World-renowned digital specialist Didier Bonnet claims big corporations such as Google, Facebook and Apple are a massive threat to banks and insurance companies because they may cause financial institutions to lose direct contact with their customers.
Banking is currently being profoundly disrupted, with large companies attacking some of its sectors, including Apple, which in payments, and Facebook is transferring money.
Bonnet, who is speaking at Daze of Disruption event at Melbourne Town Hall on December 3 and 4, told B&T: “You’re not talking small start-ups, you’re talking about companies with quite a big financial capacity to invest in these new technologies.
“Google, for instance, has acquired some insurance licenses and with the data they have they can probably start providing some interesting products, but I’m not sure they want to get into all the messy, back office processing stuff. And this is where the danger is, that this company will, to some extent, cream off the customer experience, the product offering, and the process services, and leave all the processing to be done by others. That would be the worst case scenario for banks and insurance in particular because they will lose direct contacts with the customers.”
Because these behemoth companies are extremely astute about how they analyse and capture data, Bonnet says there is a “winner takes all” phenomenon, and it’s going to take a mixture of strong leadership and innovation to make sure the smaller guys don’t get swallowed up.
“Take Amazon for web services,” he said, “it’s difficult to compete against them in terms of IT and storage capacity because they’ve reached such a size that it makes it very difficult for new entries. Same for Google in search and Facebook in content and media sharing.
“They can be very innovative because part of the innovation is how you actually analyse the data on consumers and how you can get a fairly personalised offering. There’s a kind of ‘winner takes all’ type of phenomenon in these things. It gets quite scary and you’re seeing these active platforms that are very difficult to move and therefore the trick is how do we play with them?”
Bonnet claims it’s not just a case of investing in expensive technology but enlisting the services of specialists who can simplify the process and bring the organisations up to date, and will be covering this in his Daze speech.
“I’m really focused on trying to explain to people the journey about how you get there,” he said. “It could be seeing the end results, it could be about how would you actually craft a vision that takes you there and what are the programs because it never happens in one go. It’s not like you invest in technology and the magic happens.
“It’s much more difficult than that. It requires a lot of leadership and a lot of different ways of working within a corporation and that’s why I’m trying to explain how people that have done it. They weren’t smarter than you were originally, they just had a good vision and decided to go about it. It’s the practicalities of how you do it and also some of the side effects that happens when you do that in your organisation, because the organisation designs we have today are about 100 years old.”
