The process of underwriting a consumer or a small business has always been fascinating for me. I’ve always found it stimulating to determine someone’s creditworthiness using a more or less complicated formula. Money Changers by Salomon Koninck That’s why, over the last decade, I’ve consistently gravitated toward lending and credit—across different companies, geographies, and markets. In this...
Alternative lenders are generally considered a low interest rate phenomenon: when interest rates are low, money is cheap, so alternative lenders can compete with banks because their cost of capital is comparable to the cost of capital of banks. Then, when the interest rates regime changes, things get much tougher: cost of capital for alternative lenders rises and it becomes increasingly difficult...
The microcosm of DeFi has been highly successful in the last few years in creating a set of new financial rails based on a new paradigm. These financial rails have been extensively used by a niche of power users who played with them in many different ways, with the clear goal of speculating. So far, a very limited intersection exists between the new DeFi rails and off-chain economic...
From my humble point of view, the most interesting piece of financial innovation in circulation today is what a small group of decentralized finance startups is doing: trying to bring real world assets on-chain. Roman style mosaic of robot lending money – DALL-E What these companies are doing is fascinating, and yet extremely challenging at the same time. They are trying to migrate...
The goal of this post is to provide a deep-dive in one of these decentralised credit marketplaces Credix, to analyze its capital-markets-as-a-service proposition and contextualize it in the wider lending space.
The goal of this post is to provide a guide on what buy now pay later is, which are its main dynamics, why it is so successful and how profitable it will stay in the longer run.
The main argument of the essay is that, in order to really become a mainstream product, DeFi lending will have to expand across two main dimensions: reputation and real world assets.
Last year, I wrote a post defining the most important component of a banking stack. This post is the complement to that one, and i describes the core elements of a modern lending stack, adding some new DeFi pieces to the architecture.
Over this quarantine, I’ve decided to invest some time in a renowned Coursera course on Banking. The course is great and one of the core concepts of the class is the Hierarchy of Money. Being myself very interested in cryptocurrency, I’d like to explore in this post where Bitcoin sits in this hierarchy. First of all, what is the hierarchy of money? Even though every dollar looks the...