Technology, Capital Markets, Corporate Governance, Leadership, Entrepreneurship
Category: Investment Banks
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 Targets
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 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
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.Premium
We used Google to search for various terms related to Artificial Intelligence to gauge popularity. We ran queries using Google's trend analysis to gauge the popularity of various search terms related to Artificial Intelligence. You may access our results here. We executed Google searches on the following five search terms: "AI", "Machine Learning", "Deep Learning", … Continue reading AI, Machine Learning and More
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
