TEK2day

Operating at the Intersection of Technology and the Capital Markets

    Tag: Square

    • Walmart E-Commerce Continues To Scale. A Spin-Off Could Unlock Shareholder Value.

      Walmart’s (tkr: WMT), E-Commerce offerings continued to scale with revenues of $17.1 billion in Q4 and $60.3 billion for the year. E-Commerce accounted for approximately 11% of Walmart’s total Net Sales for the year ended January 31st. WMT E-Commerce is larger than many e-commerce companies from a revenue standpoint including PayPal, Shopify, Square and Wayfair…

    • Banks Need To Try Something New

      Last night it was reported that M&T Bank (tkr: MTB) would acquire People’s United (tkr: PBCT) for more than $7 billion. These “scale” acquisitions between regional banks simply delay the inevitable. What is required is the hard work of evolving business models and service delivery capabilities. More of the same won’t suffice. Regional banks are…

    • It’s Difficult For Legacy Payments Companies To Learn New Tricks

      Legacy payments companies still have not fully embraced mobile applications. For example, Global Payments (tkr: GPN) chooses to white label certain mobile payment applications from Apriva rather than fully own its technology stack. All mobile applications are not created equal. The user experience differs dramatically across mobile apps and is primarily a function of the…

    • The Cryptocurrency Craze Is Driving Digital Wallet Innovation and Adoption

      More than a decade after the initial Tech media buzz digital wallets are enjoying adoption largely driven by stimulus check processing and more recently the cryptocurrency craze. The pace of innovation is accelerating as digital wallets incorporate equity trade execution, cryptocurrency transaction capabilities and more. Many will know of PayPal / Venmo, Square’s Cash App,…

    • What’s Next for Fiserv, FIS and Global Payments?

      Fiserv (tkr: FISV), FIS (tkr: FIS) and Global Payments (tkr: GPN) need to re-tool their product and service portfolios to better compete with modern Fintech platforms such as Square (tkr: SQ), PayPal/Venmo (tkr: PYPL), Stripe (private) and others. Tech giants Alphabet (tkr: GOOGL), Amazon (tkr: AMZN) and Apple (tkr: AAPL) also loom large in the…

    • FOMO Is Stronger Than Ever

      FOMO is stronger than ever given social media, the 24-hour news cycle and various fintech apps that facilitate equity trading. FOMO (“Fear Of Missing Out”), is stronger than ever, especially among the retail trading community. Retail traders are flush with cash coming off of 2020’s Federal Government issued checks and enhanced unemployment benefits. Technology has…

    • SolarWinds Is One of Many Cyberbreaches to Come

      Early last week we wrote about SolarWinds and the potential for another leg to drop. SolarWinds has a long road to recovery. Cyberbreaches of that sort don’t engender customer trust and often lead to significant customer churn. What other companies may be at risk of a cyberbreach? Tickers mentioned: AMZN, AVGO, CERN, EFX, EXPGF, FICO,…

    • The Free Trading Business Is Getting Crowded. Webull and Square Have an Edge.

      Webull – the China-based fintech firm – is the latest entry in the commission-free trading space along with Robinhood, Square and Fidelity to name several. These zero commission stock trading apps have enabled the equity bubble in part. A key element of these platforms is fractional share trading which enables retail equity traders to buy…

    • CyberSecurity As A Competitive Differentiator

      Were I to go to market with an Enterprise Software product portfolio I would stress our CyberSecurity capability in all product marketing efforts. It doesn’t matter what the core product offering is – CRM, HRMS, POS, Payroll – CyberSecurity must be baked into the offering. To make CybeSecurity an afterthought is to risk losing revenue…

    • CEORater 2020 Technology CEOs of the Year

      We selected five top CEOs across five Technology categories. Three of the five CEOs are founders: FinTech – Payments: Jack Dorsey, Square (tkr: SQ) FinTech – Capital Markets/ Asset Mgt.: Jeffrey Sprecher, Intercontinental Exchange (tkr: ICE) Information Services: Jerre Stead, Clarivate Analytics (tkr: CCC) Platform Companies: Satya Nadella, Microsoft (tkr: MSFT) PropTech: Andrew Florance, CoStar…