Tag: co-opetition

BBVA: Traditional retail bank embraces digital disruption

Introduction

Why are we doing non-telco case studies?

Digital transformation is a phenomenon that is affecting every sector. Many industries have been through a transformation process far more severe than we have seen in telecoms, while others began the process much earlier in time. We believe that there are valuable lessons telcos can learn from these sectors, so we have decided to find and examine the most interesting and useful case studies.

Traditional banking is being disrupted by fintech. This disruption has not happened overnight, but its speed has accelerated in recent years as consumers and enterprises have become more confident using digital tools to manage their finances. Although the fintech market is currently highly fragmented, with fintech companies typically focussing on one or two specific financial products, this can still have an enormous impact on the traditional banking value chain, which relies on a diversified portfolio to create profit. In addition, there is the threat that a digital native company, such as Amazon or Google, will enter the mainstream banking market through a series of acquisitions.

BBVA’s chairman, Francisco Gonzalez, foresaw this threat early-on, and has worked tirelessly to restructure the bank to be competitive in the era of digital banking. This transformation has involved significant changes in leadership, technology, business processes, and the bank’s portfolio. Like telcos, traditional banks are large organisations with legacy technology and processes, and turning the ship around is challenging. Therefore, there are many ways that BBVA’s experience can inform telcos’ own digital transformation strategies.

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General outline of STL Partners’ case study transformation index

We intend to complete more case studies in the future from other industry verticals, with the goal of creating a ‘case study transformation index’, illustrating how selected companies have overcome the challenge of digital disruption. In these case studies we are examining five key areas of transformation, identifying which have been the most challenging, which have generated the most innovative solutions, and which can be considered successes or failures. These five areas are:

  • Market
  • Proposition
  • Value Network
  • Technology
  • Finances

We anticipate that some of these five sections will overlap, and some will be more pertinent to certain case studies than others. But central to the case studies will be analysis of how the transformation process is relevant to the telco industry and the lessons that can be learned to help operators on the path to change.

How digital disruption is threatening banking

Retail banks rely on a two-sided business model

Retail banks make money by using deposits in current or savings accounts made by one group of customers (depositors) to finance loans to other customers (borrowers). The borrower not only pays the bank back its loan, but also interest on top – in effect, paying the bank for the service of providing the loan. The bank pays the depositor a lower interest on savings, and makes money on the spread between the two rates of interest.

Retaining depositors is a vital part of retail banks’ business model

Source: STL Partners

While this is highly simplified, this is the fundamental business model of all traditional retail banks, whose main source of income is created through managing a diversified portfolio of financial products across savings and loans. Banks also make money from applying charges when customers use credit or debit cards, or charging its customers fees such as ATM fees, overdraft fees, late payment fees, penalty fees.

Societal changes have driven digital banking adoption

Digital disruption in banking has taken much longer than in other industries, for example, publishing and media, despite attempts from banks themselves to persuade more customers to use online services. For traditional banks, moving customers to digital channels for most of their banking needs could significantly cut the cost of maintaining and staffing a large network of physical branches. However, when online banking services were first launched in the 1980s and 90s, consumer concerns about security and a lack of confidence in managing accounts themselves online meant that adoption was slow.

Since then the market has changed: For example, in 2000, 80% of banks in the U.S. were offering internet banking services. The launch of the iPhone seven years later caused a paradigm shift, triggering a wave of enormous development and widespread adoption of digital services accessible online and via smartphone apps. Ten years on, consumers are much more confident using digital financial services, and, although younger consumers are leading adoption, older generations are also increasingly using these services.

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Contents:

  • Executive Summary
  • Six lessons telcos can learn from BBVA
  • BBVA in STL Partners’ transformation index
  • Introduction
  • Why are we doing non-telco case studies?
  • General outline of STL Partners’ case study transformation index
  • How digital disruption is threatening banking 
  • Retail banks rely on a two-sided business model
  • Societal changes have driven digital banking adoption
  • Challenger banks and fintechs are changing the game
  • BBVA’s story
  • Phase one: Investing in technology to catalyse change
  • Phase two: Organisational change
  • Conclusions
  • BBVA in STL Partners’ transformation index
  • Appendix

Figures:

