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

Nobel Laureate Paul Milgrom explains the U.S. incentive auction of wireless spectrum allocation from TV broadcasters to telecoms.

Rose Prince

2023-11-21 11:32:00 Tuesday ET

Nobel Laureate Paul Milgrom explains the U.S. incentive auction of wireless spectrum allocation from TV broadcasters to telecoms.

Nobel Laureate Paul Milgrom explains the U.S. incentive auction of wireless spectrum allocation from TV broadcasters to telecoms. Paul Milgrom (2019)

+See More

U.S. fiscal budget deficit hits $1 trillion or the highest level in 7 years.

Monica McNeil

2019-10-25 07:49:00 Friday ET

U.S. fiscal budget deficit hits $1 trillion or the highest level in 7 years.

U.S. fiscal budget deficit hits $1 trillion or the highest level in 7 years. The current U.S. Treasury fiscal budget deficit rises from $779 billion to $1.0

+See More

Paul Morland suggests that demographic changes lead to modern economic growth in the current world.

Laura Hermes

2023-10-28 12:29:00 Saturday ET

Paul Morland suggests that demographic changes lead to modern economic growth in the current world.

Paul Morland suggests that demographic changes lead to modern economic growth in the current world. Paul Morland (2019)   The human tide: how

+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

Barry Eichengreen compares the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession as historical episodes of economic woes.

Olivia London

2023-03-21 11:28:00 Tuesday ET

Barry Eichengreen compares the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession as historical episodes of economic woes.

Barry Eichengreen compares the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession as historical episodes of economic woes. Barry Eichengreen (2016)

+See More

World Economic Forum warns that artificial intelligence may destabilize the financial system.

Jonah Whanau

2018-08-19 10:34:00 Sunday ET

World Economic Forum warns that artificial intelligence may destabilize the financial system.

The World Economic Forum warns that artificial intelligence may destabilize the financial system. Artificial intelligence poses at least a trifecta of major

+See More