We’ve only used hard market data to calculate the overall composite score. The data used are publicly available and have objective rules. Soft data, such as polls or surveys, have been avoided. We measure fundamental drivers that fuel innovation, including the health of a company’s current business, the diversity of its workforce, its governance structure, the investments it has made against its competitors, and its speed of new product launches. Frenemies An obvious question: how did Mastercard and Visa prosper when the ‘plastic card’ has been deemed irrelevant in the age of Apple Pay and Google Wallet? This brings us to the idea of ‘frenemies’. That is, if you can’t beat your disruptors, let them join you. Mastercard and Visa were quick to realise they can’t outrun other fintech upstarts or tech giants. Instead, they must partner with their rivals. Make your own infrastructure useful to your enemies so when they prosper, you do too. That’s why Mastercard and Visa are working with PayPal, Apple, and Google to create new market opportunities. They make such collaboration easy by investing in a wide range of application programming interfaces (APIs). And they make sure these APIs are both secure and easily accessible. This way, tech giants like Apple and cryptocurrency exchanges, like Coinbase, can both find valuable partners in Mastercard and Visa. In finance, and in fact, in many industries today, you have to be digital to win. But the major breakthrough here is the realisation that a product’s best feature will never be invented inhouse. Even Visa and Mastercard need help from other fintech disruptors. Sometimes you compete, sometimes you co-operate. It’s never a zero-sum game. That’s the new playbook. Building a team capable of rigorously challenging assumptions Key lessons learned from the financial sector can, of course, be applied to other sectors, such as healthcare and global logistics. But it requires executives to look beyond immediate
benchmarking. They need to transpose the logic from one industry to the other. They need to rigorously challenge industry assumptions based on evidence. In other words, managers must change the way they think at the team level. In a different survey project involving more than 1,500 executives from Switzerland, Sweden and Taiwan, in partnership with Taiwan’s CommonWealth magazine, we compared companies’ progress
2021 RANKING OF SELECTED FINANCE COMPANIES FROM IMD’S CENTER FOR FUTURE READINESS
87.6
MASTERCARD
74.6
SQUARE
70.9
VISA
70.8
PAYPAL
43.3
CREDIT SUISSE
41.4
JPMORGAN CHASE
40.2
BANK OF AMERICA
35.1
PING AN
28.6
ING
27.2
UBS
24.0
WELLS FARGO
23.7
CITI
13.9
CAPITAL ONE
7.9
AXA
1.0
AIG
Compiled by the authors
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AMBITION | Be in Brilliant Company
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