You may have noticed that I haven’t posted much in the last couple months and given all the interesting things going on in the world it certainly wasn’t for lack of material. Breaking my arm obviously didn’t help increase my productivity (or make typing very easy) but it wasn’t the main reason for the silence. It’s much simpler than that: I was busy!
Busy investing in a whole bunch of super exciting and interesting new businesses. Busy working on the sale of ODL Group (where I was the lead independent non-executive director) to FXCM to create a true global leader in FX trading. Busy working with my partner Uday and FT Advisors on a number of interesting strategic advisory projects, in particular focused on the electronic and algorithmic trading space. Busy helping two of our portfolio companies raise follow-on financing. Busy working on our own corporate structure and capital raising where I hope to be able to communicate some exciting news in the not too distant future. Busy.
So what have we been investing in? Here is a quick rundown (in alphabetical order):
Babuki – 2008 seedcamp winner, launching soon (will update) with an innovative platform for social gaming
BankSimple – “an easy, intuitive, and social bank for people who appreciate simple online services. Unlike other banks, we don’t trap you with confusing products nor do we charge any hidden fees. No overdraft fees. We use sophisticated analytics to help you better manage your finances by providing you a individualized service, catered to your needs and goals.” Recently got some attention when they announced that Alex Payne of Twitter fame has joined as CTO. They also got a great write-up from @maxableson in the NY Observer.
Blueleaf – investment information management and planning software “to help people like you see all their savings and investment accounts in one place; understand their financial information more completely, more quickly; securely share information and collaborate with spouses, family or advisors; save their data, even if they change financial institutions; and maybe most importantly, help them stay financially safe and secure.”
Timetric – builds services to make sense of time-series statistics, based on the Timetric Platform: a proprietary service for publishing, analysing, and performing calculations on very large quantities of time-varying statistical data. Have a look at this neat little demo website they have built for tracking equity portfolios.
Metamarkets – provides global, real-time media price discovery by aggregating billions of electronic media transactions in order to deliver dynamic price data, proprietary price and volume aggregations, and comprehensive analytic media market views to sell-side media principals.
[not yet closed - will update soon]
Over the next few weeks or so, I plan to do a proper write-up on each of these businesses and the reasons we think they have bright prospects. So watch this space.
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 think there has never been a better time (well in at least 100 years or so) to build a new bank. A new sort of bank. I’ve been meaning to post (some of) my ideas on this since last spring but have never had the time. Plus given that this is something I would love to actively drive and participate in, I probably sub-consciously was a bit loathe to spell it all out. Until I get a day or so free to translate my vision and copious notes into something coherent, here are a couple articles that might give you a taste of how I am thinking:
Embrace the possibilities offered by 21st century ICT (cf “Doing IT wrong”)
It also seems I’m not alone in this thinking, at least not in the UK, with first Tesco and now Virgin Money aggressively entering the (retail) banking space.
(via The Guardian) Virgin Money has made its much-anticipated move into the retail banking sector by taking over a small private bank.
The £50m deal to buy Church House Trust was announced to the City this morning. It is a key part of Sir Richard Branson’s attempt to challenge the UK’s major high street banks, and comes two years after Virgin failed to win control of Northern Rock.
“Virgin Money aims to bring simplicity to the UK banking market, which has traditionally been a complex sector,” said Branson, who believes the move gives Virgin “a strong platform for growth”.
I’d love to meet the leaders of these two firms as I think a lot of what we are working on would resonate with them. That is, unless we decide to start a competitor!
I have long been concerned by the rise and rise of the global mega-bank, first due to my conviction of the impossibility of managing such complex behemoths (with the dangers as we all now know having repercussions far beyond any individual bank’s shareholders or creditors) and also due to the increasing rents such a de facto oligopoly could (and so logically does) extract from the rest of the global economy. I’ve started and then stopped writing this post at least half a dozen times in the past year; partly due to a sense of ‘what’s the point’, partly due to the problem being covered by many with much (much) more influence than I, and partly (I’m somewhat ashamed to admit) due to a small underlying element of self-censorship. As some of you know, we have ambitions to raise capital to allow us to catalyze the re-invention of financial services by investing in companies with disruptive new business models in this sector, and well the big banks are not only potential sources of capital in their own right, but also have significant influence with many of the people and institutions who are potential sources of capital for us. As regular readers know, I try always to tell it like I see it but if I’m objective, I probably have had a tendency to pull my punches a bit when discussing the banking industry. But as the debate on reforming global banking takes centre stage, and at the risk of annoying some of our potential future investors with a dissident opinion, I thought it would be worthwhile to lay out my key thoughts on the subject.
