Year: 2021

Synchrony Financial and Walgreens are launching a card portfolio.
This move could reinvigorate the issuer’s business by tapping into a fast-growing retail sector.
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As part of a larger financial services push from Walgreens, the drugstore will team up with major private-label issuer Synchrony to debut a prepaid debit card, a store card, and a cobranded credit card set to run on the Mastercard network.

Synchrony Financial and Walgreens are launching a card portfolio. Insider Intelligence
Details remain scarce, but the cards, which are set to debut in H2 2021, will be tied to the chain’s new myWalgreens loyalty program and offer cash rewards, among other perks. The cobrand will also feature benefits on health and wellness spending specifically.
Partnering with Walgreens could help Synchrony reinvigorate growth by tapping into a strong and growing retail category.
Walgreens offers Synchrony access to regular volume, even amid the pandemic. Though overall US consumer spending has been down, essential goods sales have been up across categories. And health, personal care, and beauty hit $544.64 billion in retail sales last year, up 4.7% annually—the second-highest growth rate of any category, per eMarketer estimates from Insider Intelligence. Gains in Walgreens’ key category—and the products’ primary rewards focus—might help Synchrony attract customers and bring in volume, especially if it can tap into frequent repeat drugstore visits from prescription holders to generate primary card status.
And the Walgreens deal complements Synchrony’s ongoing partnership push as the issuer recovers from a rocky year. Synchrony has had a challenging few quarters after losing its Walmart partnership—a top-five portfolio—to Capital One and then facing further declines in spending amid the pandemic, although it has started to bounce back. To reinvigorate growth, the brand has entered into a slew of partnerships, including tie-ups with Verizon and Venmo. The Walgreens deal could complement these tie-ups and help the brand tap into a massive potential audience to bring in cardholders and, in turn, volume.
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7Park is being shut down as a standalone business two years after Vista bought it for $100 million, Insider has learned. Samantha Lee/Business Insider
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7Park Data, which Vista Equity Partners bought for $100 million, is shuttering as a standalone alt-data business and being absorbed into the Vista-owned software provider Apptio.
The company has struggled to deal with a new mandate from Vista, the loss of key outside data streams, and client departures, sources told Insider.
In 2017, 7Park had a large client roster including a star-studded list of buy-side firms like Tiger Global, Coatue, and Citadel, according to a pitch deck viewed by Insider.
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7Park Data, a darling of the alternative-data boom feeding quantitative hedge funds, is shuttering as a standalone business just two years after being acquired for $100 million by the private-equity juggernaut Vista Equity Partners.
Sources told Insider the Bellevue, Washington-based Apptio, another Vista portfolio company, would absorb 100% of 7Park’s business. 
A spokesperson for 7Park confirmed the deal, citing the strength of its tech. An Apptio spokesperson said in a statement that the company was “poised to enhance our robust IT Benchmarking solution as well as provide additional machine learning-driven data cleansing and auto classification capabilities” with the purchase. 
A Vista spokesperson declined to comment. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. 
The New York-headquartered 7Park has seen challenges in recent months, including client defections, losing access to key data streams, and a precipitous drop in revenues, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve their relationships. Details regarding how 7Park, and its offerings, will be integrated into Apptio were not immediately clear.
Annual revenue has fallen by more than 50% since Vista purchased the company, according to people familiar with the company. 
Read more: PE shop Vista Equity Partners paid $100 million for 7Park to get in on the alt-data craze. Insiders describe the management turnover, amped up sales pressure, and change in strategy that followed.
The alt-data company’s plummeting fortunes mark a rare miss for Vista. In recent months, the private-equity firm, which has $73 billion in assets under management, has also been rocked by its billionaire cofounder Robert Smith’s admission to yearslong tax evasion and the exit of Brian Sheth, Vista’s No. 2.

7Park, founded in 2012, rose to prominence amid Wall Street’s embrace and shift toward novel data streams, such as retail foot traffic, credit-card statements, email receipts, and website and app traffic.
The company made most of its money selling this data to many of the world’s top hedge funds, which cleaned it up and packaged the intel into algorithms to inform prospective investments. The firm in 2017 produced roughly $15 million in revenue and had more than 140 clients, including Balyasny, Citadel, Coatue, Tiger Global, and SoftBank, according to a pitch deck presentation viewed by Insider.
It had ambitions of growing that revenue stream to more than $200 million, according to the presentation. 
In 2018, a breakout year for alternative-data providers, Vista bought the company for $100 million, adding a data up-and-comer to its portfolio of technology investments.
Read more: The alt-data industry is having growing pains after its sudden glow up — and insiders are looking at new pricing models and unlikely customers
But 7Park has encountered an array of obstacles since, including a slew of staff exits and leadership changes in 2019, Insider previously reported.
More importantly, the company had lost access to data streams throughout 2020.
Jumpshot, a data stream collected and sold by the cybersecurity firm Avast before being shut down in January 2020 following concerns over data privacy, was one such example. Jumpshot’s data was a part of 10 to 15% of 7Park’s offerings at the time, a person familiar with the situation had told Business Insider. While some of 7Park’s products that included Jumpshot data were salvageable, other were not, the person added.

