Why B2B marketplace sits at the heart of a thriving ecosystem

B2B Marketplaces: A key enabler for new growth

What is a B2B marketplace?

At its core, a marketplace is an entity through which buyers and sellers can effectively and efficiently transact. It provides a platform to reduce friction for the provisioning of products, services, and solutions: connecting a distributed ecosystem of suppliers with an equally distributed ecosystem of customers.

Think of Amazon, which orchestrates a B2C retail marketplace – Amazon’s marketplace has created a site in which a host of different vendors, whether regional or global, major corporate or small/medium enterprise (SME), can compete directly with one another (and in some cases directly with Amazon’s own products) to reach and serve a wide scale customer base. Using the example of Amazon, we can therefore describe four key actors within the marketplace:

Key actors in a marketplace

B2B marketplace

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  • Customers: Amazon’s marketplace creates a simple tool through which users can seamlessly identify, evaluate, and purchase products from a wider range of sellers. These suppliers, due to competition, must continuously innovate to create value for customers or risk competing solely on price. This provides a strong proposition combining ease, choice, and value for the customer. For smaller enterprises and for more simple services (e.g. cybersecurity, productivity software) a B2C-style marketplace works well. Amazon provides a good example of a B2C marketplace – however, for larger enterprises requiring more complex, verticalised solutions, the Amazon “one click purchasing” capability may be less appropriate.
    The marketplace still acts as an entity within which enterprises can identify new, innovative, solution providers and evaluate different components/vendors but may act more as a discovery mechanism – it generates a customer lead for suppliers and a vendor lead for customers. The customer will go on to engage directly with a sales team or representative within the vendor, rather than purchasing and spinning up the service directly through the marketplace. This is because the solution sales cycle is complex and requires a deep knowledge of the end customer and vertical specific expertise. To generate revenue, the orchestrator in this situation would have to create a comparative tool pricing for the use of these larger players.
    Particularly for more fragmented industries with a significant number of SMEs, offering pre-integrated, out-of-the-box solutions still offers the orchestrator a strong revenue opportunity.
  • Suppliers: In the context of B2B, suppliers in the marketplace may offer holistic vertical solutions including end devices, connectivity, applications, infrastructure etc. or sell those capabilities as individual components. Through participation in the marketplace, these vendors gain a strong distribution channel to sell their solution. Furthermore, they can get to market with solutions much faster than a more traditional, vertically integrated route, which would require longer cycles of integration and testing between partners, more investment in marketing & sales engines, and the need to repeat the process with each channel/solution partner identified.
    It also acts as a platform through which to learn more about competitors, identify or even engage potential partners, and understand more about their end customer needs and drivers. The marketplace can therefore act as a tangible entity around which the supply side ecosystem can innovate. This is through varying levels of data and insights, collected through the marketplace, which the orchestrator may allow certain suppliers to access.
  • Orchestrators: Orchestrators help coordinate the underlying community of suppliers and customers, defining the dimensions of the marketplace (which we will discuss further in a later section of the report). They set the parameters and objectives of the marketplace (e.g. which suppliers to onboard to the marketplace and how, which customers to target), and bring additional value to suppliers and customers through insights, supplier and customer experience, and marketing and sales engines to build scale.
    As the orchestrator of the ecosystem, Amazon has leveraged these supply and demand side benefits to grow into the retail giant that we know today. It has successfully driven a flywheel to build scale with suppliers and customers, and subsequently monetised this scale through a variety of different revenue streams – we will discuss these further later in the report.

The Amazon flywheel for marketplace success

B2B marketplace

  • Enablers: For a marketplace to function smoothly, a flexible but resilient backbone of support systems is required. This includes everything from billing, to authentication, onboarding, fulfilment, delivery, settlement, etc. A digital marketplace can automate many of these functions, diminishing the friction of interaction between partners, vendors, and customers.
    Oftentimes, these enablement services will be managed by an orchestrator who has complete oversight of the marketplace. Going back to the example of Amazon, Amazon not only orchestrates the marketplace but provides enablement services to capture additional value and revenue streams. This is in slight contrast, for example, to Ebay, which orchestrates the marketplace between different sellers, but is less involved in the delivery and fulfilment of the order. There is, therefore, nuance around how much of a role the orchestrator may take in the marketplace, and whether they partner to deliver enabling capabilities or completely outsource them to others. Enablers are, however, essential for a functioning marketplace and drive simplicity and stickiness for all actors. 

