More than ever, shifting consumer behaviour and increased innovation is driving the need to use partners to deliver customer proposition and experiences at lower economic cost points.
HEADLINES
More than ever, shifting consumer behaviour and increased innovation is driving the need to use partners to deliver customer proposition and experiences at lower economic cost points.
KEY CHALLENGES
Some of the facts provided at the session:
- 82% of lenders globally are seeking fintech partnerships <3 years.
- 80% believe their business is at risk from innovators.
- 88% of incumbents are increasingly concerned they are losing revenue to innovators.
These metrics are driving many institutions to seek partners to stay fit for the future, recognising that internal efforts to innovate, whilst important, is unlikely to sufficiently meet the future demand of their customers.
Businesses need to adopt their procurement process to accelerate onboarding of new relationships as these partners are likely to be smaller businesses who do not have the capacity or potentially cashflow to support extended contract negotiations.
Some of the attendees commented on specific actions to simplify their engagement and contracts, adopting a phased approach to onboard earlier to test and learn then finalise the finer details of the contractual requirements.
Data security and GDPR remains a key issue for parties to resolve.
Being open to redefine value from the relationships was also important, whereby, a partnership that enhances your core customer proposition or experience rather than simply extracting direct economic value from partner, may offer material value to the supplier.
A few war stories were told of relationships going off the rails, but generally recovered to the satisfaction of all parties. But this did highlight that developing and actively managing the relationships with the partnerships, remains critical to ensure flexibility and responsiveness to the ever-changing needs of consumers and business models.
CONCLUSION
It is fair to say there were mixed approaches and maturity of adoption but most acknowledged that the use of partnerships was a high priority to meet existing and new customer needs, and it was necessary to evolve their business model to compete.
