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Robert Belsky
VP of Finance @ Trellis | Founder of Bob's Bookkeepers: Finance for Fashion | Investor & Advisor
Robert Belsky is the VP of Finance at Trellis Law and the Founder of Bob's Bookkeepers: Finance for Fashion. He is known for his profound work ethic, attention to detail, ambition, and willingness to succeed.
Belsky has a strong background in finance and business administration. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Finance from Florida International University and an MBA from the University of Michigan. His career history includes roles such as:
- VP of Finance at Trellis Law
- Founder of Bob's Bookkeepers
- Investor and Advisor at Gig Wage
- Advisor at StartUp Health and Blackstock & Weber
- VP of Finance and Operations at various companies
- Business Strategy Associate at J.P. Morgan
- Analyst at Bloomberg LP
On LinkedIn, Robert Belsky is an active user who regularly shares insights on finance, bookkeeping, and business trends. His LinkedIn profile can be found under the username "robert-belsky-110a1115".1 Belsky's expertise lies in financial systems and behaviors, bookkeeping, CFO services, and banking and finance industry trends.
Trellis Law, where Belsky serves as VP of Finance, is a legal data startup that makes US state trial courts searchable through a single interface.2 The company provides state trial court research and judicial analytics to attorneys, law firms, and corporate legal departments.23
Highlights
Synthetic risk transfer - a new name for an old behavior. Regional banks are selling CDS on different loan pools, focusing on auto loans at this point. The risk may be spread, but it doesn't disappear. There are some similarities to '08. Depending on how concentrated these risks become, we could see some systemic issues. Incentives at smaller banks are still not right.
At the end of the article there's this gem of a quote - "If defaults on the auto loans exceed projections, the fund could take a loss."
The optimist in me thinks investors are likely mindful of the lessons from '08 and are accurately forecasting these defaults.
But the pessimist sees a lot of unchanged behavior and incentives from back then. Who is on the hook if the bank goes under? Will we let the investors hold the bag?
https://shorturl.at/BNIIz
#RiskManagement #Banking #Finance #Investing
Two things are fascinating about the Wells Fargo, Bilt partnership that went sour (but is trying to be resuscitated):
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How easy it is for internal revenue projections to be wrong -- the card program is losing $10M a month for Wells. User behavior in payments businesses is just tough to forecast. The bad assumption was around likelihood that cardholders would carry balances. In this high-interest rate environment, you can earn good interest on deposits. The spread between that and the rewards points can still be lucrative if they find ways to drive deposits up. It's not a bad bet, they probably just overweighted the revenue contribution from interest income in the model.
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How important long-term contracts can be -- "Wells has told Bilt that it doesn’t intend to renew the contract, which is scheduled to end in 2029, unless economics are changed in its favor." -- Bilt has another 5 years to make this work. With that amount of time, there's a lot a startup can do to shift things in their favor and make the partnership work.
