YouSaid · the spoken record

Brett King

lines on the record: 28
first: 2018-04-05
most recent: 2018-04-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It's been a great seat to kind of watch an industry develop. We're talking a lot about fintech here over the last five years, like it's something new. There is a great set of public companies who've developed over the last 20 years and create a great investable class of payments companies and data companies and information services and software companies in the space that are truly kind of driving the way we consume and conduct commerce every day. But again, I think the most exciting thing for me has really been the last five years when we're really seeing fintech innovation, not just here in the US, but really on a global basis. And it seems like we're riding part of that broader wave where it's just changing the way we interact and consume and transact on a daily basis. I think because of the technology, whether it's mobile, big data, cloud, it's really given the ability to leapfrog how we think about financial services and how we think about basic things like a payment transaction going forward. It's been a fantastic seat, but it's also a really exciting time to be in the space.”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, Jeff, you've been in this space, roughly speaking, for 16 years or so. What's most surprised you about how it's changed and what are some of the things that you never thought possible that we're actually seeing today?”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't have the embedded incumbents here, like the US because they don't have the embedded infrastructure and point of sale systems. They're doing that in a much more innovative and digital way, whether it's online or through their mobile phones. So kind of fascinating parts of the world.”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, to be honest, I think you asked the question at the front about investment banking dialogue, and I would say there is more and more of our dialogue happening outside the U.S. Obviously developed markets are tremendous, great total addressable markets. But if you think about kind of the next layer of fintech, it's definitely happening in Asia, where again, you just have large swaths of population, you have this great growth of middle consumer class who's just starting to engage in financial services, you have some level of regulatory or government support, you have people going straight to mobile devices. So all the kind of secular factors that you'd want to see are in place. The other area we're seeing that tremendously is in Latin America, where again, even though the economic environment in certain countries has been difficult more recently, you do see consumers kind of rushing into this technology. So Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, we see a lot of innovation going on in these markets. And some of it looks a lot similar to what's going on in the US. But again, you see them because they”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Specifically in tech enabled lending was an area that has gone through a period of volatility, and I think will continue to evolve in this benign credit environment as we think about the next recessionary environment. They're going to have to be prepared for that. And it's interesting because I think a lot of the things that they've done are actually feeling more like a traditional financial services firm versus a tech firm. So they have incredible technology, incredible user interface, but their compliance and infrastructure was probably lacking versus where it should be. And so a lot of spend on those type of infrastructure actually a lot of infusing traditional financial services talent risk managers from large Wall Street or Boulder's bracket firms go into these startup companies and developing risk systems and risk management systems that could help them weather the storm whether it's through the next credit crisis or as they continue on a fast growth pace.”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's interesting because we're starting to see again those successful fintechs as well as some of the fintechs that have taken their base model as far as they go to think about what's the second or third leg to their stool. So to the extent I was a robo advisory doing direct to consumer, now I may be doing with businesses, small businesses, maybe I have a pension offering. Maybe for a higher fee you can actually Skype or FaceTime with some certified financial planner. And so they're adding on to services. There's companies that were doing point of sale payments now they're doing lending because they have all the merchant data. And so again, we're starting them to see morph into more traditional services. But the key theme is that they're continuing to do that in a very fintech friendly way.”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think a lot of that was around China and just the shifting regulatory landscape over there. So obviously China has been a market that has embraced fintech probably more than others, particularly in the P2P lending space. And there's a vast amount of opportunity, as we talked about, a vast amount of white space over there, but there's still kind of a moving regulatory landscape there as they think about where that fits in the broader financial services system in China. So I think between some of the regulatory changes there and some of the poor performance of the fintech IPOs out of China at a smaller scale that kind of led to a little decrease in volume. But so far already in 2018, we've seen a pickup and there's a number of large entities over there that are really going to push forward and either go public or continue to raise money at high valuations.”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was an interesting year because, again, as I said at the start, we are definitely starting to see a maturation of the investments in the cycle as well. So it was a record year, but it was also a record year for the number of large financing rounds. So there were actually 35 rounds greater than 100 million into individual companies. I think 20 of those here in the US, the rest overseas. And we also saw startup investing in fintech at its lowest level since 2012. So down about 23% over the”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For sure. I think we're on the precipice of that. I would characterize this wave as really being focused probably more operational. If you look at the prior waves, they were much more focused on user experience and front-end platforms and getting people comfortable with transaction and financial services and kind of a mobile-like way. I think those are table stakes now. If you look at this fourth wave that we're entering, whether it's AI, Internet of Things, blockchain, which we talked about, it's really, again, getting at the cost structure of underlying financial services, embedding things like AI and workflow processes to make banks better underwriters, better marketers, retain customers better, better at customer service.”