Weak competition is obvious to customers: financial companies demand high fees that are often calculated according to illogical tariffs. Fund managers’ charges, for example, are usually large and are often not linked to the quality, or the real costs of their services.
The lack of competition shows up to economists in the sector’s staggering profitability. In the second quarter of 2009, 29 per cent of US domestic profits came from finance. The profit-generating power of financial companies across the developed world has stubbornly remained higher than that of other companies.
There is, in addition, good reason to suppose that competitive pressures will weaken further. The recent wave of bank failures and mergers, born of the crisis, have left the sector more concentrated. With fewer players on the field – many enjoying implicit state guarantees – competition will be further enfeebled.
But in more advanced economies, rent-seeking takes more sophisticated forms. Instead of 10 per cent on arms sales, we have 7 per cent on new issues. Rents are often extracted indirectly from consumers rather than directly from government: as in protection from competition from foreign goods and new entrants, and the clamour for the extension of intellectual property rights. Rents can also be secured through overpaid employment in overmanned government activities.
Rent-seeking is found whenever economic power is concentrated – in the state, in large private business, in groups of co-operating and colluding firms. Private concentrations of economic power tend to be self-reinforcing. This problem was widely recognised in America’s gilded age. The well-founded fear was that the new mega-rich – the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Vanderbilts – would use their wealth to enhance their political influence and grow their economic power, subverting both the market and democracy. Today it is Russia that exemplifies this problem.
But America has a new generation of rent-seekers. The modern equivalents of castles on the Rhine are first-class lounges and corporate jets. Their occupants are investment bankers and corporate executives.
So much of the conversation seems to revolve around this question of how do we deal with financial institutions which are “too big to fail”, with the turkeys running the world’s mega-banks almost unanimously (and somewhat breathlessly) insisting that breaking banks up would achieve nothing except to hurt customers.
Back in June, I set down my thoughts on what the key issues were in terms of (fixing) banking regulation, highlighting that size (of assets or business) was not the only variable to consider when assessing systemic risk, but that ‘connectedness’ was probably even more important. Certainly the combination of both is something that should ring alarm bells.
Wouldn’t it make much more sense to build a set of rules that explicitly addresses the vulnerabilities of a scale free network and as such focuses disproportion attention and resources on protecting the hubs from attack or failure. The beauty is that the digital global financial system of the 21st century and advances in the science of networks actually now allows us to do this: we can empirically and quantitatively observe, measure and manage the ‘connectedness’ of institutions. Forget the rating agencies, companies like Bonabeau’s IcoSystems and others could help the regulators create, maintain and monitor network ‘maps’ and score each market participant in terms of their connectivity. This should be the defining core metric of financial regulation and mirroring the power law distribution of the underlying network, financial regulation should focus its attention and resources in geometrically increasing fashion.
However it’s pretty frustrating to continue to read much of the ‘financial establishment’ – people who have the luxury and the privilege of being able to speak from the pages of the FT – continue to miss the point entirely and cling to a (slighty) new and improved version of the regulatory status quo. I have enormous respect for Jamie Dimon, and while I agree with him that the system must be re-engineered so as to allow any bank of any size to fail without jeopardizing the system, I disagree that breaking up the biggest banks would be damaging and serve no purpose. The rules need to be reset (to build-in automatic and steeply increasing impediments to growth in size and connectedness), but at the same time the biggest global and domestic mega-banks need to be pruned back to a size that is commensurate with this new paradigm.
