The Bottom Line

Protecting Share, or Poking the Bear?

I asked a good friend of our firm, Ginger Schmeltzer, owner and principal of GDS Advisors, to comment on the recent announcement that PNC was blocking its customers from using their accounts to fund Venmo transactions. Ginger’s take echoed a number of comments made around the industry concerning the news.

The Pew Research Center defines Generation Z as anyone born in 1996 or later. A watershed event occurred in 2007 with the introduction of the first iPhone, which maps well to the generational differentiator about Gen Z having little experience with pre-smartphone technology.  

Last Tuesday, NCR acquired D3 Banking Technology (D3), a digital banking software company that provides solutions to regional banks. This comes just six years following NCR’s purchase of Digital Insight, a move that NCR explained would allow it to offer financial institutions a complete “omni-channel consumer experience.” Others saw the purchase as part of a “makeover” that NCR needed to survive. Whatever the case, the $1.65 billion paid for DI would suggest this was no trivial action on the part of NCR.

Is D3 another arrow in the quiver as NCR continues to remake itself? Does the acquisition signal a “reboot” to the makeover centered around DI that has stalled? Could the purchase suggest an attempt by NCR to go to market with two technologies, one more fit for smaller institutions and the other an up-market option? In fact, in the July 2 press release announcing the deal, NCR claimed that the latter question could be answered in the affirmative. The news release noted that D3 “immediately expands” NCR into new markets, notably “U.S. large banks and over time, international banks.”