Sizzle/Fizzle: Nintendo Plays, Wells Fargo Pays And Online Commerce Wins The Day

Usually, a four-day work week is a real Sizzle — since, who doesn’t like working only 4 days, right? Most people in the U.S. regard this week as a real Fizzle since most people are at least packing five days into those four and maybe even more. Here’s hoping to put a little Sizzle into your step today.

Sizzle

Online Commerce

We know two sets of folks who were laboring over Labor Day — the teams at PayPal and Mastercard. Mastercard started off the week with a bang with news of its partnership with PayPal. The deal wraps a big bow around the importance of the offline-to-online shift in commerce. As Karen Webster wrote in her commentary on Tuesday (Sept. 6), the shift to online — buying, paying and embedding commerce into other apps — is no longer something that might be this “rogue” thing that will never reach critical mass. It has.

Among other things, the PayPal/Mastercard partnership makes it possible for Masterpass to become part of the Braintree developer platform and, therefore, integrated easily into digital sites — apps and web. It also makes it easier, like the Visa deal of several months ago, for Mastercard-branded cards to have prominence in the PayPal wallet and for tokenized credentials in those wallets to be used in stores where NFC is accepted. Yes, folks, the online commerce inflection point has arrived, and that’s a Sizzle! Hope you are standing on the right side of it, too. If not, there’s a big Fizzle in your future.

SoFi

While the rest of the alt-lending world is belly-facing up, yoga class-fortified SoFi is out taking names and raising money. It’s been reported that it is mere weeks from closing a $500 million round, which simply bolsters its mantle as the most well-funded startup in FinTech. As you will recall, SoFi built its business by making loans to “Henrys” — “High Earners, Not Rich Yet” students with pristine credit — and plans to use the money to expand beyond student loans to more of the mass-market borrower. This sounds like it could be the same slippery slope that got its belly-facing-up competition in hot water. We hope that this Sizzle is not the foreshadowing of a Fizzle down the road.

The Unbanked

The FDIC reported that the number of people in the U.S. without access to a bank account has dropped — and by a lot. Now, at 7 percent, the ranks of the unbanked are at their lowest levels since the study was started in 2009 and down from its high in 2011, which was 8.2 percent. The last time the study was done, in 2013, it was 7.7 percent. Rates among black and Hispanic households dropped 10 percent. The combination of a strong economy and different banking products are credited with the progress. Yes, a Sizzle for sure.

Fizzle

Wells Fargo

This is really bad. It’s one thing to want to cross-sell. It’s another when, to meet company pressure to do it, you commit fraud in the process. Wells said it sacked 5,300 employees who wanted to cross-sell so badly — AKA keep their jobs — that they created phony accounts, including phony PIN numbers, to please management. It was slapped with a $185 million fine in the process and rightfully so. And the banks wonder why the CFPB is breathing down their necks. What could it have been thinking? Fizzle, Fizzle and Fizzle.

AirPods

Whether you’re happy or sad that (head)phone Jack has hit the road, the design of the AirPods that are intended to replace them appears to be one of those things that only looks good on the model wearing them. Their design mimics, sort of, the design of the earbuds available today, and those things are shaky, even with the cord. Doing a run or a workout wearing the new Pods looks like a nonstarter. We love design, don’t get us wrong, but if you’re gonna make something cool, make it practical, too.

Falling Asleep In An Uber

One U.K. Uber X passenger took Ariana Huffington’s advice about taking naps when you can a little too literally. After climbing in an Uber for what was typically a five-minute walk, said rider dozed off. Thirty-five miles and $111 later, she arrived home. While it’s not clear whether the driver thought he was doing a nice thing by allowing Sleeping Beauty to rest, the rider was pretty upset and expressed her unhappiness with Uber — but not until the next morning. She got home and went to sleep, apparently not conscious enough to realize that she had slept for 35 minutes in the back of some stranger’s car.

Sizzle Of the Week: Nintendo

Nintendo’s had a pretty darn good run of luck of late. Despite the fact that, going into the summer of 2016, “Nintendo is doomed” had been a common refrain among the gaming console set — supported mostly by weak sales of its latest offering, the underperforming Nintendo Wii U.

But to Nintendo’s credit, it has been counted out many times before and somehow managed to avoid the crash and burn that came for all of its contemporary video gaming companies. Nintendo always seems to find a way to bounce back — usually by getting ahead of a trend that almost no one else is looking at. The Nintendo Wii won the seventh-generation console war because, instead of investing in increasingly photorealistic graphics, Nintendo doubled down on participatory fitness gaming and wrote its victory in the countless Wii bowling tournaments held in America’s living rooms from then on.

Now, Nintendo’s latest hat trick is mobile and combining its beloved pile of intellectual property with consumers’ unending enthusiasm for mixing their digital worlds with all of their other ones. Pokémon GO, of course, was the big surprise hit of the summer, driving legions of otherwise sensible people from their homes on a single-minded quest to catch ’em all.

Whether that wave of enthusiasm portends a long-term love affair or a short-term fad remains to be seen.

But from Nintendo’s point of view, it may not matter at all, since Pokémon GO was apparently just an opening act. Because if getting people out en masse to play a game powered mostly by nostalgia is impressive, what Nintendo pulled off last week was nothing short of miraculous.

It stole Apple’s thunder.

At Apple’s event.

Normally, the full product meeting is when the world gets its sneak peak into Apple’s imagineering lab to see what have-to-have product we’ll all be shelling out for this Christmas. This year, though, the Apple fanfare was a bit more muted. No one hated what they saw exactly, but the word “incremental” showed up a lot more than the word “revolutionary” or “innovative.” And when those latter two words did show up, odds are the speaker was talking about Nintendo and the dual announcement of Pokémon GO for the Apple Watch and the iPhone-only edition of Super Mario Infinite.

“People see this announcement as a signal that Nintendo is all in with mobile,” said Michael Pachter, analyst at Wedbush Securities.

And investors see that Nintendo seems to have found a key line-in with consumers, as stock in Nintendo is up nearly 50 percent since the beginning of summer. In the aftermath of the Apple event, Nintendo packed an overnight 29 percent onto its stock price.

Apple notched about 1 percent from its product announcements; over the course of this year, stock growth has mostly been stagnant at around 2 percent.

Now, Nintendo will benefit from the building buzz that Super Mario offers to those hungrily waiting for the game to appear. The big question for “Super Mario Run” is how it will collect coins from users. A limited version may be offered free of charge, with a set purchase price that could unlock the complete game. That is not quite a “freemium” model that allows users to download the game free but make money from purchases of virtual items that enhance the game (free to play, pay to win).

But whatever it does, Nintendo has pulled of the rarest of feats: getting people to wait for the game to play, instead of the phone to play it on.

And that’s good enough for a Sizzle this week.