Two trading firms, one of them an established Wall Street player and the other a Midwest upstart, are each about to premiere a sophisticated new financial tool: a box-office futures exchange that would allow Hollywood studios and others to hedge against the box-office performance of movies, similar to the way farmers swap corn or wheat futures to protect themselves from crop failures.
The Cantor Exchange, formed by New York firm Cantor Fitzgerald and set to launch in April, last week demonstrated its system to 90 Hollywood executives in a packed Century City hotel conference room….
…On Wednesday, Indiana company Veriana Networks, which says its management includes “veterans of the Chicago exchange community,” unveiled the Trend Exchange, its own rival futures exchange for box-office receipts.
These are exactly the kind of novel risk management marketplaces that will continue to emerge over the next 5 to 10 years as technology enables robust, easy and cost-effective trading and settlement mechanisms and data (which is the raw material of any exchange or risk management toolkit) continues to grow in size, richness and availability across every sector of the economy. Indeed the greatest impediment to the development of such markets is cultural: there is still an irrational, sometime hysterical, aversion to any risk management tool that is non-traditional and can be characterized as gambling. Of course gambling, trading and hedging are indistinguishable in practice and can only be differentiated in context, and really only represent differences in intent. As such, it is very difficult to proscribe one while allowing the other(s). There are however reasonably good, tried and tested regulatory frameworks that have been developed over decades to manage unhealthy practices (insider trading, market abuse, etc.) in traded markets for outcomes and commodities. Using these, regulators should be happy to quickly approve as many new marketplaces or exchanges as creative entrepreneurs and traders invent and let a thousand flowers bloom. I don’t think it is for the regulators to second-guess who might be interested in trading such markets and why, as long as the market rules and framework are robust, transparent and participants are swiftly held accountable for any abusive behavior.
But that certainly isn’t the way the establishment sees things and even those that are developing new markets often see their market as an exceptional addition to the risk management landscape rather than a specific example of a more general case. (Although to be fair this may be simply a tactic to curry favor with the forces defending the status quo in order not to appear to be too heretical and so smooth approval for their specific new initiative.)
“The day that a widow or orphan bets against ‘Finding Nemo 3′ — that’s not a good day,” said Rob Swagger, Veriana’s chief executive.
Why? Why shouldn’t anyone be able to put their knowledge and insights to work to make a return. Why is it ok for a ‘widow or orphan’ to bet on GE’s future performance (by buying or selling their shares) but not to bet on the potential return of a film? It simply doesn’t make sense. Or the view that certain risks or outcomes are worthy of being traded and managed but not others?
Government authorities have generally approved only those futures exchanges that allow for the redistribution of a preexisting risk. Sports betting is not approved because, unlike a farmer selling a futures contract to offset losses from crop failure, neither party involved in the wager has an economic interest in the underlying event.
This statement is of course patently ridiculous. Many, many agricultural risk contracts are traded amongst principals who are neither producers nor end consumers, and to say that there is no ‘real world’ economic risks that could be managed via sports trading is just silly given that sports is an enormous, global business with hundreds of billions of dollars of capital at risk. And if that weren’t enough, it is happening anyways, with admittedly high risks of fraud and abuse. Wouldn’t it make more sense (in the context of protecting vulnerable market participants) to encourage regulated, robust, well monitored marketplaces rather than cling to the current Potemkin-esque prohibition? (Disclosure: I am a shareholder in Betfair.)
In any event, I can only endorse Cantor’s vision of creating a new, more vibrant and useful market for managing risk and structuring finance in the entertainment industry:
Now Cantor hopes for its exchange to be the first of many complex financing products for the entertainment industry. In one of the more ambitious plans, Jaycobs wants to team with filmmakers to create something like an initial public offering of stock in a specific film, staking out a potential new way to finance production.
And I hope they (and Trend Exchange,) working along side the CFTC are able to quickly illustrate that well-built and well-regulated marketplaces can mitigate the potential dangers while at the same time providing a powerful and useful set of tools for managing risk and generating returns. Perhaps this will help pry open the door to seeing more and more outcome markets develop of the course of the next several years.
I’m not sure what the venture community makes of Right Side Capital Management, but I think their novel approach to early stage investing is really interesting:
Yes, we do love fledgling startups. They may not have finished products, marquis customers, or proven markets. But every one has “Black Swan” potential.
Given the opportunity they represent, seed-stage startups are badly underserved. The chances of finding funding are so low that many qualified entrepreneurs sit on the sidelines. It takes so long to put together a decent-sized angel round that many promising companies miss their market window. The transaction costs are so high that a good chunk of investment capital evaporates instantly.
We’re going to change that. We’re planning to fund 100-200 seed-stage startups each year and give founders a yes-no decision in two weeks. It’s a win-win. Lots of entrepreneurs get a chance to innovate. We get a well-diversified portfolio.
