Using TransferWise to save your business money

TransferWise is the cheapest, and probably fastest, way to send money abroad. But did you know you can use it for your business as well? Before you get started, you will need the following documents:

• A clear scan or photograph of your passport photo page, driver's license or a national identity card.
• A copy of a utility bill or a bank statement issued within the last 3 months. It should match the personal address entered on TransferWise
• A copy of the business’s certificate of incorporation (or any other valid business registration document).

Once you have those ready, just follow these steps to get started:

1. Sign up at TransferWise.com

2. Click the close button in the top right corner to exit the transfer screen

3. Click the figure left of the "send money" button and hit "settings".

4. Fill in your personal details and click save

5. Go to the settings page again and click "business" to fill in your business details

6. Follow the link in the orange box to verify yourself and your business

Faster BTYD

The R-library "Buy 'Til You Die" for customer equity forecasting looked promising, but I quickly realised that the implementation relies heavily on loops and is not suited for any data set bigger than a couple of thousand rows.

To speed things up, I switched out a couple of the loops for some data.table magic. Here it is, about 10000X faster than the original, but there is still some room for improvement.

If you're having trouble getting the BTYD package to run, take a look at this post for fixes.

How expensive is it to buy currency at Tallinn's airport?

I was travelling back to London after a visit to our Tallinn office last Friday, and decided to take a snapshot of the currency exchange board at the airport. I always knew I was getting a bad deal at the airport currency exchange counter, but how bad is the exchange rate exactly? 

Buying currency at an airport is probably the most expensive way to get your travel money. I compared the rate at the airport to what I would get from TransferWise. The difference is quite shocking.

Airport rate: 0.55 EUR/GBP
Airport fee: 0%
500 EUR * 0.55 EUR/GBP = 275 GBP

TransferWise rate: 0.74 EUR/GBP
TransferWise fee: 0.5%
500 EUR (100% - 0.5%) * 0.74 EUR/GBP= 368.15 GBP

Difference: 93 GBP.

The cost of changing money at the airport instead of using TransferWise is 93 GBP. That means you get 25% more if you're using TransferWise.

Been at an airport recently? Send me your snapshot of the exchange rate screen to erik.johansson [a] shs.fi.

“To be a thought leader, you have to have a thought.” (Eric Schmidt, How Google Works)

“If you focus on your competition, you will never deliver anything truly innovative.” 

“Voltaire wrote, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”188 Steve Jobs told the Macintosh team that “real artists ship.”189 New ideas are never perfect right out of the chute, and you don’t have time to wait until they get there. Create a product, ship it, see how it does, design and implement improvements, and push it back out. Ship and iterate. The companies that are the fastest at this process will win.” 

“A technical insight is a new way of applying technology or design that either drives down the cost or increases the functions and usability of the product by a significant factor.” 

“If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.”

King Q2 earnings compared to forecast

The consensus forecast for King's Q2 2015 EPS was 0.36. Based on the amount of Google searches for King's main titles by the end of Q2, I predicted an EPS of 0.45. Now, the actuals are out, and the real numbers are somewhere in the middle.

At a realised EPS for Q2 at 0.41, the surprise against the consensus forecast was 13.89%. My estimate had a negative surprise of -9%.

As for revenue, I forecasted Q2 revenue to be $517M. Actuals turned out to be lower by 5%, at $490M.

Maximul Likelihood Definition

We want to maximise the likelihood of observing the data that we actually did observe.

Given a model that says how the data was generated, find the parameters that maximises the likelihood of observing that data.

Source

How to speed up csv import in R

If you're storing a lot of data in csv files, reading it to R with read.csv can be painfully slow. Using the fread function from the data.table library increase read speed by 100x, so definitely check it out.

library(data.table)
data <- fread('data.csv')

If you prefer to work with a data.frame, it's easy to tell fread to save it as such as well.

data <- fread('data.csv', data.table=FALSE)