Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
Aug 14, 2019 6 tweets 1 min read Read on X
A Japanese innovation which I expect to see in the US before long: video conferencing kiosks at bank branches for relatively low-volume transactions which, for regulatory or customer-comfort reasons, require a bank officer to meet with the client.
This lets you centrally provision the bank officer at a call center in a market where bank officers are abundant and inexpensive and increase their utilization, rather than having to have relatively expensive bank officers constantly underutilized at your most expensive branches.
A sample transaction, which takes about an hour of an officer's time at my local bank, is onboarding a new deposit account customer. This combines a bit of data gathering, a bit of salesmanship, and a bit of regulatory compliance / KYC.
(The question is almost literally:

Select which of the following you will use your new bank account for:

a) Daily life
b) Operating your business
c) Nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons development
d) Terrorism
e) Operating an anti-social group
f) International wires
)
A shadow implication of this is further deskilling of the retail bank branch employee base, since traditionally the people doing this sort of work have to be able to handle the (fairly expansive) set of things that anyone in the neighborhood could want a banker to do.
The telephone booth services are going to be provided by a computer and call center rep symbiosis, though, and while the system has to know how to handle anything, the call center rep only needs to know how to handle whatever queue they're assigned to.

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More from @patio11

Sep 4
Listening to a podcast (Trillions) a guest made an interesting claim:

Guest: You know when you swipe a card at [coffee shop] part of the fee pays for your ability to reverse the transaction with the coffee shop. But come on, no one reverses transactions with [coffee shops].
I have removed the name of the coffee shop so that no one believes I am commenting on private financial details when I say: oh you sweet summer child.
You and I will likely go through life having very few arguments with baristas. Baristas do not experience their lives as including very few arguments with customers.
Read 10 tweets
Aug 3
The existence of YouTube does not make reading and writing less valuable. It gives children a constant companion who is responsive, preternaturally so, to their desires and curiosity.
(I devote a bit of brain space—not too much but I pray not to little—to making sure that constant companion does not make the entire world look like a pale imitation of itself, which would be wrong but could easily look accurate to the subjective experience of a child.)
“Any parenting tips?”

I do not have the constant fights about screen time some parents report, do not know how much of that is due to decisions I’ve made, and have one regret: we went two years without a TV due to moving and I should have made that permanent versus “completing.”
Read 5 tweets
Jul 29
This letter is what happens when a credit card PM misunderestimates how much of an adverse selection effect they have in a new portfolio.
(In particular note the cap on cash back and the carveout for particular transaction types which some users are able to generate arbitrarily high amounts of or would naturally have arbitrarily high amounts relative to “normal” CC use.)
“How does this happen?”

Credit card PMs are extremely aware that there are multiple different personas for credit card use out there. One of them has a name in various banks, but you can think of them as Mercenary Financial Enthusiast.
Read 15 tweets
Jul 17
If I can give a slightly more optimistic take on this: much of how commercial software development is done trades some resources for others, in ways that might not be rational for people with very different strengths than e.g. AppAmaGooFaceSoft or BigCo customers.
A lot of AWS services exist so that two teams don't need to have a meeting.

That *is not a criticism of either AWS or those two teams.* That is a preference one can have about time allocation and corporate structure, and capitalism will help you satisfy it.
If you are not constrained on organizational complexity, if meetings with yourself are free, then a lot of the standard stack that BigCo uses is both overkill and underkill at the same time.
Read 5 tweets
Jun 17
So strange that card program managers make such a show of doing this careful balancing act when everyone who reads the Atlantic knows that the real source of rewards is cross-subsidization of elite cardholders by poor people. </sarcasm>
Less sarcastically: it’s a math problem conducted by people who are pretty good at math, and the marching orders they get are “In general and in steady state, all of our card programs should be margin accretive. Make it happen. If you can’t you’ll need a senior signoff.”
(The above is not private information from any particular issuer but rather is a pastiche representing industry standard practice.)
Read 7 tweets
Jun 14
I think the so-called Bitcoin treasury companies have just reinvented exchange tokens: there is an asset with X real world utility but not naturally leverageable. It should flow to place in world where most leverage is bolted onto it; immediately incentive compatible. Repeat 100x
And then “Holy %}*]^ how did so much of it end up in a place with grossly deficient risk management?!”
(I understand that MicroStrategy is the opposite of leveraged exposure from the common shareholder’s perspective but if someone with hands on keyboard believes they are allowed leverage if they hold more exchange tokens then the model happens regardless of whether that is true.)
Read 18 tweets

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