The parallels between the rise and rise of Standard Oil in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and its subsequent government mandated break-up and the rise and rise of giant global banks in the late 20th and early 21st centuries are real. John D. Rockefeller sounded every bit as sincere and paternalistic in calling for an ever bigger, ever more dominant Standard Oil – a company that would bring ‘order’ and ‘stability’ to the market making customers’ lives and choices ‘easier.’ Well of course we know that the market for oil products didn’t suffer as a result of the break-up of Standard Oil, nor did anarchy descend on the US telecommunications markets following the break-up of AT&T. I think you’ll actually find that there is a decent case to be made that things got better in both cases, with more robust and innovative markets and better value for customers. (I highly recommend that legislators everywhere take a moment to read Chernow’s great Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. before reaching their conclusions as to the merits (or not) of breaking up the biggest banks.)
But the most important long-term reason to consider government intervention in the size and power of the world’s largest financial institutions is that failing to do so will inevitably starve one of the key sectors of the economy of innovation and progress with increasingly damaging results. Indeed, in the conclusion to his column Mr. Kay hits the nail on the head:
Because innovation is dependent on new entry it is essential to resist concentration of economic power. A stance which is pro-business must be distinguished from a stance which is pro-market. In the two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, that distinction has not been appreciated well enough.
It’s time for a change. It’s time to shake things up a bit. No?
Anyone who has ever used an Apple product understands that a key part of the value flows from the design aesthetic that covets simplicity, intuition and beauty; harnessing these attributes to provide solutions and services that users find a joy to use right out of the box. The complexity of their products is hidden from view, Steve Jobs having understood that the extra effort needed to transform complexity into simplicity was something that created tremendous value both for his customers and his shareholders.
Creating simplicity is hard. Much harder than creating complexity. Entropy and all that. But it is very often worth the effort. Helpfully, John Maeda wrote a great guidebook “The Laws of Simplicity” where he articulates 10 basic laws:
Reduce: The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.
Organize: Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.
Time: Savings in time feel like simplicity.
Learn: Knowledge makes everything simpler.
Differences: Simplicity and complexity need each other.
Context: What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.
Emotions: More emotions are better than less.
Trust: In simplicity we trust.
Failure: Some things can never be made simple.
The One: Simplicity is about substracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful
Finance and financial markets are often complex. This complexity can arise within products (exotic derivatives), infrastructure (clearing, settlements and payment platforms) or regulation. And most financial services firms (and professionals) revel in this complexity. Not only do they not seek to hide it away, but they often compete vigorously to show it off in all its glory (and of course by association they seek to validate their virility and cleverness by navigating all this complexity on behalf of their hapless customers.) Of course – sticking with the computing metaphor – this ‘look how clever I am’ approach is very Microsoft-ian (and no, that isn’t a compliment) and very rarely does it provide the most utility or best value for the customer. So one of our key investment themes is to find and nurture companies who are to finance as Apple is to computing (and media!) The complexity of modern finance and markets is the ideal substrate for simple products and services, to quote John:
Simplicity and complexity need each other. The more complexity there is in the market, the more that something simpler stands out. And because technology will only continue to grow in complexity, there is a clear economic benefit to adopting a strategy of simplicity that will help set your product apart. That said, establishing a feeling of simplicity in design requires making complexity consciously available in some explicit form. This relationship can be manifest in either the same object or experience, or in contrast with other offerings in the same category—like the simplicity of the iPod in comparison to its more complex competitors in the MP3 player market.
One of our portfolio companies does exactly this. They take a simple service, using technology and their market knowledge to engineer a solution that keeps the complexity away from the customer and behind the scenes. (Where it should be.) A solution that embraces simplicity and transparency in a market heretofor characterized by complexity and obfuscation. It’s not a new music site or social network. It’s probably not something anyone would get too excited about. It’s boring. But it’s big. Billions big. And important. And for many individuals and corporates, unavoidable.
The service is foreign exchange (aka FX) and international payments. And the company, as you might now have guessed, is FX Capital Group. (See also my FX 2.0 post from this spring.) And the reason I am writing about them today is that they have just launched their new website and online trading platform and it is by far the best FX user experience I have seen. Simple. Transparent. Complete. Easy-to-use. From the initial client take-on, all the way through to the onward payment to the account of your choosing, every last detail of the process has been engineered to make the customer’s life simple. The “iTunes of foreign exchange”. After all selling one currency to buy another should not be that hard.
