Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is the richest millennial billionaire with a net worth of $97b, followed by Zhang Yiming, founder of ByteDance with a worth of $35.6b and Dustin Moskovitz, CEO of work management software Asana with $17.8b.
The United States has the most millennial billionaires, followed by China, Germany and Russia.
The technology sector has the most millennial billionaires with 28 and the combined net worth equates to an astonishing $254.5 billion.
Becoming a millennial (23–38 years old) billionaire is no easy feat and that is why only a limited number of people in the world reach billionaire status.
According to PhysicalGold.com, which analysed the latest data from Forbes revealed that finance and investment industry has the next most millennial billionaires with eight and the accumulative net worth is $24.6 billion.
The automotive, fashion and retail, healthcare and media and entertainment industries respectively have six millennial billionaires each while the construction and engineering, gambling and casinos, logistics, sports and telecommunications industries have no millennial billionaires
Overall, there are currently 78 millennial billionaires in the world and a collective net worth of $418.6 billion.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is the richest millennial billionaire in the world with a sizeable net worth of $97 billion, followed by Zhang Yiming, the founder of content media platform ‘ByteDance’ with a worth of $35.6 billion and CEO of work management software ‘Asana’ Dustin Moskovitz ($17.8 billion) and founder of messaging app ‘Telegram’ Pavel Durov ($17.2 billion) are among the other millennial billionaires with a net worth of more than $15 billion.
The United States has the most millennial billionaires (33.3%), followed by China (20.5%), Germany (10.3%), Russia (5.1%), Brazil (5.1%), Hong Kong (5.1%), Denmark (3.8%), Australia (3.8%), Sweden (2.6%), Canada (2.6%), Ireland (2.6%), Norway (1.3%), United Kingdom (1.3%), India (1.3%) and Finland (1.3%).
Traditional banks are struggling to keep pace with the tech innovations that are now driving shifting customer expectations.
$68tr in wealth is to be passed down from the baby boomers – the wealthiest generation ever – to their children and other heirs (millennials) over the next few decades, reports reveal.
Millennials have become comfortable using fintech to help them access, manage and use their money rather than using a traditional bank.
Traditional banks are struggling to keep pace with the tech innovations that are now driving shifting customer expectations as legacy technologies and clunky business models are presenting considerable transformation challenges.
According to a survey conducted by deVere Group, one of the world’s largest independent financial advisory and fintech organisations, 59 per cent of the millennials, born between 1980 and 1996, are happy to switch this year or already have a digital-only bank.
Nigel Green, CEO and founder of deVere Group, said that it is more bad news for traditional banks, which seem to have been in a perpetual game of ‘catch-up’ in recent years amid evolving customer expectations, regulatory requirements and tech advances.
“Why? Two reasons: first, millennials because they’re the fastest-growing cohort of clients; and second, because they are becoming the beneficiaries of the Greatest Transfer of Wealth in history,” he said.
According to industry reports, $68 trillion in wealth is to be passed down from the baby boomers – the wealthiest generation ever – to their children and other heirs (millennials) over the next few decades.
Digital natives
“Millennials have grown up on technology. They are ‘digital natives’. They’ve been influenced by the enormous surge in tech as they came into adulthood – which came around the same time of the global financial crash that hit in 2008,” Green said.
According to a Facebook white paper entitled “Millennials + money: The unfiltered journey,” 92 per cent of millennials distrust banks and many view them as an unreliable source of information.
Green said that the millennials have become comfortable using fintech [financial technology] to help them access, manage and use their money rather than using a traditional bank.
“Mobile-first millennials expect easy, immediate access and control of their finances in the palm of their hand. They demand to be able to transfer money and pay bills in one tap or swipe. They want to be able to review their spending habits, be offered guidance, and have real-time access,” he said.
Moreover, he said that clients are also attracted by their green credentials as well as the on-the-go convenience, control and flexibility that digital-only banks offer.
Last year, the deVere CEO said: “Individuals and companies are increasingly embracing and expecting green, paperless banking. Traditional banks have a long way to go to catch-up with tech-driven challenger banks and fintech firms, which are intrinsically much greener and are leading the charge to a paperless future.”
“It’s natural that they turn to fintech instead of a banking system that they perceive as outdated and/or untrustworthy.”
Businesses are beginning to understand that diversity is beneficial to both decision making and return on investment.
Combining AI and human capabilities can help curate frontline insights, bringing greater agility and efficiency to problem-solving and decision making.
Today, more than a year after the World Health Organisation declared pandemic, Covid-19-related themes continue to dominate digital transformation plans, from training remote workforces to digital customer experiences.
