Robos roar as Acorns raises $105M, Nutmeg $58M; Crypto looks for meaning in bear market; Porsche & MileAuto lower premiums 40% - via Autonomous ↻NEXT

Hi fellow futurists -- our top 3 thoughts for this week are:

1. ROBO ADVISOR: Digital wealth re-fuels, as Acorns raises $105M from NBC Universal, Nutmeg $58M from Goldman.  
2.  BLOCKCHAIN: Public Crypto searches for meaning, inventing new narratives for bear market
3.  INSURANCE: Porsche and Mile Auto to cut premiums 40% using AI for pay-per-mile insurance

Analysis of these items is below, and this week’s artist is Hilda af Klint.

ROBO ADVISOR: Digital wealth re-fuels, as Acorns raises $105M from NBC Universal, Nutmeg $58M from Goldman.  

Digital investment apps are the American poster-child for B2C financial technology. The vintage of the theme -- over a decade old -- has cooled some of the excitement about the transformational potential of mobile-first money management. Other products, like digital lending, payments, insurtech and challenger banks have grown on the venture radar. The reality, however, is that in each of these verticals, a brand champion has emerged after brutal competition to acquire customers. There is a best in class neobank, trading app, savings app, asset allocation app, etc. Sporting millions of users, these single product companies are fattening out into a multi-product relationship. And the roboadvisor attack into that space has just gotten stronger.

Nutmeg, the leading but modest roboadvisor in the United Kigdom, has just received nearly $60 million of fresh funding from Goldman Sachs. To earn the honor, the company manages about $1.5 billion (compare to Betterment's $15 billion-ish) and makes 50 bps in revenue. This isn't Goldman's first rodeo either, with prior acquisitions of Honest Dollar and Clarity Money -- neither of which were cheap. Even more relevant is the entry by the company into the UK with Marcus, it's Lending Club clone for personal loans. Unlike Lending Club (or Funding Circle), Marcus is attached to a bank that can provide interest to customers, and therefore natural funding for loans through deposits. That can't feel good to Monzo, Revolut and other neobank friends. We expect Nutmeg to join this lightly integrated family of broad financial products pushed by the investment banking behemoth to retail customers.

The other piece of news is arguably even more sensational. Acorns, serving 4.5 million customers (compare to Robinhood's 4 million, or Coinbase's 15 million), of which nearly 400k have IRA accounts, has raised $105 million from a conglomerate of media companies like NBC Universal and Comcast Ventures. Acorns manages $1.2 billion in assets (compare to $1.5 billion at N26) and now has a $860 million valuation. How does this story make sense? Media and finance are inextricably linked, and in the American case the glue can be financial literacy. CNBC content in the app will drive engagement, the media marketing funnel will create engagement, PayPal provides the payments and bank rails, and the bet is customer stickiness and margin expansion over time. It's starting to feel a bit like Alibaba in there!

So where are the parts of digital financial advice that are still early and not winner-take-all venture bonfires? Most digital-first financial services were built by Millennials for Millennials, and therefore have a blind spot for older generations. Companies that use modern tech for the issues facing Boomers aren't getting picked up in Techcrunch, but have a similarly large opportunity. Examples include Vestwell (B2B robo for retirement), RightCapital (financial planning with focus on tax optimization and pensions), Whealthcare (financial caretaking as clients are no longer medically fit to make decisions), and Mike Cagney's Figure (home equity digital lending). Do good and do well. 

Source: Companies House (Nutmeg), Mobile Payments Today (Acorns), Company Websites (RightCapital, Whealthcare, Vestwell)

BLOCKCHAIN: Public Crypto searches for meaning, inventing new narratives for bear market

We have seen an unusual amount of soul searching in the Crypto community in the beginning of 2019. Crypto assets, which the more detail-oriented thinkers in the space see as fundamentally improving, continue to bleed out. Nearly 90% of decentralized applications have less than 1000 users. In response, the priesthood of the movement must find new language to motivate global open source development and continued investment. Given the type of person that has a following in the crypto space (Millennial, male, developer, international, math/econ overindexed), their stories and investment theses are rooted in Bayesian thinking, macro economics, and formal logic. The stories create a sense of data-backed philosophical inevitability, but as Nic Carter and Felipe Pereira point out (links and charts below), these are just meta-stories for why followers should keep following, and the direction in which they should go. You can think of these stories as marching orders for the army of disruption.