And now, it isn’t.
FX Capital Group’s vision is to combine technology and traditional phone base services with competitive and transparent pricing to deliver on the promise of simple, cost effective, and customer friendly foreign exchange and international payments services for clients.
Leveraging experienced individuals, the best technology and a deep understanding of both international foreign exchange and payments markets, FX Capital Group brings transparency, simplicity and automation to meet the foreign exchange needs of clients in a robust, easy and effective manner.
Buy, Sell and Hedge Currencies: A full range of phone based and online services to buy/sell currencies and hedge currency risk. Competitive, consistent and transparent pricing for all customers.
Manage Currency Risks: Guidance on strategies to hedge currency risk within your business. A great service for firms who contract in multiple currencies or import / export goods and services.
Sell on Your Website in Multiple Currencies: Expand your online customer base by selling to customers in multiple currencies using our real-time FX API’s at rates that are better than those “bundled” with merchant service providers.
Invoice in Multiple Currencies: Invoice your international clients in local currency. Embedded hedging of any currency movements and no need to maintain bank accounts in multiple currencies.
Make International Payments: Our international payments service (online and phone) will save you money over you bank for making international payments and may be free if you transact your FX with us.
And other brokers and financial intermediaries are also welcome to partner with FX Capital Group, either via API or white label agreements. Indeed, first and foremost this is very much a platform company, FXaaS really. The customer facing website is in fact just an implementation of the underlying platform, and shortly the company will be launching the second implementation – RabbitFX – which will be tailored specifically to private and retail clients. Going forward we hope that many other partners choose to build innovative and customized services on top of the core FXCG platform. We also are excited by the ability for partners to integrate FX into their products and workflows simply and powerfully. Imagine for example an ERP provider, or online accounting services, or an ad network, etc. etc. …the list of potential partners is almost endless.
One area that is particularly close to my heart is the ability to allow even the smallest start-up to offer their customers payment in any currency – easily, cost effectively and transparently. Or helping start-ups with geographically dispersed operations pay employees, contractors and suppliers in any currency without having their eyes ripped out by their bank or payments provider. I’m sure most of the seedcamp finalists from the last few years have foreign exchange payments to make from time to time, many on a regular basis. In the spirit of helping to get the ball rolling on this front, I’ve convinced them to sweeten the bargain for all the companies that have applied to seedcamp (or mini-seedcamp) over the past three years.
If you have been a seedcamp applicant, finalist or winner, if you open a corporate account and do a trade before December 25th, FX Capital Group will send you a £25 iTunes or Amazon gift card and also contribute £25 to the charity of your choosing. Just let them know when you register for which seedcamp event you applied or attended. They’ll do the rest. And then sit back and save time, money and energy and never worry about managing FX payments again.
Like all good start-ups a big part of the excitement and frustration is knowing what is ‘in the pipeline’ and wanting it all to be released to users ‘yesterday’. However we also know that the best ideas and certainly the best prioritization algorithms emerge from getting a product into the wild and so after 9 months of development and private alpha, I can’t wait to hear ways in which customers and developers will want to use the platform. So for all you early adopters out there, know that the platform is probably not perfect (although we’ve stress-tested it up to 250,000 trades a day without any problems, which gives us a bit of headroom to grow into! lol) but (we think) it’s damn good and would rather challenge you to help us make it even better than pretend we’ve got it all figured out.
In case you were wondering, the team is indeed working on putting a screencast/video demo of the trading platform online and but in the mean time they are more to happy to walk you through a short online demo if you are interested. Alternatively you can go yourself to https://demo.fxcapitalgroup.co.uk/ and use the following credentials:
username: demo@splashypants
password: demosplash
pet’s name: splashy
favorite animal: whale
favorite city: atlantis
Have a go and be sure to let the team know what you think. Best channel is probably twitter where you can find them at @FXCapitalGroup or on Facebook.
