The Portrait of a Mirror
Page 2
The door shut. Wes could hear the metal latch click, lancing the balloon in his chest, popping it like a festering vesicle. The diffusion of acute pain offered a euphoric moment of relative relief, a self-congratulatory animal delight in the ability to breathe that, as his heartbeat slowed, circulated into a dull tingle at his extremities. His phone vibrated, but it wasn’t a text from Diana.
—Hugh Winslow, Anuj Chadha, and 10 others have new photos for you on Instagram!
Wes mentally chastised the cheesy come-on even as he opened the application. There was such a grammatical depravity to exclamation points; they were almost as bad as scare caps. But the pull of an endless scrolling escape from his problems swiftly allayed such objections, and his thumb fell easily into the hypnotic rhythm of its little upward swipes.
Hugh Winslow was in Italy wearing a pale pink suit at a lavish wedding. Anuj Chadha still had an unreasonably good-looking baby of indeterminate sex. Anderson Gregory was in a third-world country doing something vaguely do-goody. He had a stellar tan. Lauren Oleano’s bizarre postcollegiate obsession with tattoos and competitive pole dancing featured prominently. Lauren Coddington and her husband had closed on a yellow Georgian in Connecticut; they beamed at the camera in matching Patagonia fleeces. It was hard to believe the two Laurens had once been close friends. A video ad for Emirates airline featured a knockout flight attendant sashaying through a first-class cabin with fully reclining seats and French Riviera lighting. Entranced, Wes watched it a second time. He might have watched it for a third, if his phone hadn’t buzzed in alert:
—Save the Date: Ecco All-Staff Tour Today at 8:00 AM
It was seven forty-five.
—Shit, Wes said aloud, scrambling down from the bed as he fumbled with his phone to bring up the details, inadvertently calling on Siri.
She responded condescendingly:
—I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.
—FUCK! Fuck you, Siri. Fuck you.
CHAPTER II.
SELECT EMAIL ACTIVITY (RESORTED, CHRONOLOGICAL) OF DALE S. MCBRIDE (ENGAGEMENT MANAGER, PORTMANTEAU STRATEGY, PERSONNEL NUMBER [REDACTED]), FRIDAY, MAY 15, 2015– MONDAY, MAY 18, 2015.
From: McBride, Dale S.
Date: Fri, May 15, 2015 at 12:35 PM EDT
To: Hashimoto, Eric
Subject: Action Required: Introductory Client Brief
Hi Eric,
Great speaking with you this morning and welcome to the Mercury account. Could you please put together an Introductory Client Brief for the rest of the team? Just a few paragraphs on the company’s history and our recent work here will suffice. No need to finish it today, early Monday is fine.
Have a great weekend,
Dale
Dale S. McBride
Portmanteau Philadelphia
617.xxx.xxxx
dale.s.mcbride@portmanteau.com
________________________
From: Hashimoto, Eric
Date: Mon, May 18, 2015 at 7:42 AM EDT
To: Batra, Raj; Childs, Richard C.; Moore, Megan D.; Whalen, Diana W.
Cc: Remington, Parker W.; McBride, Dale S.
Subject: Introductory Client Brief: Mercury Incorporated
Hi Team,
Please see below for the background information I put together on our client and project. Looking forward to meeting everyone later this morning!
Best regards,
Eric
Eric Hashimoto
Analyst, Portmanteau
w: 202-xxx-xxxx / m: 202-xxx-xxxx
@: eric.hashimoto@portmanteau.com
This message is for the designated recipient only and may contain privileged, proprietary, or otherwise confidential information. If you have received it in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete the original. Any other use is prohibited. Where allowed by local law, electronic communications with Portmanteau and its affiliates may be scanned by our systems for information security purposes and Portmanteau internal policy compliance.
1 attachment
INTRODUCTORY CLIENT BRIEF: MERCURY INCORPORATED
By Eric Hashimoto
Privileged & Confidential. For Internal Use Only.
