Digital Banking 21

Startups

Dear all,

if you go out for dinner tonight and one of the conversation topics may be the startups phenomenon – maybe this is not what you are considering for an appealing dinner talk. If this is the case, you better read this post - www.fastcompany.com/3052607/the-future-of-work/the-state-of-the-most-influential-startups-on-earth -, that will provide you with an overview of startups world state-of-the-art …and plenty of data the other dinners are unaware of.

One of the data that has called my attention is that capitalization of the largest unicorns - 140 of them - is still below Apple market value. Apple has presented results this week; it has broken records worldwide and across all industries. Everyone focus on the headlines, but I haven’t found any analysis of the drivers. Forget this Q revenues and try to have a longer term vision. Watch the evolution of the past 10 years.

I am struck by profit growing faster than revenue, hence its efficiency ratio should have been substantially improved. They take care on where and how they spend their money. I accessed their web page today and they have ~ 6 product lines for a 7 billion people market - are we so different from each other after all?. As simple as that.

But back to the world of startups, back to this subset called Fintech, where I wanted to share with you two things:

• The post, http://bankinnovation.net/2015/10/6-takeaways-from-sibos-2015-in-singapore/, which has some thoughts to reflect on ... though the primary one should be that, even the differences between Fintech offerings is endlessly fascinating to a few of us in the business, to most people the only interesting thing is how to get all that money stuff done as quickly and cheaply as possible so that one can do something more interesting.

• An infographic on the digitization of banking by Efma, which contains many interesting details. And it has called my attention that there are 1,900 financial apps in the iTunes App Store beginning with the letter “A”.

And I would love to end today with something spectacular. We heard about it a couple years ago. The future is here. http://www.fastcoexist.com/3052540/will-sweden-be-the-first-country-to-get-rid-of-cash

Have a nice week