I am optimistic about the pace of innovation in financial services, and importantly, much of what we've wanted for decades *is already happening.*

This is often underappreciated, so I covered it for the second issue of Bits about Money.

bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/financ…
One of the reasons this is undercovered, by the way, is that there is a huge difference between the socioeconomic position of the financial commentariat the challenges (and solutions) faced by e.g. Americans at the 20th percentile in income.
Sometimes this causes people to underappreciate how difficult life is when one doesn't have a job in tech. That factor is well-appreciated. Less well appreciated is that it causes people to underappreciate how towering an achievement e.g. Cash App is.
Maybe I should wax poetic about Cash App someday, though I suppose my counterparts in Square's comms department might get a little weirded out by that.

Every time interfamily transfers avoid two trips to Western Union and a $10 fee the world gets a tiny bit better.

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More from @patio11

30 Oct
I broadly endorse this thread as descriptively accurate.

Some of the many implications of filtering by pedigree:
1) Not a new suggestion but *do not optimize job searches around unsolicited resumes.* Find someone inside target firms, and almost literally anyone in engineering is better than /dev/null, to get excited about you working there.

2) Given “plausible” is essentially binary…
… people early in their career may want to intentionally spend first 2-3 years on getting one plausible name versus whatever your top option would otherwise have been.

3) If you are hiring for a startup, resumes of good engineers who’d not read as plausible are your opportunity
Read 10 tweets
29 Oct
As someone who was recently on the other side of the tech money vs. charity table, one interesting learning was how accessible Donor Advised Funds are (for donors) and how ridiculously preferable they are to charities versus chasing individual checks.
I’d probably advise anyone to have one if you consistently give away more than $1k or so a year, particularly if that is to multiple recipients.

The commanding favorite among donor base was Fidelity Charitable, which (personal opinion) as a CEO I felt was wonderful to work with.
“What do you mean ‘work with them’?”

The first time you get a donation from any donor using a DAF they teach out and ask for your IRS paperwork and some relatively basic KYC and (optionally) banking information. Lead time of a few days.

2nd and subsequent: money shows up.
Read 4 tweets
29 Oct
Following up on the C.R.E.A.M exploit looks like it might be an interesting news day in cryptoland.
Not trying to chortle here; the choice to make all transactions public in real time is an interesting one and does have novel implications for e.g. responses to crises, ability to coordinate during a stressful event, contagion in a panic, etc.
You could imagine an alternate universe where the AP published “Breaking: Chase has called all deposits and loans custodied at Bank of America, causing a spike in BAC credit default swap rates.”
Read 5 tweets
29 Oct
Also, and forgive me because this sounds obvious but apparently it is not:

You should have internal tools, or a sub team, own the integration of these with internal tools, and those integrations should be as good as your shipping products are.
“What’s your favorite example at Stripe?”

There is a heuristic that runs “Is this necessarily going to be a Zoom meeting?” and updates calendar invites with Zoom details, and also a button with instant make-it-Zoom (not sure if that is via extension or otherwise).
In the Before Times this was a godsend to us remote workers because it was always socially awkward for the 1 remote in an 11 person meeting to say “Hey folks could I pretty please get you to turn on the videoconferencing hardware” and thanks to that work it would be default done.
Read 4 tweets
29 Oct
So there's a particular paper-based process that a large Japanese bank requires from us annually.

It can now be done in the web app.

Reading the terms and conditions of the web app, they've contracted with a 3rd party *to print our submission* and inject it into their workflow.
On the one hand I'm in dumbstruck awe at the project manager who got this approved and on the other hand aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.
"What process and what bank?"

It is socially difficult for me to elaborate on that due to my current position in the financial industry, but the right flavor to think of is the yearly "Update your contact information and annual income" thing that U.S. banks put you through.
Read 6 tweets
28 Oct
A fun intuition pump for lots of finance is “Is this a transactions are free but storage costs money business or a storage is free but transactions cost money business?”

(It’s more complicated than that but that is an excellent place to start.)
Interestingly this can be priced differently at different parts of the supply chain.

Take term life insurance (buy more of it!): consumers likely perceive term life to have free transactions in and out and low cost “storage.”

This is not how commissions to reps work, though.
For the reps, transactions are lucrative on one end but storage for term life is not very lucrative at all; the residuals are a friendly suggestion that you call once around renewal dates rather than something that one optimizes for.
Read 6 tweets

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