Zing + more things

Zing

HSBC’s Zing shuts down. It didn’t manage to compete effectively against Revolut and Wise. Zing provided cheap foreign exchange. On the face of it HSBC had a number of use cases in its main retail banking markets that would have made sense.

Hong Kong:

  • 7+ percent of the population are expats. This has been pretty constant over previous decades, though people are constantly coming and departing. A big group of these communities are domestic workers from the Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. All of whom would benefit from cheap foreign money transfers.
  • Like other developed Asian countries, many young Hong Kongers study abroad. Having a way to cheaply transfer money to and from Hong Kong would be useful for this second group.
  • Finally Hong Kong has a diaspora, with families being spread across the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada.

UK:

  • 30+ percent of Londoners were born outside the UK. Overall, the UK had ethnic minorities which make up 8 – 10 percent of the population. Many of them have multi-generational links with their homelands.
  • The NHS in particular has a large proportion of skilled foreigners working for them from Filipino intensive care nurses to Greek X-ray technicians.

Zing decided to launch only in the UK. Despite HSBC’s footprint, it didn’t grab the visibility or market share achieved by Revolut or Wise. It also failed to make money and HSBC seems to have taken a shorter term view to succeed or quit compared to its startup competitors. One could charitably view Zing as a correct view of the ‘fast failure’ model, if learnings from it are taken from it by HSBC and applied effectively.

Zing shutdown

Zing is emblematic of Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma where established companies lose market share as they fail to disrupt themselves to compete against new upstart businesses.

Financial innovation is hard. Barclays closed down their mobile payment system Pingit, NatWest stepped back from its digital bank offering and Vodafone has struggled to expand M-Pesa.

Beauty

SkinGPT – hyper-realistic skin simulations powered by GenAI

China

US TikTok ‘refugees’ make surprise move to China’s ‘RedNote’ | FT – Xiaohongshu’s technical team were not ready for the complexity of a western audience. What’s interesting is that the move was a political statement to US politicians and a tacit rejection of Meta’s competitor platforms very soon after their ‘pivot to free speech’.

Economics

Gen Z Americans are leaving their European cousins in the dust | FT

Energy

Toyota rethinks its bet on hydrogen | FT – renewed focus on commercial vehicles that will help drive the build out of hydrogen infrastructure.

Gadget

Honda, Sony launch Afeela with microLED external display | EE News Europe – showcased at CES

Vintage | Hi-Fi News – modern reviews on classic hi-fi models that give you a realistic understanding about how they compare to the current state-of-the-art. A number of the pieces come off much more favourably than I was expecting.

Obsolete Sony are doing a great job at documenting Sony’s history:

Ideas

Kameron Hurley: There Have Always Been Times Like These – Locus OnlineHard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom. –Ursula K. Le Guin

Luxury

ISSUE #1 — ARTSUMERISM – Power Dynamics by COPE – massification of luxury goods might have taken the artisan out of luxe. But has enabled it to develop an art collaboration somewhere between patron and influencer relationship.

Marketing

Interesting contrast between Ivy Yang’s A 2025 PR Playbook for an Unpredictable World – by Ivy Yang and Edelman’s Trust Barometer hand wringing around a crisis of grievance – 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer Reveals High Level of Grievance Towards Government, Business and the Rich.

Kantar Media to be sold to US investment firm for £820m

Materials

Shoemaking experts Rose Anvil interview Fitasy on the advantages and challenges of using additive manufacturing for shoes. Fitasy provide a more realistic perspective on the circular economy benefits of filament printing at the end of the interview.

Media

It’s Time to End our Subscription Addiction | Futureproof News – the Substack economy can’t scale.

Advertising folk, Britain’s young news readers are not all like you – The Media Leader

Online

About-Face(book) | Spyglass – MG Seigler covers the journey of Meta and Mark Zuckerberg

Meta puts the ‘Dead Internet Theory’ into practice – Computerworld – Computerworld on Meta’s AI social media profiles designed to have personalities.

Google’s mobile search results are dropping the ‘breadcrumbs’ from URLs – The Verge

Will Video Kill the Audio Star in 2025? | Vulture – I find it a bit odd as an idea, but then I do listen to a lot of talking heads YouTube channels without looking at the participants such as TLDR, Chip Stock Investor et al and much of the CNBC content I listen to is an audio track from their TV feed.

Technology

‘ChatGPT’ Robotics Moment in 2025 | AI Supremacy – this is a very software orientated look at things. Lights out factories have been pursued for decades. A big limitation is the physics governing strain wave bearings, which affects size and loads that can be managed. Much of the innovation has been in software until hardware can catch up.

UK’s elite hardware talent is being wasted. | Josef – this reminds me a lot of working in the chemical and petrochemical industry at the start of my career. When enough people opt out the capability collapses in on itself.

Daring Fireball: Siri Is Super Dumb and Getting Dumber

Web of no web

Tiny chip could offer spectral sensing for everyday devices | TechXplore