Platformit — Part Five — Platform Narrative
While talking with an entrepreneur, I tried to explain to him the importance of having a strong narrative for his business. Impolitely, he interrupted me: “Let us not waste time on ‘narrative.’ I will post a request on one of those platforms, and a freelancer will come up with a fancy slogan, as low as $100 (USD).” He was enthusiastic to explain the functionality, layout, and the color of the app. Then he elaborated on how people will love it, how it will change their lives, and how he will be the first unicorn startup in the GCC. I kept quiet and listened while enjoying my delicious salad. I was observing how he was happily ascending through the ceiling in his bubble for about 40 minutes. When I finished eating my salad, I used my fork to burst his bubble. The rest of the talk can be classified as a drama, horror, or thriller episode.
So, what is narrative, and why it is so important? There is one person on planet earth who can elegantly answer this question: click here to see him answering it. if you want to deeply understand the concept of narrative, I recommend that you bookmark these articles by John Hagel as must-read articles. This one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one.
What I will be doing in part five is to bring the narrative concept into the heart of the platform’s architecture. In other words, imagine yourself reading the articles mentioned above by John Hagel with some of Sangeet Paul Choudary’s articles (e.g., this one, this one, and this one) all of which at the same time, or colliding this short clip by Sangeet with the above one by John.
In part four, we mapped the relevant parties on the platform canvas. Everyone probably agrees that none of the relevant parties (banks, investors, and regulators) can be forced into joining the proposed industry-wide platform. The only hope is to offer a strong and compelling narrative that might persuade them. If you read the first four parts of this story-telling white paper, you quickly realize that the investment banking industry must embrace a new industry-wide narrative. The industry needs a narrative that allows banks to shift the focus from what they think their investors want to what their investors really want. A narrative that can place investors in the center of the investment process by returning control of the decision-making process. Such a narrative must be strong enough to show investors, banks, regulators, and other stakeholders the full potential that can be achieved by active participation in the platform.
So, lets the drum roll: our proposed narrative is “Invest Prudently.” This is a captivating call to action, underpinned by an ideology that the industry is shifting its view from banks’ specific needs to investors’ specific needs. This strategic move is the first building block in regaining investors’ trust in the investment banking industry. Investors no longer believe in public relations or marketing campaigns. However, if they see an entire ecosystem built around their needs and aspiration, they will eagerly participate.
Let us unpack this condensed narrative of “Invest Prudently.” As a powerful call to action, it is about you, and not any financial intermediary, since you will make the investment decision. You will decide what is prudent for you and not a bunch of bankers squeezing themselves into expensive Italian suits. Your investment decisions will be nurtured by a cumulative intellectual intelligence derived from likeminded investors and supported with real-time regulatory surveillance and a rich ecosystem of third-party intelligence. Investment is not merely about the interests of financial institutions and their shareholders. In simple terminology, “invest prudently” means that the investments process has been liberated and democratized in favor of investors.
This industry-wide platform is a movement at its core. An attempt toward mobilizing the regulator, banks, investors & others — along with their resources, expertise and capabilities — is far from being a simple mission. In such a situation, you need a framework that can help you align the forces of key stakeholders towards enabling and unlocking opportunities in a much broader context — beyond the reach of any individual key player. The Platform Narrative Framework is designed to do so.
Under the “Invest Prudently” narrative, each key player must understand what they will be getting by joining the platform.
Investors must understand:
- Why is it in their best interest to join the platform?
- What can they accomplish by joining the platform versus not being part of the platform?
- How should they connect with other stakeholders within the platform’s ecosystem to significantly increase their opportunities in maximizing their wealth?
Investment banks must understand:
- Why should they participate in the platform?
- What can they accomplish by joining the platform versus not being part of the platform?
- How should they connect with other stakeholders within the platform’s ecosystem to significantly increase their opportunities in closing more deals?
- What immediate changes are required from them to get the maximum benefit from the whole ecosystem (i.e., governance, systems, technology, etc.)
