Want to know a magic trick to wrapping your arms around startup wealth? One word is the superhighway to startup riches today: fintech.
What’s that? It’s companies that blend financial services money matters with high tech, and this is the moment for that marriage. Forever banking has been a high touch sector — lots of human to human interaction — but buckle up; the sector now is riding a tech rocket to provide better services, faster and typically at a lower cost. The pandemic is the fuel for this, as more people do much of their banking digitally. Yes, the pandemic will end, but most experts now believe the changes it has brought to financial services will persevere because we have grown to plain prefer them. Why drive to an ATM to deposit a check when you can just take a photo with your phone?
Create a startup that makes our financial lives better, and it just might become a wealth machine.
Case in point: Stripe, a payments startup primarily focused on ecommerce. In mid-March, the company jumped to a $95 billion valuation and is now the “most valuable startup in the United States,” per The New York Times….
It’s worth noting that Stripe has been around since 2010, but only now has its valuation gone stratospheric. But those riches are why interest in fintechs has soared, and they come in a rainbow of shades nowadays.
Let’s take a capsule view of three different fintech startups: Nav.it, which focuses on financial health; DoubleCheck, a new toolset for lessening the damage done by an overdraft; and Breach Clarity, which scores data breaches by how truly severe they are and who is likely to be most impacted.
The headline in Travel Weekly jumped out at me: “Several cruise lines require vaccines, but not everybody is on board.”
Back up a step. Let us review facts. At least 83 are known to have died a Covid-19 related death on a cruise ship. There were thousands of cases among passengers. Tens of thousands of passengers were grievously inconconvenienced, in some cases doing a Flying Dutchman journey in search of a safe harbor, sometimes for weeks.
No travel vendor had a blacker eye than cruise ships in the Covid era. No vendor of any kind – not grocers or restaurants, nothing – had a worse reputation.
That’s part of the reason the CDC continues to deny cruise lines the right to sail from US ports.
I have cruised perhaps 10 times – more? – and I like it, especially for certain destinations (the Greek isles are a favorite, as is Alaska). But I still have no interest in cruising and the Travel Weekly headline is why.
The cruise industry knows it has to restore passenger confidence. Many cruise lines already are doing the right, smart thing and requiring crew – who typically live in cramped quarters with scant personal space – to be vaccinated. What about crew who feel that’s a violation of their rights?
There are other jobs on this planet. They should look for them. They will. Crew aren’t the problem.
Some passengers apparently are.
A growing number of cruise lines now require vaccinations for passengers, usually 18 and over.
But that has triggered a potential passenger grumble. Reported Travel Weekly, “Although the majority of potential cruisers are on board with the idea of vaccine mandates, some travel advisors say many of their clients are not and are disappointed with cruise line vaccine requirements for sailing.
DeeAna Archer, owner of Texas-based Archer Luxury Travel, said that about 80% of her clients have told her they would refuse to get a vaccine this year.”
I have three words for those refusers: Go pound sand.
Of course it is their choice not to cruise and, given their refusal to get vaccinated, they also have decided they do not plan to cruise. Simple as that and I for one will hold the cruise lines to a vaccine mandate because only a village idiot would cruise this year without a mandatory vaccine policy in place.
Are the travelers who say they won’t get vaccinated village idiots? That’s a topic for them to discuss with cognitive experts.
I just won’t plan to cruise or in any way travel with them this year, or next, and, yes, I am dually vaccinated, meaning the full protection of the Pfizer vaccine has kicked in for me and still I have no interest in lowering my protections to accommodate people who doubtless also believe in hordes of Satan worshippers inside the Beltway.
Count me as also wanting airlines to require vaccinations for passengers and crew – and there’s growing support for that idea at least as regards international travel.
Yes, I know that having the vaccine does not prove a person is Covid free. Latest test results show about a 90% effectiveness for both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. The J & J vaccine’s effectiveness is nearer 70%.
And yet I am dramatically more comfortable with the concept of cruising or flying with others who have proof of vaccination than I am of flying with an uncertified rabble.
There really is no way a person who wants travel to resume fastest could possibly be against vaccine requirements because there is nothing that will accelerate travel recovery with the alacrity and numbers that widespread vaccinations will bring.
