Wine and liquor retailers haven’t had to look hard for a silver lining in a year that has presented many people with new physical, mental and financial obstacles. Between the beginning of March to mid-April, Nielsen estimates that online alcohol sales rose 234 percent.
And despite an abrupt shift in working patterns, business is booming in other verticals as well. In Chicago, those industries include machine learning, consumer insights, financial services and information technology.
Below, leaders from trading company tastytrade and insurance provider DAIS share how they plan to capitalize on the growth their businesses have seen and discuss tech trends they anticipate taking hold.
It’s not often business leaders attribute a certain success to luck. But this year, an ability to work from home was one of a few factors that dictated which industries shut down and which ramped up. tastytrade Co-CEO and Founder Tom Sosnoff explained how the financial services company accounted for risk and embraced the reward.
The U.S. (and global) business landscape has drastically shifted in the last six months. What's one way in which consumer or buyer behavior has changed that ultimately benefited your company?
There is always an unpredictability factor in business. Most of the time, you can reasonably define your known business risks, but there is always the chance of an outlier move. In 2020, a pandemic was just that type of unknown outlier move. As such, a lot of businesses suffered from risks they could never fathom nor plan for. Fortunately for us, the financial service space and, more specifically, the online brokerage industry benefited from the shift to working from home. Dumb, stupid luck is sometimes better than thoughtful planning.
Dumb, stupid luck is sometimes better than thoughtful planning.’’
Define “success” at tastytrade. What has a recent major win for your business been? To what do you attribute that win?
The easiest way to define success is by whether or not you love going to work. If you’re not having fun, you’re not successful. The most recent win for us has been our ability to continue to grow both revenue and profits by over 50 percent this year for the fourth consecutive year.
What big trends do you predict for your industry in 2021? How is tastytrade positioned to capitalize on these trends?
We see a continuation of individual investors gravitating from passive to active. We believe the challenge of learning to manage your own capital is going to grow exponentially. As such, we have designed our entire business model around capturing the momentum of this movement.
Living in an increasingly remote world goes beyond back-to-back Zoom meetings and virtual whiteboard sessions. It means working to digitize previously offline processes. That’s what DAIS is helping insurance companies do. CEO Jason Kolb predicts the pandemic has accelerated corporate digitization plans by at least five years. Below, he explains what that means for his business now and moving forward.
The U.S. (and global) business landscape has drastically shifted in the last six months. What's one way in which consumer or buyer behavior has changed that ultimately benefited your company?
The pandemic has forced everything that used to be offline to adapt to an online-only world. That has created massive disruption in many markets and has companies scrambling to adapt. It has accelerated corporate digitization plans by at least five years, if not more.
This is great for DAIS because insurance was very much an offline industry, and we provide a digital insurance platform that brings it online. The pandemic is tragic and it has changed the world in some interesting, and most likely permanent, ways. These changes are ultimately very good for companies like ours.
Define “success” at DAIS. What has a recent major win for your business been? To what do you attribute that win?
Success for us is when we help agents and companies write new business that they wouldn’t have otherwise captured. For example, we are helping some clients write large segmented programs. We help others set up online stores. It is rewarding to watch our technology unlock our partners’ full potential.
In 2020, the pandemic kicked off a mad dash to digitization.’’
What big trends do you predict for your industry in 2021? How is DAIS positioned to capitalize on these trends?
In 2020, the pandemic kicked off a mad dash to digitization. In 2021, you will start to see the fruits of those efforts. Many projects are currently in the works to digitize previously offline processes. They’re going to launch publicly beginning in Q1. Everyone who hasn’t started on this journey yet is at risk of being left behind if they don’t act quickly.