I think this approach is very clever and (in a slightly different context) in fact a couple years ago worked on a business model focused on improving angel funding process / environment (for both investors and entrepreneurs) that very much relied on a similar systemization of process. While I’m not sure we are ready for a fully algorithmic early stage investment process (black box VC anyone?), it seems clear that there is certainly a lot of room for a more robust (technology-enabled, data-driven) process, lowering costs and improving efficiency. I hope RSCM succeeds and in so doing helps move the market towards this vision which I think would be a win for both investors and entrepreneurs.
I particularly like the way they have clearly articulated one of the key factors involved in early stage investing – chance – and how their high-volume, process-driven approach addresses this issue head-on and seeks to mitigate the impact of luck (good or bad) on portfolio returns:
However, we also understand that the probability of a particular young startup succeeding is relatively small. Many things are beyond its control. Many things can change. Many things have to go right. Probability compounds and there are literally thousands of factors that can significantly affect a young startup. So there’s a tremendous amount of uncertainty. We do not believe anyone has a model with much skill in picking winners at the seed stage. Therefore, the only reasonable strategy is to diversify away the idiosyncratic risk as much as possible by constructing as large a portfolio as is practical.
No one can claim to ever be able to fully remove risk from any process, but by bringing talent and a deliberate process to bear, I do believe one can improve the odds of any given outcome considerably. A top professional golfer cannot guarantee a hole-in-one, and indeed it is possible that a 36 handicap weekend warrior could get one. Black swans etc. But if the competition consists of hitting 100 balls to a par 3 green and scoring 10,000 points for a hole in one, 100 points for any ball within 3 feet and 10 points for any ball on the green, I know I’d much rather back the professional golfer, even though there is a non-zero chance that the hacker could get lucky and win. I think venture – and especially early stage – investing is similar. I can’t guarantee any investor that I will get a hole-in-one. But I think I can make a credible case that most of the investments I make will be ‘on the green’ and a fair number will be ‘inside the leather.’ It seems that RSCM have taken this view and put it explicitly at the heart of their approach.
However, I would be curious as to the reaction of their potential investors/LPs to this kind of approach. It is entirely anecdotal and quite possibly an unrepresentative sample, but we have found most investors to be very cautious with respect to any new approach and/or structure, preferring standardized and ‘traditional’ ways of doing business with innovation a domain to be restricted to the companies we invest in. This of course may be particular to our circumstances, but given the extremely high homogeneity in fund structures and investing approaches we have observed across the venture capital (and private equity) universe, it would indeed seem that limited partners have little or no appetite for (as RSCM puts it) “innovation in the business of innovation.”
So if there are any LPs out there reading, I would encourage you to comment on both RSCM’s model specifically, and especially on innovation in fund structures and/or investment methodologies more generally.
The race the create the Mint.com for the UK has claimed its first victim. Kublax, a Seedcamp 2007 winner which launched in August 2008, has now gone into administration, saying it was unable to secure a further funding round.
I’m pretty disappointed to tell the truth. Not so much because we held a small stake (via our investment in seedcamp) although this is unfortunate, but mainly because I think their business proposition is valid and although they certainly made mistakes along the way, these mistakes were probably avoidable and actually more to do with raising capital and managing a start-up than anything specific to Kublax. Of course to be fair, in any new venture all aspects of execution are at least as important as the idea and/or market opportunity and a two-legged stool won’t stand. Debating which leg is missing or broken and why is ultimately a somewhat irrelevant exercise. The reality is they didn’t make it happen. Nonetheless I feel badly for Tom and Sri, who I know put a lot of passion and effort into building Kublax and stayed focused and pragmatic to the end.
The general (ie non Kublax-specific) lesson that I would put at the heart of a case-study on Kublax is that capital is important. Now that might sound blindingly obvious – and of course it is – but stay with me. The lesson I see is that not all (’tech’) start-ups can succeed bootstrapping a few hundred thousand pounds into a sustainable business model. As a relative outsider, I have and remained perplexed by the ‘one-size-fits-all’ capital model that seems pervasive in European venture capital, which often in reality turns into a feast or famine of capital for individual start-ups. Kublax was built on a shoestring and quite frankly it showed. The chicken never laid the egg and so the end became an inevitability. But I wonder if it could have been different.
You might be wondering why we didn’t invest in Kublax.* It really came down to one thing: we did not have the capital resources required to allow Kublax to hit ‘escape velocity’. I have looked very closely at Kublax over the last 18 months, and indeed we wanted to invest. However as a result of our analysis, we believed that the best risk/reward scenario would have required them to raise at least £2 million pounds and possibly as much as £5 million. Upfront. Not being in a position to provide this quantum of finance at the time, it would have been foolhardy to commit capital only to be ultimately at the mercy of other people’s investment committees. Further – and accuse me of hubris if you like – we felt strongly that our specific skills, knowledge and networks would be able to materially help the company successfully address some of it’s key strategic and operational challenges. However it would not have been economically rational for us to deploy these resources against only a modest investment. So we were confined to waiting on the touch line for others to drive the process. In the event, none did.
