Ah the good old days. Stocks up $25, $50, $100 more in a single day. Day trading was all the rage. Anyone and everyone you talked to had a story about how they had made a ton of money on such and such a stock. In an hour. Stock trading millionaires were being minted by the week, if not sooner.

You couldn’t go anywhere without people talking about the stock market. Everyone was in or knew someone who was in. There were hundreds of companies that were coming public and could easily be bought and sold. You just pick a stock and buy it. Then you pray it goes up. Which most days it did.

Then it ended. Slowly by surely the air came out of the bubble and the stock markets declined and declined till the air was completely gone. The good news was that some people were able to see it coming and get out. The bad is that others were able to get out, but at significant losses.

If we thought it was stupid to invest in public internet websites that had no chance of succeeding back then, it’s worse today.

In a bubble there is always someone with a “great” idea pitching an investor the dream of a billion dollar payout with a comparison to an existing success story. In the tech bubble it was Broadcast.com, AOL, Netscape, etc. Today it’s Uber, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

To the investor, it’s the hope of a huge payout. But there is one critical difference. Back then the companies the general public was investing in were public companies. They may have been horrible companies, but being public meant that investors had liquidity to sell their stocks.

The bubble today comes from private investors who are investing in apps and small tech companies.

Just like back then there were always people telling you their idea for a new website or about the public website they invested in, today people always have what essentially boils down to an app that they want you to invest in. But unlike back then when the dream of riches was from a public company, now it’s from a private company. And therein lies the rub.

People we used to call individual or small investors, are now called Angels. Angels. Why do they call them Angels? Maybe because they grant wishes?

According to some data I found, there are225k Angels in the US. Like the crazy days of the Internet boom, I wonder how many realize what they have gotten into.

But they are not alone.

For those who can’t figure out how to be Angels, you can sign up to be part of the new excitement called Equity Crowd Funding. Equity Crowd Funding allows you to join the masses to chase investments with as little as 5k dollars. Oh the possibilities!!

I have absolutely not doubt in my mind that most of these individual Angels and crowd funders are currently under water in their investments. Absolutely none. I say most. The percentage could be higher.

Why?

Because there is ZERO liquidity for any of those investments. None. Zero. Zip.

All those Angel investments in all those apps and startups. All that crowdfunded equity. All in search of their unicorn because the only real salvation right now is an exit or cash pay out from operations. The SEC made sure that there is no market for any of these companies to go public and create liquidity for their Angels. The market for sub 25mm dollar raises is effectively dead.DOA. Gone. Thanks SEC. And with the new Equity Crowd Funding rules yet to be finalized, there is no reason to believe that the SEC will be smart enough to create some form of liquidity for all those widows and orphans who will put their $5k into the dream only to realize they can’t get any cash back when they need money to fix their car.

So why is this bubble far worse than the tech bubble of 2000?

Because the only thing worse than a market with collapsing valuations is a market with no valuations and no liquidity.

If stock in a company is worth what somebody will pay for it, what is the stock of a company worth when there is no place to sell it?

Between 5% and 15% of online applications are abandoned by small businesses because of the irritations of manual workflows and repetitive questions.

Banks are well aware of their shortcomings. According to the same October Aite report, more than 75% of large and midsize banks admit their current onboarding process is not up to speed.

https://www.americanbanker.com/news/this-neobank-believes-it-can-solve-banks-digital-onboarding-problem

The iPhone trademark was held by Cisco. How Steve Jobs managed to take it away from Cisco’s hand?

At the time, Apple was a smaller company than Cisco, so Giancarlo knew that he had the upper hand in the negotiation. However, Steve Jobs had his reality distortion field. He called Giancarlo multiple times about getting the iPhone trademark. Giancarlo kept saying he wasn’t interested. Jobs kept persisting, often calling multiple times in a day.

He was fighting a war of attrition.

At one point he even called at 6:00 PM on Valentine’s Day and mentioned the famous line "Do you have email at home?" to try and get under Giancarlo’s skin.

He would mention how Cisco had technically already lost the right to the trademark because Cisco wasn’t using it. Giancarlo kept blowing him off, saying how he wasn’t interested in licensing it. As the launch date approached, Steve kept persisting, increasing how frequently he called. Eventually he said that Apple would go ahead with the launch, fight Cisco in court, etc.

After Apple launched the iPhone, Cisco filed a lawsuit, and this time the two sides’ lawyers and executives were forced to negotiate. The final deal terms were said to be that Apple would use Cisco’s equipment to update its networking in exchange for using the iPhone trademark.

