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Amazon.com was the virtual guest of honor this month at the Retail Banking 2014 conference. Top bank executives repeatedly cited the Internet giant's success at using data and technology to better serve and profit from customers.
March 20 -
A team assembled by ex-regulator Raj Date is preparing to launch a plastic card for Americans who don't qualify for mainstream credit. It is thought to be the first entrant into the subprime card market in several years.
February 4 -
Longtime JPMorgan Chase banker Charlie Scharf looks like the safe choice to replace retiring Visa CEO Joseph Saunders. But for the "top dog" payments network, safe is usually wise.
October 24 -
Hans Morris, who left Visa in 2009 and joined private-equity firm General Atlantic, shared his payments investing philosophy with bankers and former colleagues on Monday night.
May 22 -
But unlike many of those veterans, he isn't particularly interested in scooping up failed banks with the help of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
January 5
There's a painfully wide
Morris, who spent the past four years at the private-equity giant General Atlantic, has started a venture capital firm that will finance and advise financial technology startups.
Technology companies tend to be "more open-minded" and can "figure out how to integrate things in ways that really are breathtaking," but "if you work in financial services, you care more about details, and problems," he says. "Having exposure to both and being able to talk to both worlds is big part of why I think there's a good opportunity here."
It's a pointed mission for a man who once was in the running to be the next chief executive of Visa, the world's largest payments network. Morris left the San Francisco company in 2009, after two years spent helping it go public with then-CEO Joseph Saunders.
Saunders retired in late 2012,
For Morris, a former longtime Citigroup (NYSE:C) investment banker, the big financial companies where he spent most of his career are the least able to incubate new ideas. But the tech companies that excel at innovation don't have the experience or the practical knowledge to make their ideas work in the more regulated banking industry.
"It's hard for any big company to build software when things are changing rapidly" or to move quickly in the current banking regulatory cycle, but "to get to real scale is much, much harder than most entrepreneurs believe," he says.
Morris is particularly interested in investing in and advising startups that are working on new ways to help improve how merchants accept payments, how financial companies use data and how banks and other lenders offer credit to people and small businesses who might not qualify for traditional loans. Nyca has already invested in and advised the workplace lender workpays.me, which this week
Trying to develop such "alternative credit solutions" has become a big goal for banks and nonbanks alike, especially as regulators clamp down on some more traditional sources of short-term credit, like payday loans and banks' so-called deposit advances. One of the most high-profile efforts is coming from Raj Date, the former No. 2 of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, who in February
"I'm a big fan of his and I share many of Raj's observations about consumer credit," Morris says. "To me the criteria is that you have to be offering a very fair, transparent product that is in the interests of the borrower and you have to have some sort of competitive advantage in your underwriting."
Nyca Partners will be funded by the partners' own investments and does not currently plan to seek outside financing. Morris would not discuss who else he plans to bring on board, other than to say that they will have "backgrounds similar to mine" as an experienced operating executive.
"You can invest time, capital or some of both," he says.
Morris joined General Atlantic as a managing director in 2010, and spent four years leading the firm's investments in financial services. But in January, he stepped back from General Atlantic, where he maintains a special advisor role. He remains on the boards of the companies he joined for General Atlantic, including
His time at the "brilliant" General Atlantic helped hone Morris' appreciation for "exposure to innovation," while encouraging him to strike out on his own, he says. General Atlantic "tends to focus on later-stage companies, and a lot of the stuff that I found most personally interesting was earlier-stage companies," he says.
