You may have noticed, I haven’t been posting much here lately. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say, probably just the opposite (!) but have be full out from dawn until dusk working on a number of exciting new projects including our own development (more on that in a few weeks.) One project that has been front of mind the past few weeks is a new company we are developing that is directly inspired by Paul Graham‘s great advice to “solve problems that affect you directly”.
A bit of background. When I was in banking, one of the achievements I was most proud of was effectively using web technology to transform how (debt) capital was raised (at least in Europe*.) At DrKW, we built what for many years was the state of the art capital raising platform, whose core product was our eBookbuilding platform (now in Commerzbank yellow!) It completely revolutionised what had heretofore been a disjointed, manual, somewhat ad hoc process into a seamless, collaborative, mostly painless process. Initially it met with enormous resistance from other (much bigger and more successful) banks and syndicate managers, who as ‘guardians of the temple’ jealously guarded their power, derived (in their minds) from the information asymmetry they enjoyed (vs issuers and investors.) However – and despite being at best a middling player in the fixed income new issues market – our disruptive technology was such a big improvement on the status quo that eventually the market adopted our standards (with everyone then rushing to build their own analogous platforms.) In the spirit of making sure these platforms could ‘play well together’ we even published our XML-Schema for new issues and invited all our competitors to contribute to it and use it. (Which had the effect of basically freaking out our competitors. They thought we were crazy – like Ali – because they didn’t have the slightest idea what it means to compete in a world of information abundance and platforms, but that story is for another day…)
Anyhow, when I became seriously and then professionally active in ‘venture capital’ or more generically speaking, in investing in private companies, the lack of technology available to manage workflows surprised me; I was particularly puzzled because ostensibly this was a world populated with techophiles, early adopters and people who ate disruption for breakfast (quite unlike the world of institutional capital markets). Further, there is much talk (and consensus) around the fact that it is hard/impossible to scale venture investing. And while I think this holds at some level, it struck me that a significant number of the gating factors limiting the ability to scale could be vastly improved. Not to infinity but substantially, perhaps by an order of magnitude. Pulling out an example from my old career, when I started life as a bond trader 20 years ago (ack!) the number of bonds that a typical good trader could manage numbered in the dozens at best (and even then, you would find that a trader really traded 10 to 20 bonds 80% of the time and sort of went through the motions for the other bonds hoping most of the time not to trade.) Then came Bloomberg. And excel spreadsheets. (And later bespoke pricing and analytic tools and platforms.) And all of the sudden, a trader could manage a book with hundreds of securities. There was still a degree of 80/20 but everything was an order of magnitude bigger.
I don’t know if our new initiative will definitely achieve that degree of change in the private investment market, but we are convinced that there is a better way and having a fit-for-purpose platform to help company management, non-executive directors and investors communicate, collaborate and manage their positions and responsibilities would be a huge step forward. It’s not that nothing currently exists, but I would say we are at the ‘excel spreadsheet’ phase to use my bond trading analogy – with many firms and people starting to use things like Google Apps or Basecamp and the like to better manage information flows and collaboration. But while this (and excel for traders) is (was) a good start, the real juice comes when dedicated, purpose-built platforms emerge. If you have a screw that needs driving, a hammer is better than nothing (or a rock) but a screwdriver is even better! (A power screwdriver better still!)
So we conceived of (what has been provisionally named) CiRX – the corporate director and investor relations information exchange:
CiRX is a purpose-built platform enabling private companies, directors and investors to communicate and collaborate more efficiently saving time, money and effort. By streamlining processes and connecting stakeholders in an intuitive and context-rich environment, CiRX offers a tailored yet consistent solution to the challenge of managing information and documentation flows, reducing administrative burdens and creating opportunities for a richer, more dynamic and flexible approach to corporate governance and strategic management.
Over the past few months, we have been developing the concept, the business model and have done a significant amount of macro research to identify the potential size of the market opportunity and now have started to take the next step and ‘talk/think details’ as they say. In order to support this next stage of development, as we are poised to start ‘cutting code’, we wanted to get more direct feedback from the community – of company executives and founders, non-executives, angel and institutional investors – to better understand how their experiences and perceptions were both similar and different to our own. To do so we created a short(ish) survey and have sent it to a number of our contacts across all these communities, but if we missed you and you are a company founder or non-exec director or investor in one or more private companies and you are interested in contributing your views, you can find the survey by clicking here.(We’ll leave the survey open for a couple weeks probably but if you are so inclined to complete it, we are excited to be presenting CiRX at mini-seedcamp London next week so would be great to have as much feedback as possible before then.) Of course you are also welcome to share your views – good, bad and ugly – in the comments below.
