Building a digital ecosystem to deliver new value that exceeds the sum of its parts.

In this new paper, we offer insight into the emerging role of technology providers as ecosystems orchestrators, identify various types of ecosystem, and discuss the current opportunities to deploy them in order to meet the needs of the auto and equipment finance industries.

In asset finance technology, things change all the time. Where providers would once equip their customers with proprietary, standalone, end-to-end platforms, these days it’s much more likely to be discrete, modular applications.  

Importantly, these applications interact seamlessly with others, and can be ‘composed’ in order to provide solutions for end-to-end business opportunities. This delivers crucial new value to asset finance providers and, in turn, a seamless experience for their own customers.

Open APIs are a cornerstone of modern technology. They simplify the process of connecting applications, and enable ordered interaction between them. Granular, well designed APIs empower organisations to build ever greater value for their users in less time, and with less investment, than has been possible in the past. 

Technology providers are increasingly drawing on their industry expertise to orchestrate and manage these complex webs of applications and relationships for their customers. For those customers embarking on this journey, trust in their supplier’s ability to help develop an innovative, resilient platform is critical. The more accomplished technology providers deliver open platforms to allow their customers to connect components as they require, offering great APIs and out-of-the-box integrations, as well as valuable experience in integration and end-to-end solution architecture.

The key goal for today’s customers and providers is to embed all technology in a wider digital ecosystem; an ecosystem that provides cutting-edge capabilities - such as customer self-service portals and point-of-sale applications - and can be developed by the provider, its clients, or specialist third parties that deliver anything, from state-of-the-art digital engagement channels to innovative, usage-based products.

The vision for an open digital platform such as Alfa Systems is to empower customers to leverage the power of these connected ecosystems, which could be through receiving telematics or credit data, or introducing new products or origination channels.  

As economic pressures grow in countries across the world, so businesses are seeing pressure on budgets and investments. This background provides another argument for collaborating with other providers and forming partnerships, and offering the customer a complete, seamless journey in one ecosystem of specialist modules.

The first Digital Directions report explored leading industry opinion on how digitalisation was changing asset finance. Digital Directions 2 looked specifically at how the retail, fleet and equipment finance sectors were responding to those changes. Then the pandemic put digitalisation top of the agenda for companies around the world.  

Digital Directions 3 draws on industry experts’ input to understand a future in which technology’s power is channelled not by individual operators, but by many participants, who collaborate on delivering new value that exceeds the sum of its parts.