Tech companies seek to serve as quasi-financial intermediaries.

Amy Hamilton

2019-03-03 10:39:00 Sun ET

Tech companies seek to serve as quasi-financial intermediaries. Retail traders can list items for sale on eBay and then acquire these items economically on Amazon for direct shipments when busy buyers place orders on eBay. These retail traders serve as information arbitrageurs and so clip spreads between the divergent prices on Amazon and eBay. This online information arbitrage occurs often enough to be a viable business. From a practical perspective, this information arbitrage proves to be a valuable service at a market price.

Time is finite and human attention is precious so that the intermediary service often turns out to be worthwhile for better immediacy and convenience. In a similar vein, the online search website for real estate, Zillow Group, now attempts to serve as a quasi-financial intermediary for both home purchases and mortgage loans. Zillow brings back its co-founder and former CEO Richard Barton to lead this ambitious transformation. Zillow now transforms how Americans buy and sell their real estate properties as the tech platform uses both big data analysis and artificial intelligence to change how these residential owners and investors shop for homes with mouse clicks and satellite maps. Busy buyers pay for immediacy and convenience when they shop for homes on Zillow.

In addition to Amazon-eBay information arbitrage and Zillow real estate, Apple and Goldman Sachs enter into a strategic alliance to expand the credit card business. Apple pairs the new credit card with key iPhone features such as Face ID to better serve its active users. This credit card piggybacks on the Mastercard network and offers 2% cash rewards for most online purchases. Beyond cash bonuses, Apple and Goldman Sachs hope to leverage the Wallet app for tracking account balances and rewards for better personal finance management.

Like Goldman Sachs, big banks shift operational focus from their prior reliance on capital-intensive risk businesses to tech platforms for their tech-savvy clients. In light of financial distress and post-crisis regulation, big banks prefer to build online platforms for their key institutional clients to trade bonds, funds, and other complex securities. The banks accumulate fees and commissions when these transactions happen for the mutual benefits of both banks and institutional investors themselves. This fresh logic explains why Apple and Goldman Sachs can now work together to strengthen their credit card business. Nowadays Amazon-eBay arbitrageurs and tech titans such as Apple and Zillow seek to serve as quasi-financial intermediaries.

 


If any of our AYA Analytica financial health memos (FHM), blog posts, ebooks, newsletters, and notifications etc, or any other form of online content curation, involves potential copyright concerns, please feel free to contact us at service@ayafintech.network so that we can remove relevant content in response to any such request within a reasonable time frame.

Blog+More

The new Brexit deal can boost British pound appreciation and macroeconomic optimism.

Fiona Sydney

2019-11-13 11:34:00 Wednesday ET

The new Brexit deal can boost British pound appreciation and macroeconomic optimism.

The new Brexit deal can boost British pound appreciation and economic optimism. British prime minister Boris Johnson wins the parliamentary vote on his new

+See More

Paulson, Geithner, and Bernanke warn that people seem to have forgotten the lessons of the global financial crisis from 2008 to 2009.

Daphne Basel

2018-07-17 08:35:00 Tuesday ET

Paulson, Geithner, and Bernanke warn that people seem to have forgotten the lessons of the global financial crisis from 2008 to 2009.

Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner (former Treasury heads) and Ben Bernanke (former Fed chairman) warn that people seem to have forgotten the lessons of the

+See More

Amazon faces E.U. antitrust scrutiny over the current e-commerce use of merchant data.

Olivia London

2019-08-16 17:37:00 Friday ET

Amazon faces E.U. antitrust scrutiny over the current e-commerce use of merchant data.

Amazon faces E.U. antitrust scrutiny over the current e-commerce use of merchant data. The European Commission probes into whether Amazon uses key third-par

+See More

A physicist derives a mathematical formula for success.

Chanel Holden

2019-03-07 12:39:00 Thursday ET

A physicist derives a mathematical formula for success.

A physicist derives a mathematical formula that success equates the product of both personal quality and the potential value of a random idea. As a Northeas

+See More

Our proprietary alpha investment model outperforms most stock market indices from 2017 to 2021.

Apple Boston

2021-02-02 14:24:00 Tuesday ET

Our proprietary alpha investment model outperforms most stock market indices from 2017 to 2021.

Our proprietary alpha investment model outperforms the major stock market benchmarks such as S&P 500, MSCI, Dow Jones, and Nasdaq. We implement

+See More

The lean CEO encourages iterative continuous improvements and collaborative teams to innovate around core value streams.

Monica McNeil

2020-07-12 08:30:00 Sunday ET

The lean CEO encourages iterative continuous improvements and collaborative teams to innovate around core value streams.

The lean CEO encourages iterative continuous improvements and collaborative teams to innovate around core value streams. Jacob Stoller (2015)  

+See More