In summary, the marketplace brings opportunities to each of the actors within it and helps galvanise a diverse and fragmented ecosystem around a tangible construct. It enables customers to reach new suppliers, suppliers to reach new customers as well as engage new partners, and the orchestrators and enablers to drive new streams of revenue growth.

Table of Contents

  • Executive Summary
  • B2B Marketplaces: A key enabler for new growth
    • What is a B2B marketplace?
  • Marketplaces as a B2B growth driver
  • The dimensions of a successful B2B marketplace in healthcare
    • Due to the need for solution certification, a healthcare marketplace will remain more closed and centrally controlled
    • The healthcare marketplace will encourage participants to collaborate while excluding competitors…at first
    • Telcos should create value in the marketplace by driving biodiversity
    • Telcos have the capacity to collect valuable customer data insights but must first develop their capabilities
  • The guiding principles for building a marketplace: Where telcos should start
  • Index

Related Research

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Fighting the fakes: How telcos can help

Internet platforms need a frictionless solution to fight the fakes

On the Internet, the old adage, nobody knows you are a dog, can still ring true. All of the major Internet platforms, with the partial exception of Apple, are fighting frauds and fakes. That’s generally because these platforms either allow users to remain anonymous or because they use lax authentication systems that prioritise ease-of-use over rigour. Some people then use the cloak of anonymity in many different ways, such as writing glowing reviews of products they have never used on Amazon (in return for a payment) or enthusiastic reviews of restaurants owned by friends on Tripadvisor. Even the platforms that require users to register financial details are open to abuse. There have been reports of multiple scams on eBay, while regulators have alleged there has been widespread sharing of Uber accounts among drivers in London and other cities.

At the same time, Facebook/WhatsApp, Google/YouTube, Twitter and other social media services are experiencing a deluge of fake news, some of which can be very damaging for society. There has been a mountain of misinformation relating to COVID-19 circulating on social media, such as the notion that if you can hold your breath for 10 seconds, you don’t have the virus. Fake news is alleged to have distorted the outcome of the U.S. presidential election and the Brexit referendum in the U.K.

In essence, the popularity of the major Internet platforms has made them a target for unscrupulous people who want to propagate their world views, promote their products and services, discredit rivals and have ulterior (and potentially criminal) motives for participating in the gig economy.

Although all the leading Internet platforms use tools and reporting mechanisms to combat misuse, they are still beset with problems. In reality, these platforms are walking a tightrope – if they make authentication procedures too cumbersome, they risk losing users to rival platforms, while also incurring additional costs. But if they allow a free-for-all in which anonymity reigns, they risk a major loss of trust in their services.

In STL Partners’ view, the best way to walk this tightrope is to use invisible authentication – the background monitoring of behavioural data to detect suspicious activities. In other words, you keep the Internet platform very open and easy-to-use, but algorithms process the incoming data and learn to detect the patterns that signal potential frauds or fakes. If this idea were taken to an extreme, online interactions and transactions could become completely frictionless. Rather than asking a person to enter a username and password to access a service, they can be identified through the device they are using, their location, the pattern of keystrokes and which features they access once they are logged in. However, the effectiveness of such systems depends heavily on the quality and quantity of data they are feeding on.

In come telcos

This report explores how telcos could use their existing systems and data to help the major Internet companies to build better systems to protect the integrity of their platforms.

It also considers the extent to which telcos will need to work together to effectively fight fraud, just as they do to combat telecoms-related fraud and prevent stolen phones from being used across networks. For most use cases, the telcos in each national market will generally need to provide a common gateway through which a third party could check attributes of the user of a specific mobile phone number. As they plot their way out of the current pandemic, governments are increasingly likely to call for such gateways to help them track the spread of COVID-19 and identify people who may have become infected.