This was a brilliant negotiation tactic because Apple would have used Cisco’s equipment when upgrading its networking infrastructure anyways. It was already using Cisco’s equipment. Maybe Jobs could have also threatened to switch to Juniper Networks instead, but it would have been a lose-lose situation. This made Giancarlo think that he was getting something substantial out of the deal when in reality Jobs pretty much got the iPhone trademark for free.

The Brilliant Trick Steve Jobs Used to Win the iPhone Trademark

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Revolut – the fintech digital bank
$1.5 billion in transaction every month, 700 percent year over year growth, Revolut broke even in December 2017 for the first time ever, and now it can’t stop and won’t stop growing.

Revolut broke even in December, now has 1.5 million customers

BY ROMAIN DILLET
4 hours ago

Fintech startup Revolut can’t stop and won’t stop growing. The company has had an amazing month of December with a huge increase in the total volume of transactions and signups. Because of that, Revolut broke even in December for the first time ever.

The company told me that it wasn’t just a lucky month and January is looking good as well. Revolut announced that it had reached a million registered users back in November. Three months later, Revolut now has 1.5 million customers.

On average, Revolut now manages to attract between 6,000 and 8,000 new users per day. While social networks or messaging apps would be reasonably happy with those numbers, it’s ridiculously high when you compare this growth rate with good old banks.

But the company is aware that it started off as a foreign exchange service. After signing up, you can top up your account using a debit card or a wire transfer. You can then exchange money into another currency and send it to a bank account. Revolut also sends you a debit card so that you can pay anywhere in the world with little exchange fees.

Revolut now wants to convert those happy travelers into daily activer users. The app provides a better experience than most banking apps, and you can enable and disable debit card features in just a few seconds. And of course, the company has been adding new features to handle nearly everything you need to replace your bank account.

You can now buy travel insurance, trade bitcoins, get a personal IBAN and open a credit line with your Revolut account. 350,000 users open Revolut every day. And the company has 800,000 monthly active users.

Revolut now manages around $1.5 billion in transaction every month — this number is up 700 percent year over year. And this number should increase as well as Revolut plans to launch in the U.S., Singapore and Australia later this year. India, Brazil, South Africa and the UAE should come later.

More importantly, margins are pretty thin for fintech startups. For instance, it took TransferWise six years to reach profitability(TransferWise reports a monthly volume of $2.1 billion/£1.5 billion).

Many people believed startups that are competing with retail banks would have a hard time making money — the big banks in London make money on trading and credit after all. So today’s news is an encouraging sign for the space.

https://techcrunch-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/techcrunch.com/2018/02/25/revolut-broke-even-in-december-now-has-15-million-customers/amp/

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OCBC says it is the first bank in Singapore to offer its customers day-to-day banking and make cashless payments using their voices.

“How much money do I have in my bank account?”

Accordingng to OCBC, its retail banking customers are now able to check their bank account balances, outstanding credit card balances and details, as well as make instant e-payments – using Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant.

The e-payments can be made to any bank account in Singapore, including accounts not linked to the PayNow service. PayNow is a nationwide peer-to-peer funds transfer service that enables funds transfers using mobile or national registration identity card (NRIC) numbers. In October last year, OCBC rolled out a similar service to business banking customers.

For example, customers can ask questions such as “Hey Siri, what’s my balance?”, or “How much money do I have in my bank account?”, or “What is my credit card spend?”. They can then authenticate the transaction with their fingerprint or facial recognition.

Aditya Gupta, OCBC Bank’s head of e-business Singapore, says the new service “brings us one huge leap closer to making natural language voice-activated banking and payments a reality”.

The bank also reminds people about its previous developments. This includes introducing biometric authentication to access account details with OneTouch in March 2015, an app for Apple Watch in March 2016; and OneLook in November 2017 – also on its app.

A few days ago, Google’s Project Zero team publicly exposed a security flaw in Microsoft Edgebecause Microsoft failed to fix it in the allotted time. Although the move received slight backlash, it was also appreciated by many – some of them being Neowin readers – who praised the initiative as a means to set things in motion.

Google’s Project Zero team of security researchers is tasked with finding bugs in software products developed by the firm itself as well as those from other tech giants. On successfully finding a flaw, the researchers report it to the relevant company and provide them with 90 days to fix the issue before it is made public.

Over the past couple of years, the initiative has disclosed several vulnerabilities in the same manner. Now, Project Zero has exposed a "high" severity security flaw in Windows 10

According to the report in the Project Zero directory, the issue has been definitively tested on Windows 10 version 1709.

