Tag Archives: networks

Strategic Bets in Retail Payments

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What are the strategic drivers of change?

Where are the profit pools and how will they disperse?

A Maturing Landscape, A Shifting Playbook

Retail payments have been a cornerstone of growth and shareholder returns for decades, delivering TSRs that rivaled the tech sector. But this golden era of easy expansion is fading. Today, growth is slowing and investors are refocusing on unit economics, distinguishing between platforms with SaaS-like predictability and those more exposed to the vicissitudes of consumer credit, deposit spreads, and regulation (see Cap Gemini World Payments Report)..

This change in tone isn’t just financial, it’s structural. Value creation is migrating away from volume and into experience, infrastructure, and intelligence.

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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.  

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