Finally it’s important to make clear that I’m not just writing this post as an investor, commentator or director but first and foremost as a customer. My entire adult life I have had to deal with managing FX risk and struggle with the pain and cost of doing international transfers. When the founder Nigel Verdon came to me with his vision, I thought ‘Hallelujah!’ – at last. It may not be the sexiest business in the world but there is real pain and real profits to be made in using technology to disrupt the old way of doing business and give customers a better deal. And so I did a ‘Victor Kiam’. So next time you have to make a foreign payment, whether its for yourself or your company, give FXCG/RabbitFX a chance, I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.
I first wrote here about Ken Banks and FrontlineSMS a little over a year ago, after having seen him speak at Supernova in San Francisco where he made a tremendous impression. I remember immediately being excited by the obvious possibility of leveraging the Frontline:SMS platform to provide financial services, not only in developing countries but also in more mature markets. I put ‘try to set up meeting with Ken to discuss’ on my to do list, but it never quite made it to the top as the myriad challenges of setting up our business (and moving house) in the midst of generalized global financial calamity conspired to keep it from becoming an urgent priority. Of course (and thank goodness) the world does not wait for me and an enterprising young man, Ben Lyons, spotted the same opportunity and (much) more importantly has moved to action, teaming up with Ken and FrontlineSMS to create FrontlineSMS:credit:
FrontlineSMS:Credit aims to make every formal financial service available to the entrepreneurial poor in 160 characters or less. By meshing the functionality of FrontlineSMS with local mobile payment systems, implementing institutions will be able to provide a full range of customizable services, from savings and credit to insurance and payroll.
Launching FrontlineSMS:credit a few weeks ago, Ben wrote:
Our mission is simple: leverage the mobile space to extend access to affordable financial services to rural, disconnected and impoverished communities. To achieve this end, we are constructing a series of free and open source financial modules that will allow FrontlineSMS to communicate with mobile payment systems in real time, turning FrontlineSMS in to a microfinance management information system, a payroll center for small & medium enterprises (SMEs), a collection and distribution center for micro-insurance premiums and payouts, and a detailed center for individual credit histories and scores.
Now if this isn’t a massive opportunity, well I don’t know what is. At the risk of sounding churlish, it’s an order of magnitude more substantial and important (socially, financially, economically…) than half the me-too start-ups chasing funding and customers amongst the western digerati. Take another look at Ben’s mission statement:
… leverage the mobile space to extend access to affordable financial services to rural, disconnected and impoverished communities.
I suspect the first time you read that you thought “in Africa”, or perhaps India, or developing countries more generally. But these same under-served communities (alas) exist in every country in the world, and one could even make a case for saying that for those living in a developed economy, the relative disadvantage of not having access to basic financial services is even more damaging. It seems inevitable that the approach taken by FrontlineSMS:credit will become the primary channel through which universal access to basic financial services is delivered in any country or economy. Which leaves the politicians of many European states very little time to figure out what the hell to do with all the postal employees currently cashing cheques and taking payments for utility bills, who will soon need to find more productive work. And I’m not sure how complacent I would be as a shareholder in an incumbent retail banking operation (the top executives I doubt will lose much sleep as the timeline for this kind of transition is probably 10-15 years or so, much longer than their expected tenure…) as this bottom up, platform approach to delivering financial services has the very real potential of blowing a giant hole right in the middle of their business and revenue model.
To further whet your appetite here is an excellent 10 minute introduction to FrontlineSMS:credit by Ben at Africa Gathering in London a couple weeks ago:
Instead, Wall Street needs to be reinvented from the bottom-up: by a new generation of radical innovators, to create thick value, for an authentically shared prosperity.
Building a disruptively better global financial system is the central challenge —and the largest, richest opportunity — for today’s economic revolutionaries. It’s time for Finance 2.0.
Investors, entrepreneurs, and radical innovators of all stripes: it’s time to It’s time to go big, or go home. You’re happy that social gaming is worth billions. That’s nice. But it’s also chump change. Because the gains that can flow from better capital markets are worth trillions.