* That e-bookbuilding (generic) never gained acceptance in the US (at least not while I was still in the market) is in my opinion a telling manifestation of the oligopoly of Wall Street (which gives us things like 7% IPO fees with the spooky consistency of North Korean election results) which absent the pressure of competition, allowed the dominant underwriters to resist this change tooth and nail. It was even more glaringly apparent when these same US firms operating in Europe adopted e-bookbuilding as strongly as everyone else once it was obvious it was an evolutionary winner…
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.
I have written often (for example here and here) on the subject of how more and more of the most interesting and disruptive innovations and business models of the 21st century and of the sixth paradigm will emerge from the “edges” of the global economy. Newly empowered by the continuing advances in information and communications technologies, and building off the powerful emergent platforms of the sixth paradigm (mobile, cloud, etc.), entrepreneurs in places like India and Africa will design and popularize some of the most potent business models going forward. Indeed this is one of our key investment themes and as we grow, we hope to be able to participate by making investments in these parts of the world.
To be able to succeed (in providing meaningful, affordable, services) in such challenging environments to my mind offers great insights into how improvements can be made to how services are designed and sold in any environment – including the developed and wealthy western markets. A variation on the New York, NY theme of – ‘if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere’…
So what does this really mean for us as an ever-increasing population empowered by the social media stage? It means we have the responsibility to start speaking up for our continent. We have right to say enough is enough with the hand outs, enough with the aid mentality, enough with the top-down solutions, and enough with being ignored on the global stage. Our voices count, and it would be good to partner with us—to have a conversation with us first—before any projects are started.
I would go further and say it would be insane not to partner with the people that are “at the coal face”. That not only would this reduce the number of mistakes, failures and unintended consequences but that the opportunity for learning and cross-fertilization of ideas, business models and innovations is so rich that to ignore it would simply be foolish. Social media is giving a voice to ideas from everywhere, anywhere, with the best ideas emerging naturally based on their intrinsic worth and evolutionary strength (and not because of where or by whom they were ‘invented’.) So for talented, ambitious people everywhere the cry is no longer “Go west young man!” but “Go south, go east, go north, go west – go into the global social ecosphere and connect with the current of humanity.” Open. Not closed.
There’s nothing more valuable than an unmet need that is just becoming fixable. If you find something broken that you can fix for a lot of people, you’ve found a gold mine. As with an actual gold mine, you still have to work hard to get the gold out of it. But at least you know where the seam is, and that’s the hard part. - Paul Graham
In the latest of his series of great essays, Paul Graham makes the obvious – but all too often overlooked – point that one of the best ways to create value is by working to “fix things that seem broken.” He also highlights the fact that sometimes it pays to step back from your daily environment to get a clear picture of what is broken:
You may need to stand outside yourself a bit to see brokenness, because you tend to get used to it and take it for granted. You can be sure it’s there, though. There are always great ideas sitting right under our noses.
At the end of 2006, after a long, successful, and mostly exciting and enjoyable career in capital markets I took that step outside. And my suspicions became convictions. Finance seemed broken to me. And it bugged me. It still bugs me. It bugs me when super smart people (who aren’t financial or market professionals) resign themselves to accept crappy advice and ill-suited products and services when it comes to their finances. It bugs me that so many bright, energetic, ambitious people working within the financial services sector continue to be trapped in the status quo of 20th (even 19th) century business models, their talents misdirected when the alternative is so much more appealing.
And so I thought I should try to fix it. Not all of it. Not all at once. But more than just a single facet. I haven’t got it all figured out yet, but I think I’m headed in the right direction and most importantly I’ve learned more – about the industry, about people, about building value and about myself – in the past 3 years than in the 10 before combined. I’ve never worked harder and I’ve never had more fun. And I’ve met some pretty amazing people too.
A few days ago, Fred Wilson commenting on the (ridiculous) inclusion of venture capital in the financial stabiliy bill wrote this:
The only systemic risk the VC business is creating for the financial system is attempting to put the current one out of business by financing entrepreneurs with new ideas for banking, brokerage, insurance, and other financial services. I’m not joking about this. I believe entrepreneurs will use technology to reinvent the way financial services are provided to consumers this decade.
“Using technology to reinvent the way financial services are provided to consumers this decade.” Nice. In fact that is our elevator pitch. I just hope Fred doesn’t mind if we use it.
Admittedly a very small holding (acquired via our investment in CohesiveFT) and with some mixed feelings (more on that below) but nonetheless an excellent result for an exciting and important technology and the team behind it led by the one and only Alexis Richardson…yes today SpringSource (VMWare) announced its acquisition of Rabbit Technologies – the company behind the world’s leading implementation of AMQP, RabbitMQ.