Many executives are placing a heightened emphasis on pre-pandemic themes that became more urgent with the events of 2020.
To identify the most disruptive trends, Bain met regularly with hundreds of carefully selected technology companies and start-ups.
Combining those conversations with our experience from working with large corporations and our innovation ecosystem partners, we selected seven trends that have recently risen to the top of C-suite agendas:
Nudging is a prevalent tool
Almost 60 per cent of global executives across sectors said they adopted customer experience tools to improve different stages of the customer journey over the past five years.
The pandemic profoundly amplified the need for this digital transformation, shifting consumer behaviour and accelerating trends by two to three years.
In the digital customer journey, “nudging” is an increasingly prevalent tool to push consumers toward desired outcomes. It influences customer behaviour through positive reinforcement and subliminal messaging, often helping to better fulfill their wants and needs.
Gamification reskills remote workforce
Juerg Kronenberg, Partner at Bain & Company Middle East.
The World Economic Forum predicted that more than half of all workers will need significant re- or upskilling by 2022, in order to meet growing demands for proficiency in new technologies, analytical thinking, and emotional intelligence, among other skillsets. But the pandemic has thrown a wrench in that timeline.
Most companies—already struggling with a lack of agility and employee engagement in their training programs—found their issues were exacerbated by remote training. In addition, Covid-19 highlighted the need for new ways of working, not only to adapt for future crises, but also to meet the growing demand for remote work.
To make training more efficient and enjoyable, leading companies across industries such as retail, healthcare, and professional services have turned to gamification.
Diversity becomes a core recruiting metric
A recent study by LinkedIn Talent Solutions found that the number of people in head of diversity and chief diversity officer roles increased 75 per cent and 68 per cent, respectively, over the last five years. It also proclaimed head of diversity as the “job of the moment.”
A diverse talent base has also become a requirement for young job seekers, who increasingly prioritise personal values when deciding where to work.
Beyond the response to systemic injustice, businesses are beginning to understand that diversity is beneficial to both decision making and return on investment.
Teams with gender diversity make better business decisions 73 per cent of the time, while age- and geographic-diverse teams do so 87 per cent of the time.
And 64 per cent of consumers say they are more likely to consider or purchase a product after seeing an ad that they consider to be diverse or inclusive.
Brands and retailers turn into marketplaces
Recently, individual businesses have started moving away from these platforms to establish their own marketplaces. These owned marketplaces allow brands to benefit from the network effect: They can aggregate and sell adjacent products and services, creating a one-stop shop for their target customer. The network effect can boost customer acquisition and retention. It can also increase interactions, in turn lowering the cost to serve each customer.
This emerging trend has given rise to companies that help brands quickly launch marketplaces and provide quality service at scale through a fully configurable platform, a curated ecosystem of sellers and partners, full security, and advanced automation.
AI-enabled collective intelligence curates frontline insights for a more agile strategy
According to a 2020 study by Harvard Business Review, 86 per cent of executives say frontline workers need better technology-enabled insight to make good decisions in the moment.
As companies become increasingly customer centric, the need to create a flow of data and insights to and from those closest to customers—the front line—will continue to grow.
To filter and analyse massive amounts of input, leading companies are looking to AI-enabled collective intelligence.
While AI is highly effective in pattern recognition, it is incapable of creativity and misses insights in non-structured data. But combining AI and human capabilities can help curate frontline insights, bringing greater agility and efficiency to problem solving and decision making.
Savvy consumers demand sustainable products
When it comes to sustainability, consumers are paying far more attention and taking far more action. According to a 2018 Nielsen study, 73 per cent of global consumers say they would definitely or probably change their consumption habits to reduce their impact on the environment.
This shift in consumer preference has pushed sustainability to the top of the corporate agenda, especially in the wake of the pandemic. According to a Bain survey, more than half of executives say Covid-19 has only increased the importance of sustainability for their business.
Quantum computing starts to address specific applications
With an estimated market size of $1.1 billion in 2019—expected to grow five times by 2025—quantum computing is an emerging technology poised to radically reshape the world, by solving difficult problems beyond the power of any conventional supercomputer.
Moving away from ones and zeros, quantum computers can process exponential combinations of multiple dimensions, enabling 10,000 times the speed and complexity management of supercomputers. IBM and Google remain front-runners in the quantum sector, but venture capital activity is accelerating, with investments of about $480 million in 2020—more than double the estimated $200 million invested in 2019. However, there are still significant challenges regarding cost and energy effectiveness, hindering the technology’s commercial scalability.
As companies chart their post-pandemic path, winning organisations will consider these seven trends, and proactively identify strategies and innovation partners to help them navigate their journey.