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Using big data to combat fraud

In the financial services sector, artificial intelligence (AI) is now widely used to help detect potentially fraudulent financial transactions. Learning from real-world examples, neural networks can detect the behavioural patterns associated with fraud and how they are changing over time. They can then create a dynamic set of thresholds that can be used to trigger alarms, which could prompt a bank to decline a transaction.

In a white paper published in 2019, IBM claimed its AI and cognitive solutions are having a major impact on transaction monitoring and payment fraud modelling. In one of several case studies, the paper describes how the National Payment Switch in France (STET) is using behavioural information to reduce fraud losses by US$100 million annually. Owned by a consortium of financial institutions, STET processes more than 30 billion credit and debit card, cross-border, domestic and on-us payments annually.

STET now assesses the fraud risk for every authorisation request in real time. The white paper says IBM’s Safer Payments system generates a risk score, which is then passed to banks, issuers and acquirers, which combine it with customer information to make a decision on whether to clear or decline the transaction. IBM claims the system can process up to 1,200 transactions per second, and can compute a risk score in less than 10 milliseconds. While STET itself doesn’t have any customer data or data from other payment channels, the IBM system looks across all transactions, countrywide, as well as creating “deep behavioural profiles for millions of cards and merchants.”

Telcos, or at least the connectivity they provide, are also helping banks combat fraud. If they think a transaction is suspicious, banks will increasingly send a text message or call a customer’s phone to check whether they have actually initiated the transaction. Now, some telcos, such as O2 in the UK, are making this process more robust by enabling banks to check whether the user’s SIM card has been swapped between devices recently or if any call diverts are active – criminals sometimes pose as a specific customer to request a new SIM. All calls and texts to the number are then routed to the SIM in the fraudster’s control, enabling them to activate codes or authorisations needed for online bank transfers, such as a one-time PINs or passwords.

As described below, this is one of the use cases supported by Mobile Connect, a specification developed by the GSMA, to enable mobile operators to take a consistent approach to providing third parties with identification, authentication and attribute-sharing services. The idea behind Mobile Connect is that a third party, such as a bank, can access these services regardless of which operator their customer subscribes to.

Adapting telco authentication for Amazon, Uber and Airbnb

Telcos could also provide Internet platforms, such as Amazon, Uber and Airbnb, with identification, authentication and attribute-sharing services that will help to shore up trust in their services. Building on their nascent anti-fraud offerings for the financial services industry, telcos could act as intermediaries, authenticating specific attributes of an individual without actually sharing personal data with the platform.

STL Partners has identified four broad data sets telcos could use to help combat fraud:

  1. Account activity – checking which individual owns which SIM card and that the SIM hasn’t been swapped recently;
  2. Movement patterns – tracking where people are and where they travel frequently to help identify if they are who they say they are;
  3. Contact patterns – establishing which individuals come into contact with each other regularly;
  4. Spending patterns – monitoring how much money an individual spends on telecoms services.

Table of contents

  • Executive Summary
  • Introduction
  • Using big data to combat fraud
    • Account activity
    • Movement patterns
    • Contact patterns
    • Spending patterns
    • Caveats and considerations
  • Limited progress so far
    • Patchy adoption of Mobile Connect
    • Mobile identification in the UK
    • Turkcell employs machine learning
  • Big Internet use cases
    • Amazon – grappling with fake product reviews
    • Facebook and eBay – also need to clampdown
    • Google Maps and Tripadvisor – targets for fake reviews
    • Uber – serious safety concerns
    • Airbnb – balancing the interests of hosts and guests
  • Conclusions
  • Index

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Digital Commerce 2.0: New $50bn Disruptive Opportunities for Telcos, Banks and Technology Players

Introduction – Digital Commerce 2.0

Digital commerce is centred on the better use of the vast amounts of data created and captured in the digital world. Businesses want to use this data to make better strategic and operational decisions, and to trade more efficiently and effectively, while consumers want more convenience, better service, greater value and personalised offerings. To address these needs, Internet and technology players, payment networks, banks and telcos are vying to become digital commerce intermediaries and win a share of the tens of billions of dollars that merchants and brands spend finding and serving customers.