Banks must understand how the platform can situate them in a broader context to build stronger relationships with the investors base as well as with the regulator. The platform will allow banks to embrace a long-term understanding of industry-wide trajectories that range well outside their current self-contained vision.
How can the “Invest Prudently” narrative affect the ecosystem segment? Let’s take regulators as an example.
Regulators must understand:
- How can they enhance their regulatory framework by tapping into the platform capabilities?
- How can they strengthen their relationship with other key players on the platform?
- How should they connect with other stakeholders within the platform’s ecosystem?
- How should they reconstruct regulatory initiatives toward unlocking opportunities and potentials for investors within the investment banking industry (e.g., inclusion of new technologies, new asset classes such as cryptoassets, etc.)?
- How should they issue new sets of regulatory requirements that can help in expanding the industry (e.g., enabling new investors segment to join in a safe manner)?
How should they open new channels of communication (e.g., live channels of interactions)?
After conducting a thorough assessment of the key players, influencers, and stakeholders’ context, we shall move to understand how the platform can:
- Accelerate the players, influencer and stakeholders’ efforts to achieve their full potential;
- Amplify the players, influencer and stakeholders’ participation;
- Motivate the players, influencer and stakeholders to continually engage in reciprocal interactions; and
- Encourage non-stakeholders to join the platform.
The platform must fully understand how it will utilize its infrastructure, network, and data to enrich the process of creation, curation, and consumption. Every individual experience on the platform must be designed to amplify the platform’s narrative. For example:
- How will the platform leverage its data through its infrastructure to provide the regulator with the right information at the right time for better regulatory oversight? When the platform helps the regulator to achieve his/her purpose, this will have a direct correlation on enriching the platform’s narrative by enabling investors to invest prudently.
- How will the platform aggregate the right experiences of the third party’s professionals and match them via a robust curation mechanism to the right investors (i.e., helping 3rd party professional individual in achieving their purpose will have a direct impact on the quality of services provided to the investors to allow them to invest prudently)?
- How will the platform expose investment banks to a spectrum of new investors base with almost zero marginal cost and highest level of relevancy (i.e., helping banks to achieve their purpose will provide investors with a broader and richer investment opportunities to invest prudently)?
The platform must design every filter, feedback, notification, and feature to encourage the desired behaviors within every experience and core interaction to strengthen the platform’s narrative.
The platform narrative “invest prudently” manifests a reality that the real value to investors is not merely demonstrated in investment opportunities. The real value is to enable investors to be connected to and engaged with a much broader range of expertise and resources (i.e., richer and more profound experiences).
The aim of the platform narrative “invest prudently” is to enrich the experiences by unlocking multiple layers of value creation.
The platform narrative must inspire key players to redefine current reality. For example, the platform with its services and functionality must help banks to redefine the usage of data: on this industry-wide platform, investment banks will be having the opportunity to aggregate rich data from focused, transparent, and engaging experiences taking place within the platform, as well as the entire ecosystem. The richness of such data will allow banks to study investment behaviors in unprecedented means. Banks will be able to anticipate investment opportunities and match them with the relevant investors’ aspirations.
Let’s see how the platform can establish a simple feature to enrich a simple experience (i.e., social conversation) with an ultimate aim to help investors to invest prudently.
The point of the above simplified illustrative example is to show that value can be created from a simple interaction, if structured and supported with the right tools, channels, and services toward enriching the overall narrative (i.e., the platform architecture must gravitate key players to achieve the compelling narrative). By doing so, the platform will allow banks to predict investment opportunities from a broad range of aggregated data that is extracted from real experiences. The platform will enable banks to test such investment opportunities in real-time within active conversations. The platform will allow banks to immediately incorporate necessary changes based on investors’ feedbacks. The platform will enable banks to elevate their services to their investors by providing prescriptive experiences (i.e., where banks have a granular level of detailed information and live data that will allow them to accurately align investment opportunities to the exact need and appetite of investors).
Embedding narrative into the heart of platform’s architecture can amplify the experiences of the key players on multiple layers of value discovery. Below is a non-exhaustive list.
See you soon in part six. I guess, I don’t have to remind you: a few claps (50) is an excellent way to show your support.
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