Lack of capital was not the only problem at Kublax, but I think the other key issues that the company faced could all have been addressed given sufficient capital. I will highlight four examples:
capital structure (specifically who owned how much and why)
management depth and experience (in particular in financial services)
product and user experience (never evolved beyond alpha quality); and
marketing and brand awareness
All of these issues could possibly have been solved with an appropriate infusion of capital from a serious and domain-knowledgeable investor. A cynic might point out that these four factors are pretty much the only four factors that matter so saying you would invest subject to being able to improve these is tantamount to saying you would invest if the company was ‘good.’ Well yes. Sort of. I think in the case of Kublax, the investment decision would have boiled down to a ‘build vs buy’ logic. Starting from scratch is hard and for all its faults, Kublax had done a lot of the basic plumbing (hard, unrewarding but necessary) and didn’t get a chance to start laying the tiles (hard but rewarding.) I find it hard to believe that asset is of no value.
In any event, given Kublax’s seedcamp pedigree, I imagine that most or all of the establishment London venture capital firms had the opportunity to look at Kublax. I think it would be very interesting and helpful to the broader UK/European start-up ecosystem to understand the key factors that informed their decisions to pass. Ask your favorite London VC to comment below.
So would we have invested if we had been in a position to underwrite a £2-5 million investment? Quite possibly. And indeed we would have made a determination on each of the four points above to really understand if these issues could be addressed, and the execution risk reduced accordingly. Alternatively we might have decided (and still might in the future) to incubate something similar ourselves.
In any event I wish Tom, Sri and the rest of the team at Kublax all the best for the future and hope they take away as many positives as possible from what must be a very disappointing outcome.
* I am referring here to what I call “Kublax Mark II” – in the early stages of the company’s life there were some clear management issues and dynamics that overshadowed the business and market opportunity. However seen from the outside, the company and it’s shareholders eventually addressed these issues and seemed to have a fresh start with some new investors coming on board and importantly a new CEO (Tom Symonds) early last year. It’s at this point we became interested (having explicitly passed a year earlier due to our lack of confidence in how the company was being managed.) Unfortunately one of the lessons is that it seems in the world of capital raising you often really do only get one chance to make a first impression…
You start. You struggle against initial inertia to gain velocity. You succeed. You grow. Your success breeds more success. Momentum is now your friend. But the world changes: technology, markets, society… And your hard won momentum keeps hurtling your (now large and profitable) company down the same trajectory. And momentum is now your enemy. Ah, the joys of…inertia.
The recent sensation caused by an ex-Microsoft insider’s NYT op-ed is just one more example of this seemingly inevitible ‘circle of (corporate) life.’:
Microsoft’s huge profits — $6.7 billion for the past quarter — come almost entirely from Windows and Office programs first developed decades ago. Like G.M. with its trucks and S.U.V.’s, Microsoft can’t count on these venerable products to sustain it forever. Perhaps worst of all, Microsoft is no longer considered the cool or cutting-edge place to work. There has been a steady exit of its best and brightest.
What happened? Unlike other companies, Microsoft never developed a true system for innovation. Some of my former colleagues argue that it actually developed a system to thwart innovation. Despite having one of the largest and best corporate laboratories in the world, and the luxury of not one but three chief technology officers, the company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers.
Innovation is a new way of doing something or “new stuff that is made useful”
I’ve of course added my two cents to this discussion, with my thoughts on the subject drawing on my personal experiences (and those of friends and colleagues) of having tried (very hard) to sponsor a pro-active approach to disruptive innovation in a very large company. For those of you not familiar with my hypothesis on the question, I’ll save you the trouble of digging through my blog, it boils down to the complex weave of organizational and personal dynamics that unavoidably emerge when you assemble large groups of people in one organization:
Loss aversion dominates: most people (and sub-groups) fear loss much more than they enjoy gain. This is why the status quo is so closely guarded (at any level of resolution, from the individual through to the overall company.)
Dancing with the one that brought you: at any level of seniority, it is likely that the person in charge got to be that person in charge by being particularly skillful or adept at navigating the existing business and/or organizational model. It’s like the America’s Cup: the winner sets the rules (and has no incentive to adopt “new rules” for which they are probably less well adapted.
In fact, Machievelli eloquently summed it up 500 years ago:
It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new system. For the initator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders of those who would gain by the new ones.
These principles form the core of the corporate immune system which considers any disruptive innovation as a threatening virus. So what is a big company to do? Should they accept the inevitability of decline (hopefully slow, profitable and graceful) or can they postpone or avoid this fate?