Juerg Kronenberg is a Partner at Bain & Company Middle East.
By enabling composability in digital services, enterprises are better equipped to take advantage of digital economies.
It offers the ability to easily orchestrate, assemble and package services together based on customer subscriptions.
Every futuristic business today is seemingly knee-deep in digitisation efforts, striving to transform its technology to create newer business opportunities.
Their goal is to participate in economies that are beyond their customer interactions. By enabling composability in digital services, enterprises are better equipped to take advantage of digital economies. Composable enterprises promise exactly that! They are by design – flexible, adaptive, and resilient towards market shifts.
The report states that by 2023, 30 per cent of new applications will be delivered, priced and consumed as libraries of packaged business capabilities.
The business benefits of being a composable enterprise are many. At an organisational level, there is increased collaboration between business and IT, in their common pursuit to offer personalized, individual unique experiences to customers.
Developing building blocks as opposed to monolithic structures allows agile development and helps accelerate innovation. Imagine a Lego-like system where products and services are seamlessly integrated with the rest of the ecosystem, and partners can pick-n-choose business integrations. That’s what composable offerings are.
Most importantly, it also enables new business models by which industries can participate in shared economies (e.g. Banking – Open Banking, Telecommunications – TM- forum APIs, Healthcare – HL7 interface etc.), creates unique multi-channel experiences, and monetize on fine-grained data.
Here are some key tech capabilities of composable enterprises:
Enterprise services offered as packaged business services that are independently built, consumed and priced
Ability to easily orchestrate, assemble and package services together based on customer subscriptions
Highly configurable and customizable user experience coupled with associated business service
Ability to API-enable every business component to be easily exposed, secured, managed and consumed by internal as well as external stakeholders
Flexibility to deploy and provision application services and offerings to any infrastructure of choice
Now, where does low code fit in?
The principles of low code focused on visually building applications and services using ready-made components, integrations and design patterns align perfectly well with the theories of plug-n-play and composability.
Low code platforms can offer great speed and flexibility to services and components that can be reused for different use-cases.
This reusability and componentisation can come in especially handy for core software builders or ISVs who need to implement software with speed, and onboard a bunch of end-users with quick customisation capabilities.
How can low code help composability?
Fusion teams: Low code can foster better collaboration between business users/ citizen developers and pro developers. Developers can quickly build custom reusable business components that can be easily stitched together by citizen developers.
Component Driven Design & Development: Forcing design and development to be based out of configurable platform components like templates, widgets, layouts and domain objects allows for greater flexibility and reusability across the enterprise.
Micro-App architectures: Building full-fledged applications as micro-apps that can be bundled together as micro front ends helps with easy composition of business functionality.
API-enabled enterprise: Auto generating APIs from existing business logic and data sources (databases, web services, custom business logic, legacy system connectors) that can become the foundation for developing custom packaged business functionality and custom UI integrated widgets.
Plug-n-play business assembly: Composition of business services using visual drag & drop WYSWYG interface. With the plug-n-play model, these services can be configured and customized based on individual business needs.
Zero DevOps: Low code platforms offer seamless deployment of business services into any choice of infrastructure. They can be deployed as individual microservices that can be individually versioned.
Not just for the enterprise, taking a composable approach also lays out a variety of benefits to consumers. The low code application development paradigm provides an accelerated journey for enterprises looking to get there. Needless to say, even the most powerful low code platform has to be augmented with new-age processes and technology thought leadership.
It also means unified efforts from stakeholders at all levels (visual user interaction teams, business analysts, architecture leaders, development teams, operational teams and business executives) to be aligned towards thinking, designing, creating, and supporting reusable composable business services to taste success.
Mayur Shah is a Senior Director of Product Management and Marketing at Wavemaker, open standards-based low code development platform.
Its goal is to give maximum functionality on mobile and desktop and keep user privacy on top.
The company has added translate and the beta version of Vivaldi Mail, Calendar and Feed Reader in its version 4.0 to stand out from the crowd and give users a real alternative to Big Tech.
Vivaldi 4.0 arrives on Windows, Mac, Linux computers, and Android devices.
Many sites, apps and browsers want to gather as much information as possible about us when we visit them and later sell the collected data to advertisers for a profit.
Web browser Vivaldi, based on the same Chromium engine as Google Chrome, is a freeware and cross-platform browser developed by Vivaldi technologies, giving users plenty of features while protecting their privacy.
Headquartered in Oslo, Norway, Vivaldi continues to tackle privacy issues plaguing the internet such as data collection, user tracking, and profiling including Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC,) Google’s latest privacy-invasive technology.
