I left Part 1 noting that even as FleetCor insists on its relevance in a world of electric vehicles, it has diversified away from fuel cards, investing first in adjacent verticals like Tolls and now in more far off areas like account payables. Through its $1.2bn acquisition of STP in 2016, FleetCor has come to process 90% […]
With Visa and Mastercard, the feedback mechanism between issuers, merchants, and consumers is well understood. As I wrote in a previous post: If you wanted to build your own payments network to compete with Visa, you’d need to win over the issuing banks. Of course, you won’t get the issuers if you don’t have merchants […]
On the surface, the combination of S&P Global and IHS Markit appears both inevitable, given the frenzied consolidation of financial market infrastructure in recent years; and straightforward, given that both companies are built on data. Smash the companies together, cut duplicative costs, cross-sell datasets, and combine the datasets into new products. Easy. But the deal’s […]
One possible explanation for why Twitter has been slow at developing new products is that for many years this was a muscle it didn’t have to exercise. Twitter got so big so fast, receiving national attention in SXSW less than a year after it was separated from a failing podcasting directory in 2006, that its […]
There are some obvious benefits to combining data from different sources: a spike in call center volumes can be traced back to a database error that prevents purchase orders from going through; a purchase order from one brand can be correlated against another to promote cross-selling; a marketing department can combine first party data from […]
A relational database organizes data into tables of rows and columns and links those tables through shared identifiers (keys). This architecture gained traction in the 80s and 90s, when applications were monoliths supported by single servers, and the data structure backing them – the tables, fields, and data type of each field (integer, string) – […]
I’ve heard it said that in its early days the consumer internet was treated as another place to replicate tried-and-true practices from the offline world. Newspapers and magazines were thriving under a hybrid subscription and ad-based model, so it made sense that even as it collected ad revenue from service providers, Angie’s List charged consumers […]
In his seminal paper The Nature of the Firm, Ronald Coase posits that in cases where it is difficult to reliably procure labor or draft and enforce contracts that unambiguously cover the full scope of future activities, a firm will handle production itself rather than rely on arms-length market transactions. For example, hiring freelancers to […]