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talked about earlier, where from a fintech startup perspective, some of these businesses are reaching their maturity, their scale, their fundraising cycle, and they haven't gotten to the size or return that their investors want. At the same time, they still have great technology, great people, great innovative entrepreneurial culture that the banks don't have. On the flip side, the banks have the customer brand, the customer scale, the need for fintech and digital strategy now. And so we're seeing much more dialogue, two-way dialogue. We're seeing much more cooperation, much more partnerships, and we're actually seeing a lot of investment by traditional financial services into these fintech startups.”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And again, we did see the rise of the big tech companies looking at financial services, but for that reason, we didn't see them crossing the line to become a bank because regulatory is hard and complex and can definitely have impacts on the other side of their business. But in the second wave, we saw the incumbents react, the reaction wave when the economic environment got a little bit better and some of the incumbent financial institutions got their sea legs back underneath them. They started to do competitive things to fight this fintech onslaught. And part of that was innovation labs, fintech incubators, the return of the corporate venture arm, which we saw during the dot-com days, and some of these consortium approaches that we saw as well. And it was, again, let's bind together and go against this third-party threat, these fintech startups. And they started to build some of their own technology as well because they had the capital to do so. And then we entered the third wave of fintech, which we're currently in now, which is kind of this cooperation partnership wave, which I”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And frankly, that was overdue in some level. A lot of other industries had already been massively disrupted. And it's really the fear of regulation that's kept some of the Silicon Valley folks out of this industry.”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We talked a little bit about the first wave, which was kind of post the global financial crisis. Banks and incumbent financial institutions were on their heels a little bit. And that was because of this regulatory change, this technology change, this consumer adoption of things like social media and how they were conducting omnicommerce. And so it was a confluence of factors, basically a West Coast mentality, a venture capital, people who were forming companies in the cloud, who were getting their companies to market very quickly. But when it came to financial services, it was still clunky or difficult or it cost too much. And so we started to get this mindset out of West Coast Tech, basically saying it doesn't have to be this hard. There could be some disruption or potentially disintermediation in financial services. And that's when we saw the rise of these fintech startups filling the void. And that was kind of the first wave, which we called the disruption phase.”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a huge win for them and their investors. And so I think success will be measured by valuation and by outcome for their investors. But we are starting to see some disruption or at least some competitive reaction by the incumbents as well.”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The jury is still out, but again, like I said at the beginning, we are starting to see some success stories where they're really getting traction, whether it's from a brand perspective or scale or profitability perspective. So I do think there is some disruption occurring. I don't think there's much disintermediation, but it's definitely having an impact. And you could see that because the incumbent financial institutions are talking about it and making investments and adding it to their strategy, their digital strategy. What I would say though is that These are such giant markets. If you think about the level of unsecured consumer and small business credit in the United States, it's like $13 trillion. So for these fintech startups to be successful, these are such large total addressable markets that they really don't have to be all that successful from a market share perspective to create...”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Since the early days of the emergence of financial technology, this latest round of financial technology, there's been a pretty healthy debate about how much of the market the upstarts will take. Are the large banks in the credit card companies, which have been around forever and have big customer bases, going to be able to crowd out the small players and adapt or are some of these startups going to get scale and sort of displace the current industry? Or is it too soon to tell?”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is because they bring the flow, they bring the volume, they bring the brand and the infrastructure. But what they are doing is picking a fintech startup in the middle to kind of serve as the platform. Because again, a lot of this is about speed to market, build versus buy. We might as well, if they already have a infrastructure and technology going in the blockchain, we'll just circle around that, spend our dollars, spend our volume, and that will really become our platform and our industry-wide solution going forward.”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like the wealth management side with millennials, it's kind of early days in blockchain, but that doesn't mean it's not getting a lot of investment and focus because the fundamental problem that it's trying to solve for capital markets participants, and again, it can be applied to mortgage or title insurance or anything that has that general ledger framework to it is this cost disadvantage now and whether that's because of ongoing regulatory burdens, competitive conditions, low volatility trading environments, there's this desire to make ROE better. the way they're going to do that is to attack the cost side and blockchain specifically when it's embraced by a large consortium of market participants has the ability to do that so i would say right now it's kind of early days but i do think there's a lot of focus a lot of investment a lot of smart minds thinking about that in a consortium way as far as how can we solve this industry-wide ROE crunch.”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think what we're really seeing in the asset management space is the rise of passive investing. And I think if you think about millennials and what they're really focused on, they value their free time, they value choice, they value the ability to change their mind. And that's where I think some of these robo-advisory platforms that are built on passive ETFs and pick from one of 25 versus sit in front of a financial planner and go through your full financial health and take advice. I think they're well saluted to the kind of millennial culture and mindset. And so I think they'll be very successful. And we've seen incumbents develop that channel because they want to access that. They want to be there when that millennial does get into a different wealth stage.”