Green is the new normal. Several studies suggest that consumers - both businesses and individuals - have sustainability in their finances top-of-mind. Actively finding ways to embed sustainable practices into day-to-day actions however remains an enormous challenge.

Why is that?

1️⃣ Where to even begin? - the field seems so big and nobody answers my specific questions in an understandable way.

2️⃣ Not easy to reach - consumers want an easy access; no additional app, no additional registration, no intransparent products – embedded into existing solutions, preferably being taken care of automatically. The law of supply and demand applies. But government steering mechanisms can be effective when applied correctly.

3️⃣ Fear of greenwashing - how effective are my actions? Am I trapped into believing I do something good while I am actually not?

🎯 So, what to do? Financial infrastructure providers can make use of exponential leverage effects to strongly increase adoption of problem-solving solutions across all sectors.

Many market participants are working towards addressing the above-mentioned points, which will further increase the adoption - and ultimately lead to a greener planet. We must continue to understand environmental, economic and social sustainability as key points that are to be taken into consideration when building businesses of tomorrow. Every purposeful initiative can reach impact through scale.

Goal: Visualze the growth over time of a user base or any other element in a collection. A prerequisite is that every element has a date field - the date on which it was created.

Approach: We need to split our collection entries into series elements per day to then accumulate them together.

We can do this using the following query:
Note: Line 9 holds the date format configuration that could e.g. be changed to separate the dates by calender week, month, year or any other preferred date time

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{
    "collection": "users",
    "aggregate": [
        {
            "$group": {
                "_id": {
                    "time": {
                        "$dateToString": {
                            "format": "%Y-%m-%d",
                            "date": "$_created"
                        }
                    }
                },
                "value": {
                    "$sum": 1
                }
            }
        },
        {
            "$addFields": {
                "_id": "$_id.time"
            }
        },
        {
            "$sort": [
                {
                    "name": "_id",
                    "direction": 1
                }
            ]
        },
        {
            "$group": {
                "_id": null,
                "data": {
                    "$push": "$$ROOT"
                }
            }
        },
        {
            "$addFields": {
                "data": {
                    "$reduce": {
                        "input": "$data",
                        "initialValue": {
                            "total": 0,
                            "d": []
                        },
                        "in": {
                            "total": {
                                "$sum": [
                                    "$$this.value",
                                    "$$value.total"
                                ]
                            },
                            "d": {
                                "$concatArrays": [
                                    "$$value.d",
                                    [
                                        {
                                            "_id": "$$this._id",
                                            "value": "$$this.value",
                                            "runningTotal": {
                                                "$sum": [
                                                    "$$value.total",
                                                    "$$this.value"
                                                ]
                                            }
                                        }
                                    ]
                                ]
                            }
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        },
        {
            "$unwind": "$data.d"
        },
        {
            "$replaceRoot": {
                "newRoot": "$data.d"
            }
        }
    ]
}

Our output is a table that contains every ‘new’ element count per day, as well as the then accumulated total value

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|     date | value  | runningTotal  |
|---------:|-------:|--------------:|
| 07/02/22 |      3 |             3 |
| 08/02/22 |      3 |             6 |
| 09/02/22 |      1 |             7 |
| 10/02/22 |      4 |            11 |
| 11/02/22 |      3 |            14 |
| 14/02/22 |      7 |            21 |

Goal: Filter dates in a MongoDB aggregation using Redash and its $humanTime function

Challenge: Filtering with filters such as 3 months ago obviously takes the current day as the index. But often times we want to observe full months or years. For that, we have to find alternative ways to do that.

Approach: We need to tell the $humanTime function that it should find a date at the first (1st) of a specific time period, for example month.

Given the following query part:

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{
    "createdAt": {
        "$gte": {
          "$humanTime": "2 weeks ago"
        }
    }
}

We can use one month after last month -6 months at 0:00 to get the 1st of the month 6 months ago. Let’s say it is the 20th of August now. This date selection will be 1st of February.

To get the 1st of the current month, we simply use one month after last month at 0:00.

And finally, the most recent 1st of January can always be set through 1st january -12 months at 0:00.