  • Figure 1: BBVA is rated as “Green” (good) in the STL Partners’ Transformation Index
  • Figure 2: Retaining depositors is a vital part of retail banks’ business model
  • Figure 3: The digital banking generation gap is closing
  • Figure 4: The sharing economy has taken off
  • Figure 5: BBVA’s global presence
  • Figure 6: Telcos need to virtualise their core to deliver cloud business models
  • Figure 7: Digital experience needs to be distributed across the organisation for transformation to succeed
  • Figure 8: BBVA’s leadership team is structured to accelerate digital transformation
  • Figure 9: Traditional banks need to adopt agile processes to compete with digital-native competitors
  • Figure 10: Ecosystem markets need new business models
  • Figure 11: BBVA’s co-opetition strategy involves acquisitions, investments and open APIs
  • Figure 12: BBVA’s shares are performing well
  • Figure 13: More smart and mobile device owners in Turkey use their devices for digital banking services than any other country surveyed
  • Figure 14: Turkey leads the way in four out of seven digital banking services
  • Figure 15: Turkish respondents are the most open to automated digital banking services
  • Figure 16: Less than 60% of Turkish adults had a bank account in 2014
  • Figure 17: Turkey is an attractive emerging market for investment
  • Figure 18: BBVA is rated as “Green” (good) in the STL Partners’ Transformation Index

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Music Lessons: How the music industry rediscovered its mojo

Introduction

The latest report in STL Partners’ Dealing with Disruption stream, this paper explores what telcos and their partners can learn from the music industry and its response to disruptive forces unleashed by the Internet.

Music was among the first industries to see its core product (compact discs) completely undermined by the Internet’s emergence as the primary distribution mechanism for content and software, throwing the record labels into a long standing struggle to maintain both relevance and revenues. After almost two decades of decline, sales of recorded music are growing again and, in developed markets, at least, the existential threat posed by piracy seems to have abated. Although the music industry still has problems aplenty, the success of streaming services has steadied the ship.

This report outlines how the music industry has regained its mojo, before considering the lessons for telcos and other digital service providers. The first section of the paper considers why music streaming has become so successful and whether the model will be sustainable. The second section of the paper explores the lessons companies from other sectors, notably telecoms, can draw from the ways in which the music industry responded to the Internet’s disruptive forces.

This paper builds on other entertainment-related reports published by STL Partners, including:

Apple’s pivot to services: What it means for telcos
Telco-Driven Disruption: Will AT&T, Axiata, Reliance Jio and Turkcell succeed?
Amazon: Telcos’ Chameleon-King Ally?
Can Telcos Entertain You? Vodafone and MTN’s Emerging Market Strategies (Part 2)
Can Telcos Entertain You? (Part 1)

Music bounces back

Over the past 20 years, the rise of the Internet has shaken the music industry to the core, obsolescing its distribution model, undermining its business model and enabling new forms of piracy. Yet, the major record labels have survived, albeit in a consolidated form, and the sector is now showing some tentative signs of recovery. In 2013, the global music industry began to grow again for the first time since the turn of the Millennium. It continues to recover and will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 3.5% between now and 2021, according to research by PwC, fuelled by growth in both the recorded music and the live music sectors (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: The global music industry has returned to growth

The global music industry has returned to growth

Source: PWC and Ovum

For most of the past two decades, revenues from recorded music have been shrinking, leaving the industry increasingly reliant on ticket sales for live performances. Widespread piracy, together with the growing obsolesce of CDs, appeared to be turning recorded music into a form of advertising for concerts and tours.

But in 2015, global recorded music revenues began to grow again. In 2016, they rose a relatively healthy 5.9% to US$15.7 billion (about one third of the industry’s total revenue), according to a report by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). For music industry executives, that growth marks an important milestone. “We got here through years of hard work,” Michael Nash, executive vice president of digital strategy at Universal records, told the Guardian in April 2017, adding that the music industry was still going through a “historical transformation. The only reason we saw growth in the past two years, after some 15 years of substantial decline, is that music has been one of the fastest adapting sectors in the digital world.”

Contents:

  • Executive Summary
  • Introduction
  • Music bounces back
  • What has changed?
  • Is streaming the final word in music distribution
  • Lessons to learn from music’s recovery

Figures:

  • Figure 1: The global music industry has returned to growth
  • Figure 2: The way people buy recorded music is changing dramatically
  • Figure 3: YouTube pays particularly low rates per stream
  • Figure 4: YouTube is a major destination for music lover
  • Figure 5: Music is one of the slowest growing entertainment segments
  • Figure 6: Spotify’s losses continue to grow despite the growth in revenues
  • Figure 7: Spotify’s subscription service is growing rapidly
  • Figure 8: Concert ticket revenues are up sevenfold since 1996 in North America
  • Figure 9: Major concert tickets sell for an average of $77 apiece

Vendors vs. telcos? New plays in enterprise managed services

Digital transformation is reshaping vendors’ and telcos’ offer to enterprises

What does ‘digital transformation’ mean?