About 25% of us – one in four – now say they will not get vaccinated. There are no good arguments against getting vaccinated and, yes, initially I expressed personal hesitancy, mainly due to an abiding distrust of anything touched by Trump and his acolytes. But now with 50 million of us fully vaccinated, and 90 million more partially vaccinated, and comparatively few side effects of significance, there is no good arguments against it.
Opposing vaccinations and vaccination requirements is another way of supporting a sputtering failing economy and a dead travel business.
Word of warning: be sure to check and keep checking your many airline miles, at every carrier, because they just may be in the hands of cyber crooks.
Another big travel related data beach is why.
The victim is a company called SITA and if you haven’t heard of it, join the club. But SITA is a big data processor for many carriers and in a March 4th release it said: “SITA confirms that it was the victim of a cyber-attack, leading to a data security incident involving certain passenger data that was stored on SITA Passenger Service System (US) Inc. servers. Passenger Service System (US) Inc. (‘SITA PSS’) operates passenger processing systems for airlines.”
My favorite sentence in this otherwise uninformative statement is this: “This was a highly sophisticated attack.”
Trust me: you will never see a breach announcement that says, “The attack was the kind dreamed up by especially dumb 8th graders.” Nope. The attackers always are arch criminals and card carrying Mensa members.
Right.
But this SITA attack, the little we know about it even a month later, is ugly business especially for those of us who covet and collect airline miles.
On which carriers? Damn near all. Some 90% of the planet’s air carriers are said to use SITA. The company handles many reservations and ticketing.
Other than saying there was a serious “data security incident” on February 24 the company tells us bupkis. Company spokesperson Edna Ayme-Yahil told TechCrunch zip, for instance.
Travel Weekly got a little bit more info: “In a statement, SITA spokeswoman Edna Ayme-Yahil declined to say how many airlines have been impacted by the breach. The company also didn’t provide many details on the type of data compromised, but it did note that the data includes some personal data of airline customers, including frequent flyer account data.”
Ayme-Yahil also told Travel Weekly: “Each affected airline has been provided with the details of the exact type of data that has been compromised, including details of the number of data records within each of the relevant data categories.”
That mum’s the word posture is the norm in breaches but it is maddeningly unhelpful to possible victims who have no idea what was stolen, if the theft in fact impacts their data and what, if anything, they should do about it.
But various SITA customers – among them: United and American airlines – have been sounding alarms with a particular focus on loyalty programs.
United specifically said some customer Star Alliance data was affected, but it stressed that MileagePlus data were not touched.
American said it did not use SITA but some frequent flier data passed through the system so that loyalty points accrued on other carriers could be accounted.
Lufthansa, meantime, said 1.35 million Miles and More members were impacted.
Singapore Air has said the breach may have affected as many as 580,000 people in its loyalty programs.
Even FinnAir says 200,000 of its loyalty members were impacted.
Skift summed up the carnage: “More than two million travelers enrolled in the frequent flier programs of at least ten airlines had some of their data hacked, according to messages they received recently from the carriers.”
That’s a punch in the face.
Even worse is that we don’t really know what data was lifted.
The still worse news is that it is on you to protect yourself and we simply must proceed as though the hackers got away with our account numbers and log in info – precisely what they would need to steal the miles and sell them on the dark web or convert them into easily sold goods (iPhones are extraordinarily popular).
The worst news is that, sigh, there is nothing different now: our loyalty programs are and have been easy pickings for criminals. I wrote about an American breach in 2015, ditto a United breach. I could have written the same story many more times but why bother when there is nothing new to say?
I wrote about the Sita breach- after waiting almost a month in the vain hope for more info – simply because of its breadth (just about every carrier you and I use is involved) which is inversely proportional to how much we know about it, which is a teaspoonful of worrisome uncertainties.
Protect yourself, don’t trust the carriers. That is the bottomline.
Maybe it is because I now have gotten my second jab but suddenly I am again thinking about travel related issues and in my face is a new Travelers United lawsuit against MGM that flatly claims: MGM is lying about the costs of an overnight stay in their hotels.
Ouch.
The suit claims that MGM practices deceptive pricing because it “hides” the resort fee it slaps on its room nights. This adds up to big bucks – “hundreds of millions of dollars” in the past decade, per Travelers United, a traveler advocacy group based in Washington DC.
