own people) except for its strong partnership with Amazon.

Another good session was on payments for affiliate networks, marketplaces and direct sellers. Bill Clerico, CEO of WePay made good points about how handling marketplaces are very different from traditional e-commerce, with the need to manage the risk of buyers and sellers.

Another session — wittily called Planet of the API’s: Making Banking & Payments Programmable — explored how API’s can change how consumers will interact with their banks. Zach Perret of Plaid spoke on how creating an ecosystem of bank API’s could lead to all kind of new end-to-end experiences with online services that would not necessarily come from your bank.

While Yodlee CEO Anil Arora said he doesn’t see the need for every bank to publish its own API’s — it’s just a technology he said, and doesn’t solve anything in itself (and of course, his company has built out integrations with over 10k financial institutions, a source of competitive advantage for Yodlee). But Perret of Plaid took an alternative view, saying that Plaid expects to see at least 10,000 new start up’s / apps leveraging bank API’s over the next couple of years.

There were a couple of other good sessions today: Turning the topic to lending and the changing world of credit, there was an good discussion of alternative credit markets, with a roundtable featuring Ken Lin, CEO of Credit Karma, Aaron Vermut, CEO of Prosper Marketplace, Mike Cagney CEO of SoFi and others.

Key take away is that these companies are all solving for different issues in the current credit marketplace, where some find it difficult to obtain credit, or overpay due to market inefficiencies. Most agreed peer-to-peer term is overused, and emphasized use of risk models, data, and fact they acquire customers in new and traditional (direct mail!) models, just with a different mix.

The last session of the day was a debate on ApplePay, featuring Jim McCarthy, Global Head of Innovation and Strategic Partnerships at Visa, and Jim Smith, EVP and Head of Digital & Direct Channels at Wells Fargo, among others.

Jack Stephenson, SVP of First Data, commented on the “reality distortion field” attributed to Steve Jobs, being a factor, on some level, in that he’s never seen anything as big and complex come together until this effort to work with Apple.

Jim Smith said his team had been looking “for some time” for the right model for mobile payments, and were excited to be involved in the launch of Apple Pay, which will bring together banks, card networks, merchants and the right security model.

But many said it’s still early in the game, and Google Wallet will continue to evolve, with some noting that partnerships with biometric firms and other changes leveling the playing field, while adding the media were “missing the point” with MCX vs. Apple Pay story, a view supported by the team at Paydiant, the Boston-based software platform behind MCX.

A fitting end to the recap for today’s events at Money 20/20 – an event that some said might as well be called ApplePay 20/20 – with the day’s chatter commenting on the fact that Money 20/20 had just been bought by a European company (no word on whether the payment would be made in Bitcoin).

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