David Durand, Advisor, Innovation and Advocacy
September 9th, 2020
David Durand, LL.L., B.Sc. chem., – Founder and Managing Partner of Durand Lawyers – Lawyer (Québec)[...]
Fintech Frenzy: Hype or Reality? A Closer Look at 6 Key Sectors
Fortune | Matt Harris | Aug 8, 2018
Matt Harris is a managing director at Bain Capital Ventures. He is consistently ranked as one of the top investors in fintech, having participated in the space since 2000.
I’ve been proven wrong once again.
For eight years running, I’ve predicted that fintech investment is going to plateau. Based on the start of 2018, it hasn’t yet. In fact, we saw more than $5.4 billion invested in fintech during the first quarter of the year, with no signs of slowing momentum. For perspective, fintech investment for all of 2014 was just under $4 billion, so that’s “5x” growth in four years. In 2001, per data from Venture Scanner, it was something like $300 million.
With that said, this whole “fintech” thing is kind of a charade. As I shared with attendees last month during our annual Fintech CEO Summit, co-hosted together with Nyca Partners, the CEOs in our portfolios don’t actually run “fintech businesses.” They run a payments business or a lending business, or they build investing technologies, or they sell to banks or insurance or real estate companies.
Regardless of what VCs tell limited partners, or how media cover the industry, these businesses don’t necessarily have much to do with each other (besides the obvious of moving money around).
So while the investment numbers are up in aggregate, each sub-sector has a very different story. And it’s worth diving in more deeply to understand what’s really going on.
Wealth/Investing: Race to the bank
Wealth tech companies get a steady 10% of fintech investment year after year. There’s a durable view that they show real opportunity for disruption. One of the more interesting trends right now is that all the wealth and investment companies that have achieved scale—like SoFi, Acorns, and Wealthfront (another disclosure: my team has backed Acorns)—are doing the same thing: They’re adding a checking account. You could paint with a broad brush and say they are all trying to become banks. Not necessarily licensed banks, but rather, leveraging third parties and new technologies to try to become a consumer’s primary financial partner.
See: Lifehacks for When a Robot Wants Your Job
This is really fascinating to me and raises a key question for our industry, and our society: Will consumers bail on traditional banks? Will they go to their employer with a new direct deposit authorization form and say “send my money to Betterment, to Acorns, to SoFi”? This is truly a new phenomenon. If it works, there’s a whole new era of fintech coming, where the banks go from the “Empire Strikes Back” phase that they’re in right now—and they start to worry again. It doesn’t mean wealth tech is toast if it doesn’t work, but it’s striking that all these companies had the same ideas at the same time.
Venture investment: $1.2 billion in 2017 (Source: CB Insights)
Startup energy: Steady as she goes
Insurance: Fast growth leads to full stack
Insurance startups are really at a pivot right now. Companies like Oscar or ZhongAn have scaled from nothing to billions a year in funding, and in the process, they’ve decided to be full stack. Historically, insurance startups Insureon and Zenefits were simply brokers or managing general agents, but increasingly there’s a take that startups need to be(come) carriers. I certainly understand that instinct—if you don’t control the product, someone else controls the capital. So, I get it. But return on equity for carriers tends to be around 9%. It doesn’t make sense for a VC to invest in a carrier. Not at all.
Moving forward, the insurance tech players need to figure this out. It will be the difference between insurance getting really transformed or having a bunch of brokers with fancy apps. And that second future is not going to create a lot of equity value.
Venture investment: $1.4 billion in 2017 (Source: CB Insights)
Startup energy: Awkward teenage years
Real Estate: Disruption in full effect
Real estate and crypto are the two areas where we see the most growth. In real estate, five of the venture world’s 10 most recent unicorns—Compass, OpenDoor, WeWork, Airbnb and UCommune—are real estate companies, whether you think of them that way or not. OpenDoor, for instance, invented a true “prop” brokerage, where they don’t broker a sale for 6%, but instead buy the property, find another buyer and make money on the spread. Zillow now says they’re doing the same thing, and there have been a bunch of fast followers. This incredibly stodgy industry—which hasn’t changed in a hundred years—is getting re-made.
