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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There are Sorts within the Sort, all the way down.
(Incidentally, if you have an academically disinclined young family member who nonetheless is not a layabout, GC is potentially a good career for them.
Most people get into it after a stint in trades or real estate, but that isn’t strictly required.)
I don’t have anything novel to contribute on the substance of but have to again comment, pace Situational Awareness that I think kicked this trend off, that single-essay microdomains with a bit of design, a bit of JS, and perhaps a downloadable PDF are…ai-2027.com
… a really interesting form factor for policy arguments (or other ideas) designed to spread.
Back in the day, “I paid $15 to FedEx to put this letter in your hands” was one powerful way to sort oneself above the noise at a decisionmaker’s physical inbox, and “I paid $8.95 for a domain name” has a similar function to elevate things which are morally similar to blog posts.
This week on Complex Systems, a continued discussion of credit card rewards, interchange, and what I believe is a persistent misconception about how society should want justice done via payments systems.
It ends with the following, which the team took the liberty of putting into a short clip. (Sound on if you like hearing my voice, but video is subtitled.)
Last week the Atlantic published an opinion piece which argues that the poor are subsidizing the rich's receipt of credit card rewards. This view has wide currency among certain advocates and among opinion writers.
It is not true.
Credit card rewards are actually funded by interchange, a cost which is ultimately paid by card-accepting businesses for a combination of services they get from the payments industry.
Rewards have a few equilibria globally; the U.S. is in a high rewards, high interchange one.
An argument I have had with some credit card enthusiasts for a very long time, paraphrased.
Enthusiasts: I’m robbing the bank blind!
Me: Doubtful? They are probably pretty happy to have a portfolio of you.
E: Oh by carefully layering promotions and making a spreadsheet and…
Me: So checking my understanding: you spend a lot of money on credit cards.
E: Yes, that’s the whole point.
Me: And in a nation which makes it illegal to underwrite using an IQ test, you have self-constructed an IQ test.
E: Yes and I pass it obviously.
Me: Right. Tracking.
Me: You sound like a very desirable bank customer.
E: Oh no I’m not! I take them so hard.
Me: Your income and net worth are likely to be quite higher in ten years right. You predict that too?
E: Oh yeah.
Me: Yeah you’re going to continue consuming lots of financial services.
There is a general feeling in some quarters that the payments industry functions as a tax on everyone, and that the incidence of this tax must be highest on the poor, because they're least likely to have a rewards card.
Last up at #microconf, Marcos Rivera from Pricing I/O on pricing.
"How to avoid stupid mistakes in SaaS pricing"
(I am likely to have some thoughts.)
As always, quotes are Marcos (lightly paraphrased; real time is hard), anything attributed to Marcos is a heavy paraphrase, anything unattributed is me.
Marcos was previously Head of Pricing for Vista Equity Partners (hoohah; noted PE firm in software space).