“Diversity is not an end in itself. It correlates with innovation. Research needs originality, it thrives on the divergent point of view. But there is less of that if only the mainstream is hired and promoted.” - Isabell Welpe

💯

The field of research is just one of many many areas that benefit from #diversity and #equality in practice. Cultures in which differences are valued. Creating an environment where everyone, from any background, can do their best work is tremendously challenging, yet so rewarding

source 🇩🇪

Vertical farms could be an important part of the solution to the population’s food problem. Populations are growing and the demand for food increases every year. At the same time, we need to be more precious with earths resources and how we use them. Factory farming has a huge footprint on the planet. Current forecasts even predict that many more climate-damaging gases will be emitted worldwide in the coming years.

Vertical farms could chime in here to help. Gigantic factory halls where many different types of plants (mint, basil, arugula, young spinach, …) are grown and harvested in a highly automated way on several floors.

The advantages: much less water consumption, shorter transport routes due to decentralized cultivation, smaller carbon footprint, highly optimized growth stages - thus more outcome and higher nutrient content. And in the long run: much cheaper than traditional agriculture.

However, it has one major disadvantage at the moment: the energy consumption. The plant lighting systems consume a lot of electricity. And as with electro mobility - it’s only as green as the energy that powers it.

When observing previous success stories of literally anything in the world, it usually breaks down to one major factor. Those willing to take risks and be first-movers have the highest chances of succeeding. They apply the First Principles Thinking in a way that sets them of up for success. They always move to the frontier.

What is tomorrows Frontier? Well, nobody knows really. But there are spaces that certainly have the potential to be the next thing.

DeFi - short for Decentralized finance - is Fintechs hottest topic right now. And as we all know, Fintech is everything. Risk takers have arrived, but masses and bureaucrats/regulation has yet to follow. This creates huge growth opportunities. Some other frontiers include plant-based meat/dairy replacements to feed the planet, liquid-fuel nuclear energy to revolutionize renewable energy supply, personalized medicine for cancer, psychedelics and much more.

The future is all about enhancing humanity, making sure we can live on this planet (or other planets) with no carbon emissions and to create overall happiness & equality for every living being.

Almost every fifth new car in Germany is now an electric car. According to a current study commissioned by the BMVI, the number of e-cars on the roads will grow exponentially.

By 2030, there could be just under 15 million of them. Battery-powered vehicles on German roads, 30 million in the EU. But where will they all be charged? The infrastructure must be further expanded. And that is exactly what the German government wants to achieve with an ambitious masterplan.

📱 Customer friendliness

Payment systems today are anything but customer-friendly. Countless different providers, lengthy registration processes, a great lack of transparency. It must be easy to charge a car.

⛽ Expansion of public charging infrastructure

Customer parking lots, street space, gas stations. All places where you can easily load your car.

🚘 Promotion of private charging infrastructure

Public charging infrastructure will not suffice. But it would not be efficient either. Charging at the parking lot at home and at work is a big lever.

This is where subsidies are needed to make infrastructure construction attractive. Photovoltaic on the roof, electricity into the car.

🌱 E-mobility is only as green as the electricity you charge

In 2030, up to 30,000 GWh could be charged in Germany. That is a considerable amount – and e-mobility is only green if the electricity is green. A great deal of effort is still needed to expand renewable energies and research into efficient storage possibilities (KRAFTBLOCK).

🔋 Further development of the battery

The further development of battery technology has not yet reached its tipping point. Every year there are groundbreaking new research results to increase the efficiency of battery technology. More resource-efficient, faster charging, larger capacities.

It is a great challenge. And it’s only part of the much needed traffic turnaround. But it is an important part.

🎙️ Podcasts are on a rise, and have been for many years. Latest numbers show tremendous growth and people listen to podcasts more than ever. But one problem remains unsolved: Podcast Discovery

Anyone who’s ever searched through Apple Podcasts or Spotify has seen it: There are many podcasts out there! Overall, more than 1,000,000 podcasts with a total of >30,000,000 episodes published. New ones come in every day.

With numbers like this, it’s quite obvious that niches you are interested in probably have more podcasts than you could ever listen to. So you must find podcasts that you like, and finding those is relatively difficult.

When you ask podcast listeners, about 60% of them respond that they discover new podcasts by either searching for keywords or friends refer them a new podcast show. So there is potential to 1) optimize keywords and 2) emphasize word-of-mouth.

Due to the fact that podcasts are consumed fundamentally different than anything else we know (Watching a video📺, reading an article📝 or the newspaper📰, speaking to someone 1:1🗣️), the Discovery Problem must be tackled fundamentally different than other areas.

