What happens when you are The Boss?

Thing is once you become The Boss, how do you stay The Boss and not become The Old Boss?

Writing yesterday about the growing pains of FinTech firms, there are also menopausal strains at incumbents. Once you become The Boss, how do you stay The Boss? That is a key question.

When you become a big firm, everyone wants to bring you down. When you are #1 then numbers 2, 3 and 4 want to bring you down. You become the target.

This is clear in the technology community, where everyone had schadenfreude when IBM and Microsoft were failing. Due to good leadership choices, they survived, but it wasn’t easy or a done deal. Facebook almost failed when it missed the mobile race and PayPal also stumbled.

PayPal could be dead meat if it hadn’t been for the acquisitions of companies like Braintree and Venmo.

In other words, when you’re The Boss, everyone wants to kill you and you have to be adept at being one step ahead. I’ve experienced this personally a few times, when working for firms that wanted to kill the #1. They didn’t. In fact, they failed and died in the attempt. One had the wrong strategy and the other had a lack of ability. In both cases, they had deluded management and leadership who believed they could beat #1 by taking an alternative approach that was wrong.

So how would you beat The Boss? If I wanted to bring down Lloyds or NatWest, how would I do that?

Well, I guess I would start in the outfield. I would offer some API-based services that are compelling and attractive around transactions, payments and lifestyle management. It would be Open Banking based, and give consumers something that enriches their lives through augemented information on their financial digital footprints.

You paid for something here – ok, so here’s the Google map, photo of the store, date and time of transaction and your movements for that day.

You invested something here – ok, so here’s the tracking of your investment from that day, current price, analyst forecast for where it goes next and a swipe left to sell or swipe right to buy more.

You have a loan here – ok, so here’s when you took the loan, the current balance outstanding, the interest you are paying on this loan, alternatives to this loan that might be cheaper and a review of your aggregated finances a way to rebalance your portfolio so you get rid of this loan and can be more efficient with your money.

I could go on, but none of these attack Lloyds and NatWest. They are ancialliary information services.

The thing is that the ancillary information services, if they are done well, become more and more compelling. That’s when you open the deposit account.

It is what we are seeing with the likes of Monzo, Revolut, Zopa and more. They’ve done the ancillary bits and now they are attacking the core.

Will it bring down The Boss? Will they replace Lloyds and NatWest?

Probably not, but when you are The Boss, everyone will want to kill you. Bear it in mind.