See: Real estate crowdfunding in Canada: portal insights for 2017/18
Venture investment: $1.2 billion in 2017 (Source: PitchBook)
Startup energy: First-movers moving fast
Cryptocurrency/Blockchain: Time to get serious
What can we say about crypto? Last year at our Fintech CEO Summit, we talked about how people were going to go to jail for initial coin offerings (ICOs). No one has gone to jail yet, but it’s tricky. ICO volume is still frothy, with a peak of $4.1 billion raised in March but otherwise running at roughly $1.5 billion a month. Plus, the noise out of government is getting louder and clearer that this is not some sort of safe harbor.
Beyond ICOs, we think about the crypto space in three parts: the crypto investing ecosystem, enterprise blockchain, and distributed applications.
For the first, a key question is: Will crypto be an asset class? Provisionally, I believe the answer is “yes.” The investing ecosystem is now maturing nicely, and several pioneers like Basis and Compound (last disclosure: both are portfolio companies), are filling in key elements of market structure, assuming people want to trade crypto at scale more in the future.
Regarding enterprise blockchain, is it actually a standalone business? The market is thriving if you count press releases, but not if you look for revenue outside of proof-of-concept. We provisionally said “no” to this question in the early days, but we have great entrepreneurs working on it—and I’m sure they’ll prove us wrong.
See: ‘This Is Not a Passing Fad’: CFA Exam Adds Crypto, Blockchain Topics
Finally, distributed applications are the big prize. It’s clearly early days, but this is where the talent is heading. Will the Airbnb, Uber, and Amazon Web Services of the future simply be open source protocols powered by tokens that change the way we store our files, book our houses, book our travel, and manage our transportation? I don’t know when, but I believe we’ll get there. Someday.
Venture investment: $716 million in 2017 (Source: CB Insights)
Startup energy: Wild, wild west (and east and north and south)
Continue to the full article --> here
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association of Canada (NCFA Canada) is a cross-Canada non-profit actively engaged with cryptocurrency, blockchain, crowdfunding, alternative finance, fintech, P2P, ICO, STO, and online investing stakeholders globally. NCFA Canada provides education, research, industry stewardship, services, and networking opportunities to thousands of members and subscribers and works closely with industry, government, academia, community and eco-system partners and affiliates to create a strong and vibrant crowdfunding and fintech industry. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: ncfacanada.org
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KABN | Cara Buckspan | Dec 2, 2020 Biometric Solutions match user identity independently of mobile phones, tablets and computers, allowing transportability and safety of digital wallets and credentials across Internet enabled devices TORONTO, ON and GIBRALTAR / ACCESSWIRE / December 2, 2020 / The KABN Network together with KABN Systems NA Holdings Corp. (CSE:KABN) (the "Company" or "KABN North America"), a Canadian fintech company that specializes in continuous online identity verification, management and monetization in Canada and the US, today announces that its cloud-based biometric solutions will now be available on its digital identity management platform, Liquid Avatar (www.liquidavatar.com) enabling a further layer of identity verification that is independent of a user's device. "With more traditional services, like healthcare, education, verified purchasing and government services expanding online, we developed Liquid Avatar to allow users to use their verified identity to share what they want, when they want and with whom they want in an easy to use visually-enabled platform," said David Lucatch, CEO KABN North America. "Our goal is to reduce and, in some cases, eliminate the need to remember passwords or to present physical credentials in an ever expanding digital landscape. We hope to empower users to seamlessly ...
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CB Insights | Dec 2, 2020 Robinhood has made investing accessible for even the most inexperienced first-time investors. But while it has attracted millions of users with its no-fee, gamified approach, critics argue that the company's business model is not without risk. Almost overnight, Robinhood gave millions of first-time investors easy access to the stock markets by making trading simple and, perhaps more importantly, free. Since it launched in 2013, Robinhood has become one of the most popular and influential fintech apps in the world, growing to more than 13M users. With a valuation of over $11B, the company makes much of its revenue from razor-thin margins on vast volumes of individual trades — a business model that is as lucrative as it is potentially precarious. How Robinhood Works Robinhood’s primary means of driving revenue is making very small amounts of money on individual trades at scale. It does this by attracting large numbers of users using incentives such as “free” stocks and commission-free trading, retaining those users and encouraging trading activity via behavioral triggers in the app, and earning razor-thin margins on those trades through a process known as payment for order flow (PFOF). See: Robinhood Reportedly Hit By ...
