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Learning from the best

18 July 2017 ... min read

18 July 2017

When it comes to experts on helping businesses make the transition to platforms, there’s perhaps no better authority in the world than Sangeet Choudary.

ING’s Hugo Raaijmakers and bestselling author Sangeet Choudary talk platforms in a tour of ING’s Customer Experience Centre in Amsterdam. [4:13]

Choudary, author of numerous books including the bestseller Platform Revolution, dropped into Amsterdam last week where he among other things was given a tour of ING’s Customer Experience Centre (ICEC).

Hugo Raaijmakers, ING’s global head of innovation management, had the honour of showing Choudary around and in doing so learned a thing or two about what makes a successful platform business and how ING should be approaching the creation of its own ecosystem.

The Singapore-based author said platforms are a natural fit for banks but banking as an intermediary will need to become more efficient to stave-off competition.

He said banks will also need to move away from just selling financial products and towards creating complementary services using an ecosystem. He also posed the question of whether banks can fill their ecosystems using technology, such as the use of robotics.

Choudary is well-known in business circles having been selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and is ranked among the top-30 emerging thinkers globally in 2016 by Thinkers50 Radar, a global ranking of top business thinkers. His work on platforms has been selected by Harvard Business Review as one of the top-10 management ideas globally for the year 2016-17.

He was also recently appointed as an external expert to ING’s Global Innovation Council.

Platforms: Bigger, faster, stronger

Platform companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon have drastically changed the business landscape. But what distinguishes them from traditional businesses and why does ING Global Research expect the next wave of platform giants to be in the domain of the Internet of Things. Read the full analysis of ING economists Stefan van Woelderen and Lei Pan in their latest study "Platforms: Bigger, faster, stronger".

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