Why getting the right technology mix isn’t your biggest challenge

Technology proliferation is also becoming increasingly common in the B2B world. It seems the ‘-tech’ suffix is getting attached to almost every industry, splintering off into new sub-sectors and entering our collective vocabulary as if they were always there. These new X-tech sectors such as PropTech, LegalTech and the like are all made up of groups of enthusiastic entrepreneurs, proposing new answers to old problems and disrupting the status quo in evermore creative ways. Nowhere is this phenomenon more prevalent than in financial services and can be seen by just looking at the ecosystem graphics mapping out just how many FinTechs are now operating in the marketplace. Independent consultant Jay Palter has compiled a list of these maps which perfectly demonstrates the extent to which FinTech has reached country by country. Its quite staggering.

This innovation boom should only be welcomed, or we would never evolve. However, things just aren’t as simple in the land of B2B tech compared to its consumer counterparts. As consumers, we have the choice of a handful of operating systems to spark up our new technology in just two or three taps on a single smartphone or tablet, a stark contrast to the corporate payments landscape for example. On one side you have a whole gamut of back office systems – enterprise resource planning, treasury management systems, customer relationship management, accounting and payroll platforms and on the other side, you have the banks, all expecting the right information to reach them in their specified format. Caught in the middle, risky, inefficient and complex manual processes attempt to sort through the mire as best they can. Hardly the kind of slick automated experience you’d envisage for 2020. […]

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