Ford: From Building Cars, to Building an Ecosystem

4

October

2016

5/5 (1)

Ford is changing its focus: from being a carmaker to being a mobility company. The first step into that direction came with their app: FordPass, and now two more recently done announcements makes this suspicion stronger:

  • Ford is buying a rideshare startup called Chariot.
  • They are partnering with Motivate (the company behind all those Citibikes in NYC) to expand the San Francisco’s bike share program.

With these two investments and the app Ford’s plan becomes clear: evolve from being only a (old-fashioned?) carmaker to both a car and mobility company.

 

So what is Chariot?

Chariot is a company that operates a shuttle service around San Francisco.

What makes it a good alternative to public transpiration is that the shuttle costs around the same price as a normal buss ($3) and is equally reliable.

Chariot operates on 26 routes right now, which they got in an interesting way: the crowdsourced it. This way they only serve the neighborhoods that really need the shuttle service.

With the acquisition Chariot’s team will now join Ford and expand in other markets to grow further.

 

The partnership with Motivate.

Ford will be partnering with Motivate. This will result in an increase from 700 to 7000 shareable bikes and hundreds of pick-up and drop-off locations in the San Francisco area by 2018. This partnership will go further under the name “Ford GoBikes”.

 

And it comes all together in an app.

The FordPass app is an app that is quietly becoming a one-stop shop for all transportation needs. Ford owners can schedule maintenance with it, but also non-Ford owners can use the app to find parking, plan the most efficient route home and soon now: locate the nearest bike pick-up or book a shuttle. As Ford’s CEO explains: “We’re thinking about this as an ecosystem. How do the bikes not only serve a need… but also feed data that will allow us to provide them even more services? For example, if it’s going to rain, we can send them a note that says ‘you should take the shuttle, and here’s an incentive to do that?

 

As Henry Ford said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Now, apparently, Ford moved to the rest of the farm.

Sources:

http://www.recode.net/2016/9/9/12860834/ford-chariot-motivate-gobike-san-francisco-mobility

https://www.motivateco.com/

https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/26/chariot-new-route/

http://www.recode.net/2016/9/9/12860834/ford-chariot-motivate-gobike-san-francisco-mobility

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Get Your Cash in No Time with Stripe

25

September

2016

5/5 (1)

Last week Stripe launched their latest feature: Instant Payouts.

Stripe is a tech company that is on a mission to make digital payments as simple as possible for all businesses. It started in 2010 when the brothers Collison founded /dev/payments. After some misspellings and confusion by outsiders the competitor of PayPal renamed itself to Stripe; now worth $5B.

This new feature.

Instant Payouts is a service that allows marketplaces to send payments to sellers or service providers within minutes. This way, marketplaces can give service providers a much better product experience by sending them their earnings faster than ever – and greater flexibility and control over when they get paid.
For several months Stripe has been testing this feature with platforms of all sizes, of which Lyft is the most well-known. In Lyft’s case, the new technology enables drivers to deposit earnings in the bank the second they finish a shift, while with traditional banks it can take several days to transfer the money. Since using the beta, Lyft has already sent over $500m to drivers this way.

So what makes this faster?

Most of today’s payment services use the automated clearing house network (ACH) to transfer money. This is quite an old-fashioned system where the money is transferred to Bank #1 after which the batch is electronically sorted by the clearing house (the middle man), and then sent to Bank #2.
Instant Payments skips the middle man and quickly sends the money from Bank #1 to Bank #2 using the debit card networks of Visa and MasterCard.

But ACH is fighting back.

In the hope of keeping up with the fast-paced developments in the FinTech-industry, ACH is now giving its customers the option of same-day processing to move payments faster. What makes this possible is adding an extra submission deadline for the payments, which makes 2 a day (morning and afternoon).
This sounds nice, but choosing this new option has (as you could almost have expected) a fee accompanied with it.

Banks and other financial institutions better be ready because companies like Stripe are coming in hard. Adding one extra admission deadline to your system will not cut it.

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stripe_(company)
https://stripe.com/blog/instant-payouts-for-marketplaces
http://www.recode.net/2016/9/15/12927472/lyft-express-pay-500-million-cash-out-drivers
https://www.depositaccounts.com/blog/difference-between-wire-transfer-and-ach.html
http://bankinnovation.net/2016/09/mastercard-send-is-now-powering-stripe-instant-payout/
https://www.nacha.org/rules/same-day-ach-moving-payments-faster

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