Jon von Tetzchner, former co-founder of Opera Software and Vivaldi CEO, told TechChannel News that they have no use of data, zero interest and zero access to the data as it is either stored locally on the users’ machine or encrypted.
Jon von Tetzchner, former co-founder of Opera Software and Vivaldi CEO.
“We’ve baked a “tracker blocker” right into the browser. It protects people from the ubiquitous web trackers that follow you around the web gathering your personal information. We’re building Vivaldi without any privacy-infringing tracking,” he said.
The company has made significant performance improvements to the Vivaldi browser that is independent of the Chromium code.
“Although we use the Chromium engine, when you sync data between devices with Vivaldi nothing is leaked to Google. The changes we have made to the engine make it incompatible with Chrome synchronisation. With Vivaldi, your sync data is not only safe from Google but it’s protected with end-to-end encryption. Unlike Google, we aren’t an advertising company. We disable a lot of stuff in the Chromium code to keep your data private,” he said.
Vivaldi was launched in 2015 to make up for the lack of customisation and loss of features in other browsers.
Striking a sweet spot
“From the very beginning, we’ve focused on building our own, highly customisable UI, and unique features. Our goal is to give maximum functionality on mobile and desktop and keep user privacy on top. That is why our Sync functionality works wonders and also keeps your data safe. The browser is a pretty key piece of software on any device but each of us uses it in a unique way,” Tetzchner said.
Despite chromium’s near-monopoly on the web, we have so many browsers such as Microsoft Edge, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Opera, Firefox, etc. and do we need a new one.
In terms of competition, Tetzchner said that Vivaldi is trying to strike that sweet spot between customisability, productivity, and privacy so this should overall be the better choice if users don’t care much about using Duckduckgo, Firefox or others.
“People are different and their needs are different. Why not have more choices. There’s a host of stuff you can’t do in Chome but you can in Vivaldi,” he said.
Vivaldi is still small in users when compared to Chrome but it is speeding at a hare’s pace.
Posing a real alternative to Big Tech
The company, in its 4.0 version, has added translate and the beta version of Vivaldi Mail, Calendar and Feed Reader to stand out from the crowd and give users a real alternative to Big Tech.
Vivaldi 4.0 arrives on Windows, Mac, Linux computers, and Android devices.
Vivaldi on desktop and Android now offer Vivaldi Translate, a built-in, privacy-friendly translation service, powered by Lingvanex and hosted by Vivaldi, keeping translations out of the reach of companies like Google or Microsoft.
The eagerly-awaited beta versions of Vivaldi Mail with Vivaldi Feed Reader and Vivaldi Calendar are now available on desktop. While Vivaldi Mail Beta works with existing mail and calendar services, users can also choose to set up an account on vivaldi.net or add a trusted third-party service, such as Fastmail.
“With version 4.0, Vivaldi is making it easier to break away from the locked ecosystems and creepy, surveillance-driven practices of huge corporations,” Tetzchner said.
With an expanded set of integrated features, he said that it will give users more control of their data and your workflow.
“Simply put, the era of trusting Big Tech is over. Google has access to every piece of text that is translated. And they have been able to get away with it due to the lack of reliable options,” he said.
The platform is an online marketplace for independent fashion designers in the region offering Khaleeji themes.
Aims to give designers access to a multi-billion-dollar fashion market globally.
UAE-based e-commerce startup – Boksha – has closed a $1 million Seed funding round from a group of investors, which includes Sandooq Al Watan and family offices.
The company will utilise the funds to scale up operationally and further invest into its technology to enter new markets in the region, starting with the GCC.
The platform, founded in 2018, is an online marketplace for independent fashion designers in the region offering Khaleeji (local) themes.
“We are very excited about our next chapter post funding closing and see tremendous growth opportunities in the region. Not only do we see this as a largely scalable business, but also one with significant social impact in terms of job creation, individual empowerment and export of regional talent,” Yahya Mohamed Saleh, Boksha co-founder and CEO, said.
This is the company’s first raise, and it has bootstrapped itself since its inception, offering over 15,000 SKUs, representing over 800 designers, and shipping to over 40 countries worldwide to date.
“Through our platform and tools, we believe we can give our designers access to a multi-billion-dollar fashion market globally – something most of them didn’t have access to before,” Saleh said.
Hind Baker, Director-General of Sandooq Al Watan, said that their platform is a national initiative launched by prominent Emirati businessmen to support innovators and talented Emiratis, and create every opportunity for them to thrive and unleash their full potential.
“We are always open to any kind of bold and innovative ideas that can help diversify the UAE economy and prepare it for the post-oil era, in line with our mandate and the UAE leadership’s directives,” she said.