In some (most?) cases, I would suggest that they accept decline but this does not mean giving up. On the contrary it means aggresively (and even creatively managing the exisiting assets to create as much value as possible as the business model and or product ‘runs off’. This indeed was my prescription for Microsoft when I wrote two years ago that they should break-up the company and re-jig the capital structure, running the Windows/Office businesses for cash (with a debt financed balance sheet) and let a thousand new baby Microsofts bloom. A conventional view would see this as a failure of management and/or ambition. Obviously I think this attitude is ass backward: running the core products for cash while releasing enormous amounts of human and financial capital, which in turn could be used to create hundreds of new companies could – using any metric you like – only be considered a triumphant success. But convention, inertia and ego means that this path to success is rarely if ever taken by the leaders of market giants. Just in the last couple weeks the idea that Google might becoming the ‘next Microsoft’ has gained currency (at least in the valley.) I asked this same question (in May 2008:)
I know it has been asked a million times before but is Google the next Microsoft? (At least from a financial point of view…) At the start of 1996, MSFT traded at c. $6/share. Four years later they peaked at almost $60/share. GOOG IPO’ed at c. $85/share in 2004, and just over three years later peaked at over $700/share. Both moves of approximately 10x. Since 2000, MSFT has been more or less range bound at around $30/share, despite continuing to grow it’s top and bottom lines and produce prodigious amounts of cash. I’m not suggesting history will repeat itself exactly – perhaps we have not yet seen the peak in GOOG’s share price (sell at $850?), and I’m certain they will continue to grow their top and bottom lines and produce prodigious amounts of cast in the next 5-10 years. But…will the stock eventually settle at around $500 – 600/share…? Is it conceivable that Google, like Microsoft before it, will become the place where good companies are bought only to disappear?
However, like with human life, I think there are probably a number of recipes to extend the natural corporate life (and the quality of those extra years) and to leave a more valuable legacy when and if the company ultimately disappears. Starting with investing some of their excess capital in the innovation ecosystem that surrounds them. As I have found however, this idea is anathema to most large companies. And with some reason. The history of ‘corporate venturing’ is indeed (as Azeem Ahzar eloquently writes) riddled with failure. My view is that this is because it is exceeding hard to do this in house: the corporate antibodies as described above will almost always do their job and sabotage any in-house venture program. And yet just investing as an LP in an outside venture fund – even if one that happens to focus on markets relevant to the company – is an understandably unsatisfactory and probably equally ineffective alternative.
But we think there is a third way: a focused, strategic innovation program run independently from, but in close collaboration with the company. Maybe we can help your company. You know where to find us: where innovation grows.
AMEE announced today that they had closed a new round of financing. I think this is a fascinating company and compelling opportunity. Given the chance, would I have for certain chosen to invest? Based on what I know of the company and its management, I would like to say yes. Probably. I’m forced to hedge my opinion because I just don’t know enough, especially with respect to the financials and the attractiveness of the valuation given the opportunity. But given what I do know, I would have loved to have them in our portfolio. And I’m certainly more than a little disappointed that we weren’t in a position to throw our hat in the ring, do our homework and at least make an offer…
Which brings me to an idea I’ve been toying with for the past several months. I’ve been contemplating publishing a virtual portfolio of venture and private equity investments – ie the investments we would likely have made (and would make) had we the capital available. A sort of an analogous take on Covestor or Marketocracy but for private investments.* There are however a number of reasons I have not taken the plunge. Perhaps most obviously is the issue of proprietary knowledge. After all, the heart of the value proposition we make to prospective investors is that we have a unique and robust investment thesis and that based on this foundation, we have identified (and will continue to identify) exciting young companies who are naturally adapted to grow and prosper in the coming years. If we tell everyone who these companies are, why would anyone need to pay us a fee? Why wouldn’t they just invest directly. Or more likely, why wouldn’t competing investors just ‘free-ride’ on our research and analysis, using our list as a filter or more? And what if the companies we listed failed (see below)? What benefit would there be to publishing such a list?
Further, there are a number of structural factors at work that mean that the ‘Covestor’ metaphor is imperfect at best and fundamentally inappropriate at worst. Investing in private companies involves a number of challenges that are different/additional to those faced by a public company investor. A number of these factors are interrelated but for the sake of clarity I’ll try to enumerate a few:
deep information deficit: for most of the companies that would appear on such a list, our information is significantly limited, especially with respect to financial aspects (budgets, sales, valuation, etc.) As a practical matter it is usually not possible to obtain this level of detailed information unless one is actively engaged with the company in view of a potential investment. Obviously it would be completely disingenuous for us to misrepresent our capacity and intentions simply in order to be able to put our slide-rule over the financial model. Further, without the potential pay-off of being able to follow through and invest in companies that pass due diligence and valuation muster, quite frankly we don’t have the luxury of doing such a deep analysis even if the company was happy to provide us the data.
