The Four-Day, Eight Minute, Zero Powerpoint Pitch
This team of bankers had never met each other before the conference created the "eMe" business idea and crafted this pitch in four days, working only two hours per day (they were at a conference). This pitch is better than 98% of the pitches I see in Silicon Valley.
Incidentally, I'm the guy in the first row in an Aloha shirt. To put it mildly, I was the only one not in a suit at the conference.
-----
More tips for startups here. And if you're a banker, we have you covered here.
Comments (17)
The pitch could have used some work. I've seen teams do better in 2 days.
Even not considering the short amount of time, these guys put together a great presentation. And I was on one of the other teams.
Decent model for pitch presentations I guess.
It appears that a similar solution, to the one proposed in the above presentation, exists in the form of: http://www.paymentpathways.com (out of the TechNexus in Chicago)
www.twitter.com/aainslie
Payment Pathways Summary:
What is the best predictor of a successful financial transaction?
Since the first traders began exchanging their possessions, the best predictor has been knowing the identity of the other party.
The size of a transaction, the distance between traders, the nature of the transaction, or even the languages of the parties do not change the need to know the identity of the other party to a transaction.
But the question, “who am I doing business with?” does not always have an obvious answer. For both buyer and seller, authentication of the participating parties has become a high-value assurance of security. And today, security is a major concern for online consumers.
Solving The Identity Problem
Payment Pathways has developed patent-pending technology and business processes that elegantly solve the identity problem — without layering on yet another scheme to protect the private payment identities of consumers and businesses alike.
Our Greenlist® technology will be deployed by banks, content providers, and others to positively identify participants to a transaction, find the payment address of the other party to the transaction, and provide the means and method to complete the payment transfer.
Operated as a secure Web service for banks, Greenlist employs state-of-the-art database and security technology to verify that each party to a transaction is properly credentialed based on easy-to-remember public identifiers. The Greenlist locates virtual payment addresses just as a “white pages” finds phone numbers and physical addresses.
How You Benefit
When your virtual addresses are Greenlisted:
- You can review and pay bills electronically without divulging your credit card information.
- People can electronically send money to your public payment address.
- You can get instant retailer rebates or discount coupons when they are most valuable to you.
- Online merchants reward you with more loyalty incentives because you pay them more efficiently.
- You stop paying your doctors to retrieve your own online healthcare records.
"In the Greenlist, your identity information is locked and loaded for mobile activation. You are informed whenever an individual or a company seeks to find or authenticate any of your virtual addresses, be it your payment address, patient healthcare records, or even a merchant loyalty program account. And because it only works in one way, you can give it to anyone — in absolute confidence that your money and records will be safe. We call that informational self-determination.
Greenlist banks can offer a service that is
- less expensive for consumers than Western Union or Moneygram,
- more secure than PayPal, and
- more convenient than checks."
"Accelerating Migration To Electronic Payments
Banks also use Greenlist to virtually eliminate data entry mistakes and substantially reduce fraud risk associated with migration of paper-based money transfer systems — such as checks and cash — to the use of electronics in money transfers.
- Payment Pathways uses consumer information from banks. The most trusted source.
- Greenlist is a standard that is neutrally positioned among all traditional and emerging payment systems.
Payment Pathways works with any payment systems that choose to participate-develop in this standards-oriented model. No bets required on one payment system surviving over another.
- Payment Pathways is founded on guiding principles and intellectual insight developed by Dr. Franco Modigliani (1918-2003), the twenty-third economist to win the Nobel Prize for Economics."
But the middle section could have been much better if he had presented less of it and each of the team members had been given time to describe their one key characteristic in more depth. The "CEO" could simply have coordinated this section; after each contribution, he could have repeated the main point, and interpreted and integrated each feature to build up the whole. The sense of a team would have been much stronger.
The concept is a different subject. It is interesting; although it is not particularly novel, being a variation on a Vendor Relationship Management facility. It is likely to become available before too long and in a variety of forms, so maybe the time is about right for new services of this type.
First, let's forgive the lack of any real specificity in the video due to the event's context (e.g., Q: "How hard it is it to do this?" A: "It's easy."), since it looks to be some kind of roo-haa morale event and people look like they're wrapping up a 4-day offsite and just want to go home. The presentation style seems kinda entertaining, especially if you consider the context.
But, on it's face the challenge in pulling this concept off isn't primarily a technical one (which is, uh, pretty formidable) but interoperability of legal, policy & business practices across not just 1 particular industry but a set of inter-dependent industries. Getting multiple interoperable data networks to work around a singular data model is like getting the whole world to dump EDI for a single XML data interchange (I call it the "one ring to rule them all" myth). Remember EDI? Yeah, it's not sexy & it's antiquated but it's still around and making a s*&t load of money. XML hasn't kill the Radio Star of EDI... at least yet. The level of interoperability the presenters propose doesn't even yet exist *within* the corporation, considering the innumerable ERP, CRM, and IT applications within the enterprise. Many B2B companies died trying when the .com bubble burst.
There were many reasons Hailstorm failed, but a critical silver bullet was the inability of banks to all agree on a single legal framework & set of operational, privacy, & indemnification policies to "rule them all". Documents don't live in a vacuum; they are legal affidavits within policy-driven applications & systems that make money for specific providers, each of whom interoperate with other providers in economically-beneficial ways. You can't just extricate documents from this complex web without dealing with the messy parts.
Leave a comment...