2019 predictions: Collision of Fintech Bundles, Real Autonomous Organizations, Government and Enterprise Platforms -- via Autonomous ?NEXT

Hi fellow futurists -- happy holidays! We continue our Fintech & Crypto predictions series by looking ahead to what 2019 will bring. Our top 3 bets are:

1. 2019 PREDICTION: Collision of Fintech Bundles and Pivots to New Channels  
2.  2019 PREDICTION: Real Autonomous Organizations Take Shape
3.  2019 PREDICTION: Government and Enterprise Platforming, led by AI and Mixed Reality

Analysis of these items is below, and this week’s artist is Utagawa Hiroshige.

2019 FINTECH PREDICTION: Collision of Fintech Bundles and Pivots to New Channels

Unicorn fintech startups like Robinhood, Acorns, Revolut, Monzo, N26, Betterment, SoFi, Lending Club and others will all converge on the same multiple financial product offering across lending, banking, payments and investments. This is driven by the need to cross-sell new revenue in order to justify high spending on customer acquisition. Large financial incumbents will be following the same bundling playbook through their mobile apps, intensifying the progress of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, UBS, DBS, BBVA and Santander along this axis. Tech and finance (as well as incumbents and startups) will all be pursuing the same customer-centric solution for the digital consumer. Great for the customer.

As a result, customer acquisition costs will rise and the digital model will become more competitive as servicing costs commoditize at a cheaper price point. What we mean is that if everyone -- including large operating businesses -- will understand how to market to and serve Millennials, driving away the arbitrage opportunity Fintech companies have had to date. As a result, at least one unicorn will implode when the cross-sell does not materialize. Most likely this will look like a devaluation of the equity component in the capital stack, such that new money is raised to maintain profitable marginal operation, but the hundreds of millions already invested in the business are mere sunk cost.

New revolutionary entrants will use channels that are foreign to existing Fintechs and financial incumbents, like video, Twitch, Discord or AR/VR. One example would be credit-as-a-service, similar to Stripe payment-as-a-service, built into a B2B customer journey. Another would be native payment systems for digital experiences and environment. Yet another idea could be social currency within chat streams for video gamers. It will be foreign territory for many, and the key to success is correct market timing balanced with adoption.

Source: Images from Pexels, 2019 Keystone Predictions Deck

2019 FINTECH PREDICTION: Real Autonomous Organizations Take Shape

The last 5 years have seen fundamental innovation in crowdfunding, regulatory technology, the digitization of financial services, blockchain native organizations, and automated propaganda bots to attract human attention. 2018 brought with it sobriety and a back-to-traditional regulatory treatment of financial assets and their structures. In particular, the crypto asset movement (and its crypto-anarchist community construction) has been put into a well-understood, regulated box by most national regulators. While many interesting lego pieces exist, none of them have yet to fit together. Still, regular people have gotten a taste of both the distribution and manufacturing sides of financial mana.

2019 will re-combine these pieces to instantiate functional autonomous organizations that work in a constrained market environment and perform useful services. Unlike the failed experiments of the DAO or BitShares, these new DAOs will have a clear corporate form, a regulatory anchor, and will focus on delivering products and services to regular people, but scaled through machine strategy. The automation of company formation (Stripe Atlas) will combine with the outsourced human/machine assembly line (Invisible Tech) and distributed governance (Aragon) to create companies that scale frighteningly quickly.

Such creatures need a safe environment in which to operate, with a narrow set of functions and constraints. We see labor platforms like 99Designs or Upwork as useful sandoxes to test whether software-based organizations can compete in a human market. Such experiments will require a re-thinking of the tokenized approach, leveraging the micro-economic discoveries but avoiding the need for a poorly adopted crypto wallet or token. Designers will need to reduce friction, not just lump together coding ideas. But the timing and soil for this could be just right.

Source: Images from Pexels, 2019 Keystone Predictions Deck

  2019 FINTECH PREDICTION:Government and Enterprise Platforming, led by AI and Mixed Reality

Over the last decade, consumer tech has undergone a cycle of platform building, user aggregation, data mining, and value extraction, resulting in GAFA monopolies. Exhaustion with Facebook and the adjacent issues of privacy and radicalization, in our view, will lead to problems building new splintered consumer attention platforms for AI, AR/VR and other new media ground up. This implies that consumer platforms based on new technologies will be much more long-tail oriented, serving niche markets with very strong fit. Communities may be passionate, but smaller.

Enterprise tech lags retail adoption by, give or take, 5 years. Similar platforming has not fully penetrated on the enterprise side -- Salesforce is not yet the AI monopoly we should all fear, and Open Banking is barely a fizzle. Therefore, we expect increasing data transparency, aggregation and monetization to occur in enterprise underwritten by venture capital investors. As an example, augmented reality adoption and economics will be driven primarily by municipalities, utilities, large industrial manufacturers, and the military. Similarly, artificial intelligence at scale (and its meeker cousin Robotic Process Automation) are to be directed largely at the workflows and manufacturing processes of large corporates. Dont' get us wrong -- consumer AI is extremely important -- but within Financial Services, the scope for this in the corporate world is even larger.

The corollary is that the pricing pressure that started in consumer Fintech -- roboadvice (150 bps to 25 bps) or in remittance (600 bps to 10 bps) -- will spill over into B2B banking, money movement, insurance, treasury management and product manufacturing. An inevitable outcome is pressure on profit margins as prices equilibriate. For those companies that are able to re-design operations using a digital chassis, they will be able to compete on the margin with Fintech unicorns. Those that are not should exit, or retreat into more bespoke, relationship-driven business lines. 

Source: Images from Pexels, 2019 Keystone Predictions Deck

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Interested in these insights? We've assembled a 48 page keystone deck exploring last year's progress and 2019 insights. It is available for purchase for institutional investors. Contact Autonomous NEXT  to learn more.

Thanks for reading!

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