“ScalingUp” innovation through effective collaboration

Over the past few years, the financial services (FS) landscape has transformed as incumbent banks and insurers saw their market share drop with the rise of FinTech and InsurTech startups.

A big reason for this is that FinTechs and InsurTechs revolutionized the customer experience in the banking and insurance industries by offering end-to-end, highly personalized service. Unburdened by legacy systems, they operate with agility. They tap into emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and analytics software to derive meaningful insights, including a keen understanding of their customers.

But while they are leaders in innovation, they are unable to operate at scale. The opposite is often true for incumbents, which can scale their processes but lag in innovation. As the 2018 Capgemini World FinTech Report (WFTR) showed, scalable innovation is best achieved by combining the strengths of the incumbents and FinTech startups.

But FinTech startups tend to launch products quickly as “Minimal Viable Products.” They learn fast and can also fail fast, before starting the process all over again. Large corporations, on the other hand, tend to focus on launching fully-baked “Maximum Viable Products” that are often expensive and late for the market. This key cultural difference between the two is but one reason why collaborations can be hard to achieve. While startups have no shortage of people with passion or expertise, sometimes that just isn’t enough for a partnership.

Instead, Capgemini has found that ScaleUps, mature startups that have raised significant funding and are revenue-generating with a fully-dedicated management team, have the best opportunity to successfully collaborate with corporations. ScaleUps are able to effectively integrate with incumbents and create a go-to-market strategy that gets products into the market faster. However, since finding the right partner isn’t easy and takes time and money, Capgemini created a new program designed to make this process easier. The Capgemini ScaleUp Qualification program will evaluate, rate, and qualify the most promising ScaleUps as good partners for collaboration.

In my next blog, I’ll talk about my own story and show what criteria are used for ScaleUps to get a rating in the ScaleUp Qualification program.

Elias Ghanem

Expert in FinTech, Insurtech

Elias is the FINTECH Lead for Continental Europe at Capgemini, with the mission to engage with Fintech scaleups to actively and efficiently embed them with Capgemini Financial Services clients.
Elias is a payments expert and senior advisor, with 20+ years of industry experience at Visa and PayPal with roles spanning from APAC Head of Visa Consulting, up to PayPal regional MD in South East Asia & India and MENA. Since 2013, he has become a serial Fintech entrepreneur, having advised a dozen of high-growth and disruptive payment startups in Washington, Singapore, Barcelona, Beirut and Dubai. He sat at the Board or Chairmanship of some of these. He co-founded Telr (www.telr.com) in Singapore and Dubai, an online Payment Gateway, which has won the “2014 Start-up of the Year” award in MENA. He is a certified “Scaling Up” coach; an inspiring thought leader, and enthusiast speaker on the future of payments in Emerging Markets.
Elias has lived in US, LATAM, APAC, Middle East and Europe and is fluent in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic.