Month: February 2015

Panorama and HSBC: wasted airtime

ianwaring Budgets, Journalism, Money, Tax

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Parking emotions to one side, companies percentage of total government tax income has been relentlessly trending down in every major economy for over 50 years. Given the size of savings needed to support the illusion of austerity to the bond markets (but don’t look too closely at booming public sector debt levels), the content of this weeks Panorama was sold heavily as a “look everyone, large amounts of money squirrelled away by the rich here”. Sounded like an interesting perspective, so I recorded it on iPlayer and watched it on the 40 minute train journey into London this morning.

Unfortunately, largely content free. You could summarise it as:

  • A Whistleblower in an HSBC facility in Switzerland leaked account details of many people holding large amounts of money in accounts there
  • Many people ended up coughing up extra tax money to HMRC as a result of the data leak
  • the bank gave advice to wealthy clients to lower their tax bills through schemes designed expressly for this purpose
  • Bank says they’ve reformed such practices
  • another Whistleblower says in her experience, they have not
  • Director at the centre of managing HSBC at the time was ennobled and hired as an advisor to David Cameron
  • more could be done (lots of see saws between the words “Avoidance” and “Evasion”)
  • err, I think that’s it

It then got surreal when the politician interviewed was one widely known as one whose £1.8m trust fund is fed from her fathers company that pays an effective tax rate of 3%.

So, the pursuit of a journalist who could do a thorough job and come out with some compelling (and actionable) story here remains unfulfilled. In the meantime, a few people are watching my question on Quora for which I can find no answer:

What benefits accrue to the UK by permitting large amounts of money to be held offshore in British Crown Dependencies and British Overseas Territories?

Any ideas? I sometimes wish I could get John Lanchester (one writer who is thorough and funny too) to have a crack at answering that.

Hooked, health markets but the mind is wandering… to pooh and data privacy

ianwaring Apple, Diet, Fitness, Future Trends, Health, Internet, Medical, Mobiles, Pebble, Politicians, Software, VCs, Watches Leave a comment

Hooked by Nir Eyal

One of the things I learnt many years ago was that there were four fundamental basics to increasing profits in any business. You sell:

  • More Products (or Services)
  • to More People
  • More Often
  • At higher unit profit (which is higher price, lower cost, or both)

and with that, four simple Tableau graphs against a timeline could expose the business fundamentals explaining good growth, or the core reason for declining revenue. It could also expose early warning signs, where a small number of large transactions hid an evolving surprise – like the volume of buying customers trending relentlessly down, while the revenue numbers appeared to be flying okay.

Another dimension is that a Brand equates to trust, and that consistency and predictability of the product or service plays a big part to retain that trust.

Later on,  a more controversial view was that there were two fundamental business models for any business; that of a healer or a dealer. One sells an effective one-shot fix to a customer need, while the other survives by engineering a customers dependency to keep on returning.

With that, I sometimes agonise on what the future of health services delivery is. One the one hand, politicians verbal jousts over funding and trying to punt services over to private enterprise. In several cases to providers of services following the economic rent (dealer) model found in the American market, which, at face value, has a business model needing per capita expense that no sane person would want to replicate compared to the efficiency we have already. On the other hand, a realisation that the market is subject to radical disruption, through a combination of:

  • An ever better informed, educated customer base
  • A realisation that just being overweight is a root cause of many adverse trends
  • Genomics
  • Microbiome Analysis
  • The upcoming ubiquity of sensors that can monitor all our vitals

With that, i’ve started to read “Hooked” by Nir Eyal, which is all about the psychology of engineering habit forming products (and services). The thing in the back of my mind is how to encourage the owner (like me) of a smart watch, fitness device or glucose monitor to fundamentally remove my need to enter my food intake every day – a habit i’ve maintained for 12.5 years so far.

The primary challenge is that, for most people, there is little newsworthy data that comes out of this exercise most of the time. The habit would be difficult to reinforce without useful news or actionable data. Some of the current gadget vendors are trying to encourage use by encouraging steps competition league tables you can have with family and friends (i’ve done this with relatives in West London, Southampton, Tucson Arizona and Melbourne Australia; that challenge finished after a week and has yet to be repeated).

My mind started to wander back to the challenge of disrupting the health market, and how a watch could form a part. Could its sensors measure my fat, protein and carb intake (which is the end result of my food diary data collection, along with weekly weight measures)? Could I build a service that would be a data asset to help disrupt health service delivery? How do I suss Microbiome changes – which normally requires analysis of a stool samples??

With that, I start to think i’m analysing this the wrong way around. I remember an analysis some time back when a researcher assessed the extent drug (mis)use in specific neighbourhoods by monitoring the make-up of chemical flows in networks of sewers. So, rather than put sensors on people’s wrists (and only see a subset of data), is there a place for technology in sewer pipes instead? If Microbiomes and the Genetic makeup of our output survives relatively intact, then sampling at strategic points of the distribution network would give us a pretty good dataset. Not least as DNA sequencing could allow the original owner (source) of output to connect back to any pearls of wisdom that could be analysed or inferred from their contributions, even if the drop-off points happened at home, work or elsewhere.

Hmmm. Water companies and Big Data.

Think i’ll park that and get on with the book.