Digital Sovereignty: Protecting Your Business by Reclaiming the Infrastructure of Trust
Digitisation is a process that we must not take lightly, particularly for established businesses. There are vital lessons to be learned from industries that have already navigated this transformation. By examining these shifts, we can better understand the path forward for the financial sector.
Aerapass provides a unique opportunity for financial businesses to undertake a digital transformation without surrendering their influence to competitive platforms. Presently, many digital service providers extract value from the customer relationship without the owners of finance companies being aware of the long term consequences.
Your business is built upon its own customers and its own products. The moment you request that your client visits a traditional bank or a third party fintech, those entities will do their utmost to sell a competitive product to your customer. In certain instances, they may even place an embargo on that client to prevent them from doing further business with you.
By utilising the Aerapass composable platform, you can construct the exact digital environment that you wish your customers to inhabit. This includes all the banking services and digital currency solutions your business requires. This approach ensures you never have to ask your customer to seek services from a provider who is effectively a competitor.
Lessons from the Digital Shift
We can observe how digitisation has removed the power that incumbent players held in the past. When the record industry first encountered Apple, it attempted to dictate the terms of how products would be sold. Steve Jobs famously dismissed their traditional models and reduced the price of a release to ninety nine cents. This was a price point far lower than anything seen previously. As a consequence, the platform provider captured the majority of the value while traditional service providers struggled for many years.
Regarding the hip hop group Public Enemy, Chuck D famously stated that the arrival of digital music was like rain in the desert. He was referring to the way platforms such as Napster allowed artists to bypass the drought caused by restrictive record labels.
The retail sector saw similar upheaval when Amazon began as an online bookstore. This shift led to the demise of major retailers such as Borders, which failed to adapt its physical business model to the new digital reality. In the United Kingdom, the collapse of high street giants like Debenhams serves as a stark reminder of what happens when the digital customer journey is ignored.
The movie industry provides perhaps the most famous example of this power shift. Blockbuster Video had the opportunity to purchase Netflix in its infancy but declined the offer. Today, the streaming platform dominates the global market while physical rental stores have all but vanished. The power migrated from those who owned the storefronts to those who owned the digital interface.
The Future of Finance
The finance industry is only now beginning its true digitisation journey through the implementation of stablecoins and Central Bank Digital Currencies, often referred to as CBDCs. The primary feature of these technologies is the ability to facilitate direct transfers without the need for correspondent banks. This allows for greater control over where and how assets are utilised.
The era of programmable finance is here. With Aerapass, your institution can lead this change rather than being displaced by it.