price (valuation): while perhaps less important (within reason of course) the earlier you are in the life-cycle of a company, it is obviously a key input that is quite often unavailable. To be fair, one could possibly – at least for the purposes of such a list – assume that if respected investors participated in a given financing round that we would have been ok with the pricing too.
value enhancement: call it hubris if you like, but one of the key inputs in our investment process is understanding to what extent our participation as an investor can help reduce risk and accelerate success. Elements of this analysis can be done from ‘outside’ but without a deeper understanding of the business and in particular a personal relationship with the management team, it is hard to properly assess what value, if any, we can bring to the table. Some companies that look great to us from afar might just not be a good fit.
managing destiny: (a variation/specific case of the point above) particularly for seed and very early stage companies, one of the biggest risks they face is securing follow-on finance. In this context, a theoretical investment and a real investment are fundamentally different: there are many ways a company can fail. Failure is failure of course but I suspect there is a risk that some of the companies on our wish list might indeed fail to raise follow-on capital, whereas had we invested for real, we would be prepared to follow-on in most cases, mitigating if not eliminating this risk. Of course it’s probably impossible – even ex-post – to definitely identify companies whose failure was ultimately unavoidable (market driven) from those whose failure was only due to a financing gap.
The case for publishing such a list – assuming you can overcome some of the structural limitations outlined above – really boils down to building reputation and trust, both with potential investors and existing and aspiring entrepreneurs in particular and within the wider venture capital / private equity ecosystem in general. Part of me also likes to think that there is less risk, in terms of ‘giving away’ intellectual property, than would be the case for say a hedge fund manager focused on public equities: anyone can buy a public security, the same is not true of private companies. Wanting to invest is not sufficient to allow one to invest. Further, let’s be realistic: for better or worse, I’m not Warren Buffett or John Doerr or anyone really…will the fact that I say AMEE is a must own company really make a difference to anyone? More importantly (to me!), will it make it more or less likely that I will be able to use my skills to make a living identifying and investing in great young companies?
Basically the only potential downside to publishing a virtual or ‘wish-list’ portfolio I can see is the fact that one would have to assume that any nuance and qualifying information attached to such a list would ultimately get lost and that for better or worse, the companies would be inextricably linked to me without qualification. I was thinking that a list constructed as ‘Probables’ and ‘Possibles’ might just allow some useful qualification without diluting the impact. And yet, I hesitate. And I’m not sure why. So I thought I’d ask you.
Why should I not publish such a list?
What (if any) qualifications should I include, were I to publish such a list?
Why don’t other investors publish lists of deals they would like to or would have liked to have done? (before outcome is known of course!) (Or if any do, please tell me who/where.)
Today Markit Group announced that General Atlantic has invested $250 million, valuing the 7 year old company at a whopping $3.3 billion. Founded by Lance Uggla, Kevin Gould and Rony Grushka in 2003 to address the growing need for quality data in the burgeoning credit derivatives market, what followed was several years of unbelievably good execution and disciplined acquisitions which has positioned the company as a critical component at the heart of the trillion dollar OTC derivative markets. The products they provide aren’t considered sexy (something that is often given all too much importance in this status conscious industry) – but their data, valuations, indices, trade processing and other products and services are the plumbing that is key to the continuing operation of many financial markets. They are a great example of creating value by building a great platform and understanding how to monetize data. I had the good fortune to be a non-executive director from 2003 to 2006 and I can say without hesitation that this team is one of the best I’ve ever seen and fully deserve the success they have achieved. (Congratulation guys. Awesome, truly awesome.)
And I am certain there is more to come. Their primary constraint has and will likely continue to be the physical/logistical limitations of growing as fast as they have but each year they only improve and in terms of acquisitions the company they most remind me of (in terms of disciplined and deliberate execution) is Cisco. Besides, General Atlantic doesn’t invest in companies where they don’t think they can make 20-30% annual returns or more.
And yet many (most) people in the ’start-up’/'tech’ scene whether in the UK or the US have never (or only vaguely) heard of Markit. (For example, I counted only about 50 or so tweets referencing the announcement today, less than for any TechCrunch launching start-up…) Why is that? Obviously I can’t say for sure but (in no particular order) would guess the explanation perhaps lies in the following:
not venture capital funded; funding initially came from it’s cornerstone customers, the investment banks, and then later from some very smart hedge funds
focused on the wholesale financial services industry (and not on consumer or media or other mass markets)
key products and services (and associated economics) unknown to those outside finance and even worse generally considered ‘boring’
management team laser focused on execution, not PR (although to be fair they had this luxury not needing to sell to the mass market)
and so folks like TechCrunch and VentureBeat don’t know or write about them (aka “if a startup isn’t listed in CrunchBase does it really exist?” syndrome)
Indeed for me, Markit is a poster child for the cognitive, cultural and expertise chasm that exists between ‘Wall Street’ and ‘the Valley’ (or the ‘City’ and the ‘Roundabout’ to use the less good UK-centric metaphor.) They might as well be on different planets. Indeed bridging this divide is at the core of what we set out to do at Nauiokas Park and was the driver that led Paul Kedrosky and Tim O’Reilly to launch the Money:Tech conference in 2008 (which sadly didn’t survive the financial crisis and quite frankly was met by a deafening indifference by the vast majority of the Wall Street side of the equation.)