© 2015 Portmanteau
Mercury Incorporated became a household name in 1995, almost two decades after the landmark Marquette decision effectively deregulated the payment card industry. In one of the most successful new product launches in history, CEO Jack Howard introduced the MercuryCard to the world with the “pay like a god” ad during the 1995 Super Bowl, a resounding victory for the San Francisco 49ers over the San Diego Chargers.
The ad featured togaed Greco-Roman gods—Jupiter and his wife Juno, Mars, Venus and Cupid, Neptune, grape-crowned Bacchus, and winged Mercury—all out to dinner, arguing over who would pick up the check at an establishment one can only assume to be the Olive Garden of Mount Olympus.
“Ah, I just love this place—dinner’s on me!” offers a throaty, neck-cleavaged Venus.
Jupiter shakes his head, lasciviously. “No way, gorgeous—as the king of the gods, I insist.”
“You’re not paying for her,” Juno complains, clearly jealous. “I’d rather pick up the tab myself.”
“Well, I’m going to kill you all,” Mars interjects, played in a stroke of genius by Robert De Niro, who was personally hired by Howard against all advice for an undisclosed but presumably exorbitant sum.
The other gods freeze with their mouths open and eyebrows lifted up. After a moment of silence, De Niro’s expression melts into a buttery smile: “Unless you’ll let this be my treat.”
The tension momentarily lifts, and the unified gods jovially assent—until the camera turns to Mercury, who, half-naked with the wings, looks like a male Victoria’s Secret model (objectively speaking). Mercury gives the other gods a roguish look, and, Accelerati incredibilus, zips out of and back into the scene in a manner closely resembling the Road Runner getting the better of Wile E. Coyote.
“Too late, my friends,” he says, “I already paid with my MercuryCard.” He shows them the card. “We’re ready to fly.”
The authoritative voiceover voice, a swaggering-yet-trustworthy Morgan Freeman baritone, cuts in as we leave the restaurant and follow the various gods through other comical shopping vignettes, now using their own Mercury-Cards for humorous anachronistic purchases—Neptune buys a surfboard, Jupiter, some naughty lingerie. Now you, too, can pay with MercuryCard—it’s available on Earth wherever credit cards are accepted. Apply today. Pay with MercuryCard. Dramatic pause. Pay like a god.
In the last vignette, the scene cuts to Bob De Niro and Bacchus exiting a bar, arms around some sexy wood nymphs, Bacchus’s voice trailing off. “Honestly, Mars,” he says, “I was happy to let you pay, but you can’t actually kill me. Remember? We’re immortal.” They share a warm, rich belly laugh, shot in silhouette from behind, as De Niro gives Bacchus a friendly straight-arm shove.
The ad was unanimously lauded, receiving numerous creative awards, and the Grand Clio for television. More importantly for Jack Howard, it was obscenely effective. In less than six months, the MercuryCard was Mercury’s flagship product. As Clintonomics and the rise of the internet fueled massive industry growth in the ensuing years, MercuryCard further capitalized, gaining more than 40 percent of global market share for combined debit and credit transactions by 2000, benefiting from Silicon Valley’s success but escaping the worst of the 2001 tech bubble. Six years later in 2007, with derivative “pay like a god” ads still running strong, Mercury Incorporated had the most successful IPO in US history, opening a new corporate headquarters in the summer of 2008, a sixty-floor reflective-glass monolith towering over Center City Philadelphia, in celebration of the $18B haul. A two-story soaring-ceilinged gourmet corporate café offering 360-degree views through to the Main Line, New Jersey, and Delaware occupies the entirety of the forty-ninth and fiftieth floors. The food is somewhat expensive but quite good—particularly the soft pretzels,
a greater Philadelphia culinary staple. The building is reverently named “Olympia.”
On September 15, 2008, like almost every other large global financial institution, Mercury Incorporated had a very bad day. As an open-loop payment scheme enterprise, Mercury relies heavily on partnerships with large commercial banks. As those floundered and consumer spending plummeted, MercuryCard applications and transaction volumes did the same. Worse, by the time global markets and economic confidence started to rebound, Silicon Valley and New York startups championing hyper-secure mobile payments, blockchain-based cryptocurrency, and biometrics were starting to threaten the entire payment card ecosystem. Eager to defend his legacy, and not quite ready to pull the cord on his golden parachute, Howard decided to rethink Mercury’s strategy from the top, and called up Parker Remington, his college roommate, a renowned partner at Portmanteau.