The enterprise market for telecoms vendors and operators is being radically reshaped by digital transformation. This transformation is taking place across all industry verticals, not just the telecoms sector, whose digital transformation – desirable or actual – STL Partners has forensically mapped out for several years now.

The term ‘digital transformation’ is so familiar that it breeds contempt in some quarters. Consequently, it is worth taking a while to refresh our thinking on what ‘digital transformation’ actually means. This will in turn help explain how the digital needs and practices of enterprises are impacting on vendors and telcos alike.

The digitisation of enterprises across all sectors can be described as part of a more general social, economic and technological evolution toward ever more far-reaching use of software-, computing- and IP-based modes of: interacting with customers and suppliers; communicating; networking; collaborating; distributing and accessing media content; producing, marketing and selling goods and services; consuming and purchasing those goods and services; and managing money flows across the economy. Indeed, one definition of the term ‘digital’ in this more general sense could simply be ‘software-, computing- and IP-driven or -enabled’.

For the telecoms industry, the digitisation of society and technology in this sense has meant, among other things, the decline of voice (fixed and mobile) as the primary communications service, although it is still the single largest contributor to turnover for many telcos. Voice mediates an ‘analogue’ economy and way of working in the sense that the voice is a form of ‘physical’ communication between two or more persons. In addition, the activity and means of communication (i.e. the actual telephone conversation to discuss project issues) is a separate process and work task from other work tasks, in different physical locations, that it helps to co-ordinate. By contrast, in an online collaboration session, the communications activity and the work activity are combined in a shared virtual space: the digital service allows for greater integration and synchronisation of tasks previously carried out by physical means, in separate locations, and in a less inherently co-ordinated manner.

Similarly, data in the ATM and Frame Relay era was mainly a means to transport a certain volume of information or files from one work place to another, without joining those work places together as one: the work places remained separate, both physically and in terms of the processes and work activities associated with them. The traditional telecoms network itself reflected the physical economy and processes that it enabled: comprising massive hardware and equipment stacks responsible for shifting huge volumes of voice signals and data packets (so called on the analogy of postal packets) from one physical location to another.

By contrast, with the advent of the digital (software-, computing- and IP-enabled) society and economy, the value carried by communications infrastructure has increasingly shifted from voice and data (as ‘physical’ signals and packets) to that of new modes of always-on, virtual interconnectedness and interactivity that tend towards the goal of eliminating or transcending the physical separation and discontinuity of people, work processes and things.

Examples of this digital transformation of communications, and associated experiences of work and life, could include:

  • As stated above, simple voice communications, in both business and personal life, have been increasingly superseded by ‘real-time’ or near-real-time, one-to-one or one-to-many exchange and sharing of text and audio-visual content across modes of communication such as instant messaging, unified communications (UC), social media (including increasingly in the work place) or collaborative applications enabling simultaneous, multi-party reviewing and editing of documents and files
  • Similarly, location-to-location file transfers in support of discrete, geographically separated business processes are being replaced by centralised storage and processing of, and access to, enterprise data and applications in the cloud
  • These trends mean that, in theory, people can collaborate and ‘meet’ with each other from any location in the world, and the digital service constitutes the virtual activity and medium through which that collaboration takes place
  • Similarly, with the Internet of Things (IoT), physical objects, devices, processes and phenomena generate data that can be transmitted and analysed in ‘real time’, triggering rapid responses and actions directed towards those physical objects and processes based on application logic and machine learning – resulting in more efficient, integrated processes and physical events meeting the needs of businesses and people. In other words, the IoT effectively involves digitising the physical world: disparate physical processes, and the action of diverse physical things and devices, are brought together by software logic and computing around human goals and needs.