And yet, the opportunities available to those who can successful bridge this gap are enormous. Well, anyway that’s what we think. And the crisis in venture capital ostensibly caused by too much capital? I’m going to disagree with Paul and Fred and suggest it’s not too much money overall; rather it’s too much money concentrated with too few investors, focused on too few sectors, who end up all chasing the same deals. So to the LPs out there my message would be: don’t shrink the pool, enlarge the opportunity space. Oh, and try to make sure you’ve got exposure to the next Markit Group.
Five years ago I wrote a thought piece called ‘Through the Looking Glass’ to provoke non-linear thinking and foster debate on the possible future direction of the financial services industry and market structures. (I later turned it into a short video called AmazonBay.) It was a retrospective told from the point of view of an observer in 2015. It was never meant to be taken literally – in particular with respect to (most of) the specific corporate mergers – rather I used these as a concise and dramatic way of highlighting the possible or even probable consequence of the deep secular currents that I felt would inevitably work to reshape the landscape.
(December 2015:) …The global securities and investment banking groups that dominated the market in the last century are now extinct. In their place we have an intelligent galaxy of new specialist advisory, investment management, algorithmic software and consulting firms networked with a universe of powerful transaction facilitation exchanges. Banks now exist only as giant regulated pools of capital.
Following the sweeping banking reforms proposed last week by President Obama, and the fact that we are now halfway to this hypothetical future, I thought it might be worth doing a quick mark-to-market of how my ideas have lined up with reality.
Oracle
stock exchange consolidation and emergence of new exchange venues (A-) pretty close both in outcomes and timing – the major stock exchanges have been merging a-go-go while at the same time new trading venues have proliferated, and exchange (or quasi-exchange) trading of new asset classes continues to develop strongly.
sports/outcome trading in US legitimized (B-) my narrative had this happening in February 2010, not there yet but Congressman Frank’s bill might open the doors later this year and the trend seems to be on the right track and will probably be signed into law by Obama (!); as an aside was way early on a Betfair IPO…
giant bank mergers followed by break-up of vertically integrated universal banks, with Goldman Sachs leading the way (A) we have seen the big get mostly even bigger (RBS/ABN, BoA/ML, Barclays/Lehman…and while JPMorgan didn’t buy MS, they did get Bear Stearns and WaMu); GS hasn’t yet broken itself into three as predicted but I’m still confident it will lead the way when/if industry structure changes, and more generally the trend of regulatory thinking across the globe is definitely a trailing wind for the kind of change I envisioned. The 2010-2012 timeframe for the re-organization of global banks is probably a bit early but plausibility has certainly gone up (from near zero) significantly since I wrote this.
more (and more) algorithmic / automated intermediation of markets (A-) this was obliquely referenced in my article but was really at the heart of the idea that this fictional ‘AmazonBay’ platform would end up dominating this aspect of markets; clearly the market is heading this way – in fact it may seem obvious now but most people did not fully understand this even as little as five years ago.
Amazon anything (B+) The jury is probably still out on this one, but in my view it is looking increasingly likely that Amazon.com will become a giant of the next economic paradigm; whether or not they use their vast intellectual and technological resources to participate more directly in the financial services arena is not yet clear, but I can tell you the only ‘big company’ job I would not hesitate for two minutes to accept if it were offered would be CEO or CSO of Amazon Financial Services (AFS) Jeff are you listening?
(Note: Remember I used real company names mainly to add vividness to the ideas underlying the narrative. The key concept I wanted to convey with this GS break-up vignette was that the vertically integrated model would decompose under the light of new technology and regulations into a (technology-centric) Sales & Trading component, a more focused, relationship driven Advisory component (cf. the emerging proliferation of pure advisory ’boutiques’) and independent, conflict-free Asset Management businesses (cf. the secular growth of hedge funds and Barclays sale of BGI, etc.))