The two examples we will call out are (1) Pantera Capital's Open Finance and (2) the debate around crypto law. In the former, the argument is that the "primitives" (i.e., Lego pieces) of the financial system are being open sourced and built in a permissionless, global manner. New generation versions of timeless services like banking, lending, and investing will grow outside finance on parallel rails and be better than the existing system. We agree with the vector of change, though deeply question short term practicality and the framing from which the argument is made (i.e., protocol maximalism). A symptom of this change can already be seen in the repurposing of ICO offering platforms and liquidity into STO brokers and exchanges -- e.g., $400M marketcap biotech company Agenus is using Atomic Capital to launch a token that gets a royalty payment on a cancer treatment which is still in clinical trials. Or take SWIFT's trial implementation of R3's Corda to combat Ripple.

The second discussion is around norms that have emerged in the ecosystem, harking back to questions about whether "Code is Law". As we have seen from the regulatory blowback and the application of sovereign power, Law is Law (and jail is jail). The crypto-anarchist revolutionary fervor ended up being statistically incorrect in the short term, and a new narrative is needed to keep marching. We see these debates as similar to a Constitutional Moment, with online personalities jockeying to be Jeffersonian-framers of how the future should be negotiated and governed. Linked below is a piece by Vlad Zamfir on proposed norms (like keeping Crypto within the legal bounds of the real world and not intentionally breaking blockchains), and it is worth reading to understand what this community believes and how it reasons. No other part of Fitnech, but for AI ethics perhaps, does this much thinking and narrative building about itself. This is why it is a fundamental Black Swan threat to the financial industry, whose narrative has been rotting since 2008. 

Source: Token Economy (Decentralized Finance, Visions of Ether), Pantera Capital (Open Finance), Agenus (STO), Vlad Zamfir on Crypto Law, Fluence on Dapp Usage, Unrelated but interesting (Narratives of Economic Catastrophe)

INSURANCE: Porsche and Mile Auto to cut premiums 40% using AI for pay-per-mile insurance. 

Insurance is the holy grail for Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things in finance, because it requires a messy interaction with the physical world, rather than living merely in a spreadsheet, database, or blockchain. To this end, we like the news of Porsche partnering with Mile Auto on pay-per-mile insurance. There is a reasonable demand-side argument: owners of Porsches don't drive the car as a primary automobile, and would prefer to only pay insurance for the time they are actually on the road. The second argument is even more fun -- owners of Porsches don't want to be tracked via GPS or a black-box by something like Cambridge Mobile Telematics ($500MM from Softbank) or Metromile ($90MM from VCs) because they are fancy and private people. No tracking please!

How does the thing work? You pay a cheap base rate to Mile Auto, and once in a while take a picture of the speedometer's reading in the app. The picture is translated to numbers via a machine vision algorithm, and your per-mile variable insurance rate is calculated on the spot. The company claims this will lead to a 40% reduction in premiums for the average user. For what it's worth, we hear that the growth of renter's insurer Lemonade is similarly fueled by people who are forced to get coverage (e.g., by the landlord) but are looking for the most discounted, easy to manage product. What does that mean? It means that the low risks self-select out of the insurance pool, driving up the price for unsophisticated non-techies that don't drive a Porsche.

Let's take the argument to an absurd extreme. On the developer website Programmable Web, there are 59 separate APIs that developers can use to build insurance apps and connect into underwriting engines and carrier capital. From Clearcover (affordable car insurance in your app!) to Haven Life (term life insurance on any website or application!) to Lemonade, OCBC Materntity, Qover and a plethora of others, developers have real choice in how to weave these more digital insurance products into the attention black holes in your phone. What happens when the tech-forward customer considers only these options, and the conservative customer considers only insurance sold by agents and direct mailing? Could there be a bifurcation of risk profiles that fundamentally injures the risk-pooling function of the industry? Perfect information about risk collapses the value of hedging. Half of us will know and live in a predicted future, while the other half will pay for the ignorance.

Source: PR Newswire (Porsche), Company websites, Programmable Web (Insurance)

Thanks for reading!

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