Implications of Schwab's $26 billion acquisition of TD Ameritrade, and Tesla's black swan truck; plus 12 short takes on top developments

Hi Fintech futurists --

In the long take this week, I look at the $26 billion acquisition of TD Ameritrade by Schwab, and the implications that has for innovation, frontier technology, aggregation theory, and corporate strategy. What can you do to remain competitive if your business is behind the top dogs in the industry, even just a little? How risky of a bet should you be making, and how can that be consistent with fiduciary duty? We end on Elon Musk's insane cybertruck, and ask whether there were any cybertrucks TD could have launched to stay independent.

The latest short takes on the Fintech bundles, Crypto and Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, and Augmented and Virtual Reality are below. Thanks for reading and let me know your thoughts by email or in the comments! Last but not least, these opinions are personal (or maybe made by a robot) and do not reflect any views of ConsenSys or other parties.

Long Take

Well this morning started out as a bit of a bummer! See -- Charles Schwab to buy TD Ameritrade in a $26 billion all-stock deal. The $55 billion market cap Schwab is gobbling up the $22 billion TD Ameritrade at a slight premium. Matt Levine of Bloomberg has a great, cynical take on the question: Schwab lowering its trading commissions to zero is actually what wiped out $4 billion off TD's marketcap a few months ago. For Schwab, the revenue loss from trading was 7% of total, while for TD it was over 20%. Once Schwab dropped prices, TD started trading at a discount and became an acquisition target. You can see the share price drops reflected below in the beginning of October.

The reason for this impact disparity is that Schwab has been diversifying into asset management, wealth management, banking, lending, and a full suite of other products. The firm has a hand in all the cookie jars, and are known for a proprietary and closed approach. Some would say they have a reputation for sharp elbows as a result. TD Ameritrade, on the other hand, was arguably the most customer-centric discount brokerage, and did not conflict itself as much by going vertically into its own value chain. For example, there are no default TD ETFs that its roboadvisor customers were forced to hold. Oh well!

I disagree with Levine only on one thing. It was not Schwab's trading discount that killed TD. It is SoftBank's massive venture funding engine that was the proximate cause. Without swaths of venture capital backing for firms like Robinhood and Revolut, and by extension the API-first DriveWealth, there would be no free commissions. Without the ability to burn $250 million per quarter and get away with continued hiring and spending on Google Ads, TD and Schwab and Fidelity would still have commissions as a source of revenue. But let's not blame the Fintech start-ups -- they are just trying to survive after all.

Let's point the finger deeper at Napster and Facebook, and the Internet as a whole. Generations of people have now been trained that digital products are free, open, and available to all. As a philosophical tenet, this is amazing and empowering! It is the world we should live in -- only if that were the truth. Of course, it is not the truth. The costs of Facebook have become revealed recently, hidden somewhere between the effectiveness of propaganda bots and our twitchy anxious attention spans. Bodies flooded with dopamine, and eyes bloodshot from staring at a tiny machine sun. I mean, I love my phone.

Would we make this trade again? Probably. The cost of Napster has been a renaissance for music, and the seamless user experiences on Spotify, Apple, and Amazon. People get access to millions of songs for $10 per month across all their devices! That's what you used to pay for a single CD at Tower Records.

So of course entrepreneurs would design Fintechs in this way too -- free, open, available to all. The finance firms have been saying for a while that they are not scared of this. None of the Fintech software is truly new. It rides existing infrastructure rails of custody, exchange, brokerage, banking, payments. It is subject to the same regulation. And finance firms can simply match Fintechs, because the software is "easy to build" after a few years of corporate venture and innovation theater. Further, incumbents supposedly have the scale to defend against Fintechs with large customer network effects.

Well guess what! This is what the newspapers said, as they digitized themselves and built out a free web presence. This is what they said, as the mid-sized ones starved and the large-ones struggled to survive.

It is exactly this part that discourages me. The necessary consequence of building out a large, free service with hidden costs is that it creates monopolies ("attention platforms", "aggregation theory"). Perhaps you can call them utilities in the good case. But the middle of the market is hollowed out. In the newspaper data above, you can see publications with 100,000 to 250,000 subscribers struggling last year. Similarly in finance, it isn't the Robinhoods, or the Betterments, or the SoFis that will kill you. It is the JPMorgans, and the Goldmans, and the Schwabs. The best players in the industry can survive the longest without oxygen, because they have adjacent businesses, good operating margins, strong cross-sell, and the cash reserves to make transformative decisions.

Schwab is going to have $5 trillion in assets. That's like, more than a lot of countries.

TD Ameritrade, being the smaller player without a fully diversified business, had to be the most nimble and innovative. It has an institutional custody business for Registered Investment Advisors, and opened up third party API services for Fintechs as early as 2012. My roboadvisor was one of the first companies to integrate with their financial advisor channel. TD had no choice but to take such risks -- to be open, innovative, and supportive of others in order to compete against the larger providers like BNY Mellon, Fidelity, and Schwab. Now, 10,000 TDA RIAs are panicking about finding a new custodian that doesn't compete with them by offering wealth and asset management products. They will panic, but where can they realistically go?

On the retail side, TD was also taking risks. While JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, and Schwab were collectively raising their eyebrows, TD launched Bitcoin Futures and invested in ErisX. Will the combined larger entity have the same risk tolerance? Of course not. It will spend the next 3 years working on a multi billion-dollar integration project, and speculative stuff like this is unlikely to have highest priority. For those 3 years, Fidelity has a gift in the form of lead time. Will they capitalize on it, or face an even more powerful integrated behemoth? Looking at acquiring Coinbase sounds like a good option right now.

