Technology, Capital Markets, Corporate Governance, Leadership, Entrepreneurship
Category: Investment Banks
There were too many quality CEOs to choose from when we went about selecting the "CEORater Technology CEO of the Year" for 2019. Rather than selecting a single "Technology CEO of the Year", we elected to select five top CEOs across five Technology categories: 1.) "PropTech", 2.) "FinTech: Payments", 3.) "Platform Companies", 4.) "FinTech: Capital … Continue reading CEORater 2019 Technology CEOs of the Year
With Michael Bloomberg throwing his hat into the ring for the 2020 Democratic nomination, many have speculated as to how Bloomberg would divest his equity stake in his namesake firm were he to win the Presidency. We don't expect Mr. Bloomberg to win the Office of the President nor would a sale necessarily be required … Continue reading Prospective Bloomberg LP Acquirers
Last Week I Participated on an AI-focused Panel at the SS&C Deliver Conference The panel - “Practical Applications for AI in Investment Operations & Accounting” - was especially enjoyable because the audience engaged. While much has changed since I last worked in an Investment Operations capacity in 1998, much remains the same - meaning there … Continue reading It’s “Early Days” for NLP. The Opportunities Are Many
What if the NFL were to convert to a premium subscription service? From a technical standpoint it would not be terribly difficult to migrate to a streaming service model. The NFL could build the direct-to-consumer platform on top of AWS, Azure or GCP. The NFL’s library isn’t nearly as vast as Disney’s nor Netflix’s. The … Continue reading The NFL as a Streaming ServicePremium
Some years ago many insurance carriers wrote tranches of long-term care (“LTC”) life insurance policies which have proved to be toxic. These “toxic” LTC policies - primarily written between 1999-2004 - were at the heart of a scathing critique of General Electric (tkr: GE) last week which ultimately accused the company of accounting fraud. While … Continue reading Toxic Long Term Care Policies: A Bane for Many. A Boon for Some.
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 TargetsPremium
Based on June quarter earnings call results, management teams have less visibility into Sales pipelines, Revenue forecasts and Profitability in the aggregate than several months ago. This in turn causes would be acquirers to haircut purchase price valuations if not walk away from deals entirely. In the former case, valuation haircuts typically either stall deal … Continue reading It Takes Two to Tango. Don’t Expect M&A Activity to Accelerate Anytime Soon
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