Finance — not video games, advertising, cleantech, or social nets — is where 10x+ returns lie for today’s venture investors, and life-changing fortunes lie for entrepreneurs.
Hallelujah. Anyone who knows us knows that this is right out of our pitch book. And yet. It’s not easy. And I’ve been wondering why that might be. How much of it is a ‘turkeys not voting for Christmas’ problem? Or is it a question of ‘Lord, make me chaste. But not yet…’? I don’t know, hard to tell. Anyhow I’m sure we’ll get there in the end, but there is so many exciting opportunities and so much potential sometimes I struggle to understand why we aren’t reduced to beating back hungry investors with a stick. I guess the real answer is that we need to spend more time seeking capital and less time investing it. But I tell you that just doesn’t seem right. It should be the other way round, no?
A wise man (not being sarcastic – he really is wise) once told me of a very large private equity firm where he used to work at one time. He said they had a lot of smart and ambitious people. And a few well, Forrest Gumps. The latter took care of investing, while the former focused on the much more important job of raising more and bigger funds. I thought he was joking. I’m now pretty sure he wasn’t. (Note to self: area no. 697 of financial services ripe for disruption: allocation of capital to private equity managers…)
There has been much recent angst in the venture capital world about funds that are too big, and indeed the same debate flares up from time to time in the hedge fund world where many strategies (although not all) have analogous scaling problems (over-crowded trades, positions too big for the market, opportunities too small to ‘move the needle’ of a big fund.) But investors time and time again prefer to take the safe route and ‘buy IBM’. The classic fail-conventionally-versus-succeed-alone trade. Don’t get me wrong, there are some amazing big funds – where as an investor you get to eat your cake and have it too: ie great returns and the ‘safety’ of a tried and trusted organization – but there are also many many mediocre funds who have grown out of their edge and had their business objectives perverted into raising and keeping ever larger amounts of AUM, rather than having the objective of generating the best possible risk adjusted returns. I guess the fund-of-fund structure was one answer to solving the dilemma of how do you scale allocation of funds into many small and/or new managers, unfortunately more often than not, many of these funds find it easier and safer (reputationally not financially) to slide back into allocating to the same old, same old. (And a few bad apples discredited the whole concept by just putting all their money into a ponzi scheme and taking fees for their trouble!) I’ve thought about this a bit, and I must admit I have yet to come up with a clever mechanism that would solve the problem of efficiently (and safely) getting investment capital out into the ‘long tail’. But I’m sure it exists. Especially with the tools and access to information available today.
We also need to fix the supply-side by taking away the naked incentive for asset managers to blindly pursue AUM growth as a priority. This is easy. It was the first thing I said I’d do differently – three years ago – if i ever managed outside capital. It seemed so bloody obvious: management fees pay the cost of running the business, carry or performance fees are the juice. So set management fees at the level of the operating budget. Simple. You would think investors would love this as it reflects the true cost of managing the investments and aligns interests. Sure, it is a bit more complicated than just multiplying the capital by a fixed percentage, but only a bit: the cost structure of an asset manager is not exactly complex – people, an office, some travel, IT (more or less depending on the strategy) and some professional fees (legal, accounting, etc.) Further if there are economies of scale to be had in the strategy in question, these would be naturally passed on to the investors as the costs as a percentage of assets would naturally decline as assets grow, but the managers would be indifferent to this and so aim for an amount of assets that allowed them to create the best returns net of management fees. Indeed this is exactly what Paul Kedrosky suggested the other day. (Once again perhaps we were too early!) We thought potential investors would love this. The reality (so far) is that most have been at best indifferent and in a few cases outright skeptical – “That sounds too clever, why don’t you just stick to 2% like everyone else…” (I’m not making that up!) ie Don’t rock the boat. And that’s a problem, because we’re all about rocking the boat! And I can’t see how we can be otherwise and remain credible when our value proposition is to identify and invest in disruptive business models… (Sigh.)
Anyhow, Umair don’t lose faith, we’re working on it!