Reported Travel Weekly: “The organization claims that MGM Resorts currently charges a resort fee at all of its U.S. properties, which include the Maryland-based MGM National Harbor, located just outside of Washington, as well as the MGM Grand, Bellagio, Aria, Mandalay Bay, New York-New York and Luxor properties in Las Vegas, among others.”
Resort fees add up. Travelers United pointed to a room night at the Luxor that cost $29 in July 2020. The resort fee was $35 per night.
Travelers United further claims that in the pandemic resort fees have not been reduced, although some of the services and amenities the fees supposedly cover have been reduced or outright eliminated.
Of course there is nothing new about this story. As far back as 2013 I wrote about “resort fee scams” for TheStreet. It’s a topic I have returned to many times – 2014, 2016, 2019 and many more.
The only things that have changed is that more hotels and resorts charge them and the amounts have steadily increased. The $19 fee of 2013 now is twice as much and, bar the door, as many hoteliers drift nearer insolvency in the Covid era expect that there will be still more and higher hidden resort fees, urban amenity fees, and who knows what else they will be called.
The other reason hoteliers do this – and I have asked many – is their assertion that the competition does it. That is, the competitor down the road deceptively advertises a room price (by failing to disclose the resort fee) and therefore the competitor says he is obliged to do likewise or risk losing the business because consumers will take the lower price.
There is not an abundance of evidence that says this is true, especially not at higher price points. Many guests might opt for a $99 per night room over one priced at $104 – but it just is not proven that guests would opt for a $370 hotel room over a $400 room on the basis of price alone. So a core defense of hidden resort fees is unproven.
Also true is that hotels could clearly disclose that there is an additional fee for a bundle of services for those who opt in. Just as there are extra fees for those who use the resort or hotel WiFi in many cases (although in some cases that is bundled into a resort fee, even when the guest has no intention of using the pool, the gym, etc).
Clearly the system is based on deception and is just wrong.
But still the fees persist.
How do they get away with this? We don’t complain and, at least for the past four years, there was no appetite in Washington, DC for taking away hotelier revenue streams. The latter may change with a new administration but what probably won’t change is our passive acceptance of deceptive advertising.
This shoe is on our feet. It’s up to us to demand changes.
We can also try to duck the fees. The Points Guy notes that many Las Vegas stays that are paid for with points are exempt from resort fees. That includes IHG, Hyatt and Hilton.
Another way – used by me on multiple occasions – is to book into an organization’s block of rooms for a meeting and, often, the meeting planner has negotiated a zero resort fee for attendees. That will continue if only because meetings are likely to return to Las Vegas in slow motion and resorts will be fighting for them.
But you are on your own when it comes to ducking resort fees in locations that are primarily leisure focused (as more will be in 2021 and well into 2022). There won’t be a large corporate meeting planner that has your back.
Your other option: badger your Senators and members of the House to take action. In 2016, Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill introduced a bill that would have blocked hidden resort fees. It went nowhere and McCaskill lost her seat in 2018 – her stand on resort fees had no impact on that outcome.
But it could come up for a vote in the next two years, very possibly with different results in both the Senate and the House.
Remember, nobody is saying hoteliers can’t charge resort fees. Just that they have to disclose the charge before it lands on our bill. It is just about impossible not to support that. So write your legislators They just may act.
What about the Travelers United suit? I applaud the effort – and maybe it will prevail. But why wait when we can take our own action?
Regular readers know I have long been gnashing my teeth over what has emerged as the annual question: Amex Plat, to renew or no?
My most recent vote is yes, I will continue to shell out $550/year, even tho I have not been in a Centurion Club in a year and that had become my primary touch point with American Express. But in an era where I am not flying – and do not envision travel for perhaps another three months and maybe longer – I began looking for new perks from the Platinum card and Amex has responded.
Currently on the docket is a credit of up to $30/monthly on PayPal charges billed to the card. That replaces 2020 credits for streaming video and cell phones that expired at year-end. In my case, it is paying for my New York Times subscription and most of what I pay Netflix.
There’s also a continuing $15/monthly Uber credit (also applicable to Uber eats, which is how I have used it).
There also are miscellaneous and unexpected credits such as $100 annually ($50 max, every six months) against Saks charges.