🧠 One could assume that technology can solve the Discovery Problem by making suggestions based on interests & user behaviour. Truth is, it does not work for podcasts. Or at least not how we would assume when comparing to other types of media.

📈 The industry is accelerating at a rapid pace. Long-term view, there is going to be an ever-increasing number of really great podcasts on every topic you could think of. But podcasts have many more characteristics than music for example.

Music is pretty easy: Lyrics, Genre, Brand of Artist. Podcasts have many more categories, because touching the listeners on an emotional level is very important to be a good podcast.

Grouping by genre works, but how good a podcast is at touching someone emotionally can a) not be rated my algorithms and b) varies from person to person, and also based on emotional state/time of the day/location/surroundings.

⁉️ So how do we solve Podcast Discovery, if technology can’t solve all of it?

There is no golden rule, but one can work towards getting more discovery on a podcast.

[1] Build a community around a podcast that is truely into the niche/genre/theme of the podcast.

[2] Find existing communities around the topics you touch in the podcast and convert them to podcast listeners.

[3] Re-distribute and re-use content for other social platforms

Embedded Finance is reshaping FinTech; and moreover, joint with Banking as a Service solutions - it herals a fundamentally new era in the entire finance sector.

📉 Business models of traditional banks don’t work the way the used to anymore. Net interest margin has fallen rapidly, and so do their revenues.

🙋🙋‍♂️ Consumer needs have changed. Customers expect fully digital, easily accessible and cheap services. FinTechs and other new players have understood this fundamental change - and they are being rewarded. Growth is beyond anything banks have ever seen.

🎯 How so? FinTechs focus on customer needs, whereas banks traditionally focus on their business model.

As BaaS becomes more and more broadly available, the consumer experience and the customer in general moves into focus (where it belongs!)
It’s all about providing solutions in the right context. That’s where the term embedded finance originates from.

A customer context is the combination of events or circumstances and the touchpoint best placed to do the job they’re aiming to do.

🛒💸 Increase conversion in e-commerce? Offer 0% APY lending

💬 💸 Pay from within WhatsApp, because that’s where customers already interact with those who they want do send money to.

…

BaaS is a huge accelerator here. Brands focus on their main product and use BaaS providers to integrate financial services. Each of the two can focus on what they’re good at - their core product.

🔗⚙️ Integrating a financial service sounds complex and costly? Not so much with BaaS providers. They understood their customer needs: easy to integrate to enable quick evaluation & GTM.

BaaS sales funnels only take a fraction of the time of what a traditional ones take.

[1] 🧑‍💻 Focus on developers

In an increasingly engineering-led industry, they focus on developer experience more than anything else.

[2] 🧠💨 Provide quick access, no unnecessary sales calls

Easy sign-up for a developer portal, immediate sandbox access and self-explaining documentation for both experts and developers are way more valuable than any sales/demo call can ever be.

[3] 💳💵 Pricing

Flexible pay-per-use or subscription models with the option to upgrade to Enterprise scale. Covers 99% of all cases.

😁 While all this may sound somewhat pessimistic, the biggest part of the cake is still being distributed. But unlocking these new distribution opportunities will require an entirely new manufacturing and distribution model for the financial services industry.

This was just a short tl;dr of 11:FS newest reports. Go read them here.

Starting September 2020, major browsers will no longer accept newly issued certificates with a lifespan greater than 398 days. This is a major step towards a more secure web.

In detail, it allows issuers to phase out certificates more easily when e.g. new encryption vulnerabilities are discovered as well as limiting the exposure of a possibly compromised private key. In short, anything that could be a threat for internet security overall can only exist for a shorter amount of time.

With the current limit of 825 days pushing down to 392 days, it also causes some overhead for website administrators. Existing certificates will not be affected by the change that is going into effect September, 1st 2020. However, there are still major certificate issuers that have not adapted their certificate lifetime.

The growth of Let’s Encrypt has been scintillating over the past couple of years with more than 130M active certificates. By default, their certificate lifetime is 90 days. They’ve been going this route from the beginning on and it has led to a number of changes in the industry. Primarily, automated certificate renewals and deployments have become a standard and nothing unusual.

Sources:
Chrome: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/ae4d6809912f8171b23f6aa43c6a4e8e627de784
Safari: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211025
Firefox: https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2020/07/09/reducing-tls-certificate-lifespans-to-398-days/