A personal note on The Market Map | by aperture.co
A few years back, I was working in corporate strategy. As part of the role, I was sometimes also managing the relationship with various well-known consultancies doing vendor-assessment reports, more specifically in the core banking / digital banking platforms space.
Spending a considerable amount of time, every year, orchestrating the questionnaire responses and then digesting the results of the matrixes, it slowly became clear that the lens through which they were looking at the market was losing its focus.
When the market goes through a paradigm shift — which is a perfect storm fueling a radical re-imagination of every layer of the value chain — like the banking industry is going through right now (and the corresponding software industry serving it), the status-quo loses its relevancy and incremental changes to market assessments do not suffice anymore. It is why we probably see matrixes where almost all vendors are leaders. What’s the point? The game rules have remained unchanged over the years, the vendors have learned how to play the game, the only issue being that the game has changed entirely and there are other players playing the new one.
The banking industry is transitioning from the industrial age to the digital, networked age. During such a transition, established market-assessment criteria like the size of a company or the soundness of their 3-year strategic plan lose their relevancy. Because what matters is experimentation at scale.
During this transition, the playing field between big companies and smaller companies is levelling, as every company becomes a start-up. That is, every company, irrespective of size, is now in search of a new business model. I like to say that as the industrial-Wave has passed, the Magic is gone.
This is why, among many other reasons, we have launched The Market Map by aperture.co: A re-focus of the strategic lens used for Enterprise Software benchmarking.
And we do hope it will help software buying decision-makers, VCs & PE analysts and other strategists to better understand the wealth management technology space.
Please do read our report and we’d love to hear your feedback, after you’ve done so.
Best, Dan
