Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Many observers believe that distributed ledger technology (DLT) will bring fundamental disruption to relationships in a borderless, modern economy that has become more decentralized and more connected than ever. A recent report from the World Economic Forum pointed to blockchain — one potential implementation of DLT — as a revolutionary decentralized trust system that will reshape the global economy. The UK government has been researching DLT for some time now, exploring how the government can use the technology to benefit the country and its citizens. The bank-backed R3 blockchain consortium has gathered key players from the financial markets to work together on blockchain adoption in the financial industry. The year 2016 will definitely be remembered as the moment when blockchain and DLT emerged into the mainstream.

The digital revolution has hit the insurance sector, with insurtech disrupting the entire value chain and customer lifecycle. New technology offers opportunities to redesign the customer experience, design new products and services, streamline processes, and increase effectiveness. The opportunities are huge; hence, they attract financial technology startups and drive investment. Accenture reports that in 2015, insurtech attracted approximately US $2.6 billion in investment, up from $800 million in 2014. According to CB Insights, $1 billion has been invested in insurtech in the first half of 2016, and there are over 1,300 startups in the insurtech space worldwide.

Not surprisingly, this amount of investment impacts the traditional insurers, and according to a PwC study, almost half (48%) of insurers fear that up to 20% of their business could be lost to standalone fintech companies within the next five years.

In this article, I will address the causes of this digital revolution, the most important trends disrupting the insurance industry, and ways that incumbents can harness the insurtech trends and respond to them. 

Blockchain is most simply defined as “the first native digital medium for value, just as the Internet was the first native digital medium for information.” Blockchain has gained great attention, investment, and development because it addresses two of the riskiest aspects of life and business on the Internet: transactions and trust. We’ve long recognized the security, privacy, and trust issues that plague the Internet, and since the early 1980s technologists have been working on a solution. For transactions, intermediaries have made possible the trust and security needed to complete transactions and until now have been the best method for completing transactions with trust. However, as we know, security has unfortunately been a weak point, with data breaches leaving individuals’ personal and financial information vulnerable and putting trust at risk.

Digital transformation and technological innovation are reshaping the financial services sector. Today the sector is confronted with both large, established tech companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook and small fintech startups that are moving into the financial services space. From a sector perspective, it is clear that a lot of the innovations focus on disintermediating the incumbent organizations. There is a clear move toward more decentralization and peer-to-peer (P2P) collaboration. Blockchain technology enables value transfers through a decentralized, P2P consensus process. International money transfers are drastically improved using P2P operating models, new P2P insurance solutions are created, and both lending and capital raising now take place on P2P platforms. 

We hope the articles in this issue of CBTJ will advance the state of the knowledge for all readers, regardless ofyour specific area of interest in fintech. Whether youwish to gain an overview of the emerging fintech themes, broaden your knowledge of blockchain tech­nology, or understand the impact these technologies arehaving on the insurance and payments industries, there are learnings for you here as you continue on yourfintech journey. 

Businesses cannot establish a culture that is characterized by innovation until they intentionally adopt patterns and practices that enable innovation in the organization. Agile software development consists of many practices that businesses can adopt to facilitate innovation. In this Advisor, I highlight three core practices that businesses need to adopt to keep innovation alive in their organizations.

In the early 1980s, one of the events that kicked US artificial intelligence (AI) efforts into high gear was the announcement that the government of Japan was funding the Fifth Generation Project — a project to design a special computer for AI work. The US government promptly followed suit, and US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the military provided grants for US companies to work on their own “Fifth Generation” computers. I mention this because Japan’s National Institute for Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (NIAIST) has just announced that it will fund the development of an AI supercomputer.

I propose a discipline of “teamspotting,” which you can think of as a variety of “management by walking around.” It involves direct observation of the group or its surroundings, supplemented with some models of how a team achieves the intellectual equivalent of sofa lifting.