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McKinsey & Company and Euro Banking Association | Nov 24, 2020 Payments and accounts services are at the core of banks’ offering to customers. They contributed about a third of European banks’ total revenues in 2019 (Exhibit 1), and represent banks’ leading source of customer interactions. Banks’ payments revenues have grown steadily at about 3 percent per year over the past six years. However, some specialist payments providers—processors, acquirers, schemes, and others—have achieved double-digit growth rates over the same period (Exhibit 2). This suggests that banks’ traditional role at the centre of the payments ecosystem may be coming under challenge. High ambitions, significant challenges Almost two-thirds of the executives and experts who were surveyed as part of a joint effort undertaken by McKinsey & Company and the Euro Banking Association between November 2019 and November 2020, believe that banks will continue to be the leading players in European payments over the next five years. See: Fintech Fridays EP46: Making Business Borderless: International Payments and Partnerships However, survey respondents and interviewees identified a number of challenges faced by banks. These included increasing competition (especially from tech companies and fintechs), the rise of technologies that could allow other payments providers to come ...
Read More
Lakestar | Insights | Nov 30, 2020 In September 2020, the European Commission proposed a comprehensive legislative package for crypto assets and blockchain technology as part of its broader European Digital Finance Strategy. Pēteris Zilgalvis, one of the key contributors to the proposal, provides insightful context to the current draft and makes a bold invitation for industry participants to contribute and provide feedback. Lakestar Partner Nicolas Brand in conversation with Pēteris Zilgalvis, Head of the Digital Innovation and Blockchain Unit at DG Connect within the European Commission. Pēteris has been working for over 25 years at the European Commission, the Council of Europe and the World Bank. Originally with a background in environmental law, he started covering financial markets, cryptocurrencies and blockchain innovation in 2013, when he was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford. He is also co-chair of the European Commission’s Fintech task force. Today we want to talk about two legislative packages recently proposed by the European Commission. First, regulation on Markets in Crypto Assets – or MiCA – and second, a pilot regime for market infrastructures based on distributed ledger technology. Both proposals together are 206 PDF pages full of content and thought leadership. Can ...
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AltFi | Daniel Lanyon | Nov 20, 2020 A boom in business banking has helped boost Starling Bank’s coffers. Strong momentum in new customer accounts and increasing revenues have prompted digital bank Starling to break even, according to a trading update for the three months to 31 October. Starling Bank, which was launched by Anne Boden five years ago, is the first ‘neo-bank’ to reach this milestone, the company said. In October Starling hit 1.42 million retail accounts compared to 827k, an increase of 71.7 per cent. Over the same period business accounts were the standout growth area with an increase of 245 per cent, from 74,000 to 256,000. Business accounts saw a 500 per cent increase in total deposits with the average amount held by SMEs also going up. Starling now has total customer deposits of c.£4bn. This has all helped Starling generate a positive operating profit of £0.8m for the month of October 2020, which represents £10.1m on an annualised basis. See: Neobanks Can’t Fight the COVID-19 “Flight to Quality” Investment Crowdfunding Advocates Join to Launch New Fintech Startup GUARDD in Move to Boost Secondary Markets for Exempt Securities In total Starling generated total operating income of £9m for the month of October 2020. This, it adds, translates to an annualised revenue ...
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Crowdfund Insider | JD Alois | Nov 24, 2020 The exempt securities marketplace can be arcane and challenging to manage for entrepreneurs seeking to raise capital. The advent of online capital formation has helped to democratize access to capital as well as streamline securities offerings but hurdles do remain. A new startup co-founded by several prominent names in the investment crowdfunding industry seeks to facilitate secondary transactions for private securities. Sherwood “Woodie” Neiss, co-founder of Crowdfund Capital Advisors, Doug Ellenoff, Managing Partner of Manhattan law firm of Ellenoff, Grossman, and Schole, and Jim Dowd, founder and CEO of North Capital Private Securities, have joined to launch GUARDD: A Fintech designed to support secondary market trading for private company securities, including digital assets/tokens to facilitate compliance with both federal transparency requirements and state blue sky laws. According to a note from the company, GUARDD enables the necessary disclosure and dissemination of private company information for investors, regulators, and market participants. This allows issuers to comply with federal and state financial disclosure requirements related to the trading of private company securities in secondary markets, thus addressing a challenge regarding exempt securities that tend to be illiquid. Overall, more liquidity can help price discovery ...
