Rishi Taparia - Issue #6
Wrapping up a week in Southeast Asia with an issue featuring Mexico teaching Alibaba Spanish, an Equifax dumpster fire, Square becoming a bank, what we get wrong thinking about technology, NVIDIA getting its groove back, Brazil’s outgoing AG’s massive mic drop and more. Enjoy!
Commerce
Mexico Partners With Alibaba to Empower Its SMEs
Viva Alibaba. Mexico and Alibaba announced a partnership this week, giving Mexican SMEs access to the Alibaba platform and Alibaba bringing logistics and payments best practices to the country. The half a million Chinese tourists visit Mexico every year can certainly expect to have a better travel experience.
Kroger Seeks to Repel Amazon’s Onslaught
Kroger is slashing prices on staples, adding online ordering options and meal kits in some stores, and investing in technology to better market to consumers in an effort to try and withstand Amazon’s rapid advance in the grocery business.
Merchant attrition to merchant addition: Analytics as a payments catalyst
The need for acquirers and processors to deliver value added solutions to their merchants is more urgent than ever. Between 20 to 25% of merchants are likely to churn every year. This amounts to acquirers spending more than $1 billion every year to replace merchants they have lost.
Alibaba's Tmall Maintains Ecommerce Lead in China
Numbers are in and the leaders haven’t chained - Alibaba still runs ecommerce in China with Tmall owning 52% market share.
FinTech
Equifax Reports Data Breach Possibly Affecting 143 Million U.S. Consumers
On the surface the story is the same we have seen before - big company hacked, information stolen. However, this could be the tipping point that catalyzes true change in identity and security in a world where we our offline and online identities are different. It doesn’t help that Equifax’s response was nothing short of a dumpster fire. This thread on the someone suspect history of Equifax is a terrific read as well.
China wants to build a credit score that dings online chat group users for their political views
In other credit score news, China’s top internet watchdog, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), released new rules that will ding people’s credit scores based on their political views.
Square Becoming a Bank Is Brilliant. Here's Why
This week Square applied for a banking license that will allow it to bring it’s lending operations in house. This is a brilliant move on their part. As they continue to build and buy additional services lines, they are proving value added services based on data and software is replacing processing as the acquiring business model. Banks globally should be paying close attention.
China has banned ICOs
Chinese regulators have a lot going on these days, I can imagine at times it must be overwhelming. September 4th must have been just one of those “to hell with everything” days, because China has banned ICOs, what some have said are the disruptor of VC, investment banks taking companies public and have turned capital raising on its head. My guess is there’s a lot more to this story than meets the eye. In the mean time, other countries are making their bid to be the hot new ICO destination.
Razer unveils proposal for Singapore epayments solution
The Singaporean government is getting serious about payments. Entrepreneurs are stepping up to help. Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan came up with a framework for a cashless Singapore (called…drumroll please…RazerPay), expecting to get 1 million signups over the next 16 months. Lofty aspirations for a company with limited if any experience in hardware but hey, everyone’s doing it so why not?
LINE Indonesia head resigns, rumoured to join GrabPay
As the fight in Indonesia heats up between Go-Jek and Grab, Grab has reportedly snagged a new boss to lead the charge. LINE Indonesia Managing Director Ongki Kurniawan reportedly resigned in June and is joining Grab and leading their payments efforts.
Technology
Why a 24-Year-Old Chipmaker Is One of Tech’s Hot Prospects
In discussion about game changing companies positioning themselves to drive the world into a new paradigm that involves AI, IoT and autonomous cars, good odds suggest the name Nvidia gets nary a whisper. However, this chip maker is riding an artificial intelligence boom to put its chips in drones, robots and self-driving cars having made a gamble 10 years ago that to ensure GPUs could handle chores beyond drawing images on a computer screen.
What We Get Wrong About Technology
This week’s technology long read is by Tim Harford. In this piece he discusses why the most influential technology advances are often the most humble and cheap, compared to Hollywood’s portrayal of technology development as an isolated technological miracle that utterly transforms some part of economic life with barely a ripple elsewhere
10 of the most-funded startups to fail in 2017
More money, more problems.
Random Tidbits
Reciprocation Bias
Being aware of our biases is critical in analyzing and exploring the world. Reciprocation bias is one we don’t often recognize, particularly when selling or bring sold to - a great piece.
For Brazil’s Departing Top Prosecutor, ‘One Last Cannon Barrage’
Days before his term ends, Attorney General Rodrigo Janot dropped the proverbial mic (or in this case, bomb), accusing two former (for now) Brazilian presidents, Lula and Dilma, of corruption chargest. Janot out.
Donald Trump Is the First White President
This week’s long read by Ta-Nehisi Coates, author, journalist and comic book writer. A follow up to his piece My President Was Black on Barack Obama, this is a thought provoking piece that summarizing won’t do justice.
What will happen in season eight of Game of Thrones, a list.
This is amazing, and probably 90% right. For those of you who don’t watch the show stop reading right now and start with Season 1, Episode 1.