EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients.
How EY can help
1. Identify where and how an ecosystem can create value
It is crucial to recognize that value is not just financial in nature, nor just about products and services. “People feel the quality of their time is as important as the quantity of money in their bank account. They’d rather stay in than go out. They want to buy experiences rather than more stuff,” explains the latest EY Future Consumer Index.
What customers value and the experiences they expect are changing across industries — just think how quickly digitally native banks, mortgage providers, and loan companies have gained significant market share around the world for both B2C and B2B businesses.
To succeed over the long term, organizations need to work out how to offer customers, clients and stakeholders things they value and engage with them where they are. For FS companies, this could mean retail customers wanting to buy a new home, not a new mortgage product, or business customers wanting to expand into new markets, not worry about export declarations, finance and taxes.
To help you imagine what your customers want and how an ecosystem partner might help you to serve that need, asking some key questions can serve as a useful exercise. For example:
- What are they really trying to do?
- What do they want from you?
- How could you work together?
To imagine what non-FS customers might want and how you can participate in an ecosystem to serve them a different set of questions need answering. For example:
- What is the principal outcome the customer wants from the asset or service they are seeking?
- What will add value to that experience at the point-of-sale and throughout its lifecycle?
- When the customer requires a financial product during that lifecycle, why and what do they view as value (e.g., speed of execution, security, accessibility)?
- What is the way your enterprise can add the greatest value to that experience (directly or indirectly)?
- What would you need to do differently today to be able to achieve that outcome?