Starting from latest Square 10K, I investigate the dual nature of this business, analysing the 2 ecosystems that Square built: merchant and consumer.
A tale of two ecosystems: Square 10K
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How tokens could revolutionise the creators economy
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A post on the impact on artists' financial life of a new token-based economy.
My thesis is that the sector’s structure and dynamics will be completely reshaped by the tokenization of the creators' revenue stream and their sale to a plethora of investors/fans. And that this model will be potentially applicable to other categories
The Apple moment for financial services
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The argument of this post is that the Apple moment for financial services is coming and a new generation of fintech startups, built on engagement and coolness factor, is emerging very rapidly.
Beyonce and Monet: the first mass market app for DeFi
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Over the last few months, the Decentralized Finance ecosystem has grown at an impressive pace: every single metric you can look at shows double digits growth on a month by month basis. DeFi Users over time – source: Dune Analytics This is a great achievement, but it is a fact that so far speculation or high risk financial incentives have been the main adoption drivers for Defi (and the...
The Amazonization of retail payments
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The phenomenon of “Amazonization” refers to the wholesale disruption occurring across retail and eCommerce thanks to the leviathan-like presence of Amazon.com. Considering the platform shift happening in the retail payment space, I believe the same phenomenon of ‘Amazonization’ that happened to eCommerce will eventually happen to the retail Payments space. In this post you will find an...
A neobank stack
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Over the last few years I’ve spent a lot of time building lending and banking stacks. What used to require vast resources only 10 years ago, is today a much simpler and more inexpensive job, thanks to the enormous number of financial infrastructure businesses born in the last decade. The goals of the following 2 posts are: to highlight which are the key functional components of these stacks, to...
Bank runs in the 21th century
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We live in very special times, from many points of view. Essentially any aspect of our life is being disrupted and this wave of unusuality is impacting banks as well: banks are seeing their deposits going up, they are getting a lot of money, but, for once, that isn’t necessarily a good thing. The usual way: bank runs Usually people put their money in banks confident that they are safely stored...
The backbone of cross border transactions: correspondent banking
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A few weeks ago, while preparing my 10k analysis for Adyen, I came across a very interesting McKinsey report on Payments and stumbled into the following table on cross-border transfer flows and revenues: What really surprised me, even more than the huge revenue chuck of the B2B segment, was the disproportion between consumer and business segments and, at the same time, the...
Shopify, e-commerce eats finance
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The last session of the Fintech Product Guild `10k-a-month club` was centered around one the most interesting companies in circulation: Shopify. Shopify was established with the goal of making e-commerce very simple for anybody: the company provides a set of tools to bootstrap an online shop and essentially remove a lot of technical hurdles from the setup of an e-commerce, letting entrepreneurs...
The banking system, a giant settlement infrastructure
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A few weeks ago I noticed a tweet from one of the most interesting accounts I follow on Twitter, that of Holger Zschaepitz: Oops! Italy's Target2 liabilities have hit fresh ATH at €513bn. This increases the threat potential of the Italians. If #Italy were to leave the eurozone, the bulk of its liabilities would be lost. pic.twitter.com/LnDw5j1tlk— Holger Zschaepitz...