The Problem
An intrapreneur of a leading firm, who was working on launching a new fintech business unit, approached us for help. He needed to figure out within weeks the major trends of the large and complex fintech ecosystem that might support or risk his vision for the business unit.
The main challenge was that the fintech ecosystem had been, and still is, exceptionally fast-paced, while the intrapreneur needed a good understanding of the ecosystem’s trends about 3 years out. Just how challenging is that? At the ecosystem development pace at that time, within 3 years one could expect several new types of services, dozens of new trading venues, and a plethora of domain-specific tech advances.
Active and visible information sources had the potential to shed light on the ecosystem’s trends, but unfortunately they came short. Market data sources, such as pricing or market capitalization, were discarded for being poor sources to this end. Discussions in the technical social media were assigned a low weight for being quite noisy. Domain-specific news sources were found to provide some relevant information, but would take a significant effort to sync up with.
But if active and visible information sources are not so useful for understanding the trends of a fast-paced domain, what would?
The Analysis
We once again began our journey by taking a scientific approach to the problem.
An initial analysis made it clear to us that searching for information sources by popularity would not be focused enough, and would slow down discovery. We needed a faster and better way to find the appropriate information sources. Our conclusion was that the appropriate information sources should first be characterized and only then sought.
In a deeper analysis, we decided to look for cleaner and more stable sources, even if not rich in data. We found several such domain-specific information sources that could be leveraged to extract good information. Two important ones were academic publications and open source community information. These sources, along with some others, allowed us to obtain a good view of the important long-term innovation paths of the ecosystem.
The Solution
We provided the intrapreneur with a report on the long-term trends of the ecosystem, the methodology used to determine them, and the analyses of the relevant information sources that support them. The report identified trends deemed stable over the next 3 years as well as ones that could take a turn within an estimated period of time. In addition, we recommended how to keep the report up-to-date by monitoring the ecosystem for changes that could affect it.
The Impact
Our report enabled the intrapreneur to gain a good understanding of the fintech ecosystem, and to confidently assess the opportunities and risks of his vision. The business unit was able to consistently develop and release products that were relevant to the ecosystem’s trends as they unfolded.