Andrew Zolli

Andrew Zolli Foresight, Innovation, Sustainable Development, Resilience, Planetary Stewardship, Compassion, Nonviolent Social Change Greater New York City Area Connect Connect with Andrew Zolli Planet, Inc. See contact info 500+ connections I work at the intersection of global innovation, foresight, social change and resilience. A central thrust of my work has been on how to harness the power of networks for collaborative discovery, innovation and change. For the past 12 years, I’ve led the transformation of PopTech into renowned innovation and social change network. We bring together a community of innovators from many different fields to share ideas and to work on new approaches to some of the world’s toughest problems. We identify and train some of the most amazing people you’ll ever meet, doing things you cannot believe humanity is up to. We help them share breakthrough ideas and to work together on truly world-changing projects, doing stuff nobody has ever tried before, in areas like financial innovation and inclusion, data science and community resilience, mobile health, climate adaptation, urban resilience and violence cessation. And once a year we bring them together at much-beloved gatherings on the coast of Maine. It’s a project I’m deeply passionate about. I also spend much of my time advancing a global dialogue on resilience – how to help people and systems persist, recover and thrive amid disruption. For several years, my colleague Ann Marie Healy and I traveled from the coral reefs of Palau to the back streets of Palestine exploring these issues – the results are encapsulated in Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, published by Simon and Schuster in the U.S., and in many other languages and territories around the world. My work since has focused on bringing together coalitions of interested practitioners and leaders from many resilience-related fields. Show less Show less of Andrew’s summary Articles & activity 108,825 followers Life After Banks Andrew’s profile photo Andrew Zolli Published on LinkedIn Let's do a quick thought experiment: make a list of five companies whose brands you absolutely love, whose products delight you at ever turn, and whose customer service you wished other companies would emulate. What are the chances that a big bank made that list? Probably zero. And therein lies an absolutely gargantuan economic opportunity. Today’s big consumer banks’ business models are uniquely mismatched with demographic, psychographic and technological trends. And in the next decade, they will either be transformed or disintermediated by new technologies and new competitors. For years, particularly in the wake of the financial crisis, banks' bottom lines were juiced by charging absurdly high fees – often sneakily – all for the privilege of having an account. Now, thankfully, that trend is reversing. In 2013, banks took in over $32 billion in fees, down from their 2009 peak of $41.1 billion. Still, as banker Jay Sidhu recently pointed out, these fees – when combined with the $7 billion U.S. consumers spend at check-cashing services – are three times what America spends on breast cancer and lung cancer combined. All of those non-interest fees – which customers despise - go to support networks of physical bank branches that, in an age of mobile and digital services, the next generation of Millennial bank customers find less and less relevant. The fee-driven business model also makes banks unpalatable to millions of lower-income customers, who would rather go to a check-cashing facility that charges usary rates rather than contend with the slow-drip of sky-high overdraft and ATM fees. This untentable situation was made possible because banks are, for most of us, indispensible institutions – and they take advantage that essential role to extract significant 'rents' from their customers. However, new technologies and new competitors are poised to change that – and disrupt many parts of the banks’ long-protected value chains. Let's start with the basic checking account. Today, if you decided to suddenly ditch your bank, you can get a free replacement for a checking account from a company like Simple, a branchless, mobile-app-driven company that provides many services banks offer (like being able to upload a check by taking a picture of it with your phone) and many more that they do not (like tagging and tracking certain funds for specific purposes – like rent – and not allowing you to spend them). You can also sign up for Bluebird, a product jointly offered by American Express and Walmart, which offers many of the same features – direct deposit, bill-payment, the ability to upload checks, and the ability to spend at retail – although that’s limited to places that take American Express. Both Simple and Bluebird show how new kinds of competitors, both large and small, can take on the basic checking account – which is the bedrock of most of our banking relationships. Then there are the other categories of financial services that are needlessly expensive. Consider remittances – the sending of money internationally. Today, migrant workers in the United States send home more than $100 billion to just the top twenty recipient countries – more than $22 billion alone flows annually to Mexico. The transaction fees on such transactions aren’t just high - the World Bank says they rob developing nations of $16 billion every year. And yet this is exactly the kind of problem that peer-to-peer technologies are designed to address – lowering the cost of coordinating transactions. New p2p remittance processors like TransferWise take out 90% of the cost of transferring money, by using sophisticated software to match payments going in one direction with those going in the other. And distributed, open-source payment networks like Ripple allow for secure, ulta-low-cost transactions in many currencies across international borders in a matter of seconds. And that's just the tip of the peer-to-peer financial tech iceberg. As with remittances, peer-to-peer personal loans have rapidly matured as companies like Lending Club, Prosper and others have stepped in the gap between the sky-high interest rates on credit cards (sometimes topping 29%) and the paltry rate of return on money market and savings accounts. If you're carrying a $5000 balance on your card, the thinking goes, you’d be better off to pay it off at the under 7% interest rate you can get from one of these services; conversely, better to become a lender and earn closer to 7% than the 1-2% you’re likely getting on your savings account. While these p2p