The Lens is a discovery platform that provides discovery, analytics and research management tools that are free to use. Mark Garlinghouse, who is responsible for business development at The Lens, presents an overview followed by a demonstration of how to perform searches of interest to librarians and researchers at academic institutions, for example by looking at research output or citation intensity. The platform includes 111 million patent records as well as the metadata from over 200 million scholarly records, compiled and harmonized from Microsoft Academic, PubMed and Crossref, enhanced with UnPaywall open access information, CORE full text, and links to ORCID. It is open, meaning that there are no constraints to reuse the data displayed.

(Afterpay) is a buy now pay later service which has gone up 400% from it’s 2020 low. ASX: APT

Easily the most controversial stock on the ASX as a whole because of all the controversy the service has stirred up with not only the service continuing to grow in users but also the commentary Afterpay has had in regards to arguably delving into the credit sector, which it argues it is not providing.

The stock has seen all time highs recently during a turbulent time for many other stocks so today. I’m going to delve into the APT’s business model, competitors and outlook for 2020 and onwards to help you in determining whether APT is a buy for you. This is all general advice of course purchase at your own risk.

Now to best understand how the platform works and makes money, it basically charges the retailer to use their platform through a fixed rate for each item purchased. Which is generally from 3 to 7% plus a fixed transaction fee of 30c. So this is a volume game, the more sales that goes through the payment platform the more APT makes. The payment is made by Afterpay a day after the orders are made less the Merchant fees.

You have to ask yourself like who in the world wants to take a potential 7% hit to their profit margin? For many businesses who are making a 30% profit margin that’s pretty good, but to take a 7% hit to that and basically slash your profits by almost a third…. Like when we put it that way, what vendor would want to use Afterpay?

I’m just having a stab in the dark here but I think the leaning towards APT stems from two factors first is that millennials and the Zoomers, or GenZ have always been told to stay away from credit cards and we hear it all over the news about crippling credit card debt. So shoppers see APT as an option to stay away from the credit card, since it’s a free service if you pay on time it mentally allows people to budget their shopping into their weekly expenses. Now I know for some it doesn’t make sense and for me I don’t get it fully because I have credit cards and they offer more security …

So this converting of those anti-credit card folks to APT forms the second part of their success which is the marketing. If you frequent instagram or any online site you would’ve seen their logo and this sparks interest in a younger demographic who is looking at alternatives to credit cards that provides little friction to transacting, which btw is a win for the merchant also. But yes, their marketing is on point and speaks to the culture of the company also, young vibrant and you’ll see it in their reports. So that’s how they make the main portion of their money and I think it’s rather easy to understand.

A large portion of their merchants and transactions are also online and if we have a look at their report in the ANZ region alone it’s about 75% online, which means that the closure of retail during this pandemic has had a lesser effect than many would’ve thought when their shares went down to $9. Most of in their in store purchases were through Big W, Officeworks and Target of which were open for the most part of the pandemic.

So how has this business grown in the first half of 2020 in contrast to the first half of 2019. In terms of sales we see a boost from $2.3b to $4.8b which is up by $109%, their userbase has grown to 7.3m active users which is up 134% merchants have almost doubled and their total income has over doubled and the losses they’ve been taking has gone down overtime. Yahhhh, right very very impressive.. Just think of any other business we’ve looked at in this series, growth has generally been by 20-60% at the highest but we’re offering triple digits in growth for many of the metrics for Afterpay.

It really doesn’t when they already offer cards and charge a fee for them, creating a product that is let’s be honest very similar and then introducing that to the market when you’re already intrenched in banks and any other associations that are connected would require some rebranding and if we look at what Afterpay had to do to get their brand out there to the market; that being going into debt and capital raising it doesn’t make sense for the big dogs to make the same move and resources with no guaranteed return on investment.

Also they’ve actually already got a partnership with Mastercard and Visa so we can just remove any potential conflict from the table.

In regards to other BNPL competitors, let’s look at some examples. Z1Ppy dippy, now full disclosure I like Z1Ppy dippy and have it as a swing trade, but at the pace it’s establishing partnerships, it’s no where close to APT. It has some solid partnerships in Australia but to branch out in a market let’s say the US they would have to convince retailers who already have APT why they should accept the alternative in Z1P. There’s also the capital aspect of expansion, which they are not in a position to do.

Date: Thursday, 9 February​ 2023
Time: 9am – 10.30am (GMT); 6.00pm – 7.30pm (JST)
Location: Virtual

Japan is the only super-ageing nation in the world. At the same time, it is a comparatively healthy country. What can the UK learn from Japan, and vice versa? And how can we leverage the opportunity of Japan’s upcoming G7 presidency?

Speakers include:
• Dr Taichi Ono, National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Tokyo
• Professor Yoko Matsuoka, Tokyo Kasei University
• Arunima Himawan, Senior Health Research Lead, ILC-UK
• Professor Judith Phillips, Deputy Principal (Research) at the University of Stirling and Professor of Gerontology
• Chair: Lily Parsey, Head of Projects, ILC-UK

Scott Harrison spent 10 years as a New York City nightclub promoter, partying until sunrise every morning and ingesting almost every substance imaginable.

But when he was 28, he realized his life lacked meaning.

“My tombstone might say, ‘here’s the guy who got thousands of people drunk,'” Harrison said.

Feeling lost, he decided to volunteer for a medical charity in Liberia.

Harrison spent the next year-and-a-half in West Africa, where he encountered people with diseases he’d never seen before — such as cholera, typhoid, dysentery, and fatal cases of diarrhea and dehydration.

He smelled the yellow-brown parasitic dirty water that millions of people were drinking. He discovered that unsafe, unclean drinking water is the world’s leading cause of death.

When he returned to New York City, he couldn’t bring himself to sell expensive bottled water at nightclubs anymore.

Instead, Harrison moved into a tiny closet and launched a nonprofit, Charity: Water.

Today, Charity: Water has funded more than 24,000 water projects that have brought safe, clean drinking water to more than 7.3 million people.

That’s the good news.

The bad news? There are still 663 million people without access to clean water. That’s around double the population of the U.S.

And water-borne diseases kill about 16,000 people each week, almost half of whom are children under age 5.

There’s still a long way to go.

Today, Scott joins me on the podcast to talk about how he started and grew a major charitable organization.

– How does a nightclub promoter with zero business experience launch a massive nonprofit organization?
– What mistakes did he make?
– How did he differentiate his organization from the thousands of other charities out there?
– Who did he first hire?
– What advice would he offer to anyone who’s goal is to create a nonprofit?

Learn the answers to these questions and more in this excellent episode with Scott Harrison, the founder of Charity: Water.

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For complete show notes and resources, please visit http://affordanything.com/episode107