Money often costs too much – a look at Adyen (ADYEN:EN)

“Only two ways to make money in business: One is to bundle; the other is unbundle.” – Jim Barksdale

In the last post, I talked about the history of merchant acquiring and how the industry evolved. This post talks about the natural progression of the trend and the rise of the full stack acquirer.

A quick recap

The core jobs to be done for merchant acquiring is to enable a merchant to accept credit card payments. It started with one institution, the bank, and then unbundled into a plethora of entities. We now have a complicated ecosystem consisting of the card networks, issuing banks, acquiring banks, payment processors, and the alphabet soup of PSPs and MSP’s. Merchant acquiring transitioned to being a commodity business and scale became king. The need for scale caused the companies to grow via acquisition. Continue reading “Money often costs too much – a look at Adyen (ADYEN:EN)” →

To travel is to live – A journey through Booking Holdings (NYSE:BKNG)

I’m a broken record on this topic :), reading 10ks is the best free learning tool if you want to understand how businesses work. We have a 10K a month group as part of the Fintech PM guild and this month we tackled the travel behemoth, Booking Holdings.

What is Booking holdings?

Booking Holdings is the holding company for a constellation of brands and is an Online Travel agent company (OTA) that primarily serves the international market (Ex-US). It was previously known as the Priceline Group, renamed to Booking Holdings in 2018, and is listed on the NYSE (BKNG). The founding of the company has its roots in the acquisition of booking.com by priceline.com in 2005. They are headquartered in Amsterdam with operations in multiple countries. Their main brands are Priceline, booking.com, Kayak, OpenTable, and Agoda. In 2019 they did ~$15B in top-line revenue and their current market cap is ~$62B. A majority of booking.com revenue is driven by hotel bookings. Continue reading “To travel is to live – A journey through Booking Holdings (NYSE:BKNG)” →

Is inflation around the corner? – Consumer behavior post coronavirus

Today’s post is of the wonkish type. A few of us in the fintech pm group started chatting about certain macro trends and that discussion sparked the idea for this post. BTW this is one of the many reasons I really like having a curated private group – it leads to broader and deeper conversations. Today’s topic is inflation!

What is inflation and what are its causes?

Continue reading “Is inflation around the corner? – Consumer behavior post coronavirus” →

Strategy vs tactics – why do we get it wrong most of the time?

The difference between strategy and tactics is the most misunderstood phenomenon. 90% of the time the two are conflated. I recently read (twice, its that good!) the book 7 Powers: The foundation of business strategy by Hamilton Helmer. I highly recommend getting the paper copy of the book to make notes on and see the visuals. I plan to write some posts applying some of the concepts to industries I’m familiar with, but for today I’d like to talk about a basic framework, two sentences that illuminate the difference between strategy and tactics Continue reading “Strategy vs tactics – why do we get it wrong most of the time?” →

Lessons learned in SMB fintech

In the last post, I highlighted that SMB’s are mostly a long tail business with a majority of the market at the smaller end of the spectrum. An insight that I did not appreciate going into this market is the amount of sensitivity to price. The statement that “There are three things that are most important in SMB, price, price and price” is 100% true! With most small businesses being small and not really in it to grow this price sensitivity makes a ton of sense. So if you are a startup in this space you come across an interesting squeeze. Continue reading “Lessons learned in SMB fintech” →

Cross-sell is dead

Every companies’ strategy mentions owning the full customer relationship as a key goal. The thinking goes somewhat like this.

We have identified a customer need in a super specific niche area inside a large industry vertical.
Once we acquire this customer for this super specific need, we want to continue serving them and building a relationship with them
This same customer has varied needs that exist in the large industry vertical, a vertical that is unnecessary complex and filled with incumbents offering poor products.
We will build products that address all their needs. We will cross them into all these products
The customer is happy as there is only one place to go for all his needs
We will own the customer for everything they need in that industry vertical – we build high LTV

Continue reading →

The ultimate guide to product management hiring, Part 2: The hiring process

This post is #2 in the series of “The ultimate guide to hiring PM’s”. Post #1 is here.

Continuing with the theme of approaching the hiring process as a product, the hiring process has two main goals:

Targeting: Find the right person. Create an efficient interview process that provides a full view of the candidate.
Conversion: Reduce the candidate’s friction. Once you have decided you want a person on your team, ensure you have the best method to convert the user (candidate) to a customer (full time hire).

Continue reading “The ultimate guide to product management hiring, Part 2: The hiring process” →