Category Archives: Delivering Value

eReciepts – The Politics and Economics of SKU Data

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An update to my Data Games – 2021

© Starpoint LLP, 2025. No part of this site, blog.starpointllp.com, may be reproduced or retransmitted in whole or in part in any manner without the permission of the copyright owner.

Electronic receipts (eReceipts) COULD transform the retail landscape by offering numerous benefits to consumers and businesses. With the potential to enhance digital wallets, improve customer experiences, empower AI agents, and increase advertising effectiveness. However, the widespread adoption and sharing SKU-level data face several challenges, most of which are NOT technical. Today, I’m providing an overview of key business and economic challenges of unlocking SKU data.

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Winning in Network of Networks: Collaboration

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My largest holdings are card networks, and I’m very keen on their continued growth and sustainability of competitive advantage. My confidence is based on five broad themes. 

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Networks, Value Assembly and Organizational Structures

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Bull Case For Visa and Mastercard 

Very Long Blog.  4 Page Exec Summary. Feedback appreciated. This blog has been my “blocker” as I’ve iterated over the last 7 months. I’ve thinned this down from 31 pages (which no one would read) to 23. No I will never write something this big again.

The thoughts below are an update to my 2016 Small Wins, where I outlined how the forces that have driven scale, and shaped organizations, are atrophying (Transaction Cost Economics, asset intensity, information intensity, finance… etc). Paul Graham’s calls this change Refragmentation, I call it Transformation of Networks.

It’s as if the gravitational constant (the big G) is changing and new forces are driving the formation of new networks influenced by a rapidly evolving world of “weak links”. Information intensity has moved beyond “tweaking” 100 yr old business models to transform the design of industries, communities and people.

Whereas the 2016 blog was more about the “possibilities” enabled by tech, this blog is about the reality of how things will evolve.  

© Starpoint LLP, 2024. No part of this site, blog.starpointllp.com, may be reproduced or retransmitted, in whole or in part, in any manner without the permission of the copyright owner. Also see our Legal/Disclaimer (this is a highly opinionated and partially informed blog).

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Open Banking in US – Quick Take CPFB Proposed Rule

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Before listening to anyone on this topic its important to get a feeling for experience. I’ve been fortunate to run two of the largest online banks: Citi and Wachovia. Wachovia was the very first customer of Yodlee (1999), a service our customers loved. My banks were also scraped endlessly, representing over 30% of our traffic and 20% of our call center complaints. We were also the largest PFM bank (think MS Money and Quicken), keeping our OFX servers up and running was key. After my banking life I spent time rearchitecting payment data flows from point of sale to payment at Google. Then spent 8 years creating Commerce Signals, a payment data business. 
CPFB’s Proposed Rule

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Apple Finance – ?Tipping Point?

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Bloomberg beat me to the punch with their great article last night on Apple Pay Later and Apple Finance LLC (must read). Well, I was certainly wrong about one big thing in my Project Breakout blog “Apple doesn’t want to be a bank”. Quite frankly I believe even Goldman Sachs was surprised by the scale of what Apple is building. Last night I outlined the key points:

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PayPal – ?Super App?

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PayPal has been my #1 holding for last 5 yrs, and it has been on a fantastic ride… especially so over the last 18 months! (see MVP – Continued Domination for more). 

Paypal announced 2Q21 earnings 2 weeks ago (7.28). TPV growth was 40% with eBay, 48% without out, while sales grew at a 32% clip without eBay versus 19% with. Earnings? Not so much as margin erosion has hit the business. One core driver of margin has investors particularly concerned: “Take rate” (net merchant revenue less cost to clear payments) fell from 2.21% in the fourth quarter of 2020 to 2.11% in the first quarter and 2.01% in the second quarter. 

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Plaid – Quick Take

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I’m back to blogging after a successful exit last month. The Plaid acquisition is a great way for me to jump back in. Why read this? A key to understanding payments, banking and data is to balance historical knowledge with a network of people that know what is really happening behind the scenes. As the former head of two direct banks, former Senior Director of Oracle’s advanced technology solution’s practice and Yodlee’s first customer I have an informed perspective on the market for this one. 

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Data Tipping Point.. Good things will happen

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Recent issues with Facebook, Equifax, GDPR compliance, … have brought us to a tipping point in data. The basic structure of how data is: permissioned, shared, used, accumulated, analyzed, sold, regulated, … must change. Google and FB operate in a Big Data 1.0 architecture powered by the “virtuous cycle”. Edward Snowden showed us how the NSA also acts in this centralized model as a data vacuum (not so virtuously). Literature and entertainment have created broad awareness of the dangers of centralization and loss of privacy: 1984, the Borg, The Circle, Black Mirror, … etc.  

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Banks as a Data Business – Example Amex Advance/Acxiom

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Traditionally the core of bank margin is in risk management. The core of risk management is data.. thus Banks have been the among the best data businesses (as IBM knows). Banks “learn” about their customers through bank interaction: payroll, card transactions, lending. This has helped banks make better risk decisions (both credit and fraud/identity). Within the bank data cycle the traditional use of data is for an internal benefit: risk and cross sale of the bank’s products and services (not that of consumers or merchants).  However the “virtuous cycle of banking data” is very different from that enjoyed by Amazon and Google, both in the scale and type of data and consumer facing use. 

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