‘Virtualisation’ effectively means ‘digital optimisation’

In addition to the cloud and IoT, one of the main effects of enterprise digital transformation on the communications infrastructure has of course been Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) and SoftwareDefined Networking (SDN). NFV – the replacement of network functionality previously associated with dedicated hardware appliances by software running on standard compute devices – could also simply be described as the digitisation of telecoms infrastructure: the transformation of networks into software-, computing- and IP-driven (digital) systems that are capable of supporting the functionality underpinning the virtual / digital economy.

This functionality includes things like ultrafast, reliable, scalable and secure routing, processing, analysis and storage of massive but also highly variable data flows across network domains and on a global scale – supporting business processes ranging from ‘mere’ communications and collaboration to co-ordination and management of large-scale critical services, multi-national enterprises, government functions, and complex industrial processes. And meanwhile, the physical, Layer-1 elements of the network have also to become lightning-fast to deliver the massive, ‘real-time’ data flows on which the digital systems and services depend.

Virtualisation creates opportunities for vendors to act like Internet players, OTT service providers and telcos

Virtualisation frees vendors from ‘operator lock-in’

Virtualisation has generally been touted as a necessary means for telcos to adapt their networks to support the digital service demands of their customers and, in the enterprise market, to support those customers’ own digital transformations. It has also been advocated as a means for telcos to free themselves from so-called ‘vendor lock-in’: dependency on their network hardware suppliers for maintenance and upgrades to equipment capacity or functionality to support service growth or new product development.

From the other side of the coin, virtualisation could also be seen as a means for vendors to free themselves from ‘operator lock-in’: a dependency on telcos as the primary market for their networking equipment and technology. That is to say, the same dynamic of social and enterprise digitisation, discussed above, has driven vendors to virtualise their own product and service offerings, and to move away from the old business model, which could be described as follows:

▪ telcos and their implementation partners purchase hardware from the vendor
▪ deploy it at the enterprise customer
▪ and then own the business relationship with the enterprise and hold the responsibility for managing the services

By contrast, once the service-enabling technology is based on software and standard compute hardware, this creates opportunities for vendors to market their technology direct to enterprise customers, with which they can in theory take over the supplier-customer relationship.

Of course, many enterprises have continued to own and operate their own private networks and networking equipment, generally supplied to them by vendors. Therefore, vendors marketing their products and services direct to enterprises is not a radical innovation in itself. However, the digitisation / virtualisation of networking technology and of enterprise networks is creating a new competitive dynamic placing vendors in a position to ‘win back’ direct relationships to enterprise customers that they have been serving through the mediation of telcos.

Virtualisation changes the competitive dynamic

Virtualisation changes the competitive dynamic

Contents:

  • Executive Summary: Digital transformation is changing the rules of the game
  • Digital transformation is reshaping vendors’ and telcos’ offer to enterprises
  • What does ‘digital transformation’ mean?
  • ‘Virtualisation’ effectively means ‘digital optimisation’
  • Virtualisation creates opportunities for vendors to act like Internet players, OTT service providers and telcos
  • Vendors and telcos: the business models are changing
  • New vendor plays in enterprise networking: four vendor business models
  • Vendor plays: Nokia, Ericsson, Cisco and IBM
  • Ericsson: changing the bet from telcos to enterprises – and back again?
  • Cisco: Betting on enterprises – while operators need to speed up
  • IBM: Transformation involves not just doing different things but doing things differently
  • Conclusion: Vendors as ‘co-Operators’, ‘co-opetors’ or ‘co-opters’ – but can telcos still set the agenda?
  • How should telcos play it? Four recommendations

Figures:

  • Figure 1: Virtualisation changes the competitive dynamic
  • Figure 2: The telco as primary channel for vendors
  • Figure 3: New direct-to-enterprise opportunities for vendors
  • Figure 4: Vendors as both technology supplier and OTT / operator-type managed services provider
  • Figure 5: Vendors as digital service creators, with telcos as connectivity providers and digital service enablers
  • Figure 6: Vendors as digital service enablers, with telcos as digital service creators / providers
  • Figure 7: Vendor manages communications / networking as part of overall digital transformation focus
  • Figure 8: Nokia as technology supplier and ‘operator-type’ managed services provider
  • Figure 9: Nokia’s cloud-native core network blueprint
  • Figure 10: Nokia WING value chain
  • Figure 11: Ericsson’s model for telcos’ roles in the IoT ecosystem
  • Figure 12: Ericsson generates the value whether operators provide connectivity only or also market the service
  • Figure 13: IBM’s model for telcos as digital service enablers or providers – or both