At the end of the six-week engagement, in October 2012, Remington and Dale McBride, then a promising new MBA graduate fresh out of the Wharton School—and soon to be the Robin to Remington’s Batman—advised Mercury to metamorphose, at its core, from a financial services provider into a tech company, vertically integrating across the payment card value chain via multiple acquisitions of midsize payment processors. Wooing startup customer-facing payment apps to contract with Mercury for the capital-intensive, fundamentally requisite but aggressively unsexy work of backend processing, Mercury would naturally develop the knowledge capital to fast-follow with its own elegant frontend mobile payment solution, ultimately competing in the consumer marketplace with the advantage of singular control over the greater ecosystem. Disruptive startup investors would be indirectly funding their own resubjugation to Mercury, the incumbent competition, the very oligarch they had sought to disrupt. It was an elegant, round stratagem, a clever Trojan horse backed by a kind of divine justice, defending Mercury’s preeminence, quite in alignment with the natural order of things. To this end, between 2013 and 2015, Mercury acquired three geographically disparate, midsize payment-processing companies:
2013: Merchantes—Paris, France
2014: Pegaswipe—Saint Petersburg, Russia
2015: Settlmnt—San Francisco, USA
For Portmanteau, this meant a deep well of profitable due-diligence work, all overseen by Remington. McBride served as the lead consultant on the Merchantes deal, then returned the following year as the engagement manager for Pegaswipe.
The success of Mercury’s strategic overhaul and acquisitions depends, however, on the right post-merger integration strategy, on this upcoming project, on us. Jack Howard and Mercury’s new CIO, Prudence Hyman [sic], seek, per the statement of work, “to integrate their acquisitions into a single, unified operating model and a single, unified technology platform, a centralized underlying hub with localized instances to support country-specific customer requirements and regulations.” Spoiler alert: they want to use Pegaswipe’s code everywhere, but need our objectivity and a concrete quantitative rationalization for downstream political buy-in. By our powers combined, in these next eight weeks, we must deliver the greatest, most innovative data-driven integrated operating model and technology blueprint the world has ever seen. I am confident we will succeed in this endeavor, my friends: for we are all little engines for data collection, quantifying and prioritizing our wants against the cost of getting them, plotting our entrance past one another’s walls.
_____________
From: Remington, Parker W.
Date: Mon, May 18, 2015 at 7:48 AM EDT
To: McBride, Dale S.
Cc: Whalen, Diana W.
Subject: FW: Introductory Client Brief: Mercury Incorporated
what the fuck
Sent from my iPhone
_____________
From: Whalen, Diana W.
Date: Mon, May 18, 2015 at 7:49 AM EDT
To: Remington, Parker W.; McBride, Dale S.
Subject: RE: FW: Introductory Client Brief: Mercury Incorporated
Relax, Batman. I’m sure Robin will take care of it.
Diana Whalen
Enterprise Architecture | Portmanteau New York
917.xxx.xxxx | diana.w.whalen@portmanteau.com
_____________
From: McBride, Dale S.
Date: Mon, May 18, 2015 at 7:50 AM EDT
To: Whalen, Diana W.; Remington, Parker W.
Subject: RE: FW: Introductory Client Brief: Mercury Incorporated
Indeed he will. My apologies, Parker.
Dale S. McBride
Portmanteau Philadelphia
617.xxx.xxxx
dale.s.mcbride@portmanteau.com
_____________
From: McBride, Dale S.
Date: Mon, May 18, 2015 at 7:52 AM EDT
To: Eric Hashimoto
Subject: RE: Introductory Client Brief: Mercury Incorporated
Hi Eric,
As much as I may personally appreciate your creativity, we need to discuss what is and is not appropriate in an Introductory Client Brief (and, for that matter, in emails to partners, in emails at work). Please come find me directly when you arrive at Olympia, and do not send any more emails until you do.
Thanks,
Dale
Dale S. McBride
Portmanteau Philadelphia
617.xxx.xxxx
dale.s.mcbride@portmanteau.com
_____________
From: Whalen, Diana W.