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's still early days because obviously millennials are just entering the workforce and starting to build their wealth, so they're not as dramatic as the baby boomers and that demographic shift. But overall, if you think about how millennials want to interact with financial services, whether it's wealth management or retail banking, it's pretty much how they want to interact with any type of commerce. It's a mobile-based, tablet-based user interface, very slick, very easy, real-time, and very transparent on their own time. If you think about the rise of robo advisories and wealth management, that's where we're seeing millennials really gather that. And I think incumbent financial institutions like life insurers and asset management firms and now banks are flocking to that robust advisory technology as a new channel to get that millennial customer.”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Opportunities we have for banks now is actually carrying on two way dialogue with a lot of the fintech startups because the fintech startups, some of them have kind of gotten to a certain scale, gotten to a certain point where without another step, they're not going to get any bigger on their own and maybe their fundraising is starting to dry up. And so having a conversation with a large incumbent financial institution like a retail bank where they have customers, they have brand, they have distribution, but they don't have speed to market when it comes around technology or this innovative startup culture. That's why we are seeing much more cooperation, much more partnerships, much more investments by financial services in the retail banking landscape to kind of kickstart their fintech dialogue and strategies.”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you go back seven years ago posted the global financial crisis, retail banking was in a difficult place. There was this regulatory burden that was not as evident as it was before. There was performance issues. They were going through tough times. They needed more capital. So there wasn't a lot of mindshare or dollars to think about technology or innovation. And at the same time, there was this public perception that banks were broken or banks were wrong. And so into this void came all these startups with slick user interfaces. They were more transparent. They were done in a mobile way where consumers could really shop when they wanted to versus having to go into a branch or talk to someone about their intimate financial background and health. And so it was into this void that these startups formed. Now that we're in much more of a benign environment, the regulatory environment is at least more stable than it was. You're finally starting to see banks react. And so one of the big”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly right, exactly right. And so I think those two trends have hit home in markets like India and China, and that's why we're seeing widespread mobile adoption, widespread use of technology and digitization of financial services in those markets.”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's really a fascinating part of the world, and I think part of the issue with some of the developed markets like the US was one there was a number of incumbents who wanted to be part of the mobile wallet wars or party and want to have their own solution. And there was a lot of economics or customers at risk. And then second of all, there was a lot of legacy infrastructure here, like point of sale at retailers or ATMs or other things that really don't exist when you go to markets like China and India. Those consumers are going straight to mobile, straight to digital when they think about purchasing. No reason.”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Retail environment as well. And so right now, I think there's a burden on traditional payments companies, financial services companies, and retailers to kind of be everywhere for everyone until they kind of sort out how they want to conduct commerce.”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, if you look over the last five years and you think, for example, how a mobile phone was used in 2008 versus 2018, it's dramatically different as far as just making phone calls versus now, that's how we start our shopping experience. So whether it's in shopping for financial services or shopping for retail services, commerce has fundamentally changed over the last five to ten years. And one, there's just more form factors, whether it's mobile, credit card, QR codes, key fobs, tokens. There's a number of different ways to pay and a number of different device types. And so that just brings complexity around payments, where there was less five years ago. And so it's an increasingly complex environment. And then to your point, it's an omnichannel environment. Whether you're shopping for financial services, for grandma, there needs to be a branch. For you and me, there needs to be online banking or ATMs and for our kids there's going to be mobile or whatever follows next. And the same thing in a”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would say is just the financial services companies that we cover are clearly focused on technology now, where they may have been distracted because of capital or regulatory reasons over the prior five years. It's really been a critical part of their investment strategy, of their build strategy, and obviously as part of their communication strategy. So it's a fascinating time right now. And obviously blockchain and Bitcoin, everyone wants to talk about that as well.”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going on at least the sixth or seventh year here in the fintech cycle that we've been going through coming out of the great financial recession. And we're starting to see a couple different trends emerge. That's really taking up the majority of our dialogue with our investment banking clients. First, I would say there's a maturation overall of where we are late stage cycle, and that has led to real emerging companies no longer being startups anymore. They're actual real companies with real scale, and scale not just coming from the number of active users they have or the eyeballs they're getting, they're making real money, they're making profits, they're going public. So I think there is a class of companies separating themselves from the pack. Second, I think the traditional fintech incumbents are starting to try to get more tech. So they're investing more in software, they're talking more about APIs, they realize that's the world's going, and they've been kind of shown the light by a lot of these emerging fintech companies. And then third thing I...”
2018-04-05 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · From Mobile Wallets to Blockchain: How Fintech is Growing Up · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT