The Future of Banking and Insurance – The Ecosystem of Trust

Typically people are talking about predictions and what will happen the next twelve months these days. I can’t and don’t want to predict the future, but if I would own an Insurer or a Bank I would define my future strategy as the following: In my world there won’t be ‘Only-banks’ or ‘Only-Insurers’ anymore. There won’t be products or channels or sales departments. In my world of modern finance there  would be a profiled customer centric ecosystem  and platform of (partially invisible) services built around and needed by a peer group. This vertical aligned platform would offer banking and insurance  services, but also many other services digital enabled and profiled for my customer group. I would like to be the ecosystem of trust for my tailored customer group. These  kind of vertical ecosystems exist since decades –  mutual societies and comparable organisations – but with the digital revolution currently happening everywhere there’s a new chance to reinvent and even to massively extend this model far beyond what was possible before. And this is a chance for the old incumbents, the old banks and insurers to beat the GAFAs and all other coming platform revolutionaries and newbies on their home-turf. They know their customers, they have build trust and relationship over the century. Now it’s time to modernize their houses and to copy the digital and platform services approaches. And to profile these much better than the global horizontal providers can. You don’t need to own the product, you need to ‘own’ the customer and to provide trusted services via modern, simple and fast technologies. In the future you will very likely make  more revenue with platform services  and network effects than with a traditional approach as these numbers indicate. The Digital Mutual Peer Platform Society is one modern technology platform response to the mega global platform threat coming from all the Amazons and Alibabas these days. To provide you a simple example: As member of my platform you could login to any 3rd party service you need and to pay with your platform membership, because you are part of our community…and a trusted and accepted member.

“Banking is necessary, banks are not” (Bill Gates 1994)

Sometimes it takes 20 years and more for good ideas.

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