I was cleaning up my office a bit this afternoon and came across my copy of Andy Haldane‘s brilliant paper “Rethinking the Financial Network (April 2009). People (including me) like to complain about the lack of leadership and insight at the commanding heights of the financial system, but based on this paper alone, I’m not sure the UK could ask for a better Head of Financial Stability at the Bank of England. (He was appointed to that position in late 2008, once the horse had not only left the stable but the country…)
If you are interested in the workings and health of the financial system, you simply must read this paper if you haven’t already. I won’t attempt to summarize it here, it is worth reading in its entirety but will excerpt his conclusion:
Through history, there are many examples of human flight on an enormous scale to
avoid the effects of pestilence and plague. From yellow fever and cholera in the 19th
century to polio and influenza in the 20th. In these cases, human flight fed contagion
and contagion fed human catastrophe. The 21st century offered a different model.
During the SARS epidemic, human flight was prohibited and contagion contained.
In the present financial crisis the flight is of capital, not humans. Yet the scale and
contagious consequences may be no less damaging. This financial epidemic may
endure in the memories long after SARS has been forgotten. But in halting the spread
of future financial epidemics, it is important that the lessons from SARS and from
other non-financial networks are not forgotten.
I’m fairly certain he is not a reader so I can take no credit, but it is very rewarding to see someone in his position with such a firm grasp on the concepts I’ve been trying to articulate (much less completely and articulately) for some time now. (see The science of Financial Regulation (June 2009) and Averting (financial) ecological disasters (August 2008)) I hope his voice is listened to and his insight and intellect used to help us build a better, more resilient financial system for the future.
Every executive committee member of a large bank, exchange or insurance company should read Kirk Wylie’s latest post to understand why their cultures are broken and why they so regularly find their organisations blithely running off the edge of a cliff, comfortable in the knowledge that, “well, hey at least we’re all doing it so it must be ok” and safe in the knowledge that their is a big taxpayer airbag (or trampoline?) at the bottom protecting them from any nasty consequences. Of course they are unlikely to – except in the unlikely event that it gets published in one of the traditional echo chamber publications like the FT or the WSJ.*
I’ll resist the temptation to copy/paste the whole post here but please go read it as this excerpt doesn’t give it justice:
Independent, entrepreneurial techies can actually make the biggest impact in the organizations that fight against them the most: they’re the ones that need them the most. Use them as agents for change, challenging assumptions, challenging entrenched attitudes, challenging technical group-think. Otherwise, your worst employees (the ones who can’t really get a better job elsewhere) win, and you as an organization fail.
Kirk is speaking of technologists, but the same thing applies across the organization. But big organizations kill entrepreneurship, actually it’s in their DNA. It’s not news, tall poppies and all that. As I was leaving 16 years of working – mostly happily – in big organizations I spent a lot of time thinking about why this was (and also why I hadn’t noticed it earlier in my career.) The answer to the second question was really because of luck. For 90% of my investment banking career I had the good fortune to be right in the heart of building three new and transformational markets: first the Ecu/Euro market, then the European credit markets and finally the move to ‘electronic’ capital markets. Throughout this part of my career, innovation, entrepreneuralism and independence actually helped me succeed because there was no pre-existing status quo to upset. This only became apparent to me in hindsight.
The answer to the first question is now obvious to me, but it wasn’t always so and really only revealed itself when I left and was able to step back and look at the machine from the outside. The expression ‘well-oiled’ machine says it all. This is the ultimate compliment used to describe a successfully managed organization. So where does non-linear innovation, disruption, questioning fit in a well-oiled machine? It doesn’t. In fact the more ‘well-oiled’ the machine, the less tolerant it is of exceptions. (Which also explains why I operated happily for so long at DrKW!) Switching metaphors, entrepreneurship is seen as a virus in these companies and they produce potent ‘corporate antibodies’ to seek out and subdue any such viral outbreak and they do everything (pace Kirk) to innoculate themselves against them in the first place.
But what is a CEO to do? The ‘well-oiled’ bit is equally important. I am sympathetic to this. (I mean if I was in charge I wouldn’t want too many of me’s running around, that would be chaos.) It’s not an easy question to answer and is made even harder (especially if you are running a public company) by the fact that the visible benefits of the entrepreneurial genes are only realized over time – I’d guess at least 4-5 years at a minimum and sometimes it might take as long as a full business cycle. And yet the average leadership tenure in these organizations is at best at the short end of that, and the compensation and stock market cycles are much shorter. I’ll be frank and say up front, I don’t have an answer but I’ve got a couple ideas I think are worth trying.
