Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:08:55 · David Vélez
People pay 5% to 10% per transaction. That will go to zero. Remittances, moving money is you're moving bits. That will trend towards zero in a more competitive environment. Monthly account, people are paying $5 to $10.15 dollars per month in The US banking system for a bank account. And you look at Europe or developed economies, Japan, same thing. You see a huge amount of cost that consumers are paying that will eventually with models such as ours that come to compete, will also compete away. And then finally intelligence. I think this is also the one that is less understood and is beginning to be discussed with the advent of intelligence. If you're in the top 1% of income, you have access to the best financial advice. You probably will have a private banker. The private banker is understanding all the bank accounts that you have, is optimising your deposits, is thinking about what is the right tax efficient structure. If you need a loan, they're going to go and compete a bunch of different banks with each other and get you the base yield. But if you're in the other 99%, especially the more you go in the bottom, you have access to nothing. Historically, there's been a lot of conversation about education is the answer. You just got to educate people, people don't have financial education. That never worked. People don't sit down to do classes. You're not going solve this problem of intelligence through education. You're going solve it through AI. And that's where I think AI is really transformational in financial services, because it's almost providing every single person around the world super intelligence to be able to optimize their financial life on their behalf and remove a lot of these profit pool that exists today in banking, in an environment with intelligence will be competed away.
00:10:35 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:10:35] S0: But flesh that last piece out a little bit more. Wealthfront used to have this idea of self driving money, which comes to mind like, okay, I've got some money, either I don't have it in the banking system, which is the worst. So I come into the banking system, I'm earning 40 basis points instead of 4%. So I'm in a lousy starting position, but I certainly don't have investments or tax loss harvesting or all this other fancy stuff. What do you think that ends up being for the average person in a couple of years because of this intelligence bucket?
00:11:00 · David Vélez
[00:11:00] S1: The first obvious rearrangement is those 600,000,000,000 that banks are keeping in the balance sheet to pay for banking branches, get rearranged, get forwarded to all the banking consumers. Because suddenly they realize, what am I doing with my money leaving it at zero? Especially when you think about compounding, what that means for savings and compounding interest. This is a lot of money being sent ultimately to pay banking branches. You look at really any country around the world, any structure you look at, Mexican banking balance sheets, for example, or Brazilians, we're exactly the same thing. Big incumbent banks, about 70% of their deposits, they pay zero. And 30%, they pay some yield generally to the highest income population or the corporates. One of the things that you see in banking is in a perfectly competitive environment, the best product should win. If you're charging no fees, if you have the best experience, Banking is a commodity product ultimately. So you should be able to get 100% of the market share. That doesn't happen because there is a lot of inertia in the system. And with the combination, the multiplication of intelligence with open banking, for example, Pled. Can connect 120,000,000 accounts and you put intelligence on top of that. You're effectively allowing each customer to know how to optimise their financial life and where are the fees coming. So I'll give you an example. We're doing this in Brazil today where about 50,000,000 of our customers every day, we're telling them, Hey, your bank account, your credit card in that bank is due tomorrow. You don't have any money there. And they're going to charge you a 15% interest rate per day. Let us give you some money so you can pay that credit card. Or refinance, you have this loan at 10% interest. Let us refinance that at 5% interest. It's ultimately a drive towards optimizing and removing a lot of those profit pools on behalf of the consumer. In some products, like small businesses do want to sit down with a banker, with a human and have that conversation. If you have millions of dollars to invest, you still probably want to see a human on the other side of the table and have that conversation. For certain consumer segments and for certain products, if you want to get a mortgage or certain sophisticated products, there is value in having a physical space.
00:13:04 · David Vélez, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
But that might be 5% of the cases today versus if you have a savings account, a credit card or a loan, you just don't need that anymore. So I think the rationale would be effectively, yeah, we're trying to serve these customers, but it's ignoring that for the majority of people, especially the mass market, increasingly you just don't need it. And you don't go to that physical infrastructure anymore. Yeah. [00:13:26] S0: One of the questions that I think lots of investors and founders are wrestling with is what will be the best competitive advantages or moats in this new AI era when the cost to build new stuff digitally is much, much lower? If you had to imagine it like you're some new founder, I strip everything away from you and your only goal is to kill new bank, is to like build a new company to attack new bank, let's say in Brazil or in Latin America. What do you think you would do? Like what would be the vector of attack on your own business? [00:13:52] S1: Which in a way was what we did to the incumbent banks [00:13:54] S0: ten years ago, right? We were
00:13:56 · David Vélez
[00:13:56] S1: the disruptor going after incumbent banks. So I think the early stage startup today that is AI native, biggest advantage will be the speed, the ability to move extremely quickly and launch a number of different products. Especially if you're born unregulated, then you're to be able to move fast. By now we are fully regulated. We have banking licenses in a number of different countries. So we have to go at a certain pace. We have to be checking with regulators. Now, think specifically in financial services, specifically banking, that will only get you up to a certain point because eventually you're going to need to be regulated as well. And so I think in some areas, there's a lot of conversation about how AI disrupt software and that you can ask Charge EPT or Codex to rebuild an entire software strategy, but you still cannot really get Charge EPT to get your banking license. And you still cannot really get them to have regulators give you licensing in six months instead of two or three years. Specifically on credit or in certain products that we operate in, the amount of data that we have is pretty significant. So we have about 140,000,000 customers. For each customer, we have something like 20,000 to 30,000 data points across thirteen different years. So this is a huge massive amount of information that allowed us to build our own foundation model. We build our own foundation model for financial services, for credit. And this gives us a significant advantage in making credit decisions, for example, or collection decisions. The early stage startup entrepreneur world, they would have the speed, they would have a much harder time getting to that level of data. So data becomes a significant moat now for more of the incumbents. Companies like us, we're sort of in the sweet spot of benefiting the most from AI, because in one way we already have the scale and the data and the brand and the trust and the licenses that will be hard for the early native startup to move. But also we still have the technology angle and technology infrastructure to allow us to benefit from AI and what AI is creating and move even faster than we were moving before.
00:15:50 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, David Vélez
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