Joel's Notes: India Mobile Payments to cross 1Tn USD, A million new millionaires, Remote work surging and more...
Plus: AI talent in emerging economies, Fintech unicorns double, India's job challenge
Joel’s Notes section is a once in a week or so emailer of excerpts and notes from articles and reports about trends, technology, startups and business models. I also frequently write about High Potential Startups in this newsletter - check out my write ups on MicroAcquire, Plum Insurance, Lean Financial, Maven.
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1. AI Talent: Countries catching up with US
Hiring is rapidly accelerating in many countries. India and Brazil is > 3x compared to four years ago. India also has more diverse AI talent.
China is fast challenging the US in high quality AI research. One Chinese institution is already #1 in volume of high quality research
Big Tech companies continue to wield enormous Influence in AI research. 88% (!) of top AI faculty have received funding from Big Tech companies.
Source: All graphs are from State of AI Report 2021
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2. Fintech unicorns double in last one year
Hundred new Fintech unicorns were created in the last 12 months per CB Insights.
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3. Remote Work here to stay?
Small population size but 80% of job postings on Hacker News has a remote work option. Remote work is likely here to stay and may have profound second order effects impacting multiple areas. I am also excited if developing countries can leverage remote work to create higher paying jobs.
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4. More than a million millionaires created in 2020
More than 1.7 million new Americans became millionaires in 2020 primarily due to rise in equity prices.
Acorns notes:
Despite the economic woes brought on by the pandemic, 1.7 million Americans became new millionaires last year. That’s according to the latest Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report.
In all, there are now 56.1 million people globally with assets of at least $1 million USD, the investment bank estimates, and Americans represent 39.1% of that total. Almost 1 in 10, 8.8%, of U.S. adults are now millionaires, up from 7% in 2015.
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5. Rapid Mobile Payments adoption - India and Brazil
Brazil and India are seeing massive instant mobile payments adoption.
Pix, the Brazilian payments system launched by Brazil’s Central bank around 11 months ago has seen 110 million users and more than 89bn USD total transaction value so far!
India’s Unified Payments Interface continued to set records. In October 2021, it crossed a whopping 100bn$ in transaction value - yes, in a single month! Around 4.2bn transactions were done in October. And another astounding stat - UPI is poised to cross 1 Trillion USD in FY22!
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6. India’s Big Challenge - Creating enough Jobs
India has a massive youth population and is potentially sitting on a demographic gold mine. But these youth need jobs and fast. Per McKinsey, India needs to create 90mn non-farm jobs this decade, no small challenge.
Covid has been a terrible headwind but the economy was weakening even pre-covid.
But there are some good opportunities. For example, historic distrust of China among developed countries, an ageing developed world population, renewed focus in India on the labor-intensive textiles sector and rise of remote work can potentially create both manufacturing jobs and high paying software jobs.