Processors: Understanding Competitive Dynamics

Warning – Big Blog 12 Pages

The last three weeks gave us a full sweep of processor earnings, and the results were a mixed bag (a phrase that undersells what actually happened). What we saw was not the processor sector moving together with a common tide. It was a sector splitting apart. Adyen raised guidance and jumped 16% in a day. Toast added a record number of locations and raised its full year outlook. On the “bad side of town”, we have Fiserv, which cut guidance, missed consensus, and is now down roughly 23% for the year with a brand new CEO. FIS is down about 36%. The gap between the best processors and the worst has never been this wide, and I do not think most investors have a working framework for why.

That framework is what I want to lay out here.

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Part 3 – Internet 2.5 – The Next “Wave” is Here

Happy After Thanksgiving! Hope everyone was able to enjoy a wonderful time with family and friends. Today is the 3rd installment of the series, a long blog. 
The next big network wave is here. Call it web 2.5 or 3.0, but the integration of payments into “everything” is a major event. Payments are the “trust layer” that TRANSFORM anonymous nodes providing uncertain service into known, defined and guaranteed service providers. Effective communities require value exchange and “trust”. The payment trust function enables networks to evolve from “cost free” discovery and information sharing, into transactional resource/service exchange: from read-write to read-write-execute. Sure we could call the wave “trust” but the only ubiquitous “trust network” is payments so I prefer to keep payment wave as the naming convention.

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