Mobile commerce is frequently considered in isolation from other aspects of digital commerce, yet it should be seen as a springboard to a wider digital commerce proposition based on an enduring and trusted relationship with consumers. Moreover, there are major potential benefits to giving individuals direct control over the vast amount of personal data their smartphones are generating.

We have been developing strategies in these fields for a number of years, including our engagement with the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Rethinking Personal Data project, and ongoing research into user data and privacy, digital money and payments, and digital advertising and marketing.

This report brings all of these themes together and is the first comprehensive strategic playbook on how smartphones and authenticated personal data can be combined to deliver a compelling digital commerce proposition for both merchants and consumers. It will save customers valuable time, effort and money by providing a fast-track to developing and / or benchmarking a leading edge strategy and approach in the fast-evolving new world of digital commerce.

Benefits of the Report to Telcos, Other Players, Investors and Merchants


For telcos, this strategy report:

  • Shows how to evaluate and implement a comprehensive and successful digital commerce strategy worth up to c.$50bn (5% of core revenues in 5 years)
  • Saves time and money by providing a fast-track for decision making and an outline business case
  • Rapidly challenges / validates existing strategy and services against relevant ‘best in class’, including their peers, ‘OTT players’ and other leading edge players.


For other players including Internet companies, technology vendors, banks and payment networks:

  • The report provides independent market insight on how telcos and other players will be seeking to generate $ multi-billion revenues from digital commerce
  • As a potential partner, the report will provide a fast-track to guide product and business development decisions to meet the needs of telcos (and others) that will need to make commensurate investment in technologies and partnerships to achieve their value creation goals
  • As a potential competitor, the report will save time and improve the quality of competitor insight by giving a detailed and independent picture of the rationale and strategic approach you and your competitors will need to take


For merchants building digital commerce strategies, it will:

 

  • Help to improve revenue outlook, return on investment and shareholder value by improving the quality of insight to strategic decisions, opportunities and threats lying ahead in digital commerce
  • Save vital time and effort by accelerating internal decision making and speed to market


For investors, it will:

  • Improve investment decisions and strategies returning shareholder value by improving the quality of insight on the outlook of telcos and other digital commerce players
  • Save vital time and effort by accelerating decision making and investment decisions
  • Help them better understand and evaluate the needs, goals and key strategies of key telcos and their partners / competitors

Digital Commerce 2.0: Report Content Summary

  • Executive Summary. (9 pages outlining the opportunity and key strategic options)
  • Strategy. The shape and scope of the opportunities, the convergence of personal data, mobile, digital payments and advertising, and personal cloud. The importance of giving consumers control. and the nature of the opportunity, including Amazon and Vodafone case studies.
  • The Marketplace. Cultural, commercial and regulatory factors, and strategies of the market leading players. Further analysis of Google, Facebook, Apple, eBay and PayPal, telco and financial services market plays.
  • The Value Proposition. How to build attractive customer propositions in mobile commerce and personal cloud. Solutions for banked and unbanked markets, including how to address consumers and merchants.
  • The Internal Value Network. The need for change in organisational structure in telcos and banks, including an analysis of Telefonica and Vodafone case studies.
  • The External Value Network. Where to collaborate, partner and compete in the value chain – working with telcos, retailers, banks and payment networks. Building platforms and relationships with Internet players. Case studies include Weve, Isis, and the Merchant Customer Exchange.
  • Technology. Making appropriate use of personal data in different contexts. Tools for merchants and point-of-sale transactions. Building a flexible, user-friendly digital wallet.
  • Finance. Potential revenue streams from mobile commerce, personal cloud, raw big data, professional services, and internal use.
  • Appendix – the cutting edge. An analysis of fourteen best practice and potentially disruptive plays in various areas of the market.