There’s a similar $100 credit against HomeDepot charges (online only). $100 at BestBuy (online only). And literally 90+ more that pop up on my screen.
But now Amex has rolled out a new perk for Plat that in effect offers cellphone protection to cardholders who bill their monthly wireless charges to Amex. Similar protection costs $10 to $12 per month via Apple and various other carriers and retailers.
It takes effect April 1.
Here’s what it delivers: “Reimbursement for the actual cost to repair or replace a Stolen or damaged Eligible Cellular Wireless Telephone.”
There’s some fine print but surprisingly little. The coverage is reasonably generous: “The maximum liability is $ 800, per claim, per Eligible Card Account. Each claim is subject to a $ 50 deductible. Coverage is limited to two (2) claims per Eligible Card Account per 12 month period.”
The only curious exclusion I noted is this: “Eligible Cellular Wireless Telephones that are lost or Mysterious Disappearance.” That’s something of a bummer because I know many who have lost a phone in a taxi or an Uber.
But I have never lost a phone so I am personally unbothered by this exclusion.
Mind you, I have two phones that will fall under this protective umbrella on April 1: a presently uncovered Pixel 3 and an iPhone 8. So I call this a good deal worth perhaps $20/monthly to me.
Add that to the PayPal credit and the annual $200 Uber credit and the card, as the cliche goes, pays for itself. And it truly does.
Do note that Amex Plat continues to offer a “purchase protection plan” that essentially gives you 90 days free from worry after buying something with the card.
There’s a $10,000 cap on the purchase amount.
Also still in effect is the American Express Extended Warranty Coverage which adds a year to the standard manufacturer’s warranty for most items purchased with the card. That’s useful because many warranties run just a year, so this doubles the coverage at no cost to the cardholder. Personally I have used it a couple times – with computers – and will say I was pleased with the service.
Yes, many cards offer similar extended warranty coverage – the only network without this perk is Discover, which had it but discontinued it – so the Amex plan isn’t unique. But I know from experience it does work.
Look, I understand: in many ways I too would prefer to be regularly stopping into the Centurion (and there now is one in my home airport, Phoenix, that I have yet to step into).
But I am glad to see Amex tossing new perks our way, to keep us in the ranks despite the absence of the travel perks that just about all of us signed up for Platinum to get.
Stay tuned. There will be more perks.
And then, poof, they will vanish when most of us are back on the road again in perhaps six to 12 months. Will we then kvetch about this absence?
I think I will when the cellphone protection times out. What about you?
On July 1, Sundie Seefried, longtime CEO of Partner Colorado Credit Union, makes a huge career change. On that day she resigns the credit union job to become the CEO of Safe Harbor Financial, LLC, a Partner Colorado subsidiary formed for the purpose of handling cannabis related banking.
When Safe Harbor was created in 2015, it was a groundbreaking institution for conducting compliance based banking that would satisfy regulators.
Safe Harbor has become a big, consuming business and, said Seefried, it’s helped put credit unions into the conversation of cannabis banking – and, increasingly, that is a conversation that is being heard as more states legalize marijuana. Included are multiple big states: California, Washington, Michigan, and Illinois. In only a handful of states is marijuana fully illegal.
In this podcast Seefried talks about the process of validating the cash that flows through a marijuana business. She also talks about the early days of Safe Harbor – and the hostility and ridicule she faced.
Who’s laughing now?
By any measure, Sundie Seefried has emerged as the queen of cannabis banking.
What would her father, a Baptist, missionary think about this? We ask her.
Just as we ask about that uncommon first name, Sundie.
We ask about being perceived as a maverick in a credit union industry that does not always revere its mavericks.
The one question she is asked that she doesn’t answer is the question, are there plans to take Safe Harbor public?
Her podcast with CUInsight is mentioned. Here’s a link.
Reference is made to how much it costs to open a Dairy Queen franchise – and surely you want to know how that came up. Listen for it.
Earlier CU 2.0 cannabis related podcast guests include Paul Stull, also multiple guests on two long cannabis podcasts, episode 20 and an early unnumbered show.
Like what you are hearing? Find out how you can help sponsor this podcast here. Very affordable sponsorship packages are available. Email rjmcgarvey@gmail.com
And like this podcast on whatever service you use to stream it. That matters.
