The Uberization of Banking
The financial services industry must rise to the challenge of disruptive technology and the expectations of enhanced digital experience models to remain competitive as the primary consumer interface for banking services.
This article was first published in The Financial Brand.
Technology innovation is always spawning new words, but it is rare that the name of a company becomes a verb. Google is clearly the most prominent example of this phenomena, but now it seems, at least in the business world, that Uber may be becoming a verb meaning to ‘radically disrupt’ an entire industry.
While Google grew out of the first ‘dot-com-boom,’ Uber is one of the largest companies to have grown out of the second tech boom. This time around, the boom is being built around two main themes, ‘apps’ and the ‘sharing economy’.
An interesting infographic has been making the rounds on social media, highlighting the success of the new ‘sharing economy’ disrupters. The references, first discussed by Tom Goodwin on TechCrunch, illustrate how the middlemen get cut out and how companies that take over the customer interface are the ones to gain.
“The new breed of disruptive companies are the fastest growing in history. Uber, Instacart, Alibaba, Airbnb, Seamless, Twitter, WhatsApp, Facebook, Google are indescribably thin layers that sit on top of vast supply systems (where the costs are) and interface with a huge number of people (where the money is),” states Goodwin.
While this is a fun infographic to share with our more luddite friends, there are fundamental questions we need to ask to understand how these companies have been this successful. We might also ask what this means for innovating in the financial services industry.
To answer that question, we must first understand the attributes of both the industries they serve and their solutions, so we can see what is applicable outside of these spaces.