The first is to set – from the top – a deliberate human resource policy of seeking to “doping” the organization with a limited and controlled number of people like Kirk. (Doping is the process of adding controlled impurities to a material – for instance a semiconductor, or metallic alloy – to improve it’s useful properties.) This needs to be managed very deliberately, like a program – put a senior HR person in charge of this and manage it: these people will likely have a higher turnover, complain more often, get into trouble, want to change projects and/or departments and so need their own career track. I’m not sure what the correct ratio is, but I would guess it’s on the order of 1-2% of total staff, not necessarily evenly distributed throughout the company. (I knew my Materials Science degree would come in handy one day!)
The second is to create – and then protect institutionally, not personally – a specific department dedicated to exploring ‘white space’. When I say protect institutionally, I mean frame it like a trust so it cannot be undone or hacked by successive waves of management and is insulated from the quarter on quarter, year on year vagaries of the economy and/or the companies results. If you don’t do this, you will inevitably fall victim to the problems Azeem enumerates in his great post on why corporate venture capital (almost always) doesn’t work. Before all the serious, “pragmatic” people out there roll your eyes all at once (if indeed any such types would consider wasting time reading a blog) this doesn’t and shouldn’t need to be a big ask. Again probably on the order of 1-2% (even less for the biggest companies), of resources. The best example in practice I can think of is Xerox PARC, although the irony there is that Xerox didn’t really figure out how to plug PARC’s non-linear thinking and brilliant innovation back into the company (or at least not very well.) But perhaps that is not a bad thing (in proving my point) because I would posit that all other things being equal, Xerox’s share price has been higher (than it otherwise would have been) because they owned this asset. This cheap, deep out-of-the-money call option on the future. As far I as can tell, this is also what BT is trying to do with BT Design led by my friend JP and it is heartening to see that – at least so far – he is being allowed to continue to pursue this vision despite (and hopefully even because of?) the very poor results of the past couple years. I don’t know of any truly analogous initiatives in big finance.
And indeed that is (one of the reasons) we decided to set up Nauiokas Park. Clearly we’re not the whole solution, but we think we can play a key role for big financial institutions: a way to have (some of) their cake and eat it too: by entrusting a relatively small amount of financial capital to us, we think we can create just such a verdant ‘garden of innovation’, allowing them to harvest the fruits of some of the most dynamic entrepreneurs active in their industry, while protecting and nuturing them, away from the noxious antibodies of the corporate organism. Indeed, taking a page out of John Seely Brown, I guess you could describe our mission as seeking to create a vibrant knowledge ecology for finance and markets, and help our stakeholders profit from it:
There’s a fundamental change from finding ways to innovate inside a corporation to leveraging the knowledge ecologies of many little companies in places like Silicon Valley. You find that the shift turns much of the classical R&D into A&D – that is, acquisition and development. Larger companies can buy the research they need and instantly acquire a diverse portfolio of research groups.
I’ll be honest though, it’s not an easy sell. Even for the corporate leaders who ‘get it’ the reflex instinct is to think (sometimes aloud) “makes sense, but we can do that ourselves”. Well, you can’t prove a negative, but we’ve spent a long time inside these same big financial institutions, and our many years of experience led us to conclude that it is bloody hard to do (for all the reasons above and more.) On the bright side, being challenged makes you think harder and forces you to refine and adapt your ideas, ultimately making them better. Hearts and minds. Hearts and minds. Wish us luck.
* Just to be clear, I have nothing against the FT or the WSJ per se, I read them regularly (well WSJ not so much) and think they are solid publications. I’m not suggesting they aren’t important sources of information and opinion – you’d be stupid not to read them if you are in finance – just that, and this is the wonderful thing about the world in 2009 – I think you need to read much more widely and in particular embrace at least a diversity of viewpoints, if not views.
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