Passive investing has led to excessive Corporate Control by the Big Three The growth of passive investing is not limited to the ETF wrapper. Other indexing investment products have also been growing, with mutual funds dominating. Vanguard has pushed the industry towards such investment products with low expense ratios. Vanguard boasts an average expense ratio…

AntForest, an award winning Techfin gamification app – Global Climate Action In early December, the Two lake forum held an event in Zurich around Fintech & Wealth management. The three Z: Zurich, Zheioang, and HangZhou; discussed about the strengths and weaknesses of the two CHs – China and Confederation Helvetica (CH) – and how to…

The Crosslend & Solaris Bank partnership is key to the European debt Securitization market Santander Innoventures has not been shy in investing in Fintechs in the lending space. Kabbage is one of their earlier and well known portfolio companies and strategic investments. Several others that offer banking services in Emerging markets, offer loans. In October, they…

Walmart, the retail giant combining Bricks, Clicks & Voice Retail giant Walmart is not included in the FANGs or the GAFAs but is part of the THWAC — Target, HomeDepot, Walmart, Amazon, and Costco. Walmart is also the №1 employer in the US, ahead of Amazon, the e-commerce giant that is also in other businesses like cloud, delivery,…

Zero-commission brokers selling order flow are the new intermediaries. Who will disrupt them? In October the US market witnessed the Robinhood effect. Schwab slashed its stock commissions to zero, which in turn forced TD Ameritrade, E-trade, Interactive Brokers, Ally Invest, and Fidelity to follow suit over the next few days. Schwab called this the zero-commission…

Will Robo advisors take control of the ETF market? Betterment and Wealthfront are 11 and 8 years old. They set the tone in the market for Robo-Advisors, that are neither Robots nor Advisors as Paolo Sironi kept saying more than 4 yrs ago. They got leapfrogged by the incumbents which as of today manage 10…

Digital deployment in small and medium sized banks remains anemic Temenos released in April its annual report[1] on the State of digital sales in banking and Jim Marous provided insights in Banks Not Meeting Digital Sales Expectations. In late August, in The Illusion of Digital Transformation in Banking he categorized the digital readiness of banks in 5…

Spotting `dump pipes` during the re-bundling of banking, is not easy `Buy versus build` continues to be a discussion for incumbents.  Shared infrastructure allows for rapid deployment, economies of scale, and expansion in additional markets. On the other hand, incumbents have cultural issues and technology integration challenges that are real. Increased Saas model adoption and…