Thoughts on hacking finance

http://ac-idealog.blogspot.com/2009/03/thoughts-on-hacking-finance.html

by AaronChua • 17 years ago

15 9 17 years ago

ac-idealog.blogspot.com

antonber• 17 years ago

I like the ideas, but terribly written.

AaronChua3• 17 years ago

After rereading it, I realised you are right. Lots of errors as well as lacking flow in some of the sentences. Thanks for reading it still. Will definitely improve my writing in the future.

mixmax• 17 years ago

The information presented was good ,and that's the most important thing.

blurry• 17 years ago

Come on, the ideas are as lazy as the writing.

Consider this gem:

We need better ways to provide financing to those who need it: students, low income groups, creatives, people with poor credits. There are lots of opportunities to provide low cost alternatives to what traditional banks are failing to offer.

So the idea is to charge high-risk borrowers low-risk fees? Didn't we all just go through this?

AaronChua3• 17 years ago

I mean low cost in terms of operation costs, not in terms of cheap loans.

Current bank structures are too cost heavy to provide light weight services to these under served markets.

Some of the embedded links show more concrete examples of such models.

syntactic• 17 years ago

One of the sites he mentioned in there, covestor, seems pretty interesting in how it links to an investor's actual trading account to track his record. To me, that makes a lot more sense than following a financial adviser's advice to buy something they don't even own.

AaronChua3• 17 years ago

Thanks for reading!

Here is the post from the perspective of the VC that invested in Covestor. It highlights the opportunities in disrupting the asset management industry.

http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2008/04/covestor.html

HSO• 17 years ago

I too thought there must be opportunities in "disrupting" finance. Then I realized people "want" to be taken advantage of. Of course, not literally. But in a weird sense, people do not want to take responsibility for their finances. Instead they prefer to have someone to blame whom they can replace when things go bad. It seems easier on their ego to say "I trusted the wrong guy" than to say "I was wrong". Of course, that gets exploited by the snakes. This basic mechanism (abrogate intellectual responsibility and substitute (blind?) trust for -- questionable and contradictory -- domain knowledge(s)) is very robust over cycles and will make it very, very hard if not impossible to disrupt the financial industry. Another factor is that for most people, at least in Europe and Asia, money is not a polite subject to obsess about. Instead, it would be easier for people to, again, just have a person who makes them feel good and trust things are in "good hands". Again, in a weird sense, they don't actually want to know all that much detail about what's happening with their money. Easier to say, I gave it to this guy at such-and-such brandname institution and how can that be wrong. Maybe I'm just too stupid to see a way around this. The fact is, though, that all these attempts to give investors/customers more power seem to go nowhere or remain insignificant. There is a reason for that and I think it's not an issue of making it easier. It's a question of do they really want what they say they want?

olefoo• 17 years ago

Yes, you've totally got it nailed.

The best solutions that I can come up with off the top of my head are better tools for watching out for ones financial health.

Thoughts on hacking finance

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