Also:

• ⌚️ Apple pay anti-competitive

• 🔗 New Brand Identity for Coinbase

• 👨‍🏫 Best typography for reading

• ⛳️ The strange business of hole-in-one insurance

🥊 The battle for the SMEs

Over the last few years, the biggest trend in the corporate banking market is undoubted that banking and accounting are merging. Cicero has written a new report titled "The battle of SME is continuing" where they believe the accounting system will be the preferred surface where SMEs will collect and manage their finances.

The accounting giant Visma is going into financing by establishing a Financing company, Visma Finance, which will offer invoice sales and probably loans gradually. 

DNB and Sparebank 1 went into accounting last year when they bought into the accounting provider Uni Micro, preparing for creating "Vipps for accounting".

Read more about the movements here:

• "Visma is definitely the big ugly wolf for the banks today" Link

• "The major banks are preparing the ground for a "Vipps" for accounting" Link

• "The accountant - A joker in the SMB battle" Link

⌚️ Apple pay anti-competitive

EU will probably order Apple to let third-party apps (Like Vipps and Square ) make payments with their NFC chip. According to them, Apple Pay is anticompetitive. Interestingly, Apple recently announced that it would open up this API in the other direction by allowing apps to take payment using NFC without needing a dongle.

🔗 New Brand Identity for Coinbase

Moniker has created a new brand identity for Coinbase. As a starting point, they turned to typical financial documents for typographic inspiration and started building a bespoke typeface: Coinbase Sans. To test the typography, they started with some of the toughest UI, which were dense with information.

Coinbase is known for its blue. Moniker increased the saturation and brightness for that core blue and introduced a secondary palette to be more flexible as Coinbase introduced sub-brands. You can see the complete case study here.

👨‍🏫 Best typography for reading

Speaking of typefaces: A large new study of the best fonts for online reading is ultimately disappointing because it doesn't answer the most burning question: "what font should you use for your website?" Some of the key findings that stood out to me:

• Among high-legibility fonts, there is a 35% difference in reading speeds between the best and the worst

• People read 11% slower for every 20 years they age

• Garamond had the highest average reading speed at 312 WPM.

• Open Sans had the lowest average reading speed at 254 WPM.

• But Garamond wasn't the best for all users. Many users were faster readers with another font than Garamon, but it varied. 

• We can't ask users to choose their font because people won't pick the font best for them.

• There are age-related differences in what fonts are best, with people younger than 35 being different than people older than 35.

⛳️ The strange business of hole-in-one insurance

You've probably heard that some golf tournaments promise big cash prizes for holes-in-one if you are into golf. You probably didn't know that they turn to niche insurers to protect against a stroke of luck. 

The hole-in-one insurance business dates back nearly 100 years — but it was originally intended for a different purpose: In many golf circles, it was (and still is) customary for the lucky golfer to buy drinks for everyone in the clubhouse after landing a hole-in-one. This could naturally get quite expensive. 

By the 1990s, the hole-in-one insurance industry had a total market value of $220m. An estimated 30% of all Japanese golfers shelled out $50-$70/year to insure against up to $3.5k in expenses. Around the same time, golf tournaments began offering increasingly large prizes for holes-in-one to drive up publicity.

Read more on how hole-in-one insurance works.

That's it for this week 👋

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Marius Hauken, partner Stacc X