Date: Mon, May 18, 2015 at 8:47 AM EDT
To: McBride, Dale S.
Subject: FW: RE: FW: Introductory Client Brief: Mercury Incorporated
Dear Robin, I am downstairs at Olympia security. Told them I was here for Prudence Hyman [sic] and the guard laughed. Is she that new? Please send someone to retrieve me, preferably Eric Hashimoto, as I am absolutely dying to meet him. Facing the exit, I’m on the second bench from the left. My best, Diana
Diana Whalen
Enterprise Architecture | Portmanteau New York
917.xxx.xxxx | diana.w.whalen@portmanteau.com
_____________
From: McBride, Dale S.
Date: Mon, May 18, 2015 at 8:49 AM EDT
To: Whalen, Diana W.
Subject: RE: FW: RE: FW: Introductory Client Brief: Mercury Incorporated
Regrettably, the Joker is still en route from DC, so you’ll have to make do with me.
Dale S. McBride
Portmanteau Philadelphia
617.xxx.xxxx
dale.s.mcbride@portmanteau.com
_____________
From: Whalen, Diana W.
Date: Mon, May 18, 2015 at 8:50 AM EDT
To: McBride, Dale S.
Subject: RE: FW: RE: FW: Introductory Client Brief: Mercury Incorporated
Fine, but you better take me to the two-story, soaring-ceilinged corporate cafe with the breathtaking views of scenic New Jersey. I hear the food is somewhat expensive but quite good, and have never been more in the mood for a gourmet pretzel.
Diana Whalen
Enterprise Architecture | Portmanteau New York
917.xxx.xxxx | diana.w.whalen@portmanteau.com
CHAPTER III.
Wes range left his Uber and Briskly ascended the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, squinting at his growing reflection in the glass of the revolving door. His simple button-down was resemblant in both pattern and texture a fine Japanese graph paper, and peeked out from under the variegated silver-gray shawl collar and cuffs of his cashmere pullover, falling past the hem in the deliberate nonchalance of a quarter tuck. Cypress chinos—slim, weathered, and at least half an inch too short—exposed some sinewy bare ankle above his Nikes, which were lightly worn, but still by New York standards white. Correcting his windblown hair with his left hand, his image did the same with its right. His ring and delicate gold watch, his father’s, caught the early sun. The comparative darkness blinded him briefly as he entered the Great Hall.
—Excuse me sir, a voice intoned, sans modulation, without even the hint of a verbal comma betw
een “me” and “sir.” Museum’s not open till nine.
It was a tired, abstract voice, the kind you heed but don’t acknowledge; equanimous in apathy, too well practiced in routing rowdy school-boys and Zenned-out backpackers, Midwestern dadbods, European metrosexuals, and Asian tour groups looking like they stepped out of a 1985 Ralph Lauren catalogue and decided to rob RadioShack; unflappable by ingenues, presidents, and bums, rainbow-coiffed art students and skinny-jeaned Brooklynites, chinless Upper East Side tuxedos escorting mink-topped ladies, and privileged, well-educated, self-involved technocrats running twenty minutes late.
Wes turned to address the security guard with a warm, apologetic smile. The incongruity of her garish makeup and nails against the forced professionalism of her ill-fitting uniform stirred in Wes an uncomfortable mixture of pity and remorse. He’d already been kinder to her this morning than to his wife, Wes thought. The emphatic italics (his) felt horrible and snobby even in his mind, and Wes unfairly resented the guard for precipitating his own unfair judgment of her.
—Sorry . . . er, I’m just a bit late for a private tour.
His face pled institutional ignorance and contrition for haste. He rubbed the back of his neck bashfully.
—Just check in for me at security, hun, and I’ll escort you, she said.
Her response had a sudden pleasance, a rich, varied timbre—almost, if he wasn’t imagining it, like a tonal atonement.
He got his badge and followed the guard through the Greco-Roman wing. She left him with a warmer nod than he deserved at the entrance to the exhibition, a soaring black wall heralding in enormous, floor-to-ceiling white sans serif: