The embedded banking opportunity is clear, but choosing the right partner might be less so — You probably won’t be very surprised to hear that the Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) market is pretty hot right now. …

Banking-as-a-Service might be en vogue, but that doesn’t mean it’s well understood — I came across this impressive twitter thread a while back from Nicolas Benady, who runs a new Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform called Swan. It explains why BaaS, Core Banking and Open Banking solutions are totally different. But, to our mind, some of the confusion is justified. While today there is a…

Enterprise software analysis is broken. Here’s a new, digital age, methodology to fix it. — When was the last time you went into a branch (even pre-COVID)? Or the last time you paid for something in cash? Financial services have been gradually digitizing for years. It started with digital distribution of existing services. And then the services and service providers started to change. …

Evaluating strategic options in a world where businesses have never been easier to start, but never been harder to scale — We’ve talked often about the diminishing importance of supply-side economies of scale. In its simplest expression, digitization flips the industrial age equation. What was scarce in the industrial age was supply; what is scarce in the digital age is demand (attention). In the industrial age, scaling supply meant mass production…

Crisis is not the time to stop all IT projects, but to double down on the ones that really matter — For many, ourselves included, the extent of the current crisis came as a bit of surprise. At first, we thought we had a MERS- or SARS-like crisis: a novel virus, but which would be limited to a single region of the world. …

The banking software market is reconfiguring around the demands of the digital economy — and value is accruing to new systems of intelligence — In Clayton Christensen’s Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits, he talks about the “reciprocal processes of commoditization and de-commoditization” that occur in technology value chains when product architectures change: “The law states that when modularity and commoditization cause attractive profits to disappear at one stage in the value chain, the…