Welcome to Digital Competition in Financial Services! We’re excited to have you in the class and look forward to helping you learn more about this important topic. To begin, I recommend taking a few minutes to explore the course site. A good place to start is the navigation bar on the left. Click Course Content to see what material we will cover each week, as well preview the assignments you will need to complete. Click Discussions to see forums where you can discuss the course material with fellow students taking the class. Be sure to introduce yourself to everyone in the Meet and Greet forum! This course should take four weeks to complete. You can check out the recommended course schedule below to see a quick overview of the lessons and assignments you will complete each week. By the time you finish this course, you will have mastered important concepts needed to understand the transformation, learned from best practice in digital industries, and seen how firms in financial services are embracing the new rules of competition. You will be introduced to the Capstone Project for the specialization and have a chance to form some preliminary solutions for a financial service company that is re-inventing itself to compete in finance as a digital industry. Good luck as you get started. We look forward to seeing you in class!

The digital transformation is radically rewriting the rules of competition in the financial service industries. In this module, we are exploring the forces shaping the new competitive dynamics: product and service digitization, changing customer demands and new regulations. Together, these forces give rise to completely new market structures that force organizations to compete in new ways.

At the heart of the digital transformation rests an increased orientation towards digitally enabled platform-based business models. In this module, we cover how firms compete with platforms and how platforms change the dynamics of affected industries. We explore the workings of the platform, including how to establish a platform core for others to build on and how to manage the relationship to 3rd party developers. We contextualize the ideas behind digital platform thinking using examples both from financial service companies and from the digital giants that excel in platform-based businesses.

In this module, we introduce the business ecosystem metaphor as a way to think of and model the increasingly complex relationships between actors in the digital financial service industries. We elaborate on how to deal with relational tensions internally and towards externally. We also address how digital technology strategies become inseparable from business strategy in the digital era.