In the four years since Marc Andreessen cast his gaze on financial services and declared that “we can reinvent the entire thing,” unleashing torrents of unbundling narratives, the incumbent banks seem to be rediscovering their groove in residential housing, leveraging their span of customer engagement to develop a fintech-powered take on the age-old financial supermarket narrative.

In the four years since Marc Andreessen cast his gaze on financial services and declared that “we can reinvent the entire thing,” unleashing torrents of unbundling narratives, the incumbent banks seem to be rediscovering their groove in residential housing, leveraging their span of customer engagement to develop a fintech-powered take on the age-old financial supermarket narrative.

While fintech start-ups are disrupting many financial markets, the US municipal bond market has been largely left behind. As a result, the $3.9-trillion muni market remains largely inefficient, replete with frictions that reduce investor returns and raise costs for issuers. Higher costs for municipal bond issuers translate into a combination of higher taxes and reduced services, so minimizing issuance costs and constraining coupon rates is a matter of public interest, and should attract support throughout the political spectrum.

Finding and securing a steady inflow of capital is the harbinger of uncertainty for many founders and start-ups. Whether it’s bootstrapping with whatever resources are available or securing seed financing, start-ups face the ever-present challenge of keeping the ship above water. For some, this eats away at productivity that could have been used somewhere else. For others, it’s a sure-fire sign that infighting could threaten the company’s lifespan.

As the onslaught of dire warnings about the disappearing ability to retire continues to inundate the popular press and our inbox , it begs the questions: “Are the warnings justified?”; “Is this true?”; and if so, “Why?”  Have people simply become less responsible, or is there perhaps more to this than meets the eye? This sea change led me to take a look back to when the current crop of retirees entered the workforce, to understand what may have been different than for those who came before.

Amazon has been getting a lot of free buzz lately.  The Seattle FANG has been holding a bake-off to see which city will host the company’s second headquarters, and towns have been falling over themselves to offer tax breaks and every benefit they can drum up.  Excitement has been building as cities have been eliminated, and now we’re down to twenty survivors.

At first glance, deep learning has the hallmark hype of a technology trend that prudent institutions would do well to avoid. But beyond their celebrated successes in image recognition and translation, there are subtle and persuasive reasons for financial services organizations to deploy deep learning models, even if they haven’t used simpler machine learning methods before.

Facebook has over two billion users: a following no other social media company has been able to achieve. Blackrock has over $6 trillion in assets: an amount no other asset manager has ever managed to best. If you search “Blackrock” on Facebook, however, you are likely to default to the “Blackrock Steakhouse” page, as Facebook search uses the number of fans to rank results.

It’s 2018, and Quicken Loans, the consensus tech darling of major mortgage companies, has surpassed Wells Fargo to be the top originator during the preceding year.  In rapid succession, both Bank of America and Suntrust announced digital origination platforms.  Not to be outdone, LoanDepot debuted a $100mm HQ for its mello digital brand, complete with a 30-foot slide.

[Disclaimer: This post is intended to support investor activism, irrespective of investors’ political preferences.] If recent world events are any indication, we should expect to see an increase in individual investors demanding that their investments reflect their beliefs; it’s their money, after all. The gap in today’s personal finance and investment advice space to service this demand presents an opportunity for all types of financial advisors

Fellow NPR nerds likely spent this past week eagerly awaiting excerpts from an interview with Messrs. Bernanke, Paulson and Geithner (the “Committee of Three”) marking the 10th anniversary of the financial crisis that precipitated the Great Recession. As if to underscore its proximate cause, Paulson remarked that “mortgages are ground zero of, you know, the crisis…”