In today’s world, where companies start and then want to grow nationally, internationally and then globally all in a fraction of the time it used to take, companies need access to new types of partners to support this fast paced growth. For a traditional hotel chain, such as Hilton, the cost of this fast-paced growth would take billions in building investment, for the new economy, the sharing economy world, what you need is great staff, an app and a movement.
This development is by no means simple. It takes an investments of a different kinds, but it is less restrictive in terms of state and country boarders, plus it can be much much faster. It’s one of the reasons why the hotel chains failed to take on Airbnb. These new companies need new thinking and older companies just don’t have it within their ranks.
You would never had gone to the radio companies in the past to produce your television programmes. It takes new people with different skills.
The other dilemma for these new sharing economy companies is access to global partnerships. New types of partners to help and support these new economy companies. Finding companies that have global ambitions and technology that the platform businesses can plug into to support their own growth in areas such as trust through insurance for example.
Insurance is typically poor at technology, marketing and dealing with global issues. Their compliance, whilst very protective, also slows the industry down. It can be very hard to put a global insurance program together based on new areas of risk or a new way of looking at the risk.
On the technology front, brokers and, in many cases, insurers have poor technology infrastructure, relying on local and regional portals that are not capable of scaling to cover volume business internationally. Claims are outsourced to third parties and they have little interest in the data analytics of the business, particularly when focused on continual process improvements.
What is the answer to finding partners? It is to look very carefully before committing, particularly to insurance partners. Companies can quickly have a patchwork of different insurance offerings and be stuck with only partial cover. Companies need to decide if they want to invest in tech to make it efficient and have a team managing the insurance placements, this is all none core business investment.
The global brokers and insurance companies are not always the answer. They have limited resources to put on to this, particularly when it comes to machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) technology. They have little to knowledge of platforms and what sets these businesses apart from their normal ‘annual’ traditional core placement businesses.
The partner of choice should have a global capability, access to local knowledge, be investing in ML & AI for partner solutions and have a keen interest and knowledge of the shared, gig, freelance economies.
Take care, look before you leap.
