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How to disrupt Wall Street

cdixon.org

11–20 of 26 posts

Re: How to disrupt Wall Street

#11
post #3

A Cynical Theory: anyone with the power, money and government connections needed to disrupt Wall St. will choose instead to join Wall St. when the option is given to them. Fight the good fight or join the party? Those who aren't willing to make the right choice will be weeded out of the system before they are influential enough to disrupt. Any techniques used by outsiders who try to disrupt the party anyway will be m…

Reminds me of the mess created by both telcos and Google lobbying on net neutrality.

Re: How to disrupt Wall Street

#12
Disrupting Wall St. implies not just making a "new" UI/UX/Interface for banking clients (like Mint or Square), it implies looking at changing the Banks inherent Business Model. Can Silicon Valley pull it off? Well, from a foreigners perspective (commenting from Lisbon, Portugal) Silicon Valley has a very engineer centric perspective on problem solving, and while engineering inputs may be useful, this is not an engineering problem, it's an economics problem.

Take P2P loans (Zoppa, Prosper, Lending Club) for instance. Why aren't they gaining traction? Because while they try to change the main Business Model for banks, they fail to solve the fundamental problem of Information Assimetry. That's the "reason d'etre" of the Banks. Banks business model is not just "skin you alive in loan fee's", they solve what we economists call "Adverse Selection" problem: how to sort good from bad credit. They are basically information arbitragers. They pool your credit info, compute a score, and sort loan suppliers with loan demand. The cost of doing so is expensive for an individual investor. And there is a problem of "preference revelation", or, in layman's terms, people lie and try to free ride.

That's why banks exist. Is the model ripe for disruption? Yes, it hasn't really changed fundamentally since the last 300 years since the "Venizian Banca" but for that one need to solve the affordable decentralised sorting between creditors and debtors accounting for fraud, incentives to lie and free ride and asymmetrical information.

IMO, Facebook brought a good innovation to the table. And no, I'm not talking about the "like button", social hype (attach social to something and somehow you have an Alchemical transformation of iron to gold): Applied Network Theory.

Social Networking might be a good research direction to solving the P2P information problem solving, by revealing our preferences.

Payment methods have a different problem to it: fraud. You can, and usually do, bleed money on it. Paypal did, and still does. To counter it, you make it more painful to do transactions (that's why Paypal is, sometimes, bloody annoying). Pain acts as a filter to fraud. That's why Banking is so cumbersome. Again, pain as a filter for fraud. Think of it like this: Google could reduce spam by making it painful to search and index (reductio ad absurdum oversimplification). It's a simple "no innovation" solution.

There is a lot of innovation to be made. But it's a bit more complicated. It's not just "make a new cute web 2.0 interface to sort your personal finances" like Mint.

Just my 2 cents.

(PS: pardon the occasional english typing error. Not a native speaker)

Re: How to disrupt Wall Street

#15
Disruption is happening. We're about to launch a platform which takes a $100 Bn market and democratizes it by putting it online. And, we have some key Wall Street support.

The people who are creating these disruptive technologies are the insiders who have intimate knowledge of these systems. It's not necessarily going to be a new GUI on top of an old idea, as someone else put it in this thread.

My original comment to Chris is over a year old on that very same blog post. It's actually a bit embarrassing, since I really should have found a better way to try to contact him.

Re: How to disrupt Wall Street

#16
Wall Street is disrupted all the time. Major disruptions in many of the specific items he talks about:

4) The internet disrupted trading on the broker side (you pay $0-$8/trade now). Used to be a LOT more. HFT disrupted trading on the market maker side. It used to be that you paid a human a nickel for liquidity, now you pay a computer a penny for it. Various brokers are further disrupting trading by allowing anyone to become an HFT (e.g. Interactive Brokers).

There isn't much left to do on the trading side - trading is nearly free now.

5) Goldman Sachs seems to have come up with a disruptive innovation in IB - go semi public through an SIV to avoid all the hassles of becoming an actual public company.

7) Mutual funds - he seems aware that low fee ETFs are already disrupting mutual funds.

Re: How to disrupt Wall Street

#17
post #7

Yet another way to disrupt investment banks. Make every startup owner aware that the size of the "pop" on IPO day is the amount of money that the company failed to get and could have. Furthermore much of that money went to the investment bank that took you public, and that banker's close friends. In short, it is a form of theft. Luckily there is an easy way to avoid this theft. And that is the Dutch auction IPO. Note…

The thing is, Dutch Auction IPOs just don't usually work very well. They worked for google since it was a huge and well known name, but they don't work nearly as well for the long tail of AMEX.

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/07...

Re: How to disrupt Wall Street

#18
I think you have to split retail from investment banking.

Retail is ripe for disruption, bad service, poor websites, limited products etc. Creating a Retail Bank 2.0 could really change the sector.

I have difficulties seeing investment banking ever being disrupted. For one you have to be intimately involved to know what sort of products are needed. A 23yo SV hacker simply hasn't a clue what the mutual fund manager or forex dealer needs to make his life easier.

Once you're in the industry it isn't really radical disruption, if it were, the industry would be being disrupted all the time. Banks are massively competitive and any potential advantage inferred by new technologies and approaches would be assimilated into their business model rapidly.

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