Read More
Paul | Weiss | Nov 18, 2020 China’s competition regulator, the State Administration for Market Regulation (“SAMR”), issued a consultation draft of the Anti-Monopoly Guidelines on the Sector of Platform Economies (the “Draft Guidelines”) on November 10, 2020. This marks China’s first major step in formulating a comprehensive regime to regulate competition among platform businesses operated on the Internet (the “Platform Economy”) and signals SAMR’s changed regulatory priorities with a focus on anti-competitive behavior in the Platform Economy. The Draft Guidelines attempt to address perceived shortcomings in applying traditional antitrust analysis to the Platform Economy. SAMR has drawn upon the experience of regulators and academics in this emerging area and attempted to consolidate the lessons learnt in various jurisdictions. The Draft Guidelines set out in detail the considerations that may be taken into account and the defenses that may be available, providing some guidance to platform businesses on how to achieve compliance. See: China Stops Jack Ma’s $35 Billion Ant IPO From Going Ahead DOJ files antitrust lawesuit challenging Visa’s $5.3 billion acquisition of Plaid While the Draft Guidelines are brief in length, only 23 provisions in total, they are wide‑ranging in their scope. Rather than an exhaustive review of ...
Read More
KABN | Cara Buckspan | Dec 2, 2020 Biometric Solutions match user identity independently of mobile phones, tablets and computers, allowing transportability and safety of digital wallets and credentials across Internet enabled devices TORONTO, ON and GIBRALTAR / ACCESSWIRE / December 2, 2020 / The KABN Network together with KABN Systems NA Holdings Corp. (CSE:KABN) (the "Company" or "KABN North America"), a Canadian fintech company that specializes in continuous online identity verification, management and monetization in Canada and the US, today announces that its cloud-based biometric solutions will now be available on its digital identity management platform, Liquid Avatar (www.liquidavatar.com) enabling a further layer of identity verification that is independent of a user's device. "With more traditional services, like healthcare, education, verified purchasing and government services expanding online, we developed Liquid Avatar to allow users to use their verified identity to share what they want, when they want and with whom they want in an easy to use visually-enabled platform," said David Lucatch, CEO KABN North America. "Our goal is to reduce and, in some cases, eliminate the need to remember passwords or to present physical credentials in an ever expanding digital landscape. We hope to empower users to seamlessly ...
Read More
Read More
CB Insights | Dec 2, 2020 Robinhood has made investing accessible for even the most inexperienced first-time investors. But while it has attracted millions of users with its no-fee, gamified approach, critics argue that the company's business model is not without risk. Almost overnight, Robinhood gave millions of first-time investors easy access to the stock markets by making trading simple and, perhaps more importantly, free. Since it launched in 2013, Robinhood has become one of the most popular and influential fintech apps in the world, growing to more than 13M users. With a valuation of over $11B, the company makes much of its revenue from razor-thin margins on vast volumes of individual trades — a business model that is as lucrative as it is potentially precarious. How Robinhood Works Robinhood’s primary means of driving revenue is making very small amounts of money on individual trades at scale. It does this by attracting large numbers of users using incentives such as “free” stocks and commission-free trading, retaining those users and encouraging trading activity via behavioral triggers in the app, and earning razor-thin margins on those trades through a process known as payment for order flow (PFOF). See: Robinhood Reportedly Hit By ...