services have mostly focused on small loans, new products are scaling quickly the put the crowd in competition with banks – like those from LendInvest, which is opening up p2p mortgage lending in the UK, and SoFi and Earnest, which are creating p2p-backed market for student loan refinancing. Perhaps the most socially visionary, Pave allows investors to make loans to young people working on things like new businesses, film projects, and education – essentially investing in the next generation. None of these activities is without risk; but until now, banks were the only ones who positioned to take such risks; the new competition will put downward pressure on the rates of return they can expect from these activities, creating an additional win for consumers. Banks have had a monopoly on our money, but just as importantly, they have also had a monopoly on our financial data, and that allows them to calibrate their products accordingly. But here too, banks are going to be seeing significant future competition. But we have to look abroad to see it. In developing economies, where customers don’t have anything like a FICO credit score, it's prohibitively costly to extend borrowers credit. And that, in turn, suppresses economic activity and keeps people in poverty. Enter companies like First Access, which, in places like Tanzania, analyzes mobile usage patterns to efficiently score individuals’ credit worthiness. Mobile and social media patterns provide as-good-or-better snapshots of customers' total lives – the number of people they socialize with, where they go, and how they behave – then a mere list of transactions. The value of this social data is apparent in the recent launch of WeBank from Tencent, makers of China’s wildly popular WeChat service, which boasts 500 million users in that country alone. WeBank has indicated it will offer loans based on credit rating scores derived from Tencent's social data. And if Tencent and First Access can do it there, what’s to prevent Facebook or Google from doing it here? These players have the data, the customer relationships, the technology, the scale, and the brand clout - if not, at present, the intent. In times of core disruption, being big is not necessarily a hedge – it can be a liability, primarily because it makes you go slower, and it can mask strategic vulnerability as strength. The banks will need to figure out how to disrupt themselves, before new technologies and new competitors do it for them. 50 Comments Like Comment Share See all articles No alt text provided for this image Congratulations!!! Andrew commented 1 Like No alt text provided for this image Planet and NASA are teaming up to explore essential climate variables and use our constellation for data-intensive science. Andrew shared this 2 Likes No alt text provided for this image David, this is exactly what the planetary boundaries framework does. In some ways they are even more fundamental than the SDGs, inasmuch as they describe the basic life support systems in which life depends. What we need is a socioecologixal system that a boundary compliant first. That’s what’s proposed (in high level form) by Kate Raeworths “Donut Economics”. Andrew commented See all activity Experience Planet, Inc. VP Global Impact Initatives Company NamePlanet, Inc. Dates EmployedJan 2014 – Present Employment Duration5 yrs 4 mos LocationSan Francisco Bay Area I oversee the global humanitarian, social and ecological "Impact" initiatives of Planet, Inc. (http://www.planet.com). We're deploying the largest constellation of Earth-observing satellites in history to image the entire surface of the Earth every day, and make it universally accessible on the Internet. This data has a transformational potential for advancing inclusive social development, ecosystem monitoring, public health, climate and urban resilience, and much more. The Garrison Institute Chair of the Board Company NameThe Garrison Institute Dates EmployedJan 2016 – Present Employment Duration3 yrs 4 mos LocationGarrison, NY Housed in a former monastery on the banks of the Hudson River, the Garrison Institute (www.garrisoninstitute.org) explores the intersection of contemplative practice, scientific & creative inquiry, and systems change, and is dedicated to uncovering the wisdom, tools and practices that are urgently needed for life to flourish in the times in which we live Cure Violence Member of the Board of Advisors Company NameCure Violence Dates EmployedOct 2016 – Present Employment Duration2 yrs 7 mos LocationGreater Chicago Area Cure Violence (http://cureviolence.org/) is a pioneering violence-cessation NGO which is working to stop the spread of violence in communities by using the methods and strategies associated with public health and disease control – detecting and interrupting conflicts, identifying and treating the highest risk individuals, and changing social norms – ... See more One Concern Advisor Company NameOne Concern Dates EmployedJul 2016 – Present Employment Duration2 yrs 10 mos LocationPalo Alto, CA One Concern (http://www.oneconcern.com) uses breakthrough approaches from big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence to transform our understanding and response to natural disasters. Within minutes of an earthquake, One Concern's platform can predict where damage is most likely to have ocurred, and accelerate resources to the places w... See more Self Author of "Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back" Company NameSelf Dates EmployedFeb 2012 – Present Employment Duration7 yrs 3 mos Locationhttp://www.resiliencethebook.com Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back explores why some people, communities, systems and organizations are able to persist, recover or even thrive amid disruption. It's now been published in many languages and territories around the world. Z + Partners Founder Company NameZ + Partners Dates Employed2001 – Present Employment Duration18 yrs National Geographic Society Fellow Company NameNational Geographic Society Dates Employed2008 – Present Employment Duration11 yrs Blurb Board Director Company NameBlurb Dates Employed2005 – Present Employment Duration14 yrs LocationSan Francisco I am honored to serve on the Board of this superb company, transforming personal publishing. Brooklyn Academy of Music Trustee Company NameBrooklyn Academy of Music Dates Employed2006 – Present Employment Duration13 yrs LocationBrooklyn, NY I'm honored to serve on the board of this amazing, world-renowned home for adventurous artists and audiences. PopTech Curator and Executive Director Company NamePopTech Dates Employed