RabbitMQ was born of a JV between CohesiveFT (my partner Amy sits on their Board) and L-Shift and was spun out as an independent entity under Alexis’ leadership about a year ago. The mixed feelings I alluded to above are only because we were quite excited by the prospect of helping Rabbit grow as a standalone business, given their already excellent market share, the existing and extremely fast growing market for their product (messaging), the already strong brand and market adoption of RabbitMQ and a number of successful open-source business model pioneers and exits to emulate. As we did not have the capital required to make this happen we could not put a credible alternative on the table. To be fair, there were always a lot of moving parts and there is no guarantee that we could have put a better, workable deal forward and clearly joining the VMWare family is an awesome opportunity for the company and the team.
In any event, I’m really excited and happy for them and proud to be associated with them, even if only in a small way. Here’s to hoping this is a homerun deal for VMWare! (And yes having “Rabbit” in your name is one of our investment criterea…)
Now, though it maybe hard to predict what innovations PayPal’s platform will enable, it’s safe to say that the payment industry is going to change dramatically. As money becomes completely digitised, infinitely transferable, and friction-free, it will again revolutionise how we think about our economy.
The author talks excitedly about PayPal’s new open platform X.com and how it is poised to change the current payments landscape which continues to be dominated by the credit card companies. PayPal launched this new approach late last year with their first developers conference Innovate09. Here’s what PayPal President Scott Thompson had to say about the conference:
As you might imagine, given my views on both the enormous opportunity that exists to disrupt an increasingly anachronistic financial services industry and my enthusiasm for “platform-based” business models, it is quite satisfying to see someone like PayPal take on this opportunity in such an aggressive manner. Not only do they help to validate the opportunity – bringing both human and financial capital to bear – but they can capture the attention and imagination of a generation of engineers and entrepreneurs in a way that we simply could not (at least not yet), even if we had a very large amount of capital to deploy. And that can only be good news, except perhaps for the management and shareholders of dominant incumbents like Visa:
“What we witnessed was truly a perverse form of competition,” said Ronald Congemi, the former chief executive of Star Systems, one of the regional PIN-based networks that has struggled to compete with Visa. “They competed on the basis of raising prices. What other industry do you know that gets away with that?”
Of course payment networks are classic “two-sided” markets, with strong natural tendencies towards monopoly providers (due to strong network effects and high barriers to entry. Further the structure of these markets allows providers to levy charges on only one side of the market (merchants) while seemingly offering the other side a free or inexpensive service. Last fall The Economist explained why, in such a market, regulation is often ineffective and can often actually produce worse outcomes in some cases:
The case for tight regulation seems strong, at first glance. In rich countries, where paying by plastic is now commonplace, the firms that run card-payment systems look like other utilities, which have long been subject to price caps. Visa and MasterCard are associations run on behalf of their member banks. Competition officials are usually wary of such shared ventures but accept that it is more efficient for rival banks to band together in one network in order to process payments and settle accounts. A common fee structure stops members from abusing the rule that retailers must take all cards issued with the association’s brand. It also obviates the need for countless bilateral deals between thousands of banks. Even so, regulators still fret that banks might use their combined heft to overcharge.
They need to tread carefully. Judging how much credit-card firms ought to charge for their services is trickier even than setting the right price for water or energy supplies. That is because the payment-card system is a “two-sided” market. What sets this type of enterprise apart is that it caters to two distinct groups of customers and each sort benefits the more custom there is from the other sort. Consumers will sign up for a credit-card brand if it is widely accepted as a means of payment. Merchants will more willingly accept a card if lots of consumers use it.
In my opinion, the best way to ensure good value to all the participants in the payments value chain is to encourage and facilitate competition: new approaches, new ideas, new entrants. PayPal has long been the poster-child for “start-up” innovation in financial services, but had seemed to have lost its way in stuck in the corporate bureaucracy of eBay. It’s great to see them breaking free of that and striving to re-ignite their creative and entrepreneurial juices. (Although I still think they would probably be better off independent of eBay…even better, how about a merger of an independent PayPal and an independent AWS: now that is a stock I would love to own!)
For several years now, it has been dead obvious to me that new and exponentially improving information and communications technologies would create the foundation upon which bright, ambitious entrepreneurs would build new companies and business models that will disrupt the moribund incumbents and their 20th century business models. And that’s why I started Nauiokas Park. We’ve made some good decisions along the way, and we’ve learned a lot. But one thing we got spectacularly wrong was our naive belief that leading incumbents in the financial services sector would embrace our vision and our proposition as an opportunity to hedge the strategic risk of continuing to rely (exclusively) on their existing business models. That they would look at the management failures and massive value destruction suffered by the traditional media and telecommunications companies and look to deploy multiple strategies to mitigate the risk of being caught unawares in the same way. But it would seem that they are uninterested. A toxic cocktail of hubris, myopia, inertia and institutional politics seems too often to blind them to the risks posed to their continued hegemony. As if admitting Christmas exists – let alone voting for it – would make it’s inevitable arrival more likely.
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!
– because they didn’t have the slightest idea what it means to compete in a world of information abundance and platforms, but that story is for another day…)
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