Read More
Read More
SCC | Nov 10, 2020 Artificial Intelligence is a moving target when it comes to standardization. AI is progressing at a breakneck speed and expanding its reach worldwide as it becomes broadly incorporated into products and services. Virtually any emerging technology requires standards to provide the foundation for safety, performance, and interoperability, but AI has additional opportunities and threats associated with its use calling immediately for standards to be set. See: FFCON20 Week 7 Wrap-up: Artificial Intelligence in Fintech AI is a particularly complex technology since it can be used for information gathering, analysis, decision-making, and automation, and users are often unaware AI is driving it. For example, algorithms execute AI-based advertising on platforms like Facebook, targeting users according to their past and predicted-future behaviour. These systems do not automatically consider issues such as bias, discrimination, ethics, privacy, and human health and safety when they direct users to information or offer solutions. The Canadian Mirror Committee to JTC 1/SC 42 Artificial Intelligence “AIMS” to help. The committee has successfully advanced a project proposal for the first conformity assessment standard for AI at ISO/IEC, having garnered unanimous international support in the ballot. The Artificial Intelligence Management System (AIMS) standard will enable ...
Read More
Read More
The Globe and Mail | Matt Lundy and Mark Rendell | Nov 30, 2020 The federal government’s fall economic update included a series of tax proposals that carry implications for businesses and households. If enacted, the measures will cost you more to watch The Crown, but allow simpler deductions for the many Canadians currently working from home. Ottawa is looking to raise revenue in the coming years via the digital economy. Through a series of proposed taxes on digital goods and services, the federal government aims to raise $6.5-billion over the next five fiscal years (ending in 2025-26). Some of that would come from adding sales taxes to digital services such as Netflix, which currently doesn’t charge such taxes at the federal level. The bulk would come from a corporate tax on Big Tech companies, although details are coming next year. Canada, like many other countries, is working with the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development on a multilateral plan. However, Ottawa is “concerned about the delay in arriving at consensus” – hence the reason it’s prepared to go alone. Digital taxes Ottawa is looking to raise around $2.8-billion over the next five years by forcing foreign digital companies and e-commerce ...
Read More
Read More
TechCrunch | Ingrid Lunden | Nov 30, 2020 ServiceNow, the cloud-based IT services company, is making a significant acquisition today to fill out its longer-term strategy to be a big player in the worlds of automation and artificial intelligence for enterprises. It is acquiring Element AI, a startup out of Canada. Founded by AI pioneers and backed by some of the world’s biggest AI companies — it raised hundreds of millions of dollars from the likes of Microsoft, Intel, Nvidia and Tencent, among others — Element AI’s aim was to build and provision AI-based IT services for enterprises, in many cases organizations that are not technology companies by nature. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, a spokesperson told TechCrunch, but we now have multiple sources telling us the price was around $500 million. For some context, Element AI was valued at between $600 million and $700 million when it last raised money, $151 million (or C$200 million at the time) in September 2019. See: Element AI: The market is still figuring out how to share data with enterprise AI startups Even at $500 million, this deal would be ServiceNow’s biggest acquisition, although it would be a sizeable devaluation ...
Read More
Read More
McKinsey & Company and Euro Banking Association | Nov 24, 2020 Payments and accounts services are at the core of banks’ offering to customers. They contributed about a third of European banks’ total revenues in 2019 (Exhibit 1), and represent banks’ leading source of customer interactions. Banks’ payments revenues have grown steadily at about 3 percent per year over the past six years. However, some specialist payments providers—processors, acquirers, schemes, and others—have achieved double-digit growth rates over the same period (Exhibit 2). This suggests that banks’ traditional role at the centre of the payments ecosystem may be coming under challenge. High ambitions, significant challenges Almost two-thirds of the executives and experts who were surveyed as part of a joint effort undertaken by McKinsey & Company and the Euro Banking Association between November 2019 and November 2020, believe that banks will continue to be the leading players in European payments over the next five years. See: Fintech Fridays EP46: Making Business Borderless: International Payments and Partnerships However, survey respondents and interviewees identified a number of challenges faced by banks. These included increasing competition (especially from tech companies and fintechs), the rise of technologies that could allow other payments providers to come ...