7Park had previously faced issues around data streams going dark, a somewhat common peril of operating in the world of alternative data.
In 2015, two of 7Park’s critical data vendors were acquired nearly simultaneously, the person familiar with the situation previously told Business Insider. One of the acquiring companies wasn’t interested in working with 7Park, while the other was a competitor. As a result, the company was forced to quickly switch to new offerings essentially overnight to salvage the business, the person said. 
Read more: Alt data’s Wild West days may be ending as Congress and privacy advocates zero in on the industry. Nearly a dozen insiders tell us how data streams going dark is an ‘unhedgeable’ risk.
One former employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely, said the company was left scrambling in early 2019 when Google changed its policy to limit email-receipt data.
The company’s feed on email receipts at the time was one of its most accurate and a best seller, the person said. 
To be sure, 7Park’s view of the market, and its place in it, changed after the Vista acquisition, the person familiar with the situation previously told Insider. A key consideration of the company after the deal was the value it could provide Vista’s other portfolio companies when it came to their internal data, whether that be selling it or using it for other purposes, the person said.
But its eight-year run as a standalone firm has come to an end, and it will now be folded into Apptio, a software provider that Vista purchased for nearly $2 billion in 2018. 

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BlackRock Chief Executive Larry Fink. The asset manager reported record assets under management on Thursday. REUTERS/Toru Hanai

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BlackRock’s chief executive struck a defensive tone on Thursday during a call to discuss fourth-quarter earnings when an analyst asked about the asset management industry’s regulatory landscape.
“The concept that the asset management industry is not regulated — that must be coming from bankers. We’re not a bank,” CEO Larry Fink said on the call. 
BlackRock is the largest money manager in the world with $8.7 trillion in assets under management.
It is operating atop the industry as President-elect Joe Biden’s incoming administration is expected to take a tougher stance on financial services industry regulation than its predecessors.
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BlackRock is a titan of investing, unparalleled in its scale and influence as a money manager. It has avoided the same scrutiny as Wall Street banking giants, even if just by the Federal Reserve, that came out of the global financial crisis as villainized and more supervised.
But the idea that it has escaped the close eye from regulatory bodies in the US or abroad is flawed, BlackRock Chief Executive Larry Fink said Thursday as he defended his firm’s place in the industry on a call with analysts.
“It does feel like after being pretty quiet and dormant for a bunch of years, we are starting to see more talk about re-looking at asset managers for their systemic risk and everything,” analyst Robert Lee from boutique investment bank Keefe, Bruyette, & Woods asked. “So maybe your take on where you see that kind of chatter picking up? Is it more in Europe, or here?”
“Great question,” Fink responded. 
“The concept that the asset management industry is not regulated — that must be coming from bankers. We’re not a bank,” he said on the earnings call.
Fink appreciates that regulators are focused on well-functioning capital markets “to build a more resilient economy,” and said his firm has “encouraged” that regulation worldwide.
He emphasized that BlackRock’s massive scale relative to global capital markets, around 2%, has not changed meaningfully since 2009.
The firm is the largest money manager in the world, reporting on Thursday $8.7 trillion in assets under management. It also has a mammoth tech platform, Aladdin, used by virtually the entire investment industry to rebalance portfolios and spot possible risks.

The New York-based firm has enjoyed a rise to the top of its industry as big banks have struggled in some areas, like trading, after post-financial crisis financial regulation limited those activities that once produced juicy profits.
BlackRock is now the largest provider of exchange-traded funds in the world, according to Morningstar, a chunk of which is tied to tracking bond markets’ performance (though stock market-tracking products are still far more popular among the firm’s products). Its fixed income-linked products were part of the scrutiny it drew last year when BlackRock’s Financial Markets Advisory business got what was reportedly a no-bid contract with the Federal Reserve to handle its bond-buying program to help cushion the pandemic’s blow to the US economy. 
Fink took a similarly defensive tone on the firm’s third-quarter earnings call last October when challenged about the largesse of his company, which he cofounded 33 years ago.
“A lot of investors have been groveling that the Fed purchasing ETFs and in particular noninvestment-grade ETFs, hence, some sort of bailout for BlackRock in the ETF industry more broadly. What is your reaction to that?” analyst Patrick Davitt with Autonomous Research asked.
“I object to your — the way you framed it as a bailout. I don’t even know where you’re coming from with that question. I think it’s insulting,” he said, according to a transcript from the investment research provider Sentieo.
Read more: BlackRock has shaken up leadership in its influential advisory business that works on projects like the Federal Reserve’s massive bond-buying program
As a sprawling company with record assets under management, it is scaling new heights as President-elect Joe Biden’s administration is expected to take a stricter stance on financial services industry regulation than its predecessors.
Biden is expected to tap Gary Gensler, the former chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission who is known as a stringent regulator, to head up the Securities and Exchange Commission, Reuters reported this week, citing unnamed sources. 

“I would say the one myth about asset managers — the asset management industry is highly regulated already,” Fink said, noting his firm is regulated in the US by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency because it operates a trust bank, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Finra. 
Read more: What BlackRock’s $1 billion bid for a trendy indexing business means for the money management industry
“Overseas, we’re regulated across the board. We are not a bank, and that’s why we are not regulated by one regulator, the Federal Reserve. But we’re regulated by almost any other organization and regulator,” he said.
With the incoming US administration, BlackRock has been dubbed a new posterchild for the revolving door between policy and finance, or the new Goldman Sachs in government. While previous administrations have been filled with former Goldman executives, Biden’s administration has selected several former BlackRock leaders for senior roles. 
Brian Deese, the firm’s global head of sustainability investing who previously worked in the Obama administration and helped craft the Paris Climate Agreement, will join the administration as head of the National Economic Council. 
A former chief of staff to Fink, Adewale “Wally” Adeyemo, will serve as a top official at the Treasury Department, and Michael Pyle, BlackRock’s global chief investment strategist who had worked in the Obama administration before joining the firm, is going to be chief economic advisor to Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. 
It was rumored that Fink himself would enter politics, but he has downplayed that notion. 

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