The collision of Fintech bundles, Real Autonomous Organizations take shape, Enterprise platforms led by AI and Mixed Reality -- Autonomous ?NEXT #150

Hello and welcome to Fintech Focus --

It's our 150th newsletter! What a ride it has been so far. We truly appreciate all our followers that have been with us from the beginning, and all those that have been part of our journey. To celebrate, we are doing a mid-year review of our 2019 predictions to see how we are doing. 

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions regarding the content and/or structure of the newsletter, feel free to reach out to me directly on LinkedIn, Twitter, or via my email. I look forward to hearing from you.

Our top 3 thoughts for this week are:

1. 2019 FINTECH PREDICTION: Collision of Fintech Bundles and Focus on Transformation Strategies
2. 2019 FINTECH PREDICTION: Real Autonomous Organizations Take Shape
3. 2019 FINTECH PREDICTION: Government and Enterprise Platforming, led by AI and Mixed Reality

Our artist of the week is MC Escher and his 'Gravitation' piece -- We think it provides a good metaphor to the centralisation taking place in Fintech today

2019 FINTECH PREDICTION: Collision of Fintech Bundles and Focus on Transformation Strategies

The economic principle of perfect information is applied to instances in which arbitrage opportunities are driven away by a market with indifferent and absolute information. This principle has led us to predict that in 2019, we will see the convergence of unicorn fintech startups like Robinhood, Acorns, Revolut, Monzo, N26, Betterment, SoFi, Lending Club and others on the same multiple financial product offering across lending, banking, payments and investments. Noting that, if most players -- including large operating businesses -- understand how to market to and serve Millennials in relation to their competitors, then customer acquisition costs are likely to rise and the digital model will become more competitive as servicing costs commoditize at a cheaper price point.

Let's take this one layer deeper. Digitization costs are falling -- fueled by open banking regulation, data democratization, and freely accessible infrastructural platforms offering data storage or marketing for nothing. This is, in part, thanks to the long tail of finance aggregators such as Plaid, Bud, and Tinkwho pull data across multiple capital sources, using it to build/offer consumer facing products/services like budgeting tools, wealth management nudges, and/or service provider recommendations. As a result, Fintech verticals are becoming more competitive red oceans, as both big and small players fight over shrinking profit margins driven by such transparent data and freely available technology. But this isn't new news. What's happening now is a reaction by Fintech players and financial incumbents to get bigger, shed fixed costs, and take a shot to monopolize the industry vertical. The payments industry is a great example of where consolidation is happening all at once, with FIS buying Worldpay for $35 billion and Fiserv winning First Data for $22 billion. Consolidation is taking place in other forms as well, take UK-based challenger bank Revolut -- consolidating its cost exposure per transaction by building its own payment processor called RevP, and potentially launching a fee-free trading product to target Robinhood by the end of the year. 

We have already seen what happens when traditional bank-backed neobanks use apps as digital channels in an attempt to capture a younger client base through edgy and innovative user experiences tied to traditional financial product -- JP Morgan's Finn became a victim of this approach which eventually resulted in its demise. Wells Fargo's Greenhouse, RBS's Mettle,and MUFG's PurePoint could face a similar fate, should they fail to acknowledge digital as more of a transformation strategy than a channel. The financial initiatives of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, for example, serve as a powerful representation of how an online e-commerce chassis can translate to the physical world leveraging a digital value proposition across its front, middle and back ends. This is why we still believe to see more Fintech mergers and acquisitions beyond the current $97.53 billion industry aggregate deal value for 2019 -- more than twice the aggregate of the same period in 2018. 

Source: SPGlobal Market Intelligence

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.

At the beginning of this year we were hopeful that 2019 would re-combine these pieces to instantiate functional autonomous organizations that work in a constrained market environment and perform useful services. In order to achieve this, however, these new DAOs will need a clear corporate form, a regulatory anchor, and to focus on delivering products and services to regular people, but scaled through machine strategy. We toyed with the idea that 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.

So where are the systems that deliver most of the financial primitives without human intervention? Let's start with the fact that Facebook's digital currency Libra is far from being considered a form of decentralized finance. For starters, Libra falls on a permissioned or centralized network, meaning the governance structure consists of a fixed number of entities (29 institutions), although this is said to be only for the first 5 years from release. Nonetheless, Decentralized Finance has grown to hold over $589.9 million of value across its lending, exchange platforms, derivatives, payments, and asset management entities. A notable development comes from Maker -- the most popular decentralized protocol focusing on lending -- is considering to expand the assets it uses as collateral for its smart contracts that generate cash loans. Although Maker is only considering digital tokens such as Basic Attention Token, Ether, Golem, Augur etc. at this time, would it be crazy to think that in the near term we could see the likes of tangible assets such as land, property, and commodities in the form of security tokens included aswel?

Source: DeFi Pulse

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

We have saved our favorite for last. 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 social media networks and big tech, 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. We have seen this from multiple big tech players. Earlier this year Facebook doubled down on the enterprise-centric use case for mixed reality -- announcing its Oculus device-management subscription for enterprise users. Similarly, VR has found a fruitful niche as a training platform with OssoVR teaching the next generation of surgeons, and Walmart using VR to train its retail staff. Additionally, artificial intelligence at scale are to be directed largely at the workflows and manufacturing processes of large corporates. Take South African deep learning startup DataProphet who use AI and machine vision to reduce defects and scrap in the manufacturing sector by more than 50 percent. Don't 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, like that in the first entry above, 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. This is where we are likely to see even more M&A activity over the course of the year.

Source: Statista (The Diverse Potential of VR & AR Applications)

Further Reading:

• Goldman Sachs could create digital coin
• Europe Completes Its First Ever Blockchain Real Estate Sale for €6.5 Million
• South Korea’s Second Biggest City Wants to Create a Local Cryptocurrency

• Rumours swirl about JPMorgan interest in 10X and London skunkworks project
• Challenger banks hit back at 'delusional' claim from fintech investors
• Banks fighting on mobile battleground

• Subscription-Based Banking: Is a Netflix Model the Future of Financial Services?
• Rimilia Sparks Innovation in Artificial Intelligence for the Financial Industry Using Microsoft Azure
• Teaching artificial intelligence to create visuals with more common sense

• MyEva launches UK’s "first" regulated digital independent financial adviser
• New digital banks challenge HSBC’s Hong Kong dominance
• Wealth 2.0: the future of wealth management

• How to Take e-Commerce to a New Level With Augmented Reality App Development
• Game, tech and match: The tech behind this year's Wimbledon championship
• Gucci Beefs Up Tech With Augmented Reality App for Shoes

We put this together at Autonomous NEXT, where we love Fintech, Crypto and our community. Contact us with questions and ideas.

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Thanks for reading!  

Best,

Matt