Read More
Read More
Lakestar | Insights | Nov 30, 2020 In September 2020, the European Commission proposed a comprehensive legislative package for crypto assets and blockchain technology as part of its broader European Digital Finance Strategy. Pēteris Zilgalvis, one of the key contributors to the proposal, provides insightful context to the current draft and makes a bold invitation for industry participants to contribute and provide feedback. Lakestar Partner Nicolas Brand in conversation with Pēteris Zilgalvis, Head of the Digital Innovation and Blockchain Unit at DG Connect within the European Commission. Pēteris has been working for over 25 years at the European Commission, the Council of Europe and the World Bank. Originally with a background in environmental law, he started covering financial markets, cryptocurrencies and blockchain innovation in 2013, when he was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford. He is also co-chair of the European Commission’s Fintech task force. Today we want to talk about two legislative packages recently proposed by the European Commission. First, regulation on Markets in Crypto Assets – or MiCA – and second, a pilot regime for market infrastructures based on distributed ledger technology. Both proposals together are 206 PDF pages full of content and thought leadership. Can ...
Read More
Read More
AltFi | Daniel Lanyon | Nov 20, 2020 A boom in business banking has helped boost Starling Bank’s coffers. Strong momentum in new customer accounts and increasing revenues have prompted digital bank Starling to break even, according to a trading update for the three months to 31 October. Starling Bank, which was launched by Anne Boden five years ago, is the first ‘neo-bank’ to reach this milestone, the company said. In October Starling hit 1.42 million retail accounts compared to 827k, an increase of 71.7 per cent. Over the same period business accounts were the standout growth area with an increase of 245 per cent, from 74,000 to 256,000. Business accounts saw a 500 per cent increase in total deposits with the average amount held by SMEs also going up. Starling now has total customer deposits of c.£4bn. This has all helped Starling generate a positive operating profit of £0.8m for the month of October 2020, which represents £10.1m on an annualised basis. See: Neobanks Can’t Fight the COVID-19 “Flight to Quality” Investment Crowdfunding Advocates Join to Launch New Fintech Startup GUARDD in Move to Boost Secondary Markets for Exempt Securities In total Starling generated total operating income of £9m for the month of October 2020. This, it adds, translates to an annualised revenue ...
Read More
Read More
Crowdfund Insider | JD Alois | Nov 24, 2020 The exempt securities marketplace can be arcane and challenging to manage for entrepreneurs seeking to raise capital. The advent of online capital formation has helped to democratize access to capital as well as streamline securities offerings but hurdles do remain. A new startup co-founded by several prominent names in the investment crowdfunding industry seeks to facilitate secondary transactions for private securities. Sherwood “Woodie” Neiss, co-founder of Crowdfund Capital Advisors, Doug Ellenoff, Managing Partner of Manhattan law firm of Ellenoff, Grossman, and Schole, and Jim Dowd, founder and CEO of North Capital Private Securities, have joined to launch GUARDD: A Fintech designed to support secondary market trading for private company securities, including digital assets/tokens to facilitate compliance with both federal transparency requirements and state blue sky laws. According to a note from the company, GUARDD enables the necessary disclosure and dissemination of private company information for investors, regulators, and market participants. This allows issuers to comply with federal and state financial disclosure requirements related to the trading of private company securities in secondary markets, thus addressing a challenge regarding exempt securities that tend to be illiquid. Overall, more liquidity can help price discovery ...
Read More
Read More
Paul | Weiss | Nov 18, 2020 China’s competition regulator, the State Administration for Market Regulation (“SAMR”), issued a consultation draft of the Anti-Monopoly Guidelines on the Sector of Platform Economies (the “Draft Guidelines”) on November 10, 2020. This marks China’s first major step in formulating a comprehensive regime to regulate competition among platform businesses operated on the Internet (the “Platform Economy”) and signals SAMR’s changed regulatory priorities with a focus on anti-competitive behavior in the Platform Economy. The Draft Guidelines attempt to address perceived shortcomings in applying traditional antitrust analysis to the Platform Economy. SAMR has drawn upon the experience of regulators and academics in this emerging area and attempted to consolidate the lessons learnt in various jurisdictions. The Draft Guidelines set out in detail the considerations that may be taken into account and the defenses that may be available, providing some guidance to platform businesses on how to achieve compliance. See: China Stops Jack Ma’s $35 Billion Ant IPO From Going Ahead DOJ files antitrust lawesuit challenging Visa’s $5.3 billion acquisition of Plaid While the Draft Guidelines are brief in length, only 23 provisions in total, they are wide‑ranging in their scope. Rather than an exhaustive review of ...
Read More
Read More
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