Find out more about CU2.0 and the digital transformation of credit unions here. It’s a journey every credit union needs to take. Pronto
First came the jab in my upper arm and ten days later came my startling wish that a meeting agenda I was looking at – a virtual meeting of course – was for an in person meeting. I had not had such a thought in a year and in that year 500,000+ of us have died from Covid-19, I myself had the disease (mercifully, a milder form), and just about everything I do outside my home today is different.
But there I caught myself sniffing at the inadequacies of some virtual meeting formats and thinking that I was ready to resume in-person meetings. Thinking that was triggered by my having gotten the first Pfizer injection on Feb. 19.
Of course I was deep into delusion. In point of fact, just the first Pfizer shot delivers about 90% immunity after 21 days – but note I only have 10 days and also note that other studies put the immunity from one shot nearer 50%. Note 3: I may have some additional immunity from having had the disease – but nobody knows how much or how long it lasts (and I had it about a year ago).
I am scheduled for the second shot on March 12 and you can bet that morning is blocked off on my calendar.
Even so, a question popped into my mind: will I start traveling come April 1 (fool’s day of course)?
The full vaccination immunity for me will kick in around then.
And are others planning likewise? Are we in fact on the cusp of a boom in travel, including business travel?
I know many in this venue are cheering on the idea of a business travel boom. So far I have pooh-poohed the prospect but am I now changing my mind?
Not exactly.
The more I noodled the facts knowable by me, the more my initial skepticism seemed the likeliest outcome.
I started with vaccination data. In Maricopa County, where I live, 15% of us now have gotten at least one shot.
Only 5% of us have gotten both shots.
What’s more, there aren’t a lot of business travelers in the vaccinated population. Those 75 and older are the most vaccinated group – 53% of them have gotten a shot.
About half of all those vaccinated in Maricopa County are 65 or older. Again, not a group known for lots of business travel.
Might these numbers fuel a boomlet in leisure travel? Arnie Weissman, editor at Travel Weekly, thinks as much and I am coming over to that point of view. I definitely can see seniors buying cruises, flying to visit grandchildren, and probably getting busy ticking off bucket list travels. Probably in Q2 of this year.
But I don’t see younger demographics soon joining the traveling public.
They just won’t have been jabbed.
It will take until Q3 – possibly Q4 – to have vaccinated perhaps 75% of us, which probably is as high as we will go.
It will take years – estimates go as high as seven years – to vaccinate the world.
As for the revival of business travel, certainly not before Q4. Vaccines just won’t have been jabbed into the arms. The majority of US business travelers are 30 to 49 and, nope, that is not a demographic that is prioritized for vaccinations. They will be lucky to have been jabbed by September.
Yes, some companies have the money to put their employees at the front of the line – but right now the negative publicity that would surely trigger outweighs the benefits of vaccinated employees. Impfneid, vaccine envy, is real.
Gartner research found that only 11% of companies have resumed business travel or plan to in the next six months. 61% of companies told Gartner they “just don’t know” when they will resume business travel.
Odds are high, too, that even when it returns, business travel will be shrunken version of its former self as organizations realize they can function, well and more profitably, without traveling much at all. That realization is not vanishing.
Employment lawyers indicate that many organizations are – rightly – worried about legal consequences of employee travels in a Covid era, and even if the legal issues vanish (there continue to be state and federal efforts to protect organizations from Covid triggered litigation). But the lawyers also say that, litigation aside, many employees will simply refuse to take business trips now. Fear of the disease is high.
My advice regarding business travel remains the same: unpack. We ain’t going anywhere anytime soon on business. I know I’m not.
Breach Clarity, a startup headed up by onetime Javelin Strategy + Research co-founder Jim Van Dyke, could help cybersecurity journalists, bloggers, and PR professionals write more clearly about data breaches.
Breaches are commonplace. There are four significant ones per day, says Van Dyke.
They often affect financial information, such as bank account or credit card data, protected health records, personally identifiable information (PII), or intellectual property.
In 2020, the total number of records exposed in reported breaches exceeded 37 billion, a 141% increase over 2019. This number doesn’t even include yet 2020 data breaches reported in Q1 2021.
