Digital Innovation Comes to Banking Again - This Time It's Serious

The Internet has now been mainstream for 20 years and the first iPhone arrived eight years ago this June. We are all repeat ecommerce customers, yet the biggest business model disruptions still lay ahead of us.  Up until recently, traditional multinationals saw digital as just another route to market while thinking that the more routes they open, the more money they will make. The unintended consequences of such an approach is adding more complexity to their operations and a fragmented customer experience. 

Companies now realise that modern businesses organise around the customer, not the channel. How then do they transform themselves to compete against agile start-ups unencumbered by the ‘baggage’ of legacy operations and systems?

This challenge increases exponentially as customers’ expectations change and they start demanding services customised to their own data sets, be it their energy consumption (Nest, OVO), location data (ibeacon), fitness data (Fitbit), content consumption (Netflix, Spotify), food consumption (OpenTable, Velocity), driving habits (Nexar) etc.  Start-ups are scaling with increasing speed now that the many barriers to customer acquisition and brand building are reducing, even in the most traditional markets.  Who would have thought even five years ago that people would have such trust in start-ups that they would buy a car online from one (Tesla)?