Technology, Capital Markets, Corporate Governance, Leadership, Entrepreneurship
Category: Fintech
We recently wrote that “Scale Matters in Tech”. Technology companies that have captured the number 1 or number 2 position within a particular vertical enjoy Economies of Scale including: 1.) automatically getting a seat at the table for sales bakeoffs, 2.) job seekers naturally gravitate toward market leaders, 3.) prospective acquisition targets will find you, … Continue reading Three Activist Investor Targets
LP’s are increasingly hiring third-party expert firms to verify fees payable to Private Equity managers. When I first read this news I was surprised to learn that many LP’s don’t have an operationalized process around validating management fee schedules and payment processing. Apparently I was naive in thinking that PE managers supplied LPs with a … Continue reading LP Fee Verification & Administration as a Service
One of the services we provide at CEORater includes a CEO Personality Profile derived from Natural Language Processing applied to earnings call transcripts. Research out of Stanford University - Charles OReilly and David Larcker - demonstrates a correlation between CEO Personality and company outcomes. Separate efforts apply similar analytic methods toward evaluating institutional investors. Institutional … Continue reading When Evaluating Institutional Investors Ferraris Are A Red Flag.
We tip our hat to LSE for thinking outside the box, moving beyond a commodity business to acquire a somewhat unique data set (one of the big three with Bloomberg and Factset). Blackstone Group (BX.N) acquired a majority stake in Refinitiv from Thomson Reuters (TRI.TO) in October 2018, valuing the company at the time at … Continue reading LSE to Potentially Acquire Refinitiv (fmr. Thomson Reuters Data Business) for $27 Billion
Facebook imagines a future in which consumers will pay for online and offline services with its cryptocurrency - Libra. Our view is that Libra will eventually enjoy broad adoption. The cryptocurrency floodgates are open, it’s primarily a question as to how Libra and others will be regulated. Regulation boils down to the size of the … Continue reading Facebook Calibra and Libra.
Companies mentioned: Accenture (ACN), Alibaba (BABA), AWS (AMZN), Azure (MSFT), Bottomline Technologies (EPAY), Broadridge (BR), DataRobot (Pvt.), GCP (GOOG), IHS Markit (INFO), Oracle (ORCL), Palantir (Pvt.), Qlik (Pvt.), Solera (Pvt.), SS&C (SSNC), Tibco (Pvt.), Verisk (VRSK). Accenture’s CEO of North America, Julie Sweet, will become CEO of Accenture effective September 1st 2019. Ms. Sweet is … Continue reading Accenture Is Preparing to Double-Down on M&A. We Share Our Ideas for Likely Target Areas.
FTC slaps Facebook on the wrist and levies $5B fine. Combining legacy Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. A grand product strategy or slick tactical move to avert regulators? Facebook only found religion as it relates to user privacy after the FTC threatened to break up the company into three separate entities - 1) legacy Facebook, 2) … Continue reading Checkmate. Facebook Wins.
Our experience is that it is best to take action during disruptive periods - or better yet - at the first signs of trouble. The "wait and see" approach often leads to irrelevance and ultimately death. Deutsche Bank plans to shed 18,000 jobs and exit the institutional trading business while simultaneously investing in technology. This … Continue reading “Wait and See” Does Not Constitute A Strategy
Two-factor authentication or 2FA is virtually painless and greatly mitigates the risk of compromised personal and enterprise data. People don’t like to be told “take your medicine” much less read about it. However, an ounce of prevention goes a long way. Whether you wish to add a layer of security beyond the common password to … Continue reading Use Two-Factor Authentication (“2FA”) to Reduce the Risk of Compromised Data
Identifying acquisition targets is an arduous process. Machine learning can help. It is somewhat easier to identify acquisition targets today than it was 10 years ago given the advent of private company databases such as Bob's Guide, Crunchbase, CB Insights, PitchBook and others. However, we have yet to find a data service that combines a … Continue reading M&A Deal Sourcing – A Significant Opportunity for Machine Learning