But what does that mean for individual consumers and their personal data in each case? “The biggest challenge breach victims face,” says Eva Velasquez, CEO of the nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), “is understanding the risks associated with a particular breach, and what steps they should take next.”
Data breach press releases from lawyers, for lawyers
Ask any cybersecurity journalist what they do not like about data breach press releases of, say, financial services firms or health care providers, and the answer is: everything.
“It is nice to know that everybody’s kind of in their trackies, apart from those b*****s who went to Dubai.”
So Jake Quickenden moaned to the Manchester Evening News. He’s a Dancing on Ice winner and something of a UK celeb. The Dubai incident – where a bunch of British social media influencers and reality TV stars were treated to a junket and as they posted snaps of their holidays online, the British, indeed the global, public roared in angry resentment – has got to give anybody pause before jetting off to anyplace exotic.
Quickenden continued: “We’re all trying to get through this lockdown at the end of the day so that we can get on with our lives.
“People can rebuild their businesses, people can rebuild their relationships and their mates. We’re all trying to do that, apart from the ones who went to Dubai.”
Ouch.
This is flygskam – flight shaming – on steroids.
Know that Quickenden is just one of literally thousands of voices raised in condemnation of the skin flaunting influencers in Dubai and therefore you might think that the brands and locations that have tossed junkets to influencers might have pulled away from this marketing tactic, if not out of disgust at unnecessary travel in a pandemic but simply out of a survival instinct.
Which raises a key question: Are the brands that sponsor and host such events morally irresponsible?
The British influencers, by the way, traveled legally in that they claimed their Dubai hop was business travel and, for them, it was.
Sure, the British public, much of it, did not see the junket in the same light. But if you are earning money by showing some skin in the sun then, yes, such trips are business for you.
Legalities aside, however, the PR blowback was intense and negative. So it has seemed.
But appearances may deceive.
Indeed The Drum – an online pub that covers digital marketing – now reports that Dubai may not be forgotten but brands nonetheless are pushing forward with marketing plans built around influencers traveling abroad.
Is this nuts? Maybe not, says UK web design firm Rouge, which relates:
“we analysed the Instagram accounts of 50 popular social media stars who have been pictured abroad this Winter. And the results are somewhat surprising…
Likes per post for influencers abroad are up a staggering 144 percent compared to their average.”
The New Statesman elaborated: “Kaz Crossley, one of the Love Island stars currently in Dubai, gets 50k-60k likes per post on holiday versus nearly half that (roughly 30k likes) on posts she shares of herself in the UK. Another example is Molly Mae Hague – a Love Island 2019 runner-up… – who posts regularly to YouTube…. While her video stats vary, ranging anywhere between half a million and a million views, her travel vlogs in the pandemic have been some of her most successful ever. Her vlog from Crete this summer has 1.4 million views and a trip to Ibiza has a whopping 1.9 million; a trip to the Maldives in December has 1.3 million and – you guessed it – a vlog of her trip to Dubai that same month has 1.2 million.”
We – you and I – are drawn to this content and therefore the influencers and their sponsors are simply serving up what we apparently crave. As we are in lockdown – by government fiat in the UK, or simply by personal choice for many US travelers – we have our eyes on those who have broken out.
But a money question for the hosts and sponsors of these junkets: Yes, visits to influencer posts and content went up but did any visitor actually make any purchases? My guess is no, especially not among the core UK travelers who remain in lockdown.
Never confuse site visits with end results. I should have thought that part of the Marketing 101 class. But, evidently, it isn’t.
Just because we surf to a site doesn’t mean we are transacting.
Site visitor counts be damned, the Dubai campaign failed. Period.
If we ain’t buying tickets to fly there, or booking hotel rooms to stay, it’s one big fail.
You like food. You want to make money. Right there, for many, the fantasy collapses. Who can actually make a living by focusing on food? For many — millions probably — food blogging is a hobby. Then there are the growing numbers who actually write about food and earn substantial income from a mix of brand sponsorships and advertising dollars.
This has become a golden age for food bloggers especially as the pandemic and associated lockdowns have fueled surging interest in food as well as a lot more home cooking. From baking bread to seeking inventive ways to prepare chicken wings (an unexpected pandemic favorite), a hungry public has turned to the Web and social media to learn what to cook, now, and how to cook it better.
