Finance Geek

In December 2006, a small, relatively unknown financial firm called First Marblehead completed a $1 billion student loan securitization. At the close of the deal the company expected to receive up-front “structural advisory” fees of about $89.6 million, or 12.4% of the total balance. In addition, First Marblehead modeled and discounted additional advisory fees of $8.8 million and “residual revenue” of $48.7 million. The “blended” yield on the transaction was more than 20% of the total balance of expected student loans (the loans had yet to be acquired).
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News this week that Citigroup’s $285 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was being challenged by U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff had many cheering, including The Financial Times’ John Gapper. Judge Rakoff is “the latest hero” fighting for justice against Wall Street, Gapper writes, commending the “most influential and disruptive” figure [...]

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Provided by the Business Insider’s Alyson Shontell Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is on stage right now (around 9:30 am) at Business Insider’s IGNITION conference. “Mark Zuckerberg’s greatest fear,” she says, is a lack of innovation. To paraphrase, Sandberg says this fear is fueled by two factors. One is that Facebook, for all its size, actually [...]

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! After a strong start to the holiday shopping season and a big jump in consumer confidence reported earlier this week, November same-store sales data came in Thursday with a decidedly mixed bent — but that’s not a bad thing, according to Breakout’s Jeff Macke. “There is this [...]

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! A day after coordinated central bank action sent financial markets screaming higher, Thursday was shaping up as a day of rest and reflection — and a little bit of giveback. Major averages were modestly lower in recent trading, on the heels of higher-than-expected jobless claims data and [...]

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Last week I blogged about how e-tailers can improve their conversions and sales using data from Facebook and other social media sites.  I also made the point that e-tailers will look for innovations that encourage us to link our ecommerce accounts with our Facebook accounts via Facebook Connect, so they they can get at our Facebook data.  Simply forcing people to Connect isn’t a good idea as some people will inevitably drop out of the purchase process, hurting sales and profits.

Yesterday Wal-Mart launched a Facebook application called Shopycat which is an example of the sort of innovation I was describing.  Shopycat makes product recommendations based on the items people have liked or talked about in their newsfeed.  I installed the app and it tells me that my old school friend would like an alarm clock ipod speaker dock combination, which is pretty apt as I remember he struggled with getting up at university so much that he used to set six different alarm clocks to go off in the mornings.  Many of the other gifts recommended were pretty apt as well.

I think is pretty clever by Walmart on a number of levels:

• It promotes engagement with their brand without being overly salesy – the gift items don’t necessarily link back to Wal-Mart’s website
• It provides a real service – as we live further away from our loved ones these days it is harder to keep up with their interests, ShopyCat makes it easier again
• It is a short step to get users to link back to the Wal-Mart website, generating the Facebook Connect’s that will help with the objectives described above and in my post last week

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