The flaw in question relates to the SvcMoveFileInheritSecurity remote procedure call (RPC), which if exploited, can lead to an arbitrary file being assigned an arbitrary security descriptor, that can potentially lead to elevation of privilege.

The remote procedure call makes use of the MoveFileEx function call which moves a file to a new destination. The problem occurs when the RPC moves a hardlinked file to a new directory which has inheritable access control entries (ACEs). Now even if the hardlinked file doesn’t allow deletion, it can be allowed based on the permissions provided by the new parent directory that it has been moved to.

This essentially means that even if the file is read-only, if the server calls the SetNamedSecurityInfo on the parent directory, it will be able to assign it an arbitrary security descriptor, which would potentially allow other users on the network to modify it.

The security researcher who discovered this flaw has also attached a proof-of-concept code in C++ which creates a text file in the Windows folder, and abuses the SvcMoveFileInheritSecurity RPC to overwrite the security descriptor to allow access to everyone.

The security researcher went on to say that:

Some additional notes about this issue. Firstly based on the fix for issue 1427this only affects Windows 10, it does not affect any earlier versions of Windows such as 7 or 8.1. However I’ve not verified that to be the case but there’s no reason to believe it’s incorrect. MS consider this to be an ‘Important’ issue, but crucially not a ‘Critical’ issue. This is because this issue is an Elevation of Privilege which allows a normal user to gain administrator privileges. However in order to execute the exploit you’d have to already be running code on the system at a normal user privilege level. It cannot be attacked remotely (without attacking a totally separate unfixed issue to get remote code execution), and also cannot be used from a sandbox such as those used by Edge and Chrome. The marking of this issue as High severity reflects the ease of exploitation for the type of issue, it’s easy to exploit, but it doesn’t take into account the prerequisites to exploiting the issue in the first place.

According to the details presented in the report, the flaw – labeled "1428" – was disclosed as a "high" severity security issue to Microsoft on November 10, 2017, along with a similar security issue, dubbed 1427. The standard 90-day deadline was provided to resolve both the problems. When the issue proved difficult to fix, Microsoft asked for an extension in the deadline and released the supposed fix last week on Patch Tuesday.

However, contrary to what Microsoft may have believed, the patch fixed issue 1427, but detailed analysis from the Google researcher proves that 1428 – detailed above – still hasn’t been resolved. As such, Google has informed the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) that it is making the flaw visible to the public. It will be interesting to see if this disclosure accelerates the fixing of the bug given that it is now public knowledge accessible to everyone, even those with malicious intent.

Google has clarified to Neowin that it’s just a coincidence that the two flaws have been publicly disclosed in such close proximity in terms of time, simply because the standard 90-day deadlines and 14-day grace periods aligned as such.

We have reached out to Microsoft for clarification regarding the security flaw, and will provide an update if the company responds.

The largest US banks have acquired only 18 fintech startups since 2013, according to CB Insights‘ research, but activity in the last five months has started picking up.

In total, 2017 saw more acquisitions by top US banks than any other year, CB Insights has found. Since September 2017, there have been six fintech acquisitions made by five different banks. Four of those banks, namely JPMorgan, BNP Paribas, Credit Suisse and TD Bank, made their first fintech acquisitions of the time period (2013-2018) in 2017.

As more banks look to build out their own fintech products, more fintech M&A or acqui-hires could follow, CB Insights predicts.

Source: CB Insights

Highlights:

• BBVA has been the most active acquirer of fintech start-ups in the last five years, focusing in the online banking, payment and real estate valuation sectors. Of BBVA’s four acquisitions, three are located outside of the US: Madiva Soluciones in Spain, Holvi in Finland, and Openpay in Mexico.

• Goldman Sachs has been ramping up its consumer loan business. Most recently, Goldman Sachs’ merchant banking division took a majority stake in FinanceIt, a POS lending startup that allows contractors to offer financing to customers, while its Marcus division acquired the team behind credit card start-up Final to bolster their credit talent. The bank is also reportedly close to acquiring personal finance management (PFM) start-up Clarity Money.

• BNP Paribas acquired its first fintechs in 2017. In April, BNP Paribas purchased Compte-Nickel, an online bank, and followed that up in September by taking a majority stake in Gambit, a robo-advisor.

• JP Morgan Chase acquired two payments start-ups in 2017; one of these was WePay. This aligns with the organisational goal of scaling Chase Pay, the bank’s payments solution.

What gets measured gets done. What’s not measured is often given to luck.

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