Category Archives: scuttlebits

[scuttlebit] Shift4’s organic growth

Last week, a reader and Shift4 shareholder messaged me, raising questions about the company’s organic growth methodology. After speaking to IR, he learned that Shift4’s 3q25 organic growth calculation excluded revenue from Revel and Vectron, which were acquired in 2q24, from the year-ago base even as it included all the revenue synergies related to those […]

[scuttlebit] Fiserv’s October Massacre

What are scuttlebits? On the heels of my Global Payments post, another boomer payments stock has cratered. Source: FT You’ll recall that, through a series of mammoth-sized transactions, Global Payments morphed into an unwieldy issuer processor/merchant acquirer hybrid, only to reverse course and return to being just an unwieldy merchant acquirer. Fiserv, meanwhile, has committed […]

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[scuttlebit] Guidewire scales

What are scuttlebits? Nowhere is the insurance industry’s notorious resistance to change more evident than in how they fiercely it clings to antiquated IT architectures. Carriers adopted mainframes in the ‘80s, built policy and claims engines on top, then lagged years behind just about every other commercial enterprise in embracing client-server computing, then cloud computing. […]

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[scuttlebit] Wise is probably going to be fine

What are scuttlebits? “we fundamentally believe whoever has the best infrastructure in this space will win in the longer run” (Harsh Sinha, Wise CTO; Wise Analyst Day, 4/3/25) it’s inevitable that the lowest price operator will win the scale needed to become the infrastructure to operate the trillions of cross-border money (Kristo Kaarmann, Wise Co-Founder […]

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[scuttlebit] Charles Schwab is so back

What are scuttlebits? Nobody talks about Charles Schwab anymore, but just two and a half short years ago everyone had an opinion…and if you roamed the Twitter hellscape back then what you found was that the most amplified takes converged on one conclusion: Schwab was teetering on the brink of collapse. To recap: the most […]

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[scuttlebit] thoughts on ASML

What are scuttlebits? I recently read Focus: The ASML Way by Marc Hijink, a book I’d recommend to anyone interested in getting up to speed on ASML. Among the many interesting anecdotes cited in this terrific book, the one that stood out most to me pertained not to its mind-boggling technology but its approach to […]

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