Further Insights: Banks and fintech on platform economies

Paolo Sironi is the Global Research Leader for Banking and Financial Markets at IBM Consulting, the Institute for Business Value. He spoke with Boris Plantier about how the growth of platform-based models is transforming our economies and enterprises. 


The word platformization has become very trendy among bankers. How would you define platformization and how the platform theory was born?

The advent of “platform economies” is a tsunami for the traditional business culture, especially for bankers. Sustainable business performance is no longer based on linear relationships between manufacturers, distributors, and consumers with the logic of incremental production of costs and value. Instead, the main economic levers lie in the ability of new business models to engage users continuously, and usher in a new era of “hyper-personalization” and “hyper-contextualization”. Digital platforms can transform entire industrial sectors mainly because they favor the transition from an economy centered on "outputs" (products) to an economy centered on "outcomes" (results). In platform economies, “assets” (products) do not disappear but become peripheral from the point of view of generating value. They focus on the contextualization of user experiences at affordable prices, removing frictions in consumption and user interactions.