(February 2009:) …Reacting to new competition, Goldman Sachs becomes the first major investment bank to break itself up. Securities and distribution are sold to Ebay Financial Markets, while the remaining activities are split into two new companies: GS Advisory Services and GS Capital management…
Charlatan
eBay anything (D) Despite the fact that the actual companies cited are more symbolic than literal, the choice of eBay to represent the cutting edge of online, data-driven, algorithmic marketplaces was simply awful. To the extent that it risks distracting the viewer from the key, underlying messages. It is now entirely implausible and so instead of bridging the cognitive gap, the inclusion of eBay simply extends it. Thank goodness this is somewhat mitigated by my inclusion of Amazon.com (see above) as the other new markets avatar but they come late to the narrative…
sports trading developing as an asset class (C+) this clearly hasn’t happened, although there are one or two small funds and firms offering managed accounts; and a vibrant ecosystem of professional traders and the associated software has emerged around the Betfair and other exchange platforms. In my defense, I picked sports as just a provocative and emotionally attractive example of the idea that – enabled by technology – a vast array of new tradable markets in goods but also outcomes, would emerge. Work in progress.
credit crunch and asset bubbles (D) although the overall purpose of the piece was to provoke thinking on the sustainability of existing business models in financial services in the face of radically shifting underlying technological, economic and demographic trends, I failed to include a thread touching on the possibility of catastrophic systemic discontinuities arising as a result of the prevailing market structure and business models. It’s a significant ommission, especially as at the time of writing this I was in the process of exiting my former responsibilities as a senior executive in the credit business due in part to my increasing discomfort with the sustainability and prudence of the risk pricing in that market.
All in all, I would give myself a mid-term grade of B+/A- with room both to improve and to slip back. Mostly on the right track, especially with respect to big themes but perhaps a bit optimistic in terms of some of the timelines. What do you think? Better? Worse? To be fair, the correct measuring stick is not so much whether or not I was right or wrong, even in terms of ‘macro’ predictions but whether or not this article and video helped catalyze serious discussion, debate and thought about the potential for disruptive and non-linear change in the financial services industry. Alas I have no idea how one could even attempt to measure that, but any thoughts or anecdotes you might have with respect to this would of course be appreciated.
AmazonJP Morgan, displaying a sense of urgency that is perhaps driven by the pending launch of Apple’s tablet-style computeranti-trust legislation which will end the US banking oligopoly, is turning its Kindle devicebanking and payments infrastructure into a platform. The SeattleNew York-based company has announced that it will allow software developers to “build and upload active contentapplications” and distribute it through the KindleChase Store “later this year.” AmazonJP Morgan will be giving out a KindleChase Development Kit that will give “developers access to programming interfaces, tools and documentation to build active content innovative financial services and products for Kindle.Chase” The company will launch a limited beta effort next month. From the press release:
“We’ve heard from lots of developers over the past two years who are excited to build on top of KindleChase,” said Ian Freed, Vice President, Amazon KindleBo Nusmore, EVP, JP Morgan Chase. “The KindleChase Development Kit opens many possibilities–we look forward to being surprised by what developers invent.”
Vertically integrated black box? Or open platform? Which type of bank makes for a more robust system? Which type of a bank is more evolutionarily fit to compete on a level playing field? I know that their is an enormous moat protecting large financial institutions from competition but I would hope they would be using the super-profits that this affords them to prepare for the day the moat is breached. And perhaps behind the parapets they are. Because I pretty sure there are an increasing number of very clever, ambitious (and even angry) folks starting to congregate on the edge of that moat and while it might take some time and a dash of luck, it would seem certain that eventually they will be inside the castle. And then, it just might be too late.
I would set upon transforming the company into a retail financial services powerhouse, focusing in particular on developing markets like India and Brazil; and
I don’t have time to articulate the whole thesis here (and besides, if they want the whole thesis they can hire me!) There are some hints in my Platforms, markets and bytes presentation.
All this will no doubt help Nokia come up with better, if not magic, products. The firm may even reach its goal of 300m users by the end of 2011 because its efforts are not aimed just at rich countries, but at fast-growing emerging economies where Nokia is still king of the hill, such as India. There, services such as Nokia Money, a mobile-payment system, and Life Tools, which supplies farmers with prices and other information, fulfil real needs, says John Delaney of IDC, another market-research firm.
Which only strengthens my view that their path to salvation lies in (yet another) complete re-invention, this time to a 21st century, sixth paradigm, retail financial services platform (built on a mobile substrate.) They might even want to keep (at least some of) their handset engineering know-how: it might come in handy for building handsets that are particularly well adapted to mobile financial services.
In any event, if Nokia want their share price to go up, they better hurry up and change their frame of reference. I mean really, who would you rather compete with? Apple? Google?
I’ve been avoiding putting together a list of predictions for 2010 (more on that later) but just couldn’t resist suggesting that 2010 could well be a breakout year for weather risk management. All of the conditions necessary have finally started to come together and with the worst of the 2008/2009 hysteria behind us (without passing judgement on the future direction of markets), companies (and hopefully individuals) will start to wake up and respond to the risks and opportunities inherent in weather variability. I wouldn’t be surprised if weather risk was one of the top three risks faced by the vast majority of (non-financial) corporations, perhaps even the most important risk in some cases, and of the same order of magnitude as liquidity, foreign exchange, commodity and interest rate risk – all risk categories for which massive global markets in risk pricing and transfer exist. Weather in this regard remains significantly underdeveloped:
(via Ben Smith, First Enercast Financial) For example the Department of Commerce estimates that more than $1 trillion of U.S. economic activity is exposed to weather. Even if a small fraction of new risk is hedged through derivative contracts, 2010 will be a very good year for these markets.
