I think the online service has the potential to be the most valuable part of this whole product. All your transactions, across multiple accounts, tracked in one place allowing breakdowns of your spending and clarity on our outgoings. I also see a big win here for Coin, think Mint but with an opportunity to also suggest better products & services to spend your money on (since they'll know almost everything you're buying) - a marketer's dream.
Marketers already have access to all your purchases.
Your bank statement has ads. Your credit card issuer sells your transactions to their partners. Retailers sell your data to data processing companies. The three big scoring companies have access to all your key financial information - and they sell it back to you (in the form of credit score monitoring services), and to marketers. DSPs allow marketers to bid on impressions at a very precise level, based on which sites you visited yesterday.
Marketer's dreams were already fulfilled years ago. They have a more data than most can handle.
Coin can become the credit card of credit cards. They could offer financing, revolving credit, analytics (like Mint), and tons of other financial products based on credit history. These are a lot more interesting - and profitable - than selling ads (or data) to marketers.
It's an obvious idea, but (apparently) nicely executed. It's a perfect acquisition target for Square. Or Visa/MC/Amex.
> I think the online service has the potential to be the most valuable part of this whole product.
This is assumed to be from the user's point of view (rather than from the point of view of the company -- generating revenue -- or from an interested 3rd party).
Then you end with this:
> a marketer's dream
So is Coin targeting marketers, and the users are the product to be sold like so many other start-ups to come out of the Valley?
