Twelve years ago, when Matt Wolf was an investment banker at Morgan Stanley, he likely would have been alarmed to learn that his future finance career would be largely impacted by drinking and driving.
Such was his destiny, though, as after a 5-year stint with the investment bank in London and New York he began to fill in his itinerary with positions in both the automotive and alcohol industries—most recently, as the CFO at DRINKS, a company at the forefront of e-commerce solutions in the beverage alcohol space.
According to Wolf, his career began on a foundation of data analytics at Economists Incorporated in Washington, D.C., where he navigated the complexities of antitrust matters. This early experience instilled in him a nuanced understanding of the financial world and fueled a trajectory that would seamlessly blend traditional finance with industry regulation.
Read MoreIn the alcohol industry, this regulatory backdrop traces back to Prohibition, which resulted in varied state-by-state regulations. What’s more, Wolf points out, both the automotive and alcohol sectors feature tiered markets with distinct roles for retailers, distributors, and manufacturers, alongside legal frameworks deeply rooted in historical context.
According to Wolf, these similarities have contributed to a slower adoption of digital retail solutions in both fields, as compared to others.
When asked about his “drinking and driving,” Wolf smiles: “The humor is not lost on me, but I think that in fact there are a lot of parallels between the two sectors that enable me to leverage experience from one to the other.” –Jack Sweeney
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CFOTL: Tell us about DRINKS … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Wolf: At its core, DRINKS enables e-commerce for beverage alcohol. This is a very broad statement, I know. The way I like to think about it is to say that DRINKS allows a retailer—any retailer—to be a beverage alcohol retailer or marketer. We do this by providing compliance tools—tax, regulatory, and so on. We enable retailers who are not normally alcohol retailers to also sell alcohol alongside other products.
For example, think about any kind of gift purchase that you recently made that caused you to think, Oh, it sure would’ve been cool to send a bottle of wine with this. DRINKS can enable this, even if it’s for the simplest thing, like sending flowers on Valentine’s Day. Through its technology platform, DRINKS enables transactions of this kind in a compliant, safe way.
Read MoreAlthough this is the core is what we do, there are a couple of other things, too. We’ve had AI tools for quite some time that help merchants to identify what kinds of wine sell best to what sorts of audiences and how to best display these in a carousel, for example. So, we’re really helping merchants not only to market wines to their customers but also to find the right ones. We sort of blend a lot of different technologies into an e-commerce enablement platform. If you look at the overall alcohol industry, you see that e-commerce represents only a very small portion of it right now relative to other verticals. I believe that we are at the forefront of driving this e-commerce adoption and really ahead of the curve on what’s going to be a large portion of beverage alcohol market. jb
DRINKS | www.drinks.com | New York, NY