Has your ecosystem map aged?

The year is 1966, and unknown to many, a bold experiment is about to take place. For years, Banks were used to issue their individual credit cards. For the first time, a team at Bank of America was about to mail unsolicited, active cards, to thousands of consumers. It was the world's first mass mailing of its kind. Later, we would learn, it was a system fraught with challenges—high delinquency rates, operational mishaps, and skepticism from institutions (and regulators) that something new could upset the then state of affairs.?

What is now commonplace, a global credit card system, was about to take a leap forward. Bank of America, the largest of US retail banks at the time, began licensing its BankAmericard brand to other banks. This meant such banks could issue cards under the BankAmericard name and its operating system.?

A decentralised ecosystem was being born. It would replace hierarchical structures and manual decision making across the financial services industry. Competing institutions, while vying for the same customers, would collaborate for a shared outcome - a more efficient, customer-focused system, which would bring credit to millions of consumers, in a reliable, secure and efficient manner.

The Interbank Card Association (not the most inspiring of names, I know) was set-up in 1968, with the goal of handling the complex operational aspects of this vision, ensuring transactions were standardized and cards processed efficiently - yet assuming it is the BankAmericard that would be at the center of the ecosystem. Yet two years later, it realised that it must give up direct control of the BankAmericard program, forming a cooperative with the other BankAmericard issuing banks, and so Visa was born. It would take a further six years for the name Visa to be made public, but the change was irreversible by then.

Fast forward to 2023 and over 3.7 Billion Visa cards, in physical or digital form, are used around the world. The ecosystem which enables their owners to transact and access a myriad of services, has expanded, in turn. From a rather rudimentary network aimed at pulling together the necessary collaboration among retail banks, to ensure the delivery and activation of such cards, it has grown to hundreds of role players - and, in fact, continues to grow at a robust pace.?

Think of technology players, offering from AI to Blockchain services, Cloud, Cybersecurity and Bid data solutions. Think of new vendors, software and hardware providers, payment processors, payment gateways and merchants. Think emerging, digital payment role players as well as regulators. The ecosystem has grown exponentially. From Kenya and Tanzania to Malaysia and the Philippines, regulatory sandboxes enable new players to participate in this robust ecosystem.

If we were to write this post a mere 18 months ago, Apple would have been mentioned as part of this ecosystem, but we probably wouldn't have included their partnership with Goldman Sachs as yet. Nor would we have included the role players enabling Apple Pay Cash, where its are able to send and receive money through iMessage. This ecosystem map has aged quite signifciantly over this short time period.?

The point is this. Ecosystems are dynamic. They evolve, grow and transform, at speeds that can surprise us. Mapping an ecosystem is an essential step in carving a role for your organisation in such an ecosystem. But the time span for an ecosystem map to remain relevant is shortening. If we could have asked Dee Hook back in 1965, he would have likely replied his ecosystem map would have lasted a decade. Ask now and we speak of mere months.

Here are some questions we recently posed to ecosystem builders:

• How up-to-date is your ecosystem map at the moment??
• To what extent have new role players entered your ecosystem, since it was last mapped?
• Have you, over the past 18 months, come across a competitor announcing a strategic partnership (or other challenger move), with the same role player as you intended to partner with??
• Are there role players executing on the ecosystem strategy you had envisioned but which you simply didn’t get around to executing?

Ecosystem maps are a valuable tool in your arsenal - but they can age and sometimes, at surprising speed. Navigating with an old map then becomes perilous, unless we learn to update our maps - regularly, repeatedly, and with diverse views in the room - those who can navigate differently. This is the legacy which Dee Hook has given us - not merely a good map, but the ability to update our maps to new terrains.

Have a good week ahead.

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In memory of Dee Hook (1927 - 2022), Visa's founder, a remarkable individual and visionary. Though he was not well known outside of the payments industry, his contribution to management thinking and his influence are amongst the greatest of almost any leader over the past half century.

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