I should end there, but I really want to tie this story into the Tesla cybertruck launch. And here is how. If you are a company in the middle, like TD, then you are getting squeezed at the top by the large incumbers through power laws, and by new entrants and the chaotic churn of capitalism at the bottom. So as the middle, you absolutely have a higher risk tolerance for innovation. But you cannot outspend on R&D and acquisitions, simply due to the smaller size. That leaves you with either (1) lots of small innovation around the edges, like connecting to roboadvisors or matching trading pricing or offering someone else's Bitcoin futures, or (2) a single Hail Mary bet. A single irresponsible large systemic bet on some wild frontier thing.

That would certainly be irresponsible for a public company like TD. A company sale to Schwab may be detrimental to the industry, but is a positive for TD shareholders. The board of a public company has a fiduciary duty to maximize investment returns, even if that means doing less exciting stuff. Taking strange, black swan risks may not seen as the right approach to exercising the duty of care. But you know, that's what Elon Musk is all about! His whole career is one insane bet after another. The whole public company life doesn't really suit him very well -- to the point of official censure for fraudulent tweets to manipulate Tesla's stock price.

You don't see TD's management tweeting about securing imaginary counter-offers denominated in cannabis meme jokes. But you also don't see them building crazy electric cars from the future, and hammering Ford into the ground on market capitalization and mind share. It was also typical for Musk to blow his product presentation and give fuel to sceptics -- fuel for his own entrepreneurial engine. Regardless, Tesla is defining a new category and industry. What could TD have done to achieve the same?

Featured Interviews, Podcasts, and Conferences

• Trustless Ecosystems 2030. Come say hello this Tuesday at 630PM in London. We'll talk decentralized finance and community.
• Fintech used to be a back-office support function, now it's defining an industry. Check out my Op-Ed in Investopedia about the history and future of financial technology.
• Interview with Blocks99. In this discussion, we focus on the financial crisis, entrepreneneurship, and why decentralized finance infrastructure is needed in the industry.

Short Takes

• BlueVine raises $102.5M to build small business banking. Six year old small business lending start-up, meet high Fintech valuation. The SME segment has not yet seen the insanity of B2C (maybe for Fundbox), but it will.
• TD Ameritrade Drops Minimum Balance For Robo Advisor To $500. It is a matter of time before minimums will be $5.00, powered by fractionalization. Already, Schwab offers fractional trading, and blockchain-based assets do so natively.
• Why Did PayPal Pay $4 Billion for a Coupon Browser Extension? It's not just payments that matter. It is the entire experience of shopping and reducing friction. The target is called Honey, has 17 million users, and helps them find and apply coupons in the shopping cart experience or online retailers. This is cool, but also very expensive!

• 6 Thoughts Following the Conference Call “The Massive Potential of Multi-Collateral Dai" from Lou Kerner. Great video in the article that is worth watching to understand the latest developments and conceptual tilt for multi-collateral DAI. In short, you can put all sorts of assets in a box, and get an algorithmic Ethereum-based stablecoin. These are the people doing it.
• FinCEN: Stablecoin Issuers Are Money Transmitters, No Matter What. If you are moving something like money around, you will be regulated like someone moving money around. Of course, stablecoins are not the network, they are the asset, and the network is public and decentralized. Also, European Union Launches New Blockchain and AI Fund To Avoid Falling Behind US And China.
• Waves Enterprise blockchain unveils major updates and hundreds of smart contracts per minute and Polymath quits Ethereum to work on its own blockchain, Polymesh. As insitutional need for blockchain grows, networks continue to try and capture flow away from Ethereum. This highlights the need for ETH2, and the feature sets that the traditional economy requires.
• Zero-commission trading is coming to crypto. What's the difference between Revolut, Robinhood, and Binance in 10 years? Nothing.

• Sacha Baron Cohen's Anti-Facebook Rant at the ADL Summit Was Pure Moral Panic and Sacha Baron Cohen Is Wrong About Social Media, Wrong About Section 230... And Even Wrong About His Own Comedy. The comedian presented a powerful speech about the impact of social media on politics and the need for AI media companies to better filter and control fake information. These two articles argue the opposite, and though I don't necessarily agree, the question of who is making the speech and where it lies (relative to censorship) is important.
• Automation Anywhere hits $6.8B valuation amid a bot boom. Robotic process automation is not quite artificial intelligence, but is a good skeleton on which to hang the machine learning muscle. This company repeats human tasks and does it without complaining in the back office.
• Chatbot market sees explosive growth, thanks to AI investments. Don't know if true, but this estimate is a useful comp for the future -- The global chatbot market was valued at $1.17 billion in 2018 and is expected to reach $10.08 billion by 2026, expanding at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 31 percent, according to research firm Reports and Data.

• The Debate Over How to Encrypt the Internet of Things (Wired). What is lightweight encryption, and is it sufficient for the job of running in billions of low power devices?
• Nreal’s Android-Friendly AR Glasses Are A Blend Of Fashion And Function. Cool glasses at a crazy $1200 price and competing with Snap, Miscrosoft, and Facebook. Looks like an acquisition target to me.
• The Rise Of Virtual Beings – K/DA, Lil Miquela, Hatsune Miku, VTubers. Fantastic take on the various ways celebrities, actors, mascots, and bans are being digitized into avatars. Infallible perfect controllable avatars, who will say and do whatever The Ministry of Propaganda requires. I mean, it's great.

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