The massive costs incurred in much of the northern hemisphere over the last few weeks due to heavy snowfalls and cold temperatures are just one more example of how important a factor in economic outcomes weather risk can be. For example, just take the exceptional – and uninsured – costs incurred by local authorities and airport operators across the UK for snow removal, sanding, salting, loss of revenues, etc. Previously, a manager of a company (or government entity) who suffered an exceptional weather-related loss could shrug their shoulders and plausibly say “it was out of my hands.” In a way that would be impossible if for example their organization suffered a massive loss because their buildings or equipment perished in a fire and they were not insured. In that scenario, shareholders or taxpayers would be incandescent with rage at the incompetent risk management of the managers. Not managing weather risks is no different in substance (now that appropriate weather insurance and derivatives are increasingly widely available), only remaining so in perception as awareness lags.
Of course I am biased, having invested in Weatherbill, which is at the vanguard of transforming weather risk markets:
(via J. Scott Mathews, WeatherEX LLC) The weather market was built upside down, which is quite a feat, even for financial engineers. What we mean is that it started on the wholesale level without any retail underpinnings. It started out like a castle in the air…The changes coming in 2010 for the weather derivative market will be keyed “from the bottom up.” Solutions companies such as Guaranteed Weather and Weatherbill who bring management choices to “ground level” risk holders are helping to complete a strong base to keep that castle from crashing on us.
The difference between weather derivatives (Weatherbill.com) (or any other new risk management tool) and say books (Amazon.com) is that risk management tools need to be ’sold’ – there is a learning curve, however shallow; and while most people instinctively understand and can conceptualize their weather risks, their survival instincts – honed by decades of doing business with rapacious financial services firms – and fear of ‘getting their eyes ripped out’ means that they are understandably cautious when considering using weather risk management instruments for the first time.
This is where Weatherbill’s business model I think is particularly well adapted to the opportunity: on the one hand, they have a very modern (open) approach to pricing: anyone can go to their website and play around in their pricing ’sandbox’. Try doing that ten years ago when you wanted to price up a complex FX or interest rate option. Basically it was build your own model or keep sending pricing request to your favorite sales person (who would then have to go beg the trader for a price, and in addition to the regular parameters, the client’s identity, the salesperson and the trader’s mood would also be imputed into the price. That is of course if he felt like making one.) On the other hand, (and this is something that has evolved over the past couple years) Weatherbill has aggressively sought out distribution partners – insurance brokers, industry platforms (eg travel sites), etc. – as trusted providers to their respective customer bases, they are ideally positioned to help their customers manage their weather risks by leveraging Weatherbill’s platform. I first wrote about this a few months ago, and since then they have signed up a number of new and significant partners.
I love skiing and my family take a season pass at Les Trois Vallees. Obviously weather risk is central to running or enjoying a ski resort. While there are many different types of risk you could look at in the context of a ski resort, in the interests of simplicity (ease of understanding/customer acceptance) and maximum pain relief, there are two risks that I would have loved to have had an embedded hedge for in our season ticket (and I suspect the same would go for someone buying a week-long pass for their holiday, in fact they would probably be even more sensitive/appreciative.)
Not enough snow to ski risk: ie not that the snow is great or this or that…the basic risk that the pistes are closed. For most modern ski resorts this is actually a function of temperature and not precipitation, as they use snow-making machine to lay down a base. Temperature risk is much easier to measure and price (than snowfall) and has much lower geographic variability ie you don’t need a weather station on every piste on the mountain.
Rain risk: ie the only time it is absolutely unpleasant to ski is when it is raining. Also, rain typically doesn’t help the existing snowpack, making skiing after rain often unpleasant as well.
Using Weatherbill to hedge their risk, Les Trois Vallees could offer a ski-pass that reimbursed me for every rainy day and for every day say less than 80% of their runs were open due to lack of snow. In an age of increasing climate uncertainty (or perception thereof) I am 100% certain this would help them market (and sell more) season tickets. And for week-long tickets, it would be a great marketing tool for advance sales (with significantly positive cashflow benefits), and great for improving the user experience. Imagine a vacationer whose week in the Alps is ruined by 5 days of torrential rain…getting their money back on the lift tickets (irrespective of whether or not they braved the elements) would go a very long way to having them consider giving it another try next year.
Of course this is but one example, I’m sure all of you can think of hundreds more. In fact it might be harder to think of services or businesses that are completely